Hypatia

Hypatia 17.3 (2002) 273-276

Book Review

Fortune Is a Woman:
Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli

Fortune Is a Woman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. By Hanna Fenichel Pitkin. 2^d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

It is rare indeed that a book becomes a "classic" almost from the day it is published. For Pitkin's Fortune Is a Woman that assessment became, with few exceptions, universal soon after the first edition appeared in 1984. Now with the second edition in 1999, one might give a number of reasons for reaffirming that status. First, the breadth of the sources Pitkin uses to critique and analyze NiccolòMachiavelli's work spans the centuries from Aristotle to Hannah Arendt, both historically and philosophically, with minor digressions into John Locke, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.

Second, the unique twentieth-century lenses used to bring into focus the personal and social characteristics of Machiavelli's work, life, and upbringing [End Page 273] in Renaissance Florence, and consequently his "weltanschauung," so to speak, utilize the psychoanalytic and developmental theories of Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Jean Piaget, as well as the sociological and historical work of James Bruce Ross, William Boulting, and D. W. Winnicott, among others, and also the groundbreaking work of Dorothy Dinnerstein and Nancy Chodorow on the significance of feminine images and mothering on social development.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it was and still is the only book-length treatment of Machiavelli's political thought to explore the impact of his and Renaissance Florence's misogyny and machismo—as reflected in the most critical passages of his works dealing with the fundamental images of Fortuna and virtù and their extensions in the characteristics of the fox, the founder, and the fraternal citizen—upon his and future theorists' conceptualizations of the vivere civile. Whether this constituted a truly "feminist" critique of Machiavelli was left undetermined and not even mentioned in the first edition, and is only hesitantly raised in the second.

But what has perhaps been most overlooked about this book and what contributes most to its standing as a "classic" today is the way in which the author wove her own philosophical and political theories into the final two chapters of the original, using a theoretical construct that she labeled "Machiavelli at his best" as a foil for her own convictions. This critique demonstrated that even when one takes "Machiavelli at his best" and admits that he almost succeeded in sublimating his own personal and political fears and needs to produce a truly liberating theory of the citizen republic, his misogyny vitiated whatever validity his approach may have had toward resolving the problem inherent in modern society, of creating the "mutualistic" society that respects and incorporates the autonomy of the individual.

This critique "rang true" to those who read it then and still does today because of the controversies over war, fascism, and "machismo" that dominated the last half of the twentieth century—from World War II to Vietnam, from the Holocaust to the civil rights and women's movements. Pitkin joined others in citing Machiavelli as an extremely important political theorist for our time because of his practical republicanism, but she also unflinchingly pointed out his "protofascistic" and misogynistic failings. And while she made no apologies for these failings by calling him a "scientist" or an "amoralist," she nevertheless praised him for almost achieving what theorists, in her opinion, have been striving for ever since—a true vision of the citizen society based on political equality, "civic virtue," and what was her own principal concern, this synthesis of mutuality and autonomy. He failed, in her view, only because of his overwhelming fear of the feminine.

This book gave us all a lot to think about in 1984. And its reissue in 1999 gave an additional incentive to reread it today to those of us concerned about gender relations at the cusp of the twenty-first century. Not surprisingly, despite [End Page 274] the fact that...