Joly’s Dialogue succeeds in showing how “the dreadful despotism taught by Machiavelli in The Prince” could, “by artifice and evil ways,” impose itself on modern society. Moreover, he warns us that humanitarian means and aims may issue in murderous tyranny. We are shown that our belief in progress is little more than an unjustified faith; for progress in the arts and sciences does not constitute decisive progress in morals, politics, or wisdom. We are reminded that tyranny is a political possibility coeval with man.

Waggoner’s commentaries on this rediscovered classic take the reader on a whirlwind tour of many of the timeless issues of politics with the guidance of such masters as Machiavelli and Montesquieu. Yet Joly underestimates his heroes and their true philosophic and political radicalism.

The author of The Prince was more than an analyst of tyranny or partisan of republicanism.  More importantly, the Montesquieu of Joly’s Dialogue is, as Waggoner points out, a distortion, “more the contemporary liberal, a man of good intentions but one who would be the dupe and casualty of Napoleon’s politics.” The real Montesquieu—moderate, sober, clear-sighted, infinitely subtle—is sacrificed in the pages of Joly.

Joly simply fails to see that Montesquieu was a disciple of Machiavelli. Machiavelli seeks to liberate acquisitiveness from any sacred restraint, such as conscience, pangs of guilt, or fear of divine retribution. Montesquieu begins from the same premise but sees that it need not require the spilling of blood and may even effect the improvement of one and all. The solution to the political problem by economic means is, for Montesquieu, the most elegant solution starting from Machiavelli’s premise. The modern system of trade and finance replaces stern and bloody republican virtue with the virtue Montesquieu calls humanité. Thus, to borrow a phrase, Montesquieu’s economism is Machiavellianism come of age.

Yet, despite these limitations, Joly’s Dialogue is second to none as an analysis of despotism rooted in ideology as it first reared its ugly head in the nineteenth century. Aron and Arendt were worthy heirs of his Machiavelli and Montesquieu. In scrutinizing the threat to liberal freedom from within liberalism itself and the path to new forms of despotism, Joly set out “the conditions of modern tyranny.” In the regime of Napoleon III, we witness a new genus of despotism, “humanitarian despotism.” Joly’s powers of prediction were prophetic. The twentieth century made plain that the possibility of tyranny lies even within the soil seemingly least congenial to it.

The Dialogue’s strange fate to the contrary, Joly was not an anti-Semite. In yet another irony, the only feature of modern totalitarianism he did not foresee seems to be this past century’s predilection for murderous anti-Semitism. Still, Joly’s portrait differs in important respects from National Socialism and Soviet Communism. For Joly’s tyrant is at great pains to preserve the forms of liberalism so as to mask his tyranny.

Turning from Joly to his masters in hell, we wonder what these illustrious giants of thought would have said of our last century’s bloody tyrannies. Would the philosopher Montesquieu still say, “in all the countries of the world, we love morality,” and “men, rogues in retail, are on the whole very honest people; they love morality”?

While Machiavelli would have surely despised our twentieth-century tyrannies, would he have granted that his teaching calls forth a modern, bloodier version of the very “pious cruelty” that it was part of his ultimate intention to eliminate? The Christian concern with the salvation of man’s immortal soul seemed to require actions that appear to Machiavelli “inhuman and cruel.” Machiavelli condemns the “pious cruelty” and stupidity Ferdinand of Aragon demonstrated in expelling the gifted Jews and Marranos from Spain in the Inquisition under the orders of the Church. Machiavelli is the only non-Jew of his age who expressed this view, and it is the only kind of cruelty he condemns, precisely because Ferdinand does not so much use religion as he is used by it.

Machiavelli understood such evils of religious persecution as a necessary consequence of the Christian principle: A considerable increase in man’s inhumanity was the unintended consequence of man’s aiming too high. Machiavelli’s principle: One must lower the standards so as to avoid committing such bestialities which are not required to preserve society and freedom; let us replace the Christian virtue of charity by calculation in order to make probable, if not certain, the actualization of the right or desirable social order. Twentieth-century totalitarianism, however, with its fantastic promises for the realization of universal principles, proved to exceed the “pious cruelty” of any sect with which Machiavelli was acquainted. Hitler and Stalin put Ferdinand and Isabella to shame.

In addition to teaching us about the permanence of the possibility of tyranny, and its perverse new forms in modernity, Joly compels us to wonder whether our liberalism or Machiavelli’s teaching is truer. Machiavelli taught: To hell with morality, let us have a politics of security. We modern liberals, by contrast, want it both ways—to have a politics of security and also to be moralists. At least in that sense, Machiavelli and his beloved ancients were right: “The nature of the people never changes.”

Daniel A. Doneson is the Literary Editor of Azure.