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Was Renaissance Virtue Politics a Failure?

2022; Penn State University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 1-2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/goodsociety.31.1-2.0184

1538-9731

James Hankins,

Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

Let me begin by expressing my deep gratitude to Dr. David Ragazzoni for his energy and persistence in organizing this forum, and especially to my distinguished interlocutors, eminent experts all, for their serious and stimulating engagement with a very long book containing a great deal of unfamiliar material. No author could hope for greater generosity. Each of the responses in this forum has helped me see how readers from different points on the scholarly compass converge on the concept of humanist virtue politics. Collectively, they have made me think hard about the value of virtue politics, both in the Renaissance and today. Above all, they have made me consider the charge that virtue politics was a failure in the Renaissance (as Machiavelli believed) and that its revival in any form today would be inadvisable and possibly even harmful to democratic governance (as two of its critics in this forum suggest).Professor Ryan Balot makes several excellent points about the differences between ancient and Renaissance virtue theory as it applies to politics. In classical Athens and Sparta, regimes were aimed at different tele that required different kinds of virtue. In order to produce the kind of virtue that would achieve the telos of a given polis, whether freedom or military dominance or wealth, the regime itself had to take on an educational role. Different regimes had distinctive forms of education—the Athenians had their paideia and the Spartans their agōgē—but they also continued, via participation in political life, to train adults in the moral arts of self-government. By contrast, the virtue politics of the Renaissance appears to Balot to be "bookish."The teaching of virtue in the Renaissance was certainly more generic and more bookish. The texts taught in humanist schools were pretty much standard: Aristotle's Ethics and Politics, Xenophon's Hiero, Isocrates's Cyprian Orations, and Cicero's De officiis and De legibus were the ones most important for politics. Most Renaissance educators did not work out special curricula for different regimes, though they did produce them for different professions, like artists (Leon Battista Alberti), military officers (Roberto Valturio) or musicians (Johannes Tinctoris). The greatest teachers took in students from all over Italy and Europe, young men who had careers before them in kingdoms and republics, the Church and the Empire. The kind of education famous schoolmasters like Guarino of Verona or Vittorino da Feltre gave could not be regime-specific. However, the movement I've called virtue politics was not merely bookish, confined to men and women of letters. The chief theorists of virtue politics, apart from Petrarch, were not retired literary men or teachers in philosophical schools (like Plato and Aristotle and the scholastics) but high-level officials and diplomats like the Florentine chancellors Coluccio Salutati and Leonardo Bruni, papal secretaries like Biondo Flavio, and even major political figures such as Giovanni Pontano, prime minister of the kings of Naples.Balot is certainly correct to say that humanist virtue politics was not regime-specific. However, I don't think it's quite right that the teaching of virtue was entirely indifferent to regime type or that Renaissance humanists cared only for the education of elites. True, the great medieval manual of political education, Giles of Rome's De regimine principum (1277/80), was directed at all civic leaders (principes) indifferently, though Giles himself preferred monarchy over the power-sharing arrangements of popular communes. Petrarch's works on educating princes, however, were aimed more narrowly at turning tyrants into virtuous princes or preventing young princes from becoming tyrants. Leonardo Bruni tried to show that virtue politics could be adapted to republics, and indeed argued that republics with virtuous citizens were better governed than principalities. By the time we get to Francesco Patrizi of Siena in the 1460s, as I show in my new book, we have a humanist who designs an educational system specifically to produce well-educated citizens of good character who can serve as republican magistrates and on citizen committees. Patrizi wrote a second treatise on the education of princes (1483/84) that presents the same basic curriculum but adapted for the needs of princely rule.1Balot suggests that Renaissance virtue politics was not really politics at all since it did not side in a partisan way with one particular regime type: it was supra partes. I agree with this assessment up to a point, but it should be noted out (as Gabriele Pedullà does in his brilliant Machiavelli in Tumult), that pre-Machiavellian polities was "ideologically holistic," and regarded partisanship as tantamount to sedition.2 In republican Venice you could be tried and executed for questioning the Venetian regime or publicly, outside the councils of government, opposing any of its acts. Tongues in Florence wagged more licentiously than elsewhere, but this was regarded as a moral weakness of the community and not valued as "free speech." I would amend Balot's point to say that humanist virtue politics was not political, but only in the modern sense of that word. Debate could be vigorous in the councils of government, and that is where virtue was supposed to shine out, but for the whole city to engage in disorderly partisan strife was regarded as a disgraceful and dangerous.Balot's point is also well taken that the laws and institutions of classical Greek city-states were more integrated with their soulcraft than was the case in Renaissance states. As I describe in Virtue Politics, there was a centuries-long tradition of rivalry between legal and literary education that only intensified in the quattrocento, and this may account in part for the relative lack of integration between elite education and regime type in the Renaissance period. All powerful states wanted to have their own universities, for example, but young gentlemen continued to seek out the few really prestigious ones, mostly outside the borders of their home states. Some humanists followed the naïve view of Isocrates that the regime type didn't matter so long as the competent and just ruled (Panathenaicus 132).Early modern states on the whole regarded laws as regulative and punitive rather than educative. Political institutions could become training grounds for civic leaders, but not, as a rule, for the average citizen. Medieval communes encouraged popular participation in politics but Renaissance humanists, with their meritocratic bias, did not think the many-headed had much to offer to the councils of the wise. The humanists here invoked the practice of the Roman republic, which did not encourage deliberation in its popular assemblies. Cicero praises this as a point of Roman superiority over the Greeks (Pro Flacco 15–17), that the Greeks allowed ordinary citizens to engage in political shouting matches while seated in theaters, while the Romans insisted that deliberation should take place in an orderly way among the wise and experienced, in the Senate house. The people should be quietly herded into voting pens on the Campus Martius to record their votes, but not asked to express their opinions in public. In this way (said Cicero in Laws 3.39) the people could be made content with the libertatis species, the appearance of liberty. If some commoner were to show merit and practical wisdom he could always be taken into the ruling group (a practice sociologists call "sponsored mobility"). This was in general the practice of Renaissance republics too: deliberation was confined to the well informed, whereas the people in their councils were only allowed to vote up or down on legislation formulated by their betters. Guicciardini wrote in his Ricordi that the Florentine people had less idea of what was going on in the public palace than they had of what was done in India.To regulate the behavior of the people the Romans relied less on paideia and political participation than on religion. This was also the case with Renaissance republics. The role of religion in improving the behavior of the common people leads to a key point that also bears on the question of the utility of virtue politics today. Balot opens the window onto a major insight when he suggests that the huge gulf between ancient and modern virtue politics can be explained above all by the dominant position of Christianity in premodern Europe. This, I think, is exactly right. Once Christianity becomes the established religion of the Roman empire in the fourth century CE, and a fortiori once we have the peculiar situation of medieval Christianity, where the temporal and spiritual goods of the population are overseen by separate authorities, each with its distinctive hierarchy and legal system, the old perfectionism of the ancient city-state is simply inconceivable. (In practice, of course, it had been dead for centuries.) The view of Aristotle that man is a political animal who achieves his full flourishing through self-rule in a polis is no longer tenable, at least by orthodox Christians. Human beings now are said (and by canon law as well as by Aquinas) to have both a natural and a supernatural end. Human politics can have at best an instrumental role in achieving our highest end, salvation in a future life.This was a point generally accepted by humanists, who quite often depended on the patronage of the Church for their livelihood. What they developed was a kind of moderate perfectionism (a term I borrow from the Confucian theorist Joseph Chan). The telos of the state for them is more limited. In the version theorized by the movement's greatest political philosopher, Francesco Patrizi of Siena, the