In Not Even a God Can Save Us Now: Reading Machiavelli after Heidegger, Brian Harding makes an uncompromising examination of how Niccolò Machiavelli’s insight into violence, sacrifice, and political foundations resonates with, and even anticipates, the sometimes elusive and frequently provocative inquiries of twentieth- and twenty-first-century continental philosophy.
Harding’s study combines historical awareness, hermeneutical sensitivity, and an ambitious theoretical framework that draws from Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, all of whom placed the nexus of violence, religion, and politics at the very heart of their thinking. The result is a work that challenges, provokes, and often unsettles any simple distinction between the seemingly archaic world of Machiavelli’s Florentine Renaissance and the purportedly sophisticated currents of phenomenology and post-Heideggerian thought. Harding neither aims to write another conventional interpretation of Machiavelli nor to delineate a purely historical investigation of The Prince or the Discourses on Livy. Instead, he contends that Machiavelli’s political philosophy, rightly understood in its subtle endorsement of a form of sacrificial violence that founds or preserves a state, clarifies some of the most perplexing questions modern continental thinkers have faced regarding how communities define themselves, sustain their unity, and direct force against internal or external threats. Through a painstaking dialogue with the major Machiavellian texts—The Prince, Discourses on Livy, Florentine Histories, The Art of War, and a number of lesser-known writings—Harding uncovers how Machiavelli repeatedly wrestles with the extent to which violence can be legitimated by the end of communal well-being, how religion can be harnessed or manipulated for political means, and how moral ideals are generated, maintained, or shattered by those very acts that secure the survival of a collective.
For Harding, Machiavelli’s enduring fascination with, and deep analysis of, actions that lie on the border between virtue and cruelty—such as Agathocles’s swift but brutal seizure of power—reveal a coherent, if unsettling, attitude toward both civic glory and calculated bloodshed. Machiavelli’s refusal to confine himself to the structures of any imaginary or transcendent moral code presages the specifically modern idea that we must confront the reality of our world without consoling ourselves with illusions of universal forms or absolute, external guarantees. Harding’s argument is that this blunt acknowledgment of the “effectual truth” (as Machiavelli so memorably calls it) discloses an affinity with several post-Heideggerian philosophers who likewise reject what they view as traditional metaphysics. But whereas Martin Heidegger famously focuses on questions of Being, finitude, and the “history of ontology,” Harding demonstrates that Machiavelli’s equally unsentimental admission of the facticity of violence supplies a concrete parallel to the way Heidegger sees truth emerging from and returning to our finite, worldly conditions. Indeed, Harding’s book suggests that Machiavelli’s treatment of religion as a malleable, worldly power—one that might sanctify or camouflage political violence—matches Heidegger’s own insistence that appeals to transcendence must always be returned to the conditions of Dasein’s being-in-the-world.
Moreover, Harding’s conversations with Jacques Derrida and René Girard shed further light on the thematic underpinnings of Machiavelli’s work. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire and sacrificial violence, wherein communities regularly distinguish between “good” violence (that which cements communal solidarity) and “bad” violence (that which dissolves it), appears throughout Harding’s reading as an especially apt lens through which to interpret Machiavelli’s most surprising endorsements of brutality. Harding explores how Machiavelli, while hardly a systematic philosopher in the scholastic sense, nonetheless constructs a practical vision that hinges on reorienting a city’s energies away from the random, chaotic violence that leads to its downfall and toward the methodical, targeted cruelty that can fortify civic life. In Harding’s view, Machiavelli’s ferocious examples of state-founding violence, together with his veneration of ancient Roman religious ceremonies and his critiques of what he calls modern Christian “humility,” clarify precisely the form of sacrifice Girard identifies as foundational. By extension, Harding positions Machiavelli’s political philosophy in provocative conversation with Derrida’s reflections on the irreducible violence within law and justice, pointing out that Machiavelli both anticipates the Derridean notion of an inescapable force undergirding legal structures and resists any comforting notion that such force can be deconstructed away. Rather, Harding suggests, Machiavelli prescribes a lucid acceptance of the necessity of force, channeling it for the sake of communal endurance, thereby exposing the deep ethical tensions and paradoxes that Derrida also tried to articulate.
