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.
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.
Table of Contents
Preface: Leaders Matter
ix
Introduction: Why Leaders Matter
1
Part I.
Creation Stories: The Nineteenth Century
1.
Chasing Prestige and Security
21
2.
How to Build a State: Count Cavour, Ito Hirobumi, and Yamagata Aritomo
41
3.
How to Build Wealth: Alessandro Rossi, Okubo Toshimichi, and Shibusawa Eichi
69
Part II.
Liberal Exhaustion: The Early Twentieth Century
4.
The Death of Liberalism: Giovanni Giolitti and Hara Kei
99
5.
The Birth of Corporatism: Muto Sanji, Alessandro Rossi, Kishi Nobusuke, Giovanni Agnelli, and Ayukawa Gisuke
124
6.
The Total Leader: Benito Mussolini
152
Part III
In the American Imperium: The Cold War
7.
Chasing Democracy
179
8.
What Kind of Ally to Be: Alcide De Gasperi and Yoshida Shigeru
197
9.
Putting Corruption in Its Place: Kishi Nobusuke and Amintore Fanfani
225
Part IV.
Degrees of Freedom: After the Cold War
10.
Chasing Normality
263
11.
Choices on the Left: Achille Occhetto and Fuwa Tetsuzo
299
12.
Options on the Right: Umberto Bossi, Silvio Berlusconi, Ozawa Ichiro, and Ishihara Shintaro
316
Conclusion: How Leaders Have Mattered in Italy and Japan
A highly original and intellectually courageous piece of work, Machiavelli's Children opens up new horizons and perspectives, and will undoubtedly be the subject of considerable commentary. Richard J. Samuels is a natural comparativist: the balance between the two cases, the well-constructed conclusions to each chapter, the pausing over individual comparative detail are the best things in the book.
David I. Kertzer
A breathtakingly original and ambitious book, Machiavelli's Children sets a new standard for work in comparative politics, and restores to its proper place the classic question of the role of leaders in political history. The book offers fresh and unexpected insights into the course of both Japanese and Italian history, from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In moving us away from standard national histories-inevitably mired in 'exceptionalism'-Samuels offers a whole new way to conceive of the paths taken by states in the modern era. This truly rare and exciting piece of political and historical research raises the bar for all future study.
Ira Katznelson
What a wonderful book! Machiavelli's Children shows not just why, but how, leaders shape history. It astutely identifies the coercive, material, and normative mechanisms leaders use to loosen constraints and make choices, and offers fascinating paired comparisons of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese and Italian leaders who confronted problems of statebuilding, economic organization, and the character of political regimes. A joy to read, this engaging book combines analytical chronicles with sustained theoretical perceptions to powerfully illuminate social science's central puzzles of 'structure' and 'agency.'.
Chalmers Johnson
Italy and Japan share the experience of the United States's postwar attempts to dictate political systems for them—in each case emphasizing neofascism over democracy and independence. As it turns out, both countries also share a lot more than that, as Richard J. Samuels demonstrates in this tour de force of comparative politics.
