| Imagine, if you can, a world in which a young lawyer gains fame by publishing a best-selling memoir. The book’s reflections on class and culture make him a star among the political commentariat; soon he’s weighing in on that year’s Presidential campaign and denouncing his own party’s leading candidate as a “moral disaster.” Eight years later, the same man has completed a remarkable turnaround, becoming one of the unscrupulous politician’s most vocal supporters, and joining his ticket in a new bid for the nation’s highest office. Admirers might see the reversal as the product of a slow, thoughtful evolution. Cynics might call it Machiavellian. But who, really, is the historical figure behind that insult, and what sort of morality did Machiavelli preach? In 2008, The New Yorker’s Claudia Roth Pierpont revisited the “cursed reputation” of the ambitious Florentine thinker. Machiavelli wrote his most famous work, “The Prince,” to curry favor with his city’s new rulers. Although that gambit failed, the “little book”—released to the public five years after his death—lived on infamously for centuries, derided as an amoral, and even satanic, playbook for achieving power at any cost. Roth Pierpont examines the accuracy of that depiction, including whether the most notorious Machiavellian maxim—“The end justifies the means”—actually came from Machiavelli. Along the way, she surveys the writer’s tumultuous world, full of warring Medicis and a Borgia, a schism in the Church, and violence and mass expulsions across Europe. The result is a surprising reassessment of a thinker and his time, and one that echoes with eerie resonances today. “The great republic of [Machiavelli’s] era,” Roth Pierpont writes, “failed because the men entrusted with its liberties did not know how to fight for them.” | 
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