On 1 June 1919 in Berlin, as he was walking back from school along the Tirpitzufer Straße, a fourteen-year-old boy joined other passers-by gathering on the bank of the Landwehr Canal to observe a group of men retrieving a corpse from the water. The corpse, the men announced, was that of Rosa Luxemburg, who had been murdered by the Freikorps several months earlier and whose body had been dumped in the canal. The schoolboy was Felix Gilbert, who was to become one of the foremost Machiavelli scholars and Renaissance historians following his exile to the United States. Much later, as he recounted the episode in his memoirs, Gilbert confessed that while he disapproved of the brutal murder of the Spartakist leaders, he was “certainly pleased about the defeat of the revolt.” In retrospect, he conjectured that his decision to join the Social Democratic Party was motivated by its role in restoring order.Footnote ² But reminiscence is a slippery exercise, as Gilbert knew, and it is difficult to tell the benefit of hindsight from retrospective rationalization: the motives that the older Gilbert attributes to his younger self may also reflect a set of concerns—with stability, with power, with the illusions of revolutionary idealism, with change and history—that only took shape later and defined his subsequent career as a historian. In this short time-collapsing vignette, in which the historian looks back at himself as a child looking at the decomposing body of the revolution, Gilbert offers a powerful image of the infancy of realism as an ideology associated with the vicissitudes of modernity and the deliquescence of the idea of progress, captured by the Nietzschean innocence and unforgiveness of childhood.

Published in 1965, Machiavelli and Guicciardini remains to this day a landmark in the literature on the political thought of the cinquecento. In the United States, where scholarship on the subject was scarce outside literary studies and art history until the arrival of German émigré historians, Gilbert's work contributed to renewing the interpretation of Machiavelli. Yet the stature that Gilbert has achieved as a historian of the Renaissance has tended to obscure the fact that his work on Machiavelli has developed in close connection with an interest in foreign policy that has spanned his entire career. His calling as a historian came from an early engagement with diplomatic history, when, as a student, Gilbert took a job at the Foreign Office and worked on the publication of Germany's prewar diplomatic documents. This experience got him “intrigued by the working of international relations,” and he later approached Friedrich Meinecke with a dissertation subject on “The Origin of the Idea of Balance of Power in the Renaissance.”Footnote ³

Gilbert, in fact, was also an international thinker in his own right. After leaving Germany in 1933, he found a position at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study as the assistant of Edward Mead Earle, one of the early American realists and a founder of security studies; by 1940, he had completed the first draft of a manuscript on the intellectual origins of US foreign policy, later published under the title To the Farewell Address (1961); he assisted Earle in composing the classic Makers of Modern Strategy (1943), to which he contributed a chapter on Machiavelli; in 1953, he coedited an imposing volume on interwar diplomacy, The Diplomats 1919–1939, which stood out not only as an orthodox exercise in political history in the midst of a general turn to cultural history, but also as a get-together of veterans from the Research and Analysis branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where Gilbert served from 1943 to 1946 (Fritz Stern later described the volume as “largely an OSS operation in mufti”Footnote ⁴ ); and while Gilbert published in historical journals, he wrote as an occasional contributor to Military Affairs, World Politics, Political Science Quarterly, Social Research and Foreign Affairs. It is also by a stroke of luck that Gilbert became the historian we know and not an intelligence analyst: in 1946, after his wartime service in the OSS, Gilbert was unsuccessful at securing an academic position and he came close to join the State Department's Office of Research and Intelligence at the invitation of his former OSS boss Sherman Kent. At the last minute, Mead Earle's relentless campaign in favor of his protégé serendipitously opened the doors of Bryn Mawr college, allowing Gilbert to pursue his academic career.Footnote ⁵ More tellingly, in 1956, the Rockefeller Foundation sponsored Gilbert's archival research for Machiavelli and Guicciardini as part of its efforts to promote the academic development of international relations theory, not Renaissance studies.Footnote ⁶

It thus seems important to reconsider Gilbert's Machiavelli scholarship in connection to his involvement with the emerging national security state. It is today widely accepted in political science and international relations (IR) that Machiavelli was the first modern realist thinker. This assumption was not taken for granted among IR scholars in the 1940s, and certainly not by the self-proclaimed realists, who entertained at best ambivalent views about Machiavelli when they did not continue the anti-Machiavellian tradition. Gilbert offered a fresh interpretation of Machiavelli, yet one that was developed in parallel with his participation in the efforts to reform American foreign-policy thinking through new approaches to international politics focused on power, national interests and security. By casting Machiavelli as a republican realist, Gilbert contributed to the legitimation of power politics in terms that were congruent with American political culture, at a time when the Cold War gave renewed urgency to older discussions about emergency powers and revived anxieties about the hindrance to effective decisions represented by public opinion and democratic deliberation. In the process, he also lifted the obstacles to the inclusion of Machiavelli into a realist “tradition” that allegedly culminated with postwar realism and its academic disciplines.

The integration of Machiavelli into the fold of a realist tradition of power politics was made possible because Gilbert built upon the previous treatment of the subject by Meinecke in Die Idee der Staatsräson in der neueren Geschichte (1924). Yet Gilbert put historical flesh on Meinecke's thesis at a moment when Meinecke and a number of German historians had taken their distances from Machiavelli. The “realist” Machiavelli had fallen out of grace in West Germany, where he was increasingly viewed as the precursor of a Schmittian vision of politics or the proponent of an amoral doctrine that had degenerated into what Meinecke himself now called the “mass Machiavellism” of the Nazi regime.Footnote ⁷

One would look in vain for traces of this guarded attitude in Gilbert's work. In the United States, Meinecke's legacy survived and played out differently. In showing that Machiavelli was not the proponent of a scientific technology of government, of a manipulative political rationalism bereft of moral bearings, but a thinker who understood that history placed politics in a productive tension with values, Gilbert overcame the suspicions that had kept Machiavelli on the margins of the emerging realist mainstream. By foregrounding Machiavelli's anti-Medicean credentials and his republican inclinations, he also made power politics safe for America by associating it with the defense of liberty. Long before John Pocock identified Florentine DNA in the genetic makeup of the American republic, Gilbert had inscribed Machiavellian realism within a tradition that flowed straight into American foreign policy. Shaped in the experience of cultural displacement and in the context of the emerging national security state, Gilbert's Machiavelli provided a new historical narrative that reduced the chiasm between political realism and American democracy, as the latter was learning to cope with its new role in world politics.

Mid-century Modern? Machiavelli and the Postwar Realists

The idea of a realist tradition supposes that a specific style of thought is transmitted through a direct lineage from the Renaissance to the present, and reclaimed by successive generations of thinkers. It refers to “a discriminated pattern of subsistence and change” that is not in the eye of the beholder but represents “a convention of the works themselves,” to quote John Gunnell.Footnote ⁸ This is, for instance, what the Oxford Handbook of International Relations posits when it suggests that “political realists typically claim to be part of a tradition that stretches back, through Thomas Hobbes and Niccolò Machiavelli, to Thucydides.”Footnote ⁹ In this view, modern realists avail themselves of their Florentine predecessor and locate themselves in a tradition that he is supposed to have pioneered.

