Jeremy's Reviews > The Art of War: A Revised Edition

The only one of Machiavelli's major works to be published in his lifetime, The Art of War is a survey of Machiavelli's opinions on the composition, employment, and leadership of an army.

I found the introduction to this book by Neal Wood to be illuminating as it connected Machiavelli's views in this book to his other famous political works ( Discourses and The Prince ). It also discussed Machiavelli's sources (most of his examples are from Greek and Roman history, as befitting a Renaissance book) and some of the details that he got wrong.

Machiavelli writes the book as a question and answer session with a military expert, which became tedious as the participants kept flattering each other. Machiavelli also takes great pains to describe the composition and formations of his ideal army, which gets very long in words. The diagrams provided in the appendix were much more understandable.

One of his interesting assertions is that armies and nations win because of their virtu, which the translator left untranslated. Virtu can be termed as both character and fighting spirit. Machiavelli says it is built both through right living and also experience in warfare. Because any country who conquers all its neighbors will end up losing experience in fighting, Machiavelli asserts that every people will finally lose its virtu and be conquered by another, but he does think that can be postponed some.

After beginning the book with this discussion (which the introduction's author asserts connects The Art of War with Machiavelli's other works), he moves into more specific topics of how to attack with an army, how to march an army, how to camp an army, how to attack/defend a city, and the best characteristics of a general.

What I found most fascinating about this book was the correlaries with Unorthodox Strategies , which I recently finished. Although the authors, and the events they describe, were literally a world apart, the principles they espouse are amazingly similar. Both touch on rewards and punishments to keep discipline, the effect of terrain, supplying an army, advance and retreat, subterfuge, and more. To me, the most striking similar advice was to leave an avenue of escape for a retreating enemy because a cornered army will fight more ferociously. A sensible piece of advice, but counterintuitive. It seems principles of successful warfare were the same in Greece, Rome, or China.

This book adds some advice on artillery, which was not treated in the Chinese military classics that I have read, because they were written earlier.

While some of the book was tedious, the treatment of strategy and the connections I found with other books I have read made me glad I finally got around to reading it.