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.

As someone with little familiarity with the history of political thought, I'm really enjoying this right-tilting introduction. That's probably why I'm enjoying this book so much. There's a lot of Aristotle and Marx going head to head with the occasional What Would Machiavelli Do? As a bonus, this author worships Reagan and condemns Clinton, and argues that in the West we've achieved the classless, egalitarian ideal. What a hoot!

The best is saved for last:
p226 "... the defense of liberal democracy will remain first and most urgently a security question, just as it has in the past... generous immigration policies that reflect these societies' liberal ideals have contributed to the problem, in some cases creating a breeding ground and favorable operating environment for terrorism and globally organized crime...
"Perhaps more worrisome than the problem of unassimilated minorities as such, however, is the multiculturalist mentality that makes sensible public discussion of such issues virtually impossible today. This mentality, which finds special virtue in non-Western cultures and tends to favor preferential treatment for presumptively oppressed racial and sexual groups, represents at bottom an indifference or hostility to the values and traditions of Western liberalism that is dismaying, to say the least."
Gold.

somewhat flat and disappointing

I'm working on this right now. Thank goodness for KZ and his endless reading supply.

Carnes Lord's "The Modern Prince: What Leaders Need to Know Now" is both a Straussian critique of contemporary political science and a searching assessment of political leadership in the present age. Lord's discussion of Aristotle and Machiavelli-the first modern political thinker- is instructive and provides the framework for a cogent analysis. The author's historical examples are lively and help illustrate the salient aspects of leadership.

My only reservation regarding this work is the absence of any mention of Richard Neustadt's "Presidential Power," a book that informed the Kennedy presidency. That said, I highly recommend this volume.