At first sight, this claim is plausible. In one of the earliest American textbooks of international relations, International Politics, originally published in 1933, Frederick Schuman suggested that “the rebirth of realism” in the West was associated with the writings of Machiavelli, who saw first and more clearly than anybody else “the realities of the State System.”Footnote ¹⁰ A few years later, in a diagnosis of the interwar crisis that today stands as an early realist manifesto, E. H. Carr described Machiavelli as “the first important political realist.”Footnote ¹¹ Yet Schuman's and Carr's efforts appear as tentative bids to define “realism” in a fashion congruent with their progressive views. Carr, in particular, located Machiavelli in a line of rationalistic thinkers who saw history as a sequence of cause and effect (Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza) and thus conceived of “the possibility of a physical science of politics.” He surmised that Machiavelli inaugurated a tradition that culminated in a “progressive” nineteenth-century realism that took for granted the rational nature of the historical process. Whether or not there existed such as tradition, locating Machiavelli in a line of thinkers that ended with Hegel and Marx made him incompatible with the basic assumptions of postwar realism, an intellectual movement that found its common denominator in the rejection of scientific conceptions of history and opposed the rationalistic illusions involved in the reduction of politics to a social science.Footnote ¹² By the time he was writing, Carr knew this sort of synthesis was no longer possible and he had to concede that Machiavelli's putative realism eventually “br[oke] down.” Schuman and Carr represented isolated and, ultimately, unsuccessful attempts at building a tradition that refused to separate completely realism and idealism. They were also indicators of the common association of Machiavelli with a rationalistic, scientific vision of politics. By the same token, they give away the reasons why postwar realist thinkers never saw themselves as part of a “realist tradition” that would have included him.

Although few realists have written anything substantial about Machiavelli, those who have have consistently expressed a negative view of the Florentine. One of the most articulate statements about Machiavelli in this literature is The Statecraft of Machiavelli, published in 1940 by the British historian Herbert Butterfield, who later became the head of the British Committee on International Relations and presided over the development of the “English school” of international relations.Footnote ¹³ A reflection on the possibility of scientific history by a professional historian, The Statecraft of Machiavelli addressed the notion that Machiavelli was the inventor of a new science of politics premised on the assumption that history was driven by laws that could be discovered and formulated as “a body of rules upon which governments should act.”Footnote ¹⁴ Far from endorsing this interpretation, Butterfield contended that the “scientific flavor” of Machiavelli's writings was deceptive: the only historical science, for Machiavelli, was derived from the writers of antiquity, not from the modern scientific method. He was “a channel for classical influence” rather than the precursor of modernity so often celebrated.Footnote ¹⁵ His mistake was to assume that he could offer generalizations about politics, while he also rightly recognized it as the world of “chance and change.” “On shifting sands like these,” Butterfield declared, echoing the critique of Machiavelli by Francesco Guicciardini, “no science of statecraft could find a hold.”Footnote ¹⁶ Machiavelli had failed to see that the contingency of politics could not be captured in general terms and he was, in that sense, less modern than Guicciardini, “the modern observer standing already in the clear light of the day.”Footnote ¹⁷

This was a sobering assessment, which pointed at Machiavelli's lack of realism. His eyes riveted to the exempla handed down by Roman historians, steeped in the imitation of the ancients, Machiavelli was looking past reality. Even his view of human nature was too doctrinaire to count as realist: “Machiavelli believed that human nature was thoroughly wicked, and such a judgment makes us imagine that he was a modern realist.”Footnote ¹⁸ But nothing could be further from the truth for Butterfield. Machiavelli's indebtedness to the Classics explained “the defective nature of [his] contact with the world”—a damning judgment coming from a realist.Footnote ¹⁹ What was left was a political philosopher whose alleged “science” of statecraft could not even redeem the loss of the moral horizon of politics in the Christian Middle Ages. Butterfield's critical assessment reflected the revival of Christian realist thought in the 1940s, an intellectual position that Butterfield would defend throughout his life: the critique of the hubristic nature of political rationalism was a standard of this polemical repertoire. Under the unforgiving gaze of the Christian historian, Machiavelli was still “Old Nick,” the main culprit of a political modernity that had lost its cultural mooring in a universal Christian morality. Butterfield gave an academic voice to Christian anti-Machiavellism, and indeed sought to vindicate this tradition by suggesting that “the Anti-Machiavels and even the Elizabethan dramatists were not so willfully wide of the mark.”Footnote ²⁰ Butterfield was not alone in leading this charge. A similar diagnosis was formulated at about the same time by his German colleague Gerhard Ritter. Reviving the genre of Christian apologetics for the reason of state, Ritter, like Botero four centuries earlier, suggested that while the logic of power was inescapable, it could be countenanced only if supplemented by the Christian values that Machiavelli had so brazenly trampled.Footnote ²¹ The same sort of Christian realist attempt at saving power politics from Machiavelli can be found in the writings of Reinhold Niebuhr. As he sought to establish a historical pedigree for postwar realism, Niebuhr suggested that “by general consent, the first great ‘realist’ in Western history” was not Machiavelli but Augustine.Footnote ²² It is significant that he chose to identify realism with a thinker who was in many ways the antithesis of Machiavelli and an intellectual authority used throughout medieval times to secure the articulation between politics and a universal notion of justice that Machiavelli was supposed to have undone.Footnote ²³ For those who, like Niebuhr, led the revival of political Augustinism in the 1940s and 1950s, Machiavelli represented indeed the archenemy and the root cause of the disasters of modernity, from moral relativism to political nihilism. His claim to fame was not to have been the first modern realist, as it is believed today, but to have been “the first in a long line of moral cynics in the field of international relations.”Footnote ²⁴

Hans Morgenthau, who is widely considered to be the founding father of that field, has not given much attention to Machiavelli. Politics among Nations does not contain more than the occasional reference to Machiavelli's advocacy of expediency in politics. But an article published in 1945 in the journal Ethics provides clues about how he considered the man now believed to be his predecessor: “The Machiavellian Utopia” was indeed a scathing critique of the United Nations project. While Wilson's Fourteen Points were a “heroic and futile attempt to transform the political scene according to the postulates of liberal rationality,” the Atlantic charter and the UN represented “a less heroic and . . . no less futile attempt to mold political reality in the image of Machiavelli's thought.” Why invoke Machiavelli in this condemnation of the successor institution to the League of Nations and associate his name with Wilsonian idealism? While the Wilsonians had thought that a rational international order could subsist on the basis of its own inner force, the men of Dumbarton Oaks, wary of the failure of their predecessors, placed their hopes on the mechanics of power for keeping the Wilsonian dream afloat. In doing so, Morgenthau contended, they only moved from the Wilsonian utopia to the Machiavellian one. Like Machiavelli, they deluded themselves in imagining that the dispassionate analysis of power was sufficient to sustain a project of political unification. The United Nations project was just as utopian as the call for the unification of Italy at the end of The Prince, to the extent that it was based solely on the dispassionate analysis of power politics: “it was utopian to believe,” Morgenthau says of Machiavelli, “that a country divided into a great number of small sovereignties could be united by any one of those small sovereigns’ clever handling of the mechanics of political action.”Footnote ²⁵ Both Machiavelli and the diplomats of Dumbarton Oaks had forgotten that the foundation of any legal order was not a technique of power, but a moral code. Machiavelli's amoralism made his calls for the unification of Italy utopian, since the science of politics that was supposed to serve this aim was premised on the valediction of morality. Walking in his footsteps, the latter-day Wilsonians were “the epigones of Machiavelli.” It is worth noting that the same equation of Machiavelli with power deprived of moral bearings provides the incisive closing of Morgenthau's review of E. H. Carr's main works: like the diplomats of Dumbarton Oaks, Carr erred in thinking that a check to power could be found within the logic of power itself and not in a transcendent moral standard: “Mr. Carr,” Morgenthau writes, “might have learned that lesson from the fate of the political romantics of whom the outstanding representatives are Adam Müller and Carl Schmitt. It is a dangerous thing to be a Machiavelli. It is a disastrous thing to be a Machiavelli without virtù.”Footnote ²⁶

