The Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli is the source of the world's most infamous literary forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. John Waggoner's superb translation of and commentary on Joly's Dialogue—the first faithful translation in English—seeks not only to update the sordid legacy of the Protocols but to redeem Joly's original work for serious study in its own right, rather than through the lens of antisemitism. Waggoner's work vindicates a man who was neither an antisemite nor a supporter of the kind of tyrannical politics the Protocols subsequently served and presents Maurice Joly, once much maligned and too long ignored, as one of the nineteenth century's foremost political thinkers.

"In addition to teaching us about the permanence of the possibility of tyranny, and its perverse new forms in modernity, Joly compels us to wonder whether our liberalism or Machiavelli's is truer." - Azure

"Joly's work is a briliant account of modern depotism, and of the vulnerability of republicanism to a Machiavellianism aware of the manipulability of popular mechanisms. Joly's updating of Machiavellianism deserves to be read as a prophetic and unwittingly influential document. Having detailed the despotism of its own century and inadvertently contributed to that of the century to come, perhaps in can help our century to learn to formulate an adequate response to the all-too enduring voice of tyranny." - The Review of Politics