Machiavelli in Hell
by Sebastian de Grazia
Summary
Sebastian de Grazia's biography follows Niccolo Machiavelli from his 1469 birth in Florence, the son of an attorney, through his sudden and still unexplained appointment at twenty nine to the powerful second chancery of the Florentine republic, a post that put him at the center of Florentine diplomacy for more than a decade under the city's leader, Piero Soderini. The book follows Machiavelli on the diplomatic missions to France, Rome and other Italian courts that let him observe rulers including Cesare Borgia and Pope Julius the Second at close range, encounters de Grazia treats as the direct raw material for the political theory Machiavelli would later write.
The book gives full weight to the catastrophe of 1512, when a Spanish victory at Prato returned the Medici family to power in Florence, cost Machiavelli his position, and led to his arrest on suspicion of conspiracy: he was tortured with the strappado, denied any involvement, and was released after three weeks once a general amnesty took effect. De Grazia follows Machiavelli into the forced retirement that produced his most famous works, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, written at his farm outside Florence, and argues, against a long tradition that reads Machiavelli as a purely cold blooded pragmatist, that his writing reflects a genuine, unresolved religious and moral conscience, the hell of the book's own title.
De Grazia writes as a political philosopher rather than a conventional historian, building his case for Machiavelli's inner spiritual life from close reading of his letters and his less famous writings alongside The Prince itself. Reading the book means following an unconventional argument about a famously cynical thinker, and it suits a reader already familiar with Machiavelli's reputation who wants that reputation genuinely complicated rather than simply repeated.
Historical Context & Significance
Machiavelli in Hell won the 1990 Pulitzer Prize for Biography; that year's finalists were Jill Ker Conway for The Road from Coorain, Reynolds Price for Clear Pictures: First Loves, First Guides, and Geoffrey C. Ward for A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt. De Grazia was seventy two when the prize was announced, after a career at Rutgers University and, during the Second World War, as an analyst for the Office of Strategic Services, the wartime forerunner of the CIA.
The book's argument, that Machiavelli's supposedly cold political science grew out of a real if unorthodox religious conscience, remains a distinctive contribution to Machiavelli scholarship, still discussed alongside more conventional political biographies of a thinker whose name became a byword for cynicism long before de Grazia tried to complicate that reputation.