(from InsideHigherEd):

By Scott McLemee

For most people the word “Machiavellian” carries no connotation of virtue, and it’s never meant as praise. A stock theatrical character of the Elizabethan era was the Machiavel, who “delights in his own villainy and gloats over his successes in lengthy soliloquies,” as one literary historian puts it, with Shakespeare’s Iago and Richard III being prime examples. A Newsweek article from last year characterizes Tony Blair as “a Machiavel with a Messiah complex,” surely one of the more inventive insults in recent memory.

Otherwise it is the adjectival form of the Italian statesman’s name that turns up most often — usually in a political context, though also in articles about Game of Thrones, reality television and (this seems odd) professional soccer. I notice that one of the major American presidential candidates seems to be described as Machiavellian more often than the other. That doesn’t necessarily imply greater concern about moral turpitude; it could just be that her opponent lacks the impulse control required of a true Machiavel.

Be that as it may, Maurizio Viroli’s How to Choose a Leader: Machiavelli’s Advice to Citizens (Princeton University Press) challenges the longstanding tendency to make the Renaissance author’s name synonymous with the art of political skulduggery. Viroli (a professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and professor emeritus of politics at Princeton University) offers us a kinder, gentler Machiavelli — one notably free from cynicism, with nothing but the common good in mind. CONTINUE READING HERE