It is an even more forceful indictment of political rationalism that one finds in the writings of Raymond Aron. While Butterfield was finishing The Statecraft of Machiavelli, Aron was writing three short pieces about Machiavelli that explored the legacies of Machiavellism in the twentieth century.Footnote ²⁷ Following Mannheim, Aron saw Machiavelli as the precursor of totalitarianism.Footnote ²⁸ Machiavelli's science of politics was essentially the “codification of a technique of tyranny” that served an elitist conception of power. The problem that Aron saw in Machiavelli was not that of deciding whether he was in favor of liberty or despotism, or which of the Principe or the Discorsi best expressed his own preferences, but precisely the fact that their author could discuss republics and tyrannies in the same way because his vision of politics was dissociated from any normative criteria: it took the form of an attitude that was “the attitude of the scientist, and of the technician that relies on the results of the scientist.”Footnote ²⁹ The conception of human nature that sustained the Machiavellian science of politics inevitably led to tyrannical rule. It was nothing else, in the end, than a set of recipes for the manipulation of the vulgum pecus. The modern Princes were the Hitlers and the Mussolinis, who had inherited a realm in an illegitimate manner and needed to rely on Machiavellian advice to secure their rule.Footnote ³⁰ Whatever were his own political inclinations, Machiavelli was guilty of unmooring politics from its moral soil, which made him “probably the first among the intellectuals who effectively contributed to giving a good conscience to evil men.”Footnote ³¹ Like Butterfield, Aron made him directly responsible for the tragedies of the twentieth century.

But closer to fascism, even an über-realist such as Carl Schmitt considered Machiavelli with suspicion, as the main culprit of the modern secularization of politics and its reduction to pure technique. The legitimacy deficit of modern politics could be traced back to his rationalistic vision of politics as a self-sufficient activity. Schmitt remained weary of a thinker whom he considered responsible for the loss of the connection with transcendence, and therefore the loss of authority and political capacity.Footnote ³² While he recognized that Machiavelli's view of human nature was similar to that of Hobbes, Bossuet or de Maistre, he also felt that it did not lead to the construction of the absolutist state but to a form of politically indifferent technique of government that was abhorrent to him.Footnote ³³ A Catholic, Schmitt was also more appreciative of the baroque tradition of the reason of state, with its Jesuitical moral casuistry, than of the pagan naturalness of power characteristic of Machiavelli's thought.

This brief overview reveals that the realists were unanimously critical of Machiavelli. But it also shows that an important aspect of their anti-Machiavellism stemmed from the understanding of Machiavelli as a technician of politics: he offered a vision of politics as a sphere of strictly technical rationality, severed from the transcendent moral background of Christianity. Inheriting a long tradition of anti-Machiavellism, realism gave it a new edge under the form of a denunciation of Machiavelli's exacerbated political rationalism. This reading of Machiavelli also reflected a specific intellectual provenance, largely shaped by German idealism. Indeed, Morgenthau was not far off the mark when he had bundled Machiavelli together with the Wilsonian “idealists”: nineteenth-century German idealism had exonerated Machiavelli of the opprobrium laid upon him by the Elizabethan moralists and seen in him a precursor of political modernity. Fichte and Hegel had celebrated the Italian patriot's exposing the necessity and morality of the national state. This reading found an influential outlet in the work of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce, for whom Machiavelli “discover[ed] the necessity and autonomy of politics, of politics as situated beyond, or rather beneath, moral good and evil, of politics which has its own laws against which it is useless to rebel, and which cannot be exorcized and expelled from the world using holy water.”Footnote ³⁴ This interpretation of Machiavelli was still extremely influential in the Machiavelli scholarship for much of the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote ³⁵ It was Croce's rationalist philosopher that the realists had in mind when they inveighed against Machiavelli, and they were certainly confirmed in their suspicion by the fact that he was admired by neo-Kantians, such as Ernst Cassirer, for whom Machiavelli was not so much a politician addressing historically circumscribed problems as “the founder of a new science of politics” who had done for the study of politics what Galileo had done for the study of nature.Footnote ³⁶ If there was anything like a realist “tradition” in the aftermath of World War II, it not only did not include Machiavelli; it defined itself against him.

Felix Gilbert and Renaissance “realism”: from the cinquecento to the 20th century

A symptom of the changing perception of Machiavelli among international relations scholars can be gleaned from a review of the American edition of Butterfield's The Statecraft of Machiavelli that Felix Gilbert wrote in 1957. Except for an interesting analysis of Machiavelli's influence on Bolingbroke, Gilbert wrote, Butterfield essentially reproduced the traditional anti-Machiavellian argument for which the Florentine was “a teacher of artifice.” How much consideration Gilbert thought this position deserved was reflected in the length of his review, which disposed of Butterfield's pamphlet in nine terse lines.Footnote ³⁷ Such a dismissal was significant, because it did not come from a Renaissance historian working at several removes from international relations debates and with an unsteady grasp of what modern “realism” meant. Like Butterfield, Gilbert was involved in the emergence of IR as a distinct academic field and had extensively published on foreign affairs and diplomacy. What this suggests is that anti-Machiavellism was no longer central to realism and that a reassessment of Machiavelli was under way that reflected the changing landscape of international thought in the 1950s.

A detailed biography of Felix Gilbert will probably not be available until his personal papers, held at the Hoover Institution archives, are open to researchers in December 2018. Yet his publications, his own recollections, and archival documents provide enough elements to understand the context of his approach to Machiavelli and to assess his role in crafting an image of the Florentine palatable to his realist colleagues despite the notorious reputation Machiavelli had among them. It is indeed with Gilbert that Machiavelli becomes, for the first time and with the seal of authenticity that only a historian can provide, a forerunner of twentieth-century realism.

