Differing perspectives on Rudolph Giuliani, New York’s mayor from 1994 to 2001, were offered at a discussion Wednesday at the Wolfson Center for National Affairs at New School University. The program, moderated by Linda Lees, concerned Fred Siegel’s book “The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life” (Encounter Books).

Mr. Siegel, who drew his book title from Niccolo Machiavelli’s “The Prince,” said Mr. Giuliani broke with “pious cruelty,” namely, the rhetoric of compassion that in fact meant more people on welfare and more misery. Mr. Giuliani’s phrase, “I’d rather be respected than loved” played on Machiavelli’s saying that it is better to be feared than loved. Mr. Siegel even pointed to Mr. Giuliani’s rectangular features, which could have been copied from a Florentine tapestry.

Mr. Siegel said Mr. Giuliani embodied paradoxes: he was an “immoderate centrist,” a self-promoting traditionalist espousing duty and honor but unable sometimes to honor these values in his own life. “You couldn’t pick and choose” among his virtues and vices, one had to take them whole.

The director of the Center for New York City Affairs at the Milano Graduate School, Andrew White, praised Mr. Siegel’s book for its analysis of such processes as police chief William Bratton’s re-engineering of the police force. But he said the book did not give enough emphasis to the role that community organizations played in revitalizing neighborhoods.

New York Sun columnist and former Giuliani administration chief speechwriter, John P. Avlon, said management, not magic, turned around the city. “We were not passive victims of some upward trend.” Prior to Mr. Giuliani, the consensus that the city was ungovernable was acceptable to express, and the prevailing wisdom was “you could only manage the decline.”

WCBS-TV political reporter Andrew Kirtzman, author of “Rudy Giuliani: Emperor of the City” (Harper-Collins), said there was good and bad during the Giuliani years. He said covering Mayor David Dinkins for the New York Daily News was “an incredibly depressing experience,” watching him assaulted by events and constantly playing defense. Then he watched Mr. Giuliani and was enormously impressed by his competency in forming an agenda and carrying it out.

Mr. Kirtzman said he was surprised the mayoralty could be so powerful. Mr. Giuliani found levers of power in the city charter that Mr. Dinkins apparently didn’t even know existed. On this point, Mr. Siegel said that Mr. Giuliani studied the city charter the way Napoleon studied the topography of a battlefield.

Mr. Kirtzman said Mr. Giuliani led the greatest demilitarization in modern urban history – getting guns off the street – but that it came at a cost to young black males. They were humiliated by the “stop and frisk” campaign, but it was effective. Mr. Giuliani did not build up the political support he needed in the black community, and they were not there for him when he needed it during the Diallo crisis.

The executive editor of the American Prospect, Michael Tomasky, said that, since moving Washington, he found Mr. Giuliani looked better than many Republicans. Mr. Giuliani “believes in evolution – or will, until the South Carolina primary.” Mr. Tomasky, like Mr. White, placed the blame for the city’s decline less on liberals like Mayors Lindsay and Dinkins and more on long-term historical changes.

From the 1950s on, he said, manufacturing jobs were leaving the city: Previously, “you could graduate from high school and then go down to the docks and get a job.” Only a fool can gainsay the miraculous job of lowering crime, he said, but Mr. Giuliani failed to bring that passion to other areas such as education. “Maybe,” Mr. Tomasky reflected, “a person can only do one great thing” and only has so much energy. On this point, Mr. Siegel said Mr. Giuliani’s second term, like that of most administrations, was not as energetic but did include the revitalization of CUNY, rebuilding the child welfare agency, and renewing neighborhoods.

Mr. Tomasky recalled Mr. Giuliani speaking after defeating Ruth Messinger and saying that, in his second term, he would try to do a better job lifting all boats. But he then immediately began a crackdown on hot-dog vendors, street artists, and jaywalkers that perplexed even his supporters. Mr. Giuliani could have united the city but did not. He said people remember Mr. Giuliani’s brilliance after September 11, but are less likely to remember his pushing to cancel the election and make himself mayor again.

It’s part of democracy that “we have quadrennial elections,” Mr. Tomasky said. Elections don’t stop when the country is in the middle of a crisis, not even for Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. He said Mr. Giuliani’s attempt to take that moment for personal aggrandizement limited his greatness.

Mr. Siegel said what Mr. Giuliani actually wanted was a 90-day extension, which made a good deal of sense. At that moment, as national hero, Mr. Giuliani had the support of almost the entire Congress. The lack of progress to date in building at ground zero reflects a loss of momentum.

Pollster Craig Charney said he was running focus groups on September 4, 2001, when words such as “authoritarian, dictatorial, and womanizer” were used to describe Mr. Giuliani. “What were the choices?” Mr. Avlon interjected, to audience laughter. It was “free association,” Mr. Charney said. Mr. Siegel said what Mr. Charney’s comment missed was that the 2001 election – with the exception of Freddie Ferrer – was about who could be most like Mr. Giuliani.