It's interesting that Mansfield would put such a great weight on the President's power to pardon without calling attention to the significant explicit qualifier: That the pardoning power does not apply in cases of impeachment. In other words, the Constitutional Framers gave the national legislature the supreme trump card. I would be curious to know if Mansfield simply believes that the U.S. Constitution should no longer be applicable. He certainly seems to lean in that direction. I wonder if he would express the same level of enthusiasm, if under a petty tyranny, he found himself imprisoned without charge for his writings. I suspect when push comes to shove Mansfield would refuse to go all the way and run from the logical conclusion of his argument.

In reference to Machiavelli, I have had the opportunity to read both The Prince and Machiavelli's Discourse on Livy (as Mansfield undoubtedly has as well).

I find it strange that an undue emphasis would be placed on The Prince to the exclusion of Machiavelli's analysis in The Discourses. The point of emphasis that I took away from The Discourses is that a tyranny was an inferior form of government to that of a Republic. Tyrannies frequently rely on mercenaries, and seem to abound in situations where the population lacks "virtu". Machiavelli as a point of contrast examines the strength of governments such as the Roman Republican and the nearly contemporaneous (for Machiavelli) Swiss Republic. In both cases these Republics gained strength from popular support (a condition largely absent in a tyranny or a principality where power was maintained largely through coercion). Undoubtedly many of the Framers were also aware of Machiavelli's key writings, but unlike Mansfield they also possessed the experience of monarchical rule, which in turn tempered their enthusiasm for the creation of another monarchy in the post-revolutionary period. Mansfield seems a little too prone to the vices of the Ivory Tower.

It is extremely odd too that The Wall Street Journal and the Weekly Standard would provide Mansfield's with such a public platform and allow themselves to be associated with these ideas. It is a fairly sad statement about where their priorities seem to rest, and to whom they are beholden.

It's interesting that Machiavelli did not dedicate his last days to writing about the virtues of Imperial Rome. I find it equally telling that he seems to give the highest marks in The Discourses to those unitarians, who at the end of the day became law-givers. Mansfield reverses the order by stating that the ideal is for the Republic and the rule of law to revert to the rule of a Prince. This would seem like a perverted reading of Machiavelli in light of his later work. A principality might become an expedient once the population becomes corrupted. But the endgame was the creation of a Republic.

Even just based on the experience of the past 300 years, it has been demonstrated amply that highly centralized rule into one man, or a faction, is a recipe for a weak government over the long haul--e.g. the Fascist states of the 30s and 40s; and more recently with the collapse of the Soviet Union dominated by one-party rule. When put to the test by outside pressures, or even internal ones, these governments just didn't hold up (see Iraq for a recent example). Governments with broad popular support, which by definition are ones empowered by a virtuous population, are the ones best capable of defending themselves and exerting "greatness". But perhaps this is not Mansfield's ideal?

Once again, this seems to come back to the issue of experience. Ivory Tower theorists seem to get it wrong so often (see the Royal Kagans), because their theories fail to conform to the real world of experience, and their analysis is too narrowly focused; too abstracted from a complex reality. Machiavelli and the Framers certainly lived and experienced the world in ways in which the likes of Mansfield fail to even imagine.

Never mind that George W. Bush would be a fairly low-grade version of the Prince. Not exactly a student of history, a man of deeply considered opinions, or a man of especially broad experience. I don't remember the section in The Prince dedicated to "ruling from the gut". I do remember sections in The Discourses about the corruption of second and third generation rulers in the context of a principality.