Felix Gilbert was born in 1905 in Berlin, the scion of an important Jewish family converted to Lutheranism in the nineteenth century, the Mendelssohns, a banking dynasty that had made outstanding contributions to German high culture (his great-grandfather was the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, and the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn was one of his forebears).Footnote ³⁸ His reminiscences about his childhood and about the reasons for his early embrace of history as a vocation follow a pattern not uncommon among members of his generation who, like his fellow Berliner Walter Benjamin, had witnessed the unraveling of the enchanted world of their childhood, only to find themselves suddenly propelled in the maelstrom that engulfed Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The regular succession of cozy summers in Charlottenburg or on the Traunsee in Austria gave way to a period of instability and uncertainty that overlapped with Gilbert's coming of age. “War, revolution, and social turmoil, in an interlocking chain, shaped the crucial years of my youth,” he later wrote. For the young Gilbert, the choice of history was inseparable from the prevalence of politics in his immediate experience: politics was constant change and fluctuation, not the rational realization of transcendent or unquestioned values. “I felt . . . that we belonged to a special generation, different from the ones that preceded and followed mine. Skeptical about the values of the past, we were also skeptical about the likelihood of stability in the future.”Footnote ³⁹ History, at least in the historicist tradition in which Gilbert was schooled, made it possible to cultivate this skepticism and functioned as a propaedeutic to political realism. Gilbert was indeed the product of an intellectual tradition in which historical consciousness was intrinsically tied to the development of the modern national state and for which, therefore, the state was the primary subject of historical research: from the beginning, history was “mainly, almost exclusively, political history.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As a historian, Gilbert would remain an exponent of the Rankean tradition that saw history as the history of high politics—a disposition strengthened by Meinecke, who taught Gilbert that a historical topic was important for political reasons.Footnote ⁴¹ This connection between historiography, high politics, and international relations would remain a characteristic of Gilbert's scholarship throughout his life. Beyond what may appear as intellectual eclecticism, the constellation of themes that commanded his attention found its coherence in this early experience of crisis. The combination of writings on “diplomatic history, the history of historiography and political thought with special reference to the Italian Renaissance and nineteenth-century Germany” was typical of this intellectual generation, according to another émigré historian, Arnaldo Momigliano. In his judgment, this made Gilbert “the premier survival [sic] of a glorious phase of German culture.”Footnote ⁴²

This concern with high politics took a concrete form early, when the economic crisis forced Gilbert, still a student, to take his first steps as a “professional” historian by taking a job at the Foreign Office to assist with the publication of Germany's prewar diplomatic documents. Gilbert went back to his studies in 1925, but with a confirmed interest in international politics and the intention to write a dissertation on “The Origin of the Idea of Balance of Power in the Renaissance.”Footnote ⁴³ Meinecke rejected it, arguing that the handwriting of that time made it extremely difficult to deal with archival documents, and suggested instead a thesis on Droysen, which Gilbert reluctantly embarked upon and completed in 1931, before being able to pursue his interest in the political thought of the Renaissance. This pursuit, however, would be resumed only during the exile into which Gilbert was forced in 1933.

The place of Machiavelli in Gilbert's oeuvre must therefore be resituated in the complex framework made up by Meinecke's impress on the understanding of Machiavelli, and the experience of exile. Gilbert resumed his work on the Renaissance as he had left Germany for the United Kingdom. He had initially hoped that the political thinkers of the Renaissance were “an ‘international’ subject,” but he quickly realized that the history of the political ideas of the Renaissance was left to art or literary historians, with the result that, in the history of political thought, the suspicion that Machiavelli was “an advocate of the devil” still lingered on.Footnote ⁴⁴

From his first writings on the Renaissance, Gilbert cast Machiavelli as a very different figure from the ideological foil that occasionally surfaced in the writings of contemporary realists. Gilbert sought to understand Machiavelli by resituating him in the context of Florentine politics between the end of the fifteenth century and the first decades of the cinquecento. Machiavelli ceased to be a scandalous and isolated figure who smeared the pristine tapestry of Renaissance humanism, to become a man of his time, fully immersed in the cultural atmosphere of his city. His political doctrine was no longer an idiosyncratic anomaly, but the expression of a diffuse political culture; the concepts and ideas that he adopted or revisited circulated widely in Florence and informed municipal politics as well as foreign policy.Footnote ⁴⁵ His originality “did not consist . . . in the ideas which he proffered,” since they were not exclusively his; rather “his contribution was to weave them together in such a way that a new vision of politics emerged.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Much of this was pure Meinecke, in method but also in intent. Meinecke had turned to Machiavelli in the context of a “self-examination of historicism,” as he sought to understand the impasse in which this tradition had thrown Germany. Nineteenth-century German idealism had seen in Machiavelli a thinker who expressed the “rational” aspect of the national interest and thus a particular moment in the dialectic that led to the rise of the ethical state. In this tradition, individuality and identity, reality and rationality, the interests of a particular state and the accomplishment of Reason in history were conflated. Seen from the perspective of the defeat of 1918, however, this sanctification of power politics looked like a dangerous illusion. The notion of a philosophy of history, already challenged since Dilthey, was now in total disrepute for sanctioning power under the seal of rationality and morality, and a critical reassessment was in order. This was Meinecke's main problem in Die Idee der Staatsräson: recovering a tradition of power politics that did not end up with the idealization of Machtpolitik, but that remained in tension with ethics and recognized the limitations of rationality.Footnote ⁴⁷ In his search for a new articulation between politics and ethics that did not conflate them in the illusion that national power operated unwittingly for the realization of Reason in world history, Meinecke saw in Machiavelli the naturalistic, “realist” element of modern historical consciousness, aware of the contingency of politics and of the limits of reason, and irreducible to idealistic syntheses. The permanence of war was no longer the sign of a Hegelian “cunning of reason,” but suggested on the contrary an “incapacity” of reason, unable to “triumph by her own strength.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The last part of the book, moving from historical analysis to a critical diagnosis of the situation of Weimar Germany, was shaped by a concern that was no longer “the legitimation or the justification of history, but [the problem] of the responsibility of historical actors.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Meinecke sought to recover the problematic nature of the relationship between morality and politics, rather than considering history as the instance of its resolution. In doing so, he was challenging Croce's neo-Hegelianism, and this tension could only be exacerbated when it came to making sense of Machiavelli.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Florentine secretary became the first exponent of a “reason of state” which, in Meinecke's view, acted as a countervailing principle to the idealistic force of mass politics, “a benefic ice-cooling on the heat that irradiates from nationalism.”Footnote ⁵¹ With Meinecke, Machiavelli was enrolled in a critique of nineteenth-century idealism and universalistic nationalism that would soon become a standard of realist thought. He stood for a separation of politics from morality that acted as a safety valve preventing politics from descending into extremist forms of self-righteousness. He also became the indispensable starting point for responsible political reflection in the turmoil of the twentieth century.

Raised in the anti-Hegelian tradition of Ranke, Burckhardt, and Meinecke, Gilbert's Machiavelli was not an abstract rationalist, but the exponent of a culture that tied politics and ethics in ways that may have been contradictory, but that did not have to be resolved into a higher conceptual unity. No matter how scandalous Machiavelli's doctrine may have sounded, it was couched in a rhetoric inherited from the tradition of specula principum, a genre that he revisited but that tied his vision of politics to a cultural hinterland of debates about the moral qualities of the Prince that gave its specific meaning to his concept of virtù.Footnote ⁵² In light of this ethical background of Machiavelli's thought, Gilbert confidently asserted that “the view that he was a mere technician of statecraft can be considered obsolete, despite the attempts by Mosca, and more recently by Butterfield, to revive it.”Footnote ⁵³ Any notion of “amoralism” was thus historically inaccurate and could only be viewed as a contrived attempt to transform into a rigid philosophy a thought that was historical throughout. By refuting the idea that Machiavelli had formulated a pure “science” of politics, Gilbert also invalidated the interpretations that connected Machiavelli to modern totalitarianism.

