Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan [Hardcover]

Richard J. Samuels (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 27, 2003

Two late-developing nations, Japan and Italy, similarly obsessed with achieving modernity and with joining the ranks of the great powers, have traveled parallel courses with very different national identities. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan.

Beginning with the founding of modern nation-states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, Samuels traces the developmental dynamic in both countries through the failure of early liberalism, the coming of fascism, imperial adventures, defeat in wartime, and reconstruction as American allies. Highlights of Machiavelli’s Children include new accounts of the making of postwar Japanese politics—using American money and Manchukuo connections—and of the collapse of Italian political parties in the Clean Hands (Mani Pulite) scandal. The author also tells the more recent stories of Umberto Bossi’s regional experiment, the Lega Nord, the different choices made by Italian and Japanese communist party leaders after the collapse of the USSR, and the leadership of Silvio Berlusconi and Ishihara Shintar on the contemporary right in each country.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

"Italy and Japan share the experience of the United States’s postwar attempts to dictate political systems for them—in each case emphasizing neofascism over democracy and independence. As it turns out, both countries also share a lot more than that, as Richard J. Samuels demonstrates in this tour de force of comparative politics."—Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire "What a wonderful book! Machiavelli’s Children shows not just why, but how, leaders shape history. It astutely identifies the coercive, material, and normative mechanisms leaders use to loosen constraints and make choices, and offers fascinating paired comparisons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese and Italian leaders who confronted problems of statebuilding, economic organization, and the character of political regimes. A joy to read, this engaging book combines analytical chronicles with sustained theoretical perceptions to powerfully illuminate social science’s central puzzles of ‘structure’ and ‘agency.’—Ira Katznelson, Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History, Columbia University

"A highly original and intellectually courageous piece of work, Machiavelli's Children opens up new horizons and perspectives, and will undoubtedly be the subject of considerable commentary. Richard J. Samuels is a natural comparativist: the balance between the two cases, the well-constructed conclusions to each chapter, the pausing over individual comparative detail are the best things in the book."—Paul Ginsborg, University of Florence

"A breathtakingly original and ambitious book, Machiavelli’s Children sets a new standard for work in comparative politics, and restores to its proper place the classic question of the role of leaders in political history. The book offers fresh and unexpected insights into the course of both Japanese and Italian history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In moving us away from standard national histories—inevitably mired in ‘exceptionalism’—Samuels offers a whole new way to conceive of the paths taken by states in the modern era. This truly rare and exciting piece of political and historical research raises the bar for all future study."—David I. Kertzer, Dupee University Professor of Social Science, Brown University

About the Author

Richard J. Samuels is Ford International Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for International Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also Chairman of the Japan–U.S. Friendship Commission and Founding Director of the MIT Japan Program. He is author of several books, including "Rich Nation, Strong Army": National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan, also from Cornell.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 456 pages
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr (February 27, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801434920
• ISBN-13: 978-0801434921
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.4 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,725,122 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Actually, kind of bland, April 6, 2004

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[e-mail] (Edmonton, Alberta Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Machiavelli's Children: Leaders and Their Legacies in Italy and Japan (Hardcover)

For two countries with very different languages and religions and with no real contact with each other before the 1860s, Japan and Italy have a surprisingly lot in common. Both countries moved towards modern national capitalist politics under authoritarian monarchs in the 1860s. Both sought to limit universal suffrage and modern democracy up until the First World War. Both became fascist dictatorships that launched brutal wars of aggression and allied with Nazi Germany. Both, of course, were defeated and occupied by the Americans, and in the end joined in military alliance with their former conqueror. Both were dominated by conservative parties who ruled for decades while engaging in massive corruption. Both faced political and fiscal crisis at the end of the cold war as their massive corruption was exposed in the early nineties. But there were also differences between the two. Japanese Shintoism never had the independence that Italian Catholicism did. Whereas for most of the post war period Italy had a large public sector that was poorly run and subject to corruption and patronage, Japan had a sleek private sector that in fruitful synthesis with government direction became the second leading industrial power in the world. But in the nineties Italy made heroic efforts to control its financial problems and achieve a degree of political reform with the demise of the Christian Democratic Party, while Japan was stuck in stagnation as the Liberal Democratic Party maintained its baleful hegemony.

Such are the basic facts that a comparison between the two countries provides. However Richard Samuels' recent book does not offer much more. Samuels instead spends much of the book trying to argue that leaders made a crucial difference to the history of their countries, while castigating the spectre of determinism. So we have chapters on the founders (Cavour, Ito, Yamagata), the original economic strategists, the death of liberalism (Giolitti, Hara), the leading corporatists, Mussolini, the postwar leaders (De Gasperi, Yoshida), the masters of corruption, the post-cold war left leaders, and the post-cold war right leaders. There is something ham-fisted in this attack on determinism. It is not clear that the men in question made all that much of a difference. After all, if NATO could take the trouble to include Portugal, it would almost have certainly have gone out of its way to include Italy, whatever Alcide de Gasperi did. Nor does Samuels really convince that with different leadership the two countries would have been more liberal and less corrupt. (And the discussion of Silvio Berlusconi is disappointingly brief about the many allegations of corruption that surround him). We do get perhaps the least interesting chapter ever presented on Mussolini, which ends with the obvious conclusion that his entry into the Second World War was a big mistake. And if we are going to be talking about leaders whose choices made a difference, surely there should be a chapter for Victor Emmanuel II and Hirohito. There is also something shallow about a view of agency which limits itself to a handful of leaders. What about the actions of the rest of society? The history of the Japanese Socialist Party is discussed in scattershot terms, so one is never clear what is happening to it. Nor does Samuels explain why civil and democratic politics in 1920 Japan was so much weaker than in Italy. But surely it cannot just be the result of the superior cunning of a few of Japan's conservative politicians. Gender, trade unions, farmers, civil society and cultural politics are many subjects that do not get their due.

There are other problems. At times Samuels discusses fascism in both countries without explaining it or defining it. He does not provide any reason for why the 1937 Japanese elite felt the need to enter into a vicious war that it could not win. There is also a rather turgid political science jargon that makes the book less interesting to read. The one interesting passage is a discussion of Kishi Nobusuke, prime minister of Japan during the fifties and perhaps the single most important figure behind the conservative ascendancy in that country. He was also a major war criminal who barely escaped trial and Samuels argues that he was responsible for much of Japan's endemic corruption that involved American funds, industry kickbacks, fixers from the ultra-right and Yakuza (Japanese mafia) as well as, in more recent years, the Moonies. Perhaps not surprisingly, this fascist and crook, who had helped declare war on the United States in 1941, got the praise of Richard Nixon as both "a great leader of the free world" and "a loyal and great friend of the people of the United States." Unfortunately, Samuels admits that the study of political corruption is poorly developed and his assertions are somewhat speculative. A number of prominent scholars have praised this book. The reader should peruse their works instead of this one.