Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 348 - The Sweet Restraints of Liberty - Republicanism and Civic Humanism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, The Sweet Restraints of Liberty – Republicanism and Civic Humanism. As we know, Italian Renaissance humanism was a pretty fractious movement, featuring heated debates in writing and physical confrontations in person. There was plenty of character assassination, and the occasional attempt at actual assassination. Modern-day research on humanism is by and large a more placid affair. In fact, I can't think of a single knife fight involving specialists in the field. But it has not been without controversy, and one of the most prominent of the controversies has concerned the ideas put forward by a German historian of the Renaissance named Hans Barun, who died in 1988. His life's work centered on the idea of civic humanism in the original German, Bergehumanismus, which he saw as a new and thrilling development in the history of political thought. He traced this development to the turn of the 15th century, when the city of Florence was engaged in an existential struggle with Milan, which was ruled by the Visconti family. Florentine intellectuals began to promote republicanism as the ideal form of political life, presenting liberty as the core value for which Florence was fighting against an enemy city whose system they saw as oligarchic, if not tyrannical. The heroes of Barun's story are humanists like Coluccio Salutati and above all, Leonardo Bruni. We have met them as experts in classical learning and rhetoric, but both were chancellors of Florence and emphatic in their endorsement of republican ideals, thus the term civic humanism. Barun was of course well aware that Petrarch and other Italian intellectuals had anticipated these 15th century figures with their love of antiquity and cultivation of eloquence, but he believed that it was only in response to the conflict with Milan that humanists started to use that eloquence for overtly political ends. He pointed to their new ethic of practical engagement, as found in Salutati's remark that virtuous activity is holier than idleness, or Bruni's comment, learning, literature, eloquence, none of these is equal to glory won in battle. So while a Plato or Aristotle might be admirable, a good general is more useful to his city. With this stress on the political involvement of the humanists, Barun was correcting an earlier scholar of the Renaissance, Jacob Burckhardt. Writing in the 19th century, Burckhardt proposed that what was really new in the Renaissance was a stress on the value and freedom of the individual. You can see why he might have said this if you think back to Picco's so-called oration on the dignity of man, but Barun thought otherwise. For him, the transition from the medieval period to the Renaissance was above all a matter of new ideas about the community, not about individuals. The freedom cherished by the civic humanists was in fact political and not metaphysical in nature. Thus Barun's key text was not Picco's oration, but another oration given generations earlier by Leonardo Bruni, his speech In Praise of Florence, perhaps written in 1404 as a kind of audition for replacing Salutati as chancellor, though the dating is something else scholars disagree about. It was with this speech that Bruni really put the civic in civic humanism. This eulogy to his adopted city touches on its physical beauty and its military prowess, as you might expect, but it also puts great stress on the Florentine political system, which calls for a delicate balance of powers, comparable to the perfect tuning of a musical instrument. Furthermore, all citizens, even the poorest, are equal before the law and can receive justice. This he sees as a kind of birthright of the city, which according to him was founded by the Romans during their own republican period. In fact, Bruni speaks of Florence the way you might talk about a noble individual, emphasizing the city's lineage and even ascribing to it various virtues that would be more naturally assigned to a single person, like practical wisdom and generosity. But if this is so, then it is because Florence's constitution facilitates the pursuit of virtue among its citizens. All this is confirmed and extended in another speech of Bruni's, a funeral oration written in 1427. Here he praises the Florentine Nanni Struttzi by extolling his city. Bruni again stresses the Roman origins of the city and says that its republican institutions give liberty to individuals and allow them to strive for honor and influence. A popular government avoids the danger of monarchy, since kings inevitably pursue their own interests over those of their subjects. Thus, as he puts it, praise of monarchy has something fictitious and shadowy about it, and the only truly legitimate constitution is that in which there is real liberty, in which pursuit of the virtues may flourish without suspicion. This certainly looks like strong evidence for Baron's account, and there is further confirmation to be found in later humanist writings from Florence. The domination of the city's affairs by the Medici provoked a critique from the republican point of view by Alemanno Rinocini. His Dialogue on Liberty, which appeared in 1479, extols equality of citizens and even the right of free speech, and as we know, a generation later the visionary preacher Savonarola would be endorsing a republican form of government as part of his own rhetorical assault on the Medici and their supporters. When Piero de' Medici fled from the city in 1494, the streets rang with the cry, the people and liberty. The invading French king Charles VIII was welcomed to town with a sign bearing that