What was remarkable, however, was that Gilbert consolidated Meinecke's intellectual legacy precisely when Meinecke himself had gone much further in his revision of historicism and taken his distances from Machiavellian realism. In his postwar diagnosis of the German tragedy, Meinecke indicted the degeneration of Machiavellism into a mass ideology. Far from having an “ice-cooling” effect, it now seemed that the ragione di stato itself had reached a point of incandescence at the contact of modern nationalism. The “daemonic,” nonrational element in the reason of state was no longer the key to political greatness, but a force that had led first the German bourgeoisie and then the masses into an “intoxicated craze for power.” By propelling ever-broader segments of the population into politics, the liberalization of government had “multiplie[d] the keys to the chest of poisons in which lie the essences of Machiavellism.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Not only had Meinecke's view of the tradition changed dramatically, but he now associated his distrust of power politics with Burckhardt's nostalgia for “the aristocratic character of the ancien régime.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The reference to the Basel historian, who had stood out as the counterpoint to the celebration of power politics by his Berlin colleagues, was anticipating a wider turn to Burckhardt in the postwar years. In a 1947 lecture on Ranke and Burckhardt given at the German Academy of Sciences, Meinecke suggested that, between the two historians, it was Burckhardt, with his bleak view of power and the state, who was now more attuned to the present than his Berlin counterpart, with his harmonious view of the “regulated progress of world history.”Footnote ⁵⁶ That Burckhardt actually viewed Machiavelli with admiration and even saw in him an anxiety about the ethical decline of political communities that echoed his own concerns was irrelevant: he was now the symbol of the rejection of Machiavellism and the power state, and as such he was swiftly conscripted into the Cold War fight against Soviet totalitarianism.Footnote ⁵⁷

Although he acknowledged his debt to Burckhardt, Gilbert refused to follow Meinecke in this indictment of power politics and Machiavellism.Footnote ⁵⁸ He rejected the idea that Ranke and Burckhardt were the opposite terms of an alternative and insisted on their complementarity, a view he defended at the end of his life in a small volume dedicated to the two historians.Footnote ⁵⁹ More importantly, his studies on Machiavelli remained indefectibly wedded to the perspectives opened by Die Idee der Staatsräson despite Meinecke's later denunciation of “Machiavellism” as a pathology of the reason of state in the era of mass politics. Yet it would be wrong to read into this divergence a discrepancy between Meinecke's concern for the present and a putatively more historical perspective pursued by Gilbert. For most German historians since Burckhardt and Ranke, the Renaissance was not a specialized field of study, but the foundation both of the history of modernity and of modern historiography. They “studied the Renaissance because of its essential contribution to the formation of modern Europe.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Gilbert was no exception and he had his own presentist concerns as he turned to Machiavelli, but they were markedly different from those of his West German colleagues.

One of Gilbert's concerns was provided by his firsthand experience of the failure to “maintain the state” (mantenere lo stato) that had led to the collapse of the Weimar Republic. Machiavelli's relevance to contemporary politics had nothing to do with the intellectual lineage of totalitarianism, but, on the contrary, with a robust defense of liberty that avoided the pitfalls of idealism. In Machiavelli and Guicciardini, the crisis of idealistic representations of politics was illustrated at one extreme by the fall of Savonarola, and at the other by a waning faith in politics based on reason and a positive view of power. The collapse of the Republic was seen as the failure of political rationalism, and the Medicean restoration was supported by a new generation of aristocrats who no longer believed in reason: they were, in Gilbert's pointed expression, “prophets of force.”Footnote ⁶¹ Within a few decades, humanistic rationalism and the moralistic idealism of Savonarola had succumbed to the attack on reason and the unleashing of brute power. It is difficult not to hear in Gilbert's masterwork echoes of the intellectual and political climate in which it had matured over thirty years: a frail republican regime born out of international developments and military defeat; a period of unprecedented artistic expression and creativity and, at the same time, of political uncertainty and instability; a protracted constitutional crisis; a violent coup supported by “prophets of force” who abolished republican institutions. One can only concur with Gabriele Pedullà when he observes that “the clash between rationalism and irrationalism that led to the triumph of the Medici is modeled after . . . the direct experience of the conflict that had torn apart Germany during the 1920s and was brought to conclusion with the establishment of Nazism.” Gilbert's Renaissance was indeed a “transfiguration” of Weimar.Footnote ⁶²

Seen through the prism of Weimar, Machiavelli represented a political wisdom that could have saved the day and had much to teach an embattled postwar liberalism. Equally distant from the “idealism” of Savonarola or the humanists and from the irrationalism of the “prophets of force” who had brought the Medici back into power, he stood for the capacity to rise up to the challenge of political emergencies, to act decisively in a timely manner, unconstrained by moral norms and accepted customs, yet within an ethical horizon defined by republican values. This was a Machiavelli critical of the powerlessness of rationalism and of its incapacity to stop the rising tide of fascism—not the abstract rationalist of the pro-appeasement Carr. This did not make him an apologist of pure force, but the ragione which for him guided political action was a reason entirely exposed to contingency, and therefore limited in its purchase—yet it was precisely this limitation that ensured its connection to reality and its effectiveness. It was a reason that could not rise above its own historical situation, and which, as a result, could not serve as a transcendent justification of power. This was a historicist Machiavelli, yet redeemed from the sins of extreme historicism and the sanctification of power characteristic of the German idealist tradition. In outlining a paradoxical bond between the idealistic Savonarola and the Medicean advocates of force, who despite their fundamental differences found themselves united in a common attack on reason, Gilbert may have read into the Florentine cinquecento the combination of idealism and power politics that distinguished the historicist tradition he knew so well, while also seeking to exonerate Machiavelli from it.Footnote ⁶³ For if the Machiavellian moment was coming to an end in West Germany, it was only dawning in America.

From German historicism to American realism: Meinecke's Atlantic legacy

It is difficult to understand the discrepancy between Machiavelli's dismal fate in postwar German historiography and his rising fortunes in American political science without keeping in mind the context in which Gilbert's scholarship developed from the late 1930s onward. Just like Machiavelli's Prince, Gilbert's mature work on Machiavelli began post res perditas, in exile, and in some ways as an offering of historical wisdom to the powers that be of his new adoptive country.Footnote ⁶⁴ As Meinecke reflected upon Machiavellianism from the dead end of the German Sonderweg, Gilbert was considering it from the perspective of a victorious power coming to terms with its world-political role, a perspective shaped by his participation in the nascent fields of security studies and international relations theory.

Shortly after arriving in the United States in 1936, Gilbert found a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies as the assistant of Edward Mead Earle (1894–1954).Footnote ⁶⁵ A somewhat forgotten figure of international studies, Earle has been recently rediscovered as an early American realist and an influential academic entrepreneur who largely contributed to the emergence of security studies.Footnote ⁶⁶ Trained in history, Earle shared the frustration of the “New Historians” who felt that rigorous source criticism and historiographical technique were not sufficient and that they needed to be able to address contemporary issues—a concern that Gilbert also shared.Footnote ⁶⁷ The seminar that he started at Princeton in 1939, and in which Gilbert was a participant for years, brought together an impressive roster of strategists, policymakers, political scientists, and historians in an effort to create “a new regime of inquiry” that would mobilize and integrate different disciplines in an effort to mainstream “national strategy” thinking in academia.Footnote ⁶⁸ Much more than an interdisciplinary experiment, this was an ambitious ideological project that examined the conditions for a social, political, economic, and educational reform that would better prepare American society to confront its global duties in terms of its national interests. This propaedeutic consisted in, among other things, moving away from isolationism and reconciling oneself with the “role of force in international affairs.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Earle's project was, in effect, intellectual propaganda.