state should aim at achieving concrete human goods in this life: peace, security, justice, social harmony, prosperity, and a desirable way of life. The humanists believed that virtue education of both princes and citizens could help achieve these ends. They thought that the moral character and practical wisdom of political leaders and citizens could be improved, and that would lead to better government. Cultivating the classical virtue of pietas might even improve the practice of religion.Now I admit to believing that an education in the traditional humanities might still be of benefit to political life today, but I don't think (as Balot suggests) that there is any necessary linkage between virtue politics and a public world shaped either by Christian or liberal-individualist principles. Balot, if I am reading him correctly, seems to think that education in democracies should be more regime-specific, as it was in antiquity, which would mean, I suppose, more civic education in democratic principles and more citizen participation. I take him to be preferring ancient to Renaissance models of paideia in something like a communitarian spirit, as more fitting to modern liberal-democratic and republican traditions. He seems to associate humanist virtue politics, by contrast, with modern procedural liberalism, indifferent to any conception of the good life, and implies that it can do less to support democracy given its compatibility with multiple regime types. These include (as I point out in chapter 17 of Virtue Politics) an absolutism unconstrained by any constitutional limits at all.These are deep waters and I hesitate, as a mere historian, to wade into them. I do agree with Pareto that all government is oligarchical in the sense that all government implies the rule of a few over many. I think this was true even of Athens in its most democratic period in the late fifth century BC. The important questions are whether political elites are closed or open to merit (as the humanists advocated), and whether they are constituted by decent people of good character who accept a duty of care towards the poor and the powerless. Modern democracies are nothing like ancient ones and in practice resemble oligarchies; and they are yearly becoming less liberal. In modern Western societies small groups of the wealthy and powerful dominate government, the economy, and the wider culture (while talking incessantly of equality). It is still possible and, in my view, highly desirable to have a democratic check on ruling elites, but I believe, with the humanists, that, as things now stand, the best way to improve our governments is to improve our governors. The advantage of humanist virtue politics is that it is potentially compatible with modern pluralistic societies where citizens profess many faiths, including scientism and secular humanism, but also share common political institutions. For those institutions to function well, we need our societies to share a least a few common principles of practical reason—what Justus Lipsius called a civil wisdom—as well as common models of what constitutes civilitas in Suetonius' sense (Augustus 51–56), that is, the correct comportment of citizens. These standards are most likely to be widely accepted when derived from common traditions and from teaching common classical texts (not necessarily those of Greco-Roman antiquity).Reading Prof. Michelle Clarke's comments brought to mind one way in which humanist virtue education could make—and has in fact made—a beneficial contribution to modern pluralistic societies: namely, through its careful attention to precision of language and eloquence. Clarke takes seriously, I think, Machiavelli's critique of humanist eloquence: that when humanists read texts, their obsession with correct latinity and their practice of hunting for examples of fine conduct blinded them to what the ancients, above all the Romans, actually did to achieve political success. Machiavelli did not read Livy to polish his Latin or for moral improvement in the conventional humanist way, but to see what actually made the Romans great, which for him was their militarized society, their readiness to go to war, and their regular practice of using terror and fraud to win empire.3As Clarke points out, the humanists believed, beginning with Petrarch (and following Cicero), that good speech was important because it made men better. To attempt to find the most correct and powerful words to express one's thoughts forced a speaker to examine his own character and desires and to relate them to his audience and to the particular situation in which he was making his case. These were the circumstantiae of classical rhetoric. That is why an orator-statesman has to be a vir bonus dicendi peritus (Quintilian's report of Cato the Elder's ideal). It is the desire to be, and to be considered, a good man by his hearers that makes a man truly eloquent. The truly eloquent man thus will advocate a course of action that is good for the whole republic and the common