Customer Reviews

Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: Why Machiavelli's Iron Rules Are As Timely And Important Today As Five Centuries Ago

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

Machiavelli on Modern Leadership by Michael A. Ledeen is one of the most entertaining and instructive books I've read. It's one that I am going to keep at hand because I am sure to be going back to it time and again. It's also the perfect book to buy for your friends-and your enemies. Ledeen serves up Machiavelli's thoughts on the makings of a leader in easily digestible morsels, garnished with wonderful (good and bad) examples from the modern world of politics, government, military life, business, sports, religion. He has so much fun at this game that you inevitably start playing along with him, applying Machiavelli's rules to all the "bosses" you've ever known in your own life. With this book in hand you can also gain a new perspective on all the political figures you have learned to love and hate. Many world figures have already been dispassionately dissected for you by Ledeen, but you will find yourself looking around for others on whom Machiavelli would have conferred his seal of approval or disapproval.

Looking back over my own life, I found many classic Machiavellian examples, especially of the "bad" prince, in that terrible Communist world I left behind in 1978. Machiavelli tells us that, because men are more disposed toward evil than toward good, the supreme leaders are bloody minded; that is exactly how Nikita Khrushchev, one of my "supreme bosses" from my other life, looked to me, both when he was sober and when he was drunk. The Machiavellian man uses change and flexibility to stay on top, but the Soviet bloc leaders I knew were increasingly dogmatic and inflexible, culminating with Leonid Brezhnev, who acted like a mechanical puppet (as does Boris Yeltsin today). Or take another of Ledeen's points, in which Machiavelli recommends avoiding the mistake of believing that all men are the same, no matter where they may live. When given a private tour of Macy's department store in New York, my former Romanian boss, Nicolae Ceausescu, believed the displays had been specially set up for him, because that was what he would have done to impress a foreign visitor to his Communist Romania. Today, when Yeltsin appointed the bloody KGB general Sergey Stepashin as prime minister of Russia, I pondered the fact that in the last four centuries all Russian/Soviet tsars have turned to their political police to defend their thrones. When I looked into Ledeen's book to see if Machiavelli also had an answer for that, there it was: "Machiavelli very badly wants to believe that a great leader can almost always be confident about his ability to win, provided that he has studied history carefully."

During the 20 years that Michael Ledeen has been my friend, we have often worked together to fight the evils of Soviet Communism-and today's crypto-Communism-by using Machiavelli's weapons, and I have always been sure he would some day write the ultimate contemporary book on Machiavelli. Ledeen has so admired this eminent mind of the Italian Renaissance that he has himself become the perfect American Machiavelli.

Ion Mihai Pacepa (former adviser to Ceausescu and acting chief of his espionage service)

Originally, I bought this book as a gift for my girlfriend, because she is a big fan of philosophy. I wasn't expecting much, but thought it might be a fun read.
Our first impression of Mr. Ledeen was that he was way out there. He has very strong opinions of how the world works. He loves Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher for instance. LOVES them. But after reading the book through, and then reading the original Machiavelli's "the prince," we determined that Michael Ledeen knew exactly what he was talking about!
We also decided to learn more about Michael Ledeen, so we went online. We went to a web site about him and learned that the man has a double Phd in Philosophy and history respectively. We found his e-mail address and send him a note, expressing our enjoyment of his book. He promptly replied BACK to us and explained his views on the George W. Bush presidency.
This book is fun, interesting, true to Machilavelli completely, and Mr. Ledeen makes a good comparison of the modern time with the time in which Machiavelli lived.

When you read a book like this, it can be judged by the facts you know to be true or false. The author made serious factual error regarding that Bill Gates invent the BASIC programming language (like Al Gore saying he invented the Internet). His comment, "...Mata Hari have famously been exceptional espionage agents", is grossly wrong. Mata (Margaretha Gertrude Mac Leod) was a prostitute who worked for the Germans and the French. She did a bad job at it, both sides knew she was a double agent and in the end the French shot her. The rest was myth.

On the other hand, the commandment "thou shalt not murder" is correct versus "thou shalt not kill". The Hebrew words for murder and kill are only slightly different, but absolutely unambiguous. And unlike the New Testament, the Torah has not gone through tons of alterations. There are other facts that are easily verified or refuted.

So why read it? If you read "The Prince", you better know your history (but I strongly recommend you read it first). Michael A. Ledeen uses modern day examples to help illustrate Machiavelli's insights. This should make it much easier to understand. But if you wonder about the facts behind the example, do check it out yourself and don't take the authors words as Gospel.

I don't recall when or where I learned about this book but I read it after I finished Machiavelli's "The Prince". I wanted to get inside the mind of today's neo-conservative thinker to try and get a better understanding of the neo-conservative mentality. In this book Ledeen attempts to persuade the reader that the "Machiavellian" mentality is how we should approach leadership roles in all aspects of life. However, Ledeen, like other neo-conservatives, misses Machiavelli's point entirely.

Machiavelli's message in The Prince was this: Adapt or fall. In every chapter he explores what is necessary for a ruler to maintain control over a principality. However, he gives no hard and fast rules and implores that an aspiring ruler would have to base his actions on the current situation.

The necessity of adaptation in all aspects of life is true enough. But we don't remember that about Machiavelli and that message is not the concept that Ledeen draws on. What we all remember from Machiavelli's writings, what Ledeen draws on and what we used to term the coin "Machiavellian" was the set of rules that the players of Machiavelli's time operated under:

1. The ends justify the means.
2. The end goal is personal glory and power.
3. The means are the destruction of the opposition at all cost.