Machiavelli obviously had much to contribute to a project that advocated the “return to an earlier tradition that treated military problems as an inherent element in the science of government and politics.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Edited by Earle, Craig, and Gilbert in 1943, Makers of Modern Strategy opened with a chapter by Gilbert emphasizing that the connection between “military power” and “political order” was at the center of Machiavelli's thought. Something deeper, however, was at stake in this relation between the use of force and political institutions. The question of military might was indistinguishable from the question of the ordinamenti, of the concrete constitution of the polity, and Gilbert considered that the “grandiose theme” of the Discorsi was the relationship between Rome's rise to world power and its republican constitution.Footnote ⁷¹ The conditions of military success were not only a matter of strategy and tactics: they were rooted in politically organized civic virtue. The absolutistic tradition outlined by Meinecke did not preclude the possibility that power politics could be reconciled with republican values and the defense of freedom.

The relation between power politics and republican values was one of the central questions that Earle's Princeton seminar sought to address in its uphill battle to reformulate problems of national security away from isolationism and its putative role in ensuring America's political virtue. In this context, the problem formulated by Meinecke was entirely relevant and captured what was now an American dilemma. Building upon it, Gilbert was directly engaging the most pressing issues of American foreign policymaking. The difference, however, was that the dualism between politics and ethics that Meinecke associated with Machiavelli and which eventually led him to take sides in 1946 was less pronounced when considered from Princeton. For in thinking historically about the Renaissance and its aftermath, Gilbert very much had America in mind.

In his memoir, Gilbert acknowledged that the seminar had a strong influence on his work and that “American foreign policy became a chief concern” of his in the late 1930s.Footnote ⁷² During the 1939–40 academic year, the topic of the seminar was “American isolationism” and Gilbert gave several talks on the subject, which he revised and eventually published under the title To the Farewell Address (1961). Although it does not invoke Machiavelli once, this slim volume provides an important backdrop against which Gilbert's Renaissance work developed from the late 1930s onwards, and it played a crucial role in assembling the historical circuitry in which Machiavellism could circulate unimpaired by moralistic reservations. To the Farewell Address examined the two main tendencies of US foreign policy—isolationism and international messianism—from the perspective of their antecedents in eighteenth-century European political thought. In effect, it was a painstaking attempt to uncover under the idealistic garb of Washington's Farewell Address what Gilbert presented as the basic realistic thrust of early American political thought about international affairs. He acknowledged that the address ultimately reflected the basic tension in American ideas about foreign policy “between Idealism and Realism,” yet he also suggested that they manifested themselves in different ways. The address belonged to a type of document—“political testaments”—that were “closely tied to the eighteenth-century concept of power politics.” What distinguished it was “the integration of idealistic assumptions” that came to conceal its realist bottom line.Footnote ⁷³ These conventional assumptions notwithstanding, nothing less than the entire “intellectual framework” of the recommendations on foreign policy “was that of the school of the interests of the state.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Far from being a cultural import, realism turned out to be as American as apple pie.

With realism thus safely lodged in the foundations of the American republic, it was possible to look at the reason of state with a more benevolent gaze. If Gilbert saw value in Machiavellism and the ratio status tradition even after Meinecke had repudiated it, it was because he was outlining an alternative historical path for this tradition, one that did not end up with the Nazi catastrophe but with the American republic. In many ways, To the Farewell Address was a critical appendage to Meinecke's book and explored another trajectory of the Idee der Staatsräson, one that saw the tension between politics and ethics subside with the founding of the American republic. By sketching a genetic connection between sixteenth-century Florence and the American republic, Gilbert paved the way toward the acculturation of Machiavelli in American political thought. He was no longer the forerunner of totalitarianism, but, on the contrary, a defender of republican liberty who directly spoke to the dilemmas of a democracy confronted with issues of national security, and in particular to the inescapable tension between its attachment to moral values and the necessity of survival.

Renaissance decisionism versus modern rationalism

The exposure to the “security dilemma” in the context of Earle's seminar and wartime service in the OSS, in which the émigrés gained “an education in contemporary Realpolitik and an insight into the unvarnished process by which the political decision later studied by historians are [sic] made,”Footnote ⁷⁵ undoubtedly helped crystallize the main themes of Gilbert's work, and in particular the vexed question of the relationship between power politics and moral norms. They also help explain why he kept in sharp focus the aspects of Machiavelli's thought that made him a theorist of force and power, while they tended to be downplayed by other historians of the Renaissance involved in the rehabilitation of Machiavelli as a model republican.Footnote ⁷⁶ For Hans Baron, for instance, Machiavelli was only a link in the transmission of “civic humanism” from the trecento all the way to Wilhelmine Bürgertum.Footnote ⁷⁷ Gilbert—who, as an early reader of Nietzsche, was “more interested in his Genealogy of Morals because of its attack on bourgeois values than in his Zarathustra”Footnote ⁷⁸ —on the contrary, saw in him a healthy corrective to bourgeois values, which sometimes had to be infringed in order to be safeguarded. The reason-of-state tradition may have informed early American political thought, as To the Farewell Address suggested, but it was also distinct from America's liberal and democratic values and Gilbert made it clear that this separation was paramount.Footnote ⁷⁹ The recovery of Machiavelli's thought was thus used to reintroduce in democratic practice a dimension of politics that was not bounded by it and was more commonly associated with absolutism.Footnote ⁸⁰

Yet, while he defended the idea that foreign policy should be exempt from the democratic strictures of domestic politics, Gilbert was also seeking to ease its acceptance. By emphasizing Machiavelli's anti-Medicean credentials and relating his considerations on the use of force to a normative background of humanist and republican traditions, he was suggesting the possibility of a more harmonious, less threatening relationship between prerogative power and established norms. Machiavelli's republicanism ultimately meant that political expediency was functional to the defense of the republic and thus normatively justified.

However, this reading of Machiavelli was up against a formidable obstacle, namely his association with a scientific, abstract, and rationalistic approach to politics, which had earned him the contempt of the postwar realists. Gilbert did much to change this, in particular by foregrounding the dimension of Machiavelli's politics that was restive to rationalization and formalization, and by dramatizing the “contrast between ragione and Fortuna,” in which he saw the structuring force of sixteenth-century Florentine politics.Footnote ⁸¹ The vicissitudes that had led to the fall of the Medici in 1494 and the protracted crisis of the republic before its eventual collapse had strengthened the notion that politics was not about realizing a fixed template or an ideal order, or about following universal rules, but about dealing with constant change and fluctuation.Footnote ⁸² Machiavelli's greatness was to have expressed this new historical consciousness better than any of his contemporaries.