good. Machiavelli, with his cynical view of human moral potential, thought the ancient and humanist ideal of eloquence was naive and likely to lead to poor statecraft.I would like to develop a couple of points here that are relevant to humanism's utility in modern democratic societies. The humanists (like Cicero) valued eloquence in part because it offered an alternative to violence. The "good man skilled in speaking" could (as Isocrates and Cicero argued) create social harmony through persuasion. This required his audience to be persuadable, meaning both rational and brought up to value the right things in the right way, to have educated thoughts and emotions. In other words, the humanist ideal of eloquence implies an educated citizenry. It should be no surprise that Francesco Patrizi of Siena was, I believe, the first writer in Western history to call for all citizens in a republic to be literate (and in Latin!). Sophisticated users of language (as Clarke notes) are also better able to judge the character of political leaders, which reveals itself in speech.Humanists like Patrizi criticized the scholastics for relying too much on "tortured" logical proofs. Scholastic dialectic, he wrote, "seems more to extort (extorquere) what it tries to prove, and by certain abrupt speeches drags us into [the speaker's] own way of thinking, and it compels us to confess things in words which we by no means assent to in mind." Humanist oratory is more civil, "because it draws minds towards one's will in a softer way, by persuasion and dissuasion." Severe logic may appeal to those living in religious orders, he writes, but ordinary human beings, those who live in civil society, require "gentler belief" (mitior opinio), which indulges our softer mores. "For those harder arguments are more suited to contemplation than to action and cannot easily persuade readers, but through shrewd argumentation extort (extorquent) confessions that those beliefs are true rather than [producing voluntary] assent to them." They might dazzle for a moment, but soon the undertow of the audience's prepossessions and social commitments will cause them to lapse back into its customary beliefs.In other words, humanist eloquence is better suited to civil society than scholastic logic (or its modern counterpart, the analytic method in philosophy). Under modern conditions, if citizens cannot be educated and persuaded to behave voluntarily in civil ways and to endorse the common good, they must be surveilled, propagandized, and punished. I think it is not widely appreciated that the great traditions of civic oratory in Great Britain and the United States are descended directly from Italian humanism. In the United States during the early republic the most influential work of civic rhetoric was a compilation known as The Columbian Orator made by Caleb Bingham in 1797. This work, a downstream product of Renaissance humanism, included sample speeches by George Washington and Benjamin Franklin but also many ancient speeches, all designed to promote "republican virtue" and the abolition of slavery. Great American orators like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Frederick Douglass modeled their eloquence on it. In America we no longer have eloquent public speakers (Barack Obama is perhaps the only recent exception) but perhaps if we had fewer spin-doctors and more virtuous orators, it would be easier to create common ground in our politics.I think I can count Prof. Vickie Sulivan as an ally in my contention that Renaissance virtue politics was neither a failure in its time nor a poor model for the reform of modern democratic politics. Sullivan, author of a stimulating recent monograph on Montesquieu, is struck by the similarity of aims between the humanists with their virtue politics and those of the Enlightenment philosophes and the early modern republic of letters more broadly.4 One might add—and this surely bolsters Sullivan's case—that the Venetian humanist Francesco Barbaro was the one who invented the term respublica litteraria in 1417. He used the phrase to congratulate Poggio Bracciolini (who liked to refer to his fellow humanists as philosophi) for having liberated works of classical antiquity from imprisonment in monasteries. Sullivan would like to push further the similarities I noted in Virtue Poliics between the informal, cosmopolitan character of both movements, their mutual reliance on the power of letters, and to assert a substantive overlap in their political tendencies as well. For instance, both movements created "cultural empires," or "empires of thought," that challenged the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church and scholasticism; both movements wanted to reform absolutism and create checks on arbitrary power. She is particularly struck by George of Trebizond's defense of open, commercial societies against Plato's "closed, authoritarian, hierarchal, static, inward-looking, and deeply conservative society." It reminds her of Montesquieu's vindication of modern commercial