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I'm not sure where to begin when it comes to my disappointment with this book, but I suppose the title would be a logical place to start:
Lord calls his book The Modern Prince because he ostensibly sees it as as using Machiavelli's classic as "a point of reference for understanding the particular character and (especially) the limitations of leadership today and as a tool for shaping the elements of an art of politics to suit the needs of contemporary leaders...The Prince also serves as a literary model of sorts, with its brisk, colloquial, and irreverent style designed, among other things, to deflate the pretentious of intellectuals..." (Preface) I'm not sure what Lord is trying to say about himself with that last part, but this whole pretense that this book necessarily has anything whatsoever to do with The Prince is nonsense. References to its antecedent are rare, scattered, and by no means necessary to understand the points he is making. The seem to have been added after the fact in order to give at least some support to his decision to entitle the book as he did. The most generous interpretation that I can come up with for Lord giving his book the title that he did is that he believes it to be part of the same tradition that Machiavelli's is; more likely, it seems, is that he felt this was the best way to catch the eye of a bookstore browser and dupe him/her into buying something isn't what s/he thought it would be. Thankfully I got my copy from the bargain bin. But still.
Anyway, The Prince was a short manual of political advice. The Modern Prince is basically a textbook (or at least it reads as drily as one) of leadership and politics in the modern world. I say "basically" because although most of the book is generally a bland explanation of various facets of leadership and statecraft (to use Lord's favorite word), he also includes occasional interjections of personal opinion which he dresses up as established fact. Frequently my impression while reading this book was that of having a conversation with an intelligent but cranky older relative who spends his days watching Fox News, complaining about kids today, and who can no longer discern his own beliefs from objective truth, but whom you know you'll never be able to convince of that, so you roll your eyes and let it go because you only see this guy once a year at Thanksgiving and it isn't worth starting a huge fight over and besides, he probably doesn't have that many Thanksgivings left anyway. I mean, he's got to be... what, 80? 90 by now?
By the end of the The Modern Prince, my feeling was one of confusion as to why he wrote the book in the first place. It's too long to be kind of accessible handbook in the style of The Prince, but way too short to be of any value as a kind of comprehensive manual of contemporary global leadership (an impossibly broad topic anyway). There isn't enough opinion in here for the author to be asked to appear on a Fox News show, but certainly too much to be taken seriously as a dispassionate study. In the end, the best I can come up with is that maybe the War College where he teaches requires a certain number of publications from members of the faculty and he was just out of ideas.
Lord calls his book The Modern Prince because he ostensibly sees it as as using Machiavelli's classic as "a point of reference for understanding the particular character and (especially) the limitations of leadership today and as a tool for shaping the elements of an art of politics to suit the needs of contemporary leaders...The Prince also serves as a literary model of sorts, with its brisk, colloquial, and irreverent style designed, among other things, to deflate the pretentious of intellectuals..." (Preface) I'm not sure what Lord is trying to say about himself with that last part, but this whole pretense that this book necessarily has anything whatsoever to do with The Prince is nonsense. References to its antecedent are rare, scattered, and by no means necessary to understand the points he is making. The seem to have been added after the fact in order to give at least some support to his decision to entitle the book as he did. The most generous interpretation that I can come up with for Lord giving his book the title that he did is that he believes it to be part of the same tradition that Machiavelli's is; more likely, it seems, is that he felt this was the best way to catch the eye of a bookstore browser and dupe him/her into buying something isn't what s/he thought it would be. Thankfully I got my copy from the bargain bin. But still.
Anyway, The Prince was a short manual of political advice. The Modern Prince is basically a textbook (or at least it reads as drily as one) of leadership and politics in the modern world. I say "basically" because although most of the book is generally a bland explanation of various facets of leadership and statecraft (to use Lord's favorite word), he also includes occasional interjections of personal opinion which he dresses up as established fact. Frequently my impression while reading this book was that of having a conversation with an intelligent but cranky older relative who spends his days watching Fox News, complaining about kids today, and who can no longer discern his own beliefs from objective truth, but whom you know you'll never be able to convince of that, so you roll your eyes and let it go because you only see this guy once a year at Thanksgiving and it isn't worth starting a huge fight over and besides, he probably doesn't have that many Thanksgivings left anyway. I mean, he's got to be... what, 80? 90 by now?
By the end of the The Modern Prince, my feeling was one of confusion as to why he wrote the book in the first place. It's too long to be kind of accessible handbook in the style of The Prince, but way too short to be of any value as a kind of comprehensive manual of contemporary global leadership (an impossibly broad topic anyway). There isn't enough opinion in here for the author to be asked to appear on a Fox News show, but certainly too much to be taken seriously as a dispassionate study. In the end, the best I can come up with is that maybe the War College where he teaches requires a certain number of publications from members of the faculty and he was just out of ideas.