But Gilbert went further and provided an astute reinterpretation of Machiavelli's rationalism. Here again, To the Farewell Address provides important clues. Gilbert drew a conventional opposition between power politics and the French Enlightenment: the target of revolutionary thought in the eighteenth century was the “balance of power.” The balance of power was the obstacle to all projects of perpetual peace, and, in the eyes of the political reformers of the eighteenth century, “foreign affairs showed most clearly the ills of a world not yet ruled by reason.” But Gilbert was too much of a historian to assume that this clear-cut opposition between power politics and the reformist philosophies of the eighteenth century was historically accurate or intellectually sound. If power politics “undisguised and untrammeled by moral values” was one aspect of the century, the other was the “scientific and systematizing spirit” that led politicians to believe that there existed “laws” of politics. This belief was not confined to revolutionary thinkers: it defined the mentality of the age and found supporters even among the realists. The result was that even advocates of power politics sought to express their philosophy in a rationalistic form: “even the power struggle among states was considered to have its laws. The attempt to discover these laws, though condemned to futility because of an erroneous belief in the rationality of human society,” Gilbert went on, “resulted in a clearer insight into the nature of diplomacy and a sharper definition of its tasks.”Footnote ⁸³

Gilbert did not hide his own skepticism of political rationalism and the idea that political knowledge could take the form of a “science,” but he also considered that the Enlightenment had paved the way for the transformation of power politics into an intellectually coherent doctrine. Rationalism was not necessarily a rigid philosophy of politics: it was a rhetorical convention that could be applied even to power politics and made it more persuasive. By the same token, it could be peeled off, leaving intact the fundamental insight of realism. Thus, “divested of its rationalistic exaggerations, the doctrine of the interests of the states contained a kernel of truth.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Examined against the backdrop of To the Farewell Address, Machiavelli's rationalism in Machiavelli and Guicciardini becomes very different from the quality attributed to him as the founder of a new science of politics. Gilbert assigned a purely conventional meaning to Machiavelli's political rationalism. Certainly, his early articles were replete with the idea that Machiavelli was looking for “the laws behind political phenomena” and mentioned repeatedly his “passionate concern to discover the hidden laws of history's involutions.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Machiavelli's “basic approach [was] rationalistic” to the extent that his understanding of human nature made men's actions “calculable.”Footnote ⁸⁶ But none of this meant that he thought reason was a sufficient and reliable guide to politics. His rationalism was a rationalism humbled by defeat, weakened by the historical involution of 1512 and the increased awareness of the volatility and unpredictability of Fortuna. Machiavelli was fully “aware that conducing politics according to pure reason had limits.” It was the nonrational part of the human psyche that allowed great politicians to impose their will on Fortuna and achieve glory.Footnote ⁸⁷ The role of contingency and timeliness in politics (la qualità dei tempi) was such that, in some circumstances, ratiocination had to give way to a decision taken in the absence of practical and normative certainty. Machiavelli was indeed “extremely critical of irresoluteness and delay. Determination and will power were the qualities which might prevail against all reason.”Footnote ⁸⁸ In the last instance, Gilbert placed the emphasis on the limited nature of Machiavelli's rationalism: immersed in the ever-changing “stream of history,” politics was the realm of pure contingency and could not take the form of rule-following. Machiavelli's genius was to rely on rationalistic conventions to deliver a message that limited the purview of reason in political affairs, to formulate a rational approach to politics that took into account and gave pride of place to what was not rational: his greatness was in revealing, “more than anyone before or after him, that, at any time, politics is choice and decision.”Footnote ⁸⁹ And to add gravitas to this judgment, Gilbert sealed it with the epitaph engraved on Machiavelli's tomb in Santa Croce: Tanto nomini nullum par elogium.Footnote ⁹⁰

While this portrait of Machiavelli was the result of a careful philological and historical reconstruction, Gilbert's choice of words suggests that he was also reading Machiavelli in light of recent political debates. In an essay on Meinecke's study of the political ideas of German academics from the nineteenth century to the twentieth published shortly after Machiavelli and Guicciardini, Gilbert dealt once again with political thinkers who “emphasiz[ed] will and decision rather than intellect.” These thinkers, however, were not Florentine politicians, but Carl Schmitt and Karl Mannheim.Footnote ⁹¹ The use of identical terms to describe both what Gilbert considered to be the defining feature of Machiavelli's thought and Schmitt's decisionism or Mannheim's rejection of the possibility of fully rationalizing politics cannot be discounted as an unfortunate coincidence. It was symptomatic of the tendency to use Machiavelli as a surrogate for discussing the issues raised by the decisionist thinkers of the interwar period. The more or less explicit connection between Machiavelli and Schmitt's theorization of emergency powers was on the mind of a number of German thinkers eager to salvage from the Nazi episode what they considered to be the still valuable contribution of decisionism to modern politics. In Ritter's Machtstaat und Utopie, Machiavelli appeared as a Schmittian for whom the essence of politics subordinates “all moral and human considerations to the friend–foe relationship.”Footnote ⁹² While Ritter deemed his realism morally deficient, it nonetheless found redemption in the emergency situation, since for Ritter too “self-preservation is a moral duty.”Footnote ⁹³

In the United States, this casuistic justification of power politics could be dispensed with because of the robustness and intrinsic virtue of the constitutional order. Adopting Schmitt's theory of dictatorship, Harvard political scientist Carl Friedrich, who made no secret of the decisionist persuasion of his youth, also turned to Machiavelli with a polemical intent vis-à-vis liberal constitutionalism in order to illustrate the importance of preserving the reason of state in the context of constitutional government.Footnote ⁹⁴ Constitutional Reason of State (1957) invoked the Florentine because only “pre-liberal” political thought considered with sufficient clarity the existential issue facing modern democracies.Footnote ⁹⁵ A few years later, Friedrich went back to Machiavelli in order to suggest that the republican reason of state generated its own morality and represented a rational interruption of the “reasoned elaboration” of political action.Footnote ⁹⁶

These debates were perfectly known to Gilbert. He praised Friedrich's 1957 book for “clos[ing] a gap which Meinecke had left” and exploring the problem of the reason of state beyond absolutism. Friedrich's merit was to point out that “the constitutional thinkers of the past were aware that an emergency situation might arise in which the maintenance of legality might involve great risks for the continued existence of a constitutional order.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Gilbert could only agree with a colleague who, like him, suggested that absolutism was not the only historical course for the reason of state: Friedrich too was cobbling together an Atlantic tradition of power politics that fed directly into the American present. In this alternative tradition, Meinecke's dualism between politics and ethics subsided. Friedrich indeed “argue[d] convincingly that the problem of the reason of state did not exist for Machiavelli.” Unburdened by the tradition of liberal constitutionalism or by legal positivism, unaffected by a conflict between legality and legitimacy that did not yet exist, Machiavelli could advocate robust measures departing from political and moral customs because he envisaged politics in relation to the concrete, historical existence of a free community.

Here, then, was the starting point for recovering power politics beyond the moral dilemma framed by Meinecke. Reengaging historically with Machiavelli made it possible to retrieve from the wreckage of the twentieth century an important line of political thought traditionally associated with authoritarian politics, and to reconsider it without being blinded by liberalism, yet without following the absolutist tradition ending with the illiberal thinkers of the interwar years. Gilbert's Machiavelli was thus informed by, and fed into, a discussion about emergency powers going back to the 1930s now revived by anxieties about the capacity of democracies to meet the challenges of the Cold War.Footnote ⁹⁸ Gilbert may indeed have been the first one to see in Machiavelli a form of “republican exceptionalism” that contributed to the acclimatization of power politics in American political thought (and, accessorily, to the academic fortune of the concept of republicanism in the United States).Footnote ⁹⁹

San Casciano-on-Hudson: The Florentine recruit of a new academic discipline

It is difficult to ascertain whether Gilbert himself conceived of his work as a direct contribution to the invention of a realist “tradition.” He certainly framed Machiavelli in terms that were indigenous to the postwar discussion about “realism” and “idealism” in international politics.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ And, by painting the portrait of a republican Machiavelli concerned by the political capacity for decisive action unimpaired by moralistic strictures or utopian rationalism, he definitely lifted the obstacles that had previously condemned the Florentine to the opprobrium of the postwar realists. Whatever Gilbert's intentions may have been, the fact remains that the academic entrepreneurs involved in the institutionalization of international relations theory after 1945 saw his work as sufficiently relevant to their project to sponsor it.