The book’s novelty, however, does not rest only on theoretical alignment between Machiavelli and these modern heirs; Harding also underscores the specificity of Machiavelli’s historical context. Chapters are replete with extensive discussions of how Machiavelli interprets the ruinous politics of his Florentine milieu, the fragile balance of power among Italian states, and the catastrophic illusions of princes who fail to understand that their authority, to be legitimate, must be grounded in the potent confluence of religion and ruthless expediency. Yet despite Harding’s attention to the epochal shifts that separate Machiavelli from modern phenomenologists, his central thesis is that Machiavelli’s reflections illuminate perennial dilemmas of origin, belonging, and communal violence. The “effectual truth” of politics, Harding proposes, remains the same: governance is sustained by fateful decisions regarding whom or what must be sacrificed, and by the intricate ways states generate narratives and ceremonies (sacred or profane) to justify these decisions.
Readers will find the book uncompromising in its philosophical rigor. It does not hesitate to subject Machiavelli’s references to ancient religion, his often subtle rhetorical devices, and his unsystematic but intense claims about human nature to searching phenomenological scrutiny. William B. Parsons of Carroll College, commenting on Harding’s skill in drawing such disparate figures as Machiavelli, Heidegger, Derrida, and Girard into a single discussion, lauds the book as an important stimulus for those interested in both intellectual history and the philosophy of religion. J. Aaron Simmons further applauds Harding’s “refreshing and bold attempt” to marry Machiavellian analysis with post-Heideggerian continental thought, demonstrating how even Machiavelli’s less discussed works like The Art of War and Florentine Histories reveal the same tension over sacrificial force and truth.
At the same time, readers looking for a purely historical exegesis or a textbook introduction to Derrida or Girard might find themselves vexed by the combination of arguments. Wayne Lusvardi’s online review captures this ambivalence, praising Harding’s sections on Machiavelli for their clarity and subtlety while lamenting how the forays into Heidegger, Derrida, and Girard occasionally grow complex and conceptually difficult, risking a certain abstractness that requires philosophical stamina from the reader. Nevertheless, Harding’s method demands that we trace Machiavelli’s unblinking contemplation of sacrificial violence and then compare it to the conceptual frameworks of these difficult modern thinkers. Rather than presenting a simple or reductive reading of Machiavelli, Harding forces us to feel the same discomfort that Machiavelli’s contemporaries may have felt when confronted by his startlingly pragmatic notions of cruelty and piety.
Harding’s own stated intention, as illustrated by reflections in his preface, is to wrest Machiavelli from stereotypical caricatures—either as an amoral cynic or as a clever but limited political strategist—and to show how his reflections on religion, power, and the savage underpinnings of civic life anticipate a wide swath of later phenomenological concerns. Machiavelli, Harding suggests, would balk at the tradition of seeking moral comfort in illusions of transcendent goodness, just as Heidegger scorns the flight into the realm of the “ontic.” Whether or not one accepts Harding’s conclusion that Machiavelli already grasped the essence of sacrificial violence as a structural principle fundamental to human community, his argument resonates strongly with the pivotal concerns that shape contemporary continental thought: the moral precariousness of political unity, the necessity of forging shared horizons of meaning out of brute reality, and the inevitable tension between pious ideals and the shock of mortal conflict.
In the process of developing this thesis, Harding does not ignore Machiavelli’s literary craft, nor does he discount how Machiavelli’s occasionalism—his tendency to write in response to fleeting historical and personal circumstances—both complicates and enriches his reflections on the interplay of virtue and brutality. Yet Harding’s reading cuts through superficial contradictions to isolate consistent themes of violence, religion, and sacrificial logic. The Machiavellian notion of “cruelties well used” acquires, in Harding’s view, a gravitas that goes beyond strategy: it crystallizes the paradox of forging a political order capable of outlasting the barbarisms it must commit. For Harding, this is precisely the paradox that Girard sees when communities expel a scapegoat to restore unity, and which Derrida laments when he perceives that law is always haunted by the violence of its own foundation. The difference, perhaps, is that Machiavelli welcomes that knowledge unflinchingly, seeing in it an inevitable condition for sustaining a republic or a principality, whereas many later interpreters wrestle with the moral and conceptual aftershocks of that acceptance.
