Salon’s Minna Proctor is not impressed with Maurizio Viroli’s new biography of Niccolo Machiavelli, Niccolo’s Smile. Like most people who comment on Machiavelli, the only work of his Machiavelli’s that Proctor mentions is The Prince.
An excellent revisionist look at Machiavelli is Sebastian De Graza’s Machiavelli in Hell which does a very good job of placing The Prince in its proper context within Machiavelli’s larger view of political philosophy.
No, Machiavelli doesn’t emerge as anything like a classical liberal, but at the same time he was neither a moral relativist nor a simple apologist for state-sponsored violence.