Michael Anton’s Studies in Machiavellian Political Philosophy is an engaging, intelligent, and sobering work. Anton believes or hopes that the book’s essays “form something like a coherent whole.” This characterization is at once modest and immodest as befits the volume, which gratefully and repeatedly acknowledges Harvey Mansfield (to whom the book is dedicated), Leo Strauss, and Leo Paul de Alvarez. Anton, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute and former director of policy planning at the State Department, follows their clues in walking along Machiavelli’s winding paths while discovering, or making visible, some byways of his own.

The book’s major part consists of several studies of Machiavelli’s Prince. These are supplemented in a later part by discussions of de Alvarez’s The Machiavellian Enterprise (1999), Mansfield’s essay “Party and Sect in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories” (collected in his book Machiavelli’s Virtue, 1996), and Strauss’s writings on Machiavelli. These parts are interrupted by essays on Xenophon, Baron de Montesquieu, and The Federalist. Anton concludes the book with four essays on modernity, the United States, and Machiavelli’s connection to, or responsibility for, them.

Anton’s argument centers on and emphasizes the notion that Machiavelli successfully