In 1956, the Rockefeller Foundation funded the archival groundwork for Machiavelli and Guicciardini. While a number of historians received such funding at the time, what is surprising is that Gilbert was funded under a grant program not devoted to history. The recently established Program in Legal and Political Philosophy was probably the most important institution behind the diffusion of a realist approach to international relations in the 1950s. Headed by Kenneth Thompson, a former student and protégé of Hans Morgenthau, it brought together the main exponents of postwar realism.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It funded both Gilbert's research for Machiavelli and Guicciardini and his subsequent work on Meinecke, as part of an effort at clarifying “the origins of political realism.” Born under Meinecke's auspices, raised in the cozy atmosphere of Mead Earle's Princeton seminar, Gilbert's Machiavelli ultimately matured under the benevolent nursing of Kenneth Thompson, the philanthropic patron of IR in the 1950s.

One can only build conjectures about the first contacts between Felix Gilbert and the Rockefeller Foundation. The foundation had supported the making of The Diplomats, but it seems that contacts were made through Craig rather than Gilbert. It seems safer to assume that his family's extensive social networks were involved. One of Gilbert's uncles, Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, was a professor of international law and, with Max Weber and the historian of warfare Hans Delbrück, an early proponent of the creation of a German institute for foreign policy at the Versailles conference. He eventually became the first director of the resulting Institut für Auswärtige Politik, which received Rockefeller Foundation funding during the interwar years, and in this capacity he was also a member of the Rockefeller Committee in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁰² Gilbert thus had a direct connection with the higher echelons of the foundation, and a name that certainly elicited goodwill from its officers.

In any event, when he met with Kenneth Thompson, Gilbert found a receptive interlocutor. A first meeting in May 1954, meant to discuss the state of diplomatic history, revealed that Gilbert, whom Thompson thought a “stimulating, thoughtful and imaginative scholar,” was currently embarked upon a project focused on “16th century Italian international relations.”Footnote ¹⁰³ This meeting, of a fact-finding nature, paved the way for a second one, in which Gilbert probed the possibility of having the foundation support the research sabbatical he needed to work on historical documents at the Warburg Institute in London and the Archivio di Stato in Florence. Meeting again with Thompson in November 1954, Gilbert explained that he planned to spend the 1955–6 academic year working on Machiavelli's theory of politics. In the formal inquiry he sent a few weeks later, he presented his project as being focused on “the theory of international relations in the sixteenth century.” He was very clear that his research in European archives would address a question of contemporary relevance. In studying the role of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, his purpose was to break with traditional scholarship, which treated them as isolated phenomena: “I am interested . . . in investigating their thought from the point of view of clarifying the relationship between political science and historiography.” Gilbert was touching upon a key issue that was at the center of the discussions surrounding the birth of IR theory. He was in fact emphasizing its relevance to the debates about the nature of political knowledge, caught between history and science, and its place in universities transformed by the behavioral social sciences. Much remained to be done, he continued, in order to understand the sixteenth-century “turning point toward realism.” There was primarily a need to study the emergence of new political concepts, and he intended to work in particular on a new intellectual approach to foreign affairs, which had generated many of the notions still guiding twentieth-century diplomacy, from the “balance of power” to the notion of state system. Here again, the point was to “elucidate the presuppositions which underlie the conceptual framework of our own political thought.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Gilbert's request was strongly supported by the referees whom Thompson consulted upon Gilbert's suggestion, and who included both historians and political scientists (Gordon Craig, Sigmund Neumann, H. Stuart Hughes, Isaiah Berlin, Hans Morgenthau, Hajo Holborn), some of whom were former OSS colleagues. Morgenthau, who had tried a few years earlier to hire Gilbert at his Center for the Study of American Foreign Policy in Chicago to work on early US foreign policy (a task for which he finally recruited the Viennese historian Gerald Stourzh), had only praise for Gilbert and his planned study. While he had disparaged Machiavelli as a cynical utopian ten years before, he was now strongly supporting “a study of political realism in the 16th century” because of the considerable contemporary relevance it would have.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

But the most clear-sighted endorsement probably came from Gilbert's friend and former Meinecke student, the historian Hajo Holborn. Holborn was the first occupant—at twenty-nine years—of the Carnegie-funded chair for the study of international relations at Berlin's Hochschule für Politik, and he had an immediate grasp of the stakes of Gilbert's work on Machiavelli for contemporary politics. He observed that in the anglophone tradition, most of the work on the rise of modern political theory had focused on representative government and civil rights, overlooking the “absolutistic or power state.” “A trail was blazed by Friedrich Meinecke's Idea of the Raison d’Etat [sic] but the book is not an answer to many of the problems implied.” Gilbert's work was important because it would enrich “not only the knowledge of 16th century history but the orientation of our own political thinking.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The other references were equally praiseful, and on 23 February the Rockefeller Foundation decided to award Gilbert a $5,400 grant for the study of “the origins of political realism.” The additional information included in the grant docket stated that “the study of political science and international relations has been marked by an increasing interest in the principles and forces governing political conduct . . . The early Florentine political realists including Machiavelli and Guicciardini were among the first to grapple with this problem.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

This was an important grant for several reasons. It was one of the early grants of the Program in Legal and Political Philosophy meant to strengthen international relations theory. Of course, Gilbert was in part facing the problem of all German refugee historians who had to “attract funding not specifically designed for their field,” given the lack of prior international networks in history.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ But historians such as himself or Holborn came to the United States already versed in the study of international relations and did not have to craft their projects in a way designed to meet the programing constraints of potential sponsors. It is clear that, for Gilbert's referees, for the Rockefeller Foundation, and probably for Gilbert himself, the topic of Machiavelli and Guicciardini was directly connected to the question of political realism in the twentieth century and to the consolidation of a new approach to international politics. His proposal also came at the right time: Thompson had convened an important planning meeting in May 1954, during which it was decided to promote the development of international relations theory.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ While the specific contents of the theory itself were never really worked out, it was supported by a negative consensus against the reduction of the study of politics to a behavioral social science, blind to the contingency and uniqueness of historical situations. In this context, Gilbert provided a powerful antidote against the scientization of politics. His Machiavelli relied on rationalistic conventions to convey a historicist message that refused the resolution of politics into an abstract rationalism and kept it fully immersed “in the ever-moving stream of history.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ But if politics could not be reduced to technical expertise, it could not be conflated either with democratic deliberation: “reason of state” or “security” considerations required the statesmanship of seasoned politicians, who understood that the logic of power and time occasionally demanded an expediency violating established norms. The rehabilitation of power politics via the Renaissance dovetailed with the ideological agenda of postwar realism, and in particular its repeated calls for insulating foreign policy from the liberal values it was meant to defend. It also provided realism with a long and prestigious historical tradition that enhanced its status and, more importantly, obfuscated its direct antecedents in German historicism and in the interwar critiques of liberal democracy.