Machiavelli's Children - by Richard J Samuels (Paperback)

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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. In this audacious book about leadership and historical choices, Richard J. Samuels emphasizes the role of human ingenuity in political change. He draws on interviews and archival research in a fascinating series of paired biographies of political and business leaders from Italy and Japan. 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. 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.

Review Quotes

An extraordinary and, in large part, successful, book. Machiavelli's Children.... compares and contrasts Italian and Japanese political and economic history from the mid-nineteenth century until the present. It explores the nature and meaning of leadership. And, less wittingly, it expresses American dreams and nightmares in the early twenty-first century.

Samuels offers excellent comparative analysis of each time period and each grouping of leaders. Samuels argues convincingly that their leadership styles are not necessarily cultural or national. In both countries there have been those who missed opportunities, those who exploited opportunities, and those who created opportunities.... This is the essence of leadership. It is also what makes this history so interesting.

Samuels sensibly argues that 'leaders may not be all that matters in politics, but they are surely more than mere vessels for irresistible and inevitable change.'... The best sections in this provocative book detail the story of how Italy has reformed itself, economy and politically, while Japan dragged its feet. In Japan's case, it is a story of how leadership has faltered and blinked.

Samuels' marvelous book is a sweeping historical study of Italy and Japan through the lens of key leaders from the mid-19th century, when these two nation-states were constructed, to the present.... This carefully researched and readable book reminds us that leaders matter.

This is a bold and audacious work, an example of what comparative politics can be but rarely is.... The use of Italy and Japan is somewhat counterintuitive but provides an effective and highly entertaining springboard. Each chapter pairs the experience of a leader with a decision he made at a critical juncture. For Samuels, leadership is the constant manipulation of and movement between the past and the future. Bullying and buying off the opposition may work, but the most effective leaders actively remake the past in pursuit of the future. As Samuels compellingly illustrates, history enhances choice more than it restricts it.

To trace the developmental dynamic in both countries from their founding as modern states after the Meiji Restoration and the Risorgimento, respectively, up to the present is an ambitious task. But it is one that Dr. Samuels carries off with aplomb, giving the reader a brilliantly fine-grained story of what has worked or not worked for the two peoples, how historical events will shape Japan and Italy in the future, and how lessons from the past can be applied in the present.

About the Author

Samuels is Ford International Professor and Head of the Department of Political Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Director of the MIT-Japan Program. He is also the author of "Rich Nation, Strong Army" and The Business of the Japanese State: Energy Markets in Comparative and Historical Perspective, both from Cornell, and winner of the Masayoshi Ohira Memorial Prize.