republics against their ancient predecessors.I am willing to go a certain distance down this road, but I have a few reservations. The early humanists, including Petrarch, Boccaccio, Patrizi and others, were certainly sharp critics of scholasticism, seeing it as a form of education that was morally empty (as Italians, they were mainly thinking of scholastic legal and medical education). Lorenzo Valla, Thomas More, Erasmus, and Ludovico Vives continue this critique, decrying the obscurantism of scholastic theology. In time, however, by the mid-sixteenth century, humanism and scholasticism in Catholic countries develop a kind of moyen de vivre. This is best seen in the Jesuit educational system, where the early years were devoted to mastery of Latin, Greek, eloquence, and humanistic subjects, while more advanced students were given a grounding in scholastic theology and canon law.As for the Catholic Church, opposition to it for humanists was a form of career suicide, since a very large proportion of humanists were either supported on Church benefices or hoped to be. Even Valla, who tried to undermine the Church's temporal authority in his famous Oration on the Donation of Constantine, became a loyal son of the Holy Church once he came to Rome and was absorbed into the Church's rich system of patronage. The same Valla in his prefaces to the Elegantiae linguae latinae praised the Church for having preserved the empire of Latin and continued its civilizing mission. This cultural victory (Valla claimed) made the Church's empire even greater than the political empire of the Romans.In this respect Valla was not atypical. In general, the humanists presented their movement as complementary to the teachings of the Catholic faith. Many of them (like many Enlightenment philosophes) wanted to reform the Christian churches, not challenge their authority. Humanists wanted to improve Christian practice by harnessing the power of classical eloquence to reform the Church's liturgy, to elevate its sacred eloquence (i.e., sermons), and to classicize its poetry (e.g., in the Girolamo Vida's sacred epic The Christiad). Humanist philological study was potentially revolutionary, to be sure, as in Valla's Donation and Erasmus's textual work on the New Testament, which undermined biblical authority for the doctrine of the Trinity. But, before the Reformation, mainstream humanist philology was rarely if ever harnessed to cancel the Church's religious authority, at least not to the extent that Pierre Bayle and Spinoza later attempted at the end of the seventeenth century. Erasmus himself remained loyal to the Church despite the pleas of Protestant humanists to join their cause.Humanist attitudes to wealth and commercial society were, again, less radical and more critical than those found in Montesquieu. Renaissance Italy did of course include wealthy commercial republics run by men who themselves had extensive mercantile interests in banking, international trade, and agriculture. No Renaissance republic prohibited its senators from engaging in commerce the way the Romans did, and the kind of contempt for commerce we find in Plato and Aristotle was rare. Francesco Patrizi, moreover, went so far as to insist that all the citizens of his optimal republic should engage in some kind of work, whether agriculture, foreign trade, banking, shopkeeping, or crafts. No one should live on rents, and everyone should ideally take on some role, however small, in the governance of the city-state.What the humanists opposed was subordinating politics and political ends to economic ones—allowing the wealthy to use the state to enrich themselves, for example. (Sallust provided a good deal of grist for this mill.) Even Filelfo, the main conduit for the Renaissance's knowledge of ancient Sparta, distinguished between good commercial activity and bad. Bad was activity such as Cosimo de'Medici's, who used his wealth to corrupt politics in the interest of his own party. Good commerce was modeled by the dedicatee of Filelfo's De exilio, the Milanese merchant banker Vitaliano Borromeo, whose mercantile activity served the needs of his prince, Filippo Maria Visconti. Many humanists praised frugality, using examples borrowed from Livy and Sallust, but many also praised wealth, if it was acquired licitly, without fraud or usury, and if its use were subordinated to supporting a family, embellishing the city, or supplying the military needs of the state. On the other hand, I know of no humanist who praised mercantile activity for its role in softening mores, expelling destructive passions, or moderating militarism in the way Montesquieu does. While prosperity was a good thing, a mark of good government (as illustrated in the famous fresco in Siena's Palazzo Comunale), the humanists despised a life devoted to competitive money-making, driven by avarice. If there was to be competition among elites it should be generosa aemulatio, a noble rivalry in the best things, rivalry in human excellence or virtue. That too is a teaching of virtue