Harding’s project is a highly original and provocative approach to both Machiavelli and continental thought. By carefully aligning Machiavelli’s text with theoretical motifs drawn from the aftermath of Heidegger’s turn against metaphysics, Harding shows that Machiavelli’s focus on actual events and lived experiences—on “the effectual truth”—can speak startlingly well to philosophers who seek a fresh lens on human finitude, communal identity, and the generative but terrible potential of sacrificial violence. Indeed, Harding’s interpretive framework itself amounts to a kind of sacrificial operation: it cuts through centuries of commentary and misunderstandings to revive Machiavelli’s harrowing yet bracing insights, even while it subjects those insights to the demands of a modern discourse shaped by phenomenology and deconstruction. Far from being a straightforward commentary, Not Even a God Can Save Us Now demands of its reader an openness to the very themes Machiavelli scrutinizes—namely, how we might look to religion, to civic mythologies, and even to the figure of God as we wrestle with the brutality that underwrites political existence.
Throughout the book, Harding’s writing remains both steeped in Renaissance historiography and steeped in the idioms of continental philosophy. This dual footing prompts what some will find to be necessary density: he cannot simply rewrite Machiavelli’s centuries-old political manuals nor merely offer a potted summary of complex modern thinkers, so he instead weaves them together in a style that presupposes familiarity on both sides. In that sense, the text speaks powerfully to scholars of political philosophy, intellectual history, and theology who are willing to engage at length with fundamental questions of how states are built and how truths are violently established or unmade. The editorial reviews rightly stress how Harding’s scholarship is not intended for a cursory reading, but offers a wealth of insights for anyone who takes the time to track each step of his argument.
Readers will discover that Harding, in rereading Machiavelli “after Heidegger,” revisits in painstaking fashion Machiavelli’s meditations on ancient Roman religion, on the savage displays of public sacrifice, on the ways in which Christian modes of worship diminish or transform the ferocity needed for civic renewal, and on how a phenomenological description of political life might encapsulate these stark truths. The book shows, in short, that Machiavelli’s works derive their power not from shallow cynicism but from an unrelenting recognition that every form of political unity is precariously suspended upon the willingness of its members to sanction ferocious acts in its name. For Harding, this willingness to embrace the practical horizon of violent necessity, rather than fleeing to a realm of transcendent ideals, resonates with the post-Heideggerian emphasis on human finitude, the irreducibility of conflict, and the inescapable fact that all meaning-structures are established through a certain symbolic—and sometimes literal—sacrifice.
In the end, Harding’s book earns its place as a conversation starter across multiple disciplines. Students of Machiavelli, especially those who have grown weary of the routine stereotypes of “Machiavellian cunning,” will see new depth in his analysis of religion, the symbolic dimensions of warfare, and the sacrificial distinction between “good” violence and mere chaos. Readers committed to Heidegger, Derrida, Girard, and the phenomenological tradition more broadly will be intrigued by Harding’s ability to reconstruct a debate that runs from the heart of Renaissance Florence to the heart of modern metaphysics, revealing persistent questions about the concealments and unconcealments of power. And scholars in the fields of intellectual history and the philosophy of religion will find both the admiration and the criticism in the top reviews indicative of just how lively, challenging, and divisive Harding’s argument can be. As Bobbie’s concise online review asserts, the “well thought out” and “cogent” interpretation might well inspire those who suspect that Machiavelli has been too hastily dismissed as an antiquated or merely practical thinker. For Harding, Machiavelli’s reflection on violence, truth, and religiosity runs deeper than a simple set of tactical instructions: it raises the very questions that continue to haunt us—how a community is founded and preserved, who or what is sacrificed to secure that preservation, and whether there is any outside or beyond to these necessities.
Not Even a God Can Save Us Now is therefore not just a book about Machiavelli. It is an original, probing, and frequently unsettling meditation on how philosophical inquiry, historical contingency, and raw political force converge to shape our social worlds. Harding strives to strip away sentimental illusions, forcing us to confront what it means to uphold religious or political ideals that so often rest on the rubble of destroyed adversaries. By comparing Machiavelli’s acceptance of this dynamic to the explorations of sacrifice, desire, and deconstruction in modern continental thought, Harding makes the case that Machiavelli remains indispensable to our current debates about religion, violence, and the precariousness of political belonging. The book thus becomes a relentless invitation to wrestle anew with Machiavelli’s enduring provocation, reminding us that the darkest corners of his analysis may hold the key to insights as relevant now as they were five centuries ago.
Simon Gros 
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