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Machiavellian Democracy. By John P. McCormick. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. 264p. $90.00 cloth, $27.99 paper.
Imagine an America in which indictments by the people could be brought against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger for the secret bombing of neutral Cambodia that killed thousands of civilians and paved the way for the rise of the murderous Khmer Rouge regime. Imagine a college of tribunes, drawn by lot exclusively from the pool of ordinary citizens, that could initiate charges against George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and John Yoo as torturers, or indict the heads of financial institutions for the crimes that triggered economic ruin in 2008. Consider how different American democracy might be if its governing institutions included a body of and for the plebs, empowered to veto one major piece of legislation a year (perhaps the recent extension of the Bush tax cuts) or oversee an annual national referendum (maybe on a single-payer health insurance plan).
These are the otherwise unimaginable possibilities that arise from John P. McCormick's important book Machiavellian Democracy. Setting aside for the moment the problem of how people's tribunes might be introduced into modern democracy, the significance of this work lies in the powerful critique it contains of contemporary representative institutions. Not only does this book challenge central pillars of electoral democracy's legitimacy, but it does so through a careful reading of Machiavelli that convincingly recasts this paragon of elite cunning and survival as a determined champion of real democracy for the lower classes. By charting the path to a more robust democracy through Machiavelli, McCormick provides us with an arresting reinterpretation of both the governing form and the thinker.
The central defect of modern democracy is that it cannot constrain the enormous power of wealthy oligarchs. McCormick also mentions the problem of controlling nonwealthy political elites. But his analysis and the architecture of the remedies he envisions strongly emphasize material considerations. Electoral democracies permit the ultra-rich to exert exaggerated power and political influence, and "encourage political and economic elites to enrich themselves at the public's expense and encroach upon the liberty of ordinary citizens" (p. vii). Even under the most ideal conditions of full suffrage and free participation, the distorting...