politics that could profitably be revived today. Our democracy needs the right kind of competitiveness as much or even more than it needs equality.This brings me to Prof. Gabriele Pedullà's weighty contribution to the forum, which I saved for last as he is the commentator most critical of virtue politics both in its Renaissance form and as a resource for modern politics. For him, virtue politics was a "gigantic failure." As he states pithily,Pedullà begins by charging me with not giving due weight to the "second wave" of humanist political theory centered in the kingdom of Aragon, and in particular with neglecting the work of Giovanni Pontano. He presents this charge politely, as a friendly amendment, suggesting that a fuller treatment of the Neapolitans might alter the overall picture of humanist political thought I draw in Virtue Politics. To this charge I plead guilty. In Virtue Politics I was trying to draw attention to less familiar political thinkers, or to thinkers I believed had been misrepresented in the modern literature. I was well aware that much recent work had been done on the Neapolitans, above all by Guido Cappelli, Fulvio Delle Donne, and Pedullà himself—work with whose revisionist bent I generally found congenial. In English there was also the recent monograph of Matthias Roick, though it focused more on ethics than politics. I also shared with Ada Palmer, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, and John-Paul Heil, who was finishing what turned out to be an excellent dissertation on Neapolitan political thought, and I did not want to trespass too much on his turf. I don't think I can be accused of dismissing Pontano's importance, having published seven volumes in the I Tatti Renaissance Library devoted to him—second only in number to the volumes devoted to Marsilio Ficino. And I hope that with the publication of my new monograph on Francesco Patrizi of Siena, who spent the last three decades of his life in Naples and finished his two great political treatises there, that the charge of anti-Neapolitan bias will now be dropped. I fully agree with Pedullà that further study of the trattatistica produced in the Aragonese kingdom is highly desirable and may well refine my picture of virtue politics. John-Paul Heil, for instance, already suggests that Neapolitan political thought in the quattrocento pioneers a kind of moral realism that prefigures the work of later Renaissance thinkers like Giovanni Botero and contrasts with the amoral realism of Machiavelli.Pedullà's more serious criticism involves my use of the term "meritocracy" to describe humanist virtue politics. Here I think the problem is definitional. He understands meritocracy in its modern Anglo-Saxon sense to mean creating avenues of social mobility, ways for individuals from the lower classes to rise in government and society, with the goal of creating greater equality and therefore a healthier democracy. He thinks that real meritocracy requires what in America is called a "level playing field," equal opportunity for all persons to rise and distinguish themselves.I was using "meritocracy" in a more general sense: in the way it is used by modern Confucian theorists like Daniel Bell, Tongdong Bai, and Joseph Chan to mean political structures designed to "elevate the worthy" and improve the moral and intellectual quality of ruling elites. Political meritocracy, as distinct from the more ambitious Anglo-Saxon kind, is seen as just in that everyone in society has an interest in being well governed. This form of political meritocracy is not necessarily regime-specific. Modern Chinese theorists distinguish between meritocratic regimes, such as that of imperial China, and meritorious governance in general, which may exist under any form of government. Traditional Chinese dezhi (often now translated as "virtue politics") since the Han dynasty required education in the Confucian classics, designed (at its best) to produce moral virtue, immersion in ancient wisdom traditions, refined powers of literary expression, and an ideal of service both to the state and to the welfare of the common people. My general idea in Virtue Politics is that Renaissance humanists shared at least some of these ideals and goals. The Chinese form of virtue politics lasted for well over 2,000 years and can hardly be considered a failure simply in terms of its relative stability and longevity.Pedullà dismisses Renaissance virtue politics as fundamentally oligarchical in tendency and regards as insincere its calls for rewarding merit in all classes with political power. He points to the fact that most people in quattrocento Italy who enjoyed a classical education—and therefore, in humanist terms, were justified in exercising power—were from the wealthier classes; cases of "sponsored mobility" were relatively few. I suppose this means that, for him, humanists like Boccaccio or Mario Salamonio who sympathized with popular politics were outliers. I suppose he also dismisses as atypical or irrelevant the form of equalit