Books, Arts & Manners: Clouded Vision

The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel By J. H. Hexter Basic Books, 243 pp., $8.50 J. H. Hexter has opened up a marvelous subject and then obscured much that he might have illuminated. He sets The Prince’s arguments for amoral political realism against Utopia’s case for “utopian” justice, and pits against both the principles of a practical statesman who sought the morally and politically best that his circumstances might allow. Such a debate is a “natural” at any time and especially in our time, when similar views on right and might are live political alternatives.

Most readers know of the little classics of Machiavelli and More; few know Claude de Seyssel’s La Monarchic de France. Hexter’s last and best chapter does a useful service in showing that Seyssel’s task in the sixteenth-century France of Francis I was similar to The Federalist’s in 1788-89: He coaxed his country’s more or less dominant power toward less dominance, toward the constitutional institutions of a more moderate and mixed regime.

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Robert K. Faulkner

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The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel By J. H. Hexter Basic Books, 243 pp., $8.50 J. H. Hexter has opened up a marvelous subject and then obscured much that he might have illuminated. He sets The Prince’s arguments for amoral political realism against Utopia’s case for “utopian” justice, and pits against both the principles of a practical statesman who sought the morally and politically best that his circumstances might allow. Such a debate is a “natural” at any time and especially in our time, when similar views on right and might are live political alternatives.

Most readers know of the little classics of Machiavelli and More; few know Claude de Seyssel’s La Monarchic de France. Hexter’s last and best chapter does a useful service in showing that Seyssel’s task in the sixteenth-century France of Francis I was similar to The Federalist’s in 1788-89: He coaxed his country’s more or less dominant power toward less dominance, toward the constitutional institutions of a more moderate and mixed regime.