In The Prince, Machiavelli made these rules very apparent as he gave many examples from recent and ancient history. The times were very violent and the people often paid the price for the ascension of tyrant after tyrant. Ledeen states that it is necessary to step into this evil mindset to ensure the "greater good". He stretches quite a few ideas to try to make his point, especially in regard to business. There is quite a bit of circular logic, contradiction and historical omission in the context.

What Ledeen forgets is that the rules changed when we decided it was time for a "great experiment". We decided individual liberty, free markets and small government worked as opposed to fascism, communism and the tyrannies of the past. We proved that we didn't need to cut each others throats to pursue happiness.

I gave this book two stars not because I thought it was a good read, accurate or relevant, but that I was able to gleam some of the perspective I sought in it. The neo-conservative mindset that is derived from this "ends justify the means" mentality has put much of the world in great jeopardy in the nine years since this book was written. Don't fret if that bothers you...one of the six chapters in this book is used to make the excuse that bad luck can thwart the best of planning.

If you want to learn anything about Machiavelli, read Strauss or Mansfield. Old Nick's presence here seems to be nothing more than a "hook" or marketing gimmick. Nonetheless, this book is useful if only for its emphasis on the need always to be armed and vigilant. With that, Machiavelli would agree.

Much has been hyped of the neocon propensity for Straussian deception and omission -- the kind supposedly justified by a transcendent moral calculus -- and the parallels between this imperative, its rationales, and Machiavelli's logic all bear a "family resemblance". Nevertheless, Mike Ledeen has rarely come across as diabolical, not even when covering a genius famous for his explication of the darker side of statecraft.

Instead, Ledeen comes across as mildly senile, and disappointingly arrogant. This book, while being a peaen to Machiavelli, attempts to draw glorious parallels between Machiavelli and big egos in the American pantheon of not-so-profound men, like Bill Gates, just one of the "figurines" Ledeen holds aloft like a boy playing with a superman doll.

In the section 'How to Rule,' on page 117, Ledeen writes "Since it is the highest good, the defense of the country is one of those extreme situations in which a leader is justified in commiting evil" -- the book is filled with passages like these, reminiscent of Strauss's maxim of "the noble lie", then interwoven with factual innacuracies (such as Ledeen's claim that Gates "invented" the Basic programming language).

I remember the fiasco around another book Ledeen wrote back in the eighties, one that claimed to uncover a vast world-wide global conspiracy by the Soviet Union. In the book, Ledeen claimed to have evidence that every terrorist group around the world was actually controlled by the USSR: so Abu Nidal and the IRA both collected their paychecks from the same paymaster, etc. As it turned out, the book fooled everyone for a while, including William Casey and Ronald Reagan, until the CIA black ops guys who had been planting these stories in European publications since the sixties finally admitted that they created that myth as part of a black-propaganda campaign.

This would have been funny if Ledeen had not been working in government at the time. Coincidentally, Ledeen was also working in Doug Feith's Office of Special plans -- the DoD project that fabricated Bush's case for war -- before we invaded Iraq in 2003. Whether intentional or accidental, this guy's innacuracies are just scary.

Read this is you like to study these men, but avoid this book if your interest is in Machiavelli as a historical figure.

Look for how to lead and why you need to lead this way by looking to Machiavelli. His penchant for grace isn't based on masturbatory tenets but on virtue. Leaders such as Moses, Reagan, Thatcher, Walesa, Mandela, Havel and Pope John Paul II are regularly referred to and exhibited as who to model yourself after if you choose to lead. They show what needs to be to done and how through 188 pages, by the hegemenous and peripatetic Michael A. Ledeen, with erudite brevity. This book should empower and engage the reader to be the best type of leader, one who never surrenders, yet nourishes dreams with faith and never yields to despair.

I've been well aware of Mr. Ledeen and his international criminal endeavors for years now. But only recently did I decide to take a look into the mind of this madman.
Honestly, this is just a terrible read overall. Even forgetting the factual errors already listed, it's clear that Mr. Ledeen (who has never worn a military uniform that I'm aware of) is a naturally born arm chair general. When he takes time to mock Bill Clinton for looking to avoid large military casualties on his watch, I find myself both amused and horrified at the same time. Additionally, his analogy of a football coach telling his players to try not to get hurt is ludicrous.
Most troubling of all is Mr. Ledeen's rant towards the Bush 1 administration on page 28. Here Ledeen lauds the former President and Colin Powell (never mentioning then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney) for not going straight to Baghdad in the first Gulf War. Taking into account that this was written in the late 90's, it's hard not to scratch your head when he writes off notions of The US being "mired in a Vietnamlike swamp," had we invaded on a massive level in 1991. For those of you keeping score at home, that's exactly what DID happen. Just substitute swamp with urban warfare.
This is a great read for those who still blindly support the war in Iraq and wish to generate some factually challanged talking points. However, if you're more rooted in reality, you'll find very little to cling to in these pages.

A non cynical and practical view of how Machiavelli's principles of statecraft are applicable to everyday life. The author's use of modern figures lends credence to his arguments.

To learn a more accurate description of Machiavelli than is taught in schools was very refreshing and enjoyable; however by the end, I was disappointed in how little there was about modern leaders.

Except for Bill Clinton, most modern leaders got no more than a brief paragraph or if they were mentioned more than once, it was usually the same comment rephrased.

I still recommend the book because what is in the book is great; but you will enjoy it more with the right expectations.