As Samuels compellingly illustrates, history enhances choice more than it restricts it." Bullying and buying off the opposition may work, but the most effective leaders actively remake the past in pursuit of the future. For Samuels, leadership is the constant manipulation of and movement between the past and the future.
Each chapter pairs the experience of a leader with a decision he made at a critical juncture.
The use of Italy and Japan is somewhat counterintuitive but provides an effective and highly entertaining springboard. "This is a bold and audacious work, an example of what comparative politics can be but rarely is. This truly rare and exciting piece of political and historical research raises the bar for all future study." 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. The book offers fresh and unexpected insights into the course of both Japanese and Italian history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. "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. Kertzer, Dupee University Professor of Social Science, Brown University: 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.ĭavid I. 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. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. 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.
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