same word liberty emblazoned upon it. Looking back on these events, the historian Francesco Guicardini named 1494 as the end of a 40-year period of tranquility and prosperity in Italy, one that had begun with the peace treaty between Milan and Florence in 1454. But Guicardini did not lament the effort to establish a genuine republic in Florence in place of the Medici oligarchy. He was one of a number of political thinkers who wondered how to set up a republican government so that it would be long-lasting and stable. Like Savonarola before him, Guicardini looked to the city of Venice as a role model. Guicardini thought the key was a legislative body that could mediate between the wealthy aristocrats, the automati, and the relatively poor mass of the people, or popolo. But he also believed that political leadership should be chosen through election. The people were not themselves qualified to be leaders, but they could still be trusted to choose those who are qualified, who would be drawn from the upper classes. The results would not be perfect. Guicardini wrote, I do not mean to deny that the people sometimes votes erroneously, since it cannot always know the quality of every citizen, but I affirm that these errors are incomparably less than those committed in any other way of proceeding. Though no one would mistake Guicardini for Che Guevara, he was at least still defending republicanism in the 16th century, albeit one with a strong balance in favor of the automati. Actually, it's rather appropriate that the scholar who introduced the concept of civic humanism was named Baron, because the republican institutions envisioned by the Italian humanists were always rather oligarchic in nature. It's been calculated that at the beginning of the 15th century, as this movement was supposedly being born, only 3,000 of the city's 20,000 male inhabitants were qualified to hold public office. So a real government of all the people was never really on the cards. At best it was going to be a government of all the people who mattered. This point has been made in correction of Baron's thesis, for instance by John Najemi. He has argued that the Florentine Republic, endorsed by the humanists, actually represented a victory for the wealthy in their struggle against poorer compatriots who had organized themselves around the city guilds. The high point of that movement came in 1378-1382 when the guilds achieved dominance in Florence. Looking back on this event, supposed man of the people, Leonardo Bruni, spoke with horror of the way that the people were eager to plunder the possessions of the rich. The lesson he drew was the following, never let political initiative or arms into the hands of the multitude, for once they have had a bite, they cannot be restrained, and they think they can do as they please because there are so many of them. When Bruni came to write a treatise on the topic of the Florentine constitution, he praised the city not for being a pure republic, but as a so-called mixed constitution, in which stable laws keep the wealthy in check so that the poor are neither oppressed nor given an opportunity for direct political participation. Bruni was here following the teachings he found in Aristotle's Politics, which he knew well, having translated the text himself. Aristotle likewise suggested that the best constitution should be one that minimized the chances of factional dispute, what the Greeks called stasis. A mixed constitution was a pragmatic solution for achieving this goal. The observation that Bruni and others had a rather oligarchic idea of republicanism is only one of numerous qualifications or outright refutations that have been aimed at Baron's account. One fundamental complaint has been that one could be a civic humanist, writing about and being involved in politics, without being a convinced republican. We've just seen an example in the later writings of Bruni, where he follows Aristotle rather than a set of ideals inspired by the Roman Republic. A similar arc was travelled by Francesco Patrizzi. He wrote a treatise on republican government, but went on to write in the so-called mirror-for-princes genre. In one text, he directly raises the question of whether a republican or monarchical constitution is better. He prefers a republic, but admits that they tend to fall apart thanks to factional disputes. For that matter, monarchies or principiats can be good and even represent a more natural form of government. However, the success of such a constitution depends on having a good ruler, and even the good ones tend to be succeeded by inferior ones. This sort of on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand attitude obviously falls far short of being a clarion call for the institution of republican governance all over the globe, as does another tendency we find among republican-leaning authors like Savonarola and the historian Guicardini. You might recall that Savonarola actually admitted that monarchy is the best form of government, but argued that it was unsuitable for the Florentines in particular. Likewise, Guicardini said that one must always take into account the particular needs and traits of a people before prescribing what sort of institutions it should have, much as a doctor takes into account the temperament of the patient before prescribing treatment. This idea goes back to the medieval period, as with Engelbert of Admonte, who already died in 1331. Echoing Aristotle and anticipating Savonarola in a single breath, Engelbert observed that the effects of climate make some people, for instance the Greeks and Italians, suitable for popular rule, while others need a firmer ruling hand. In fact, the republicans of Florence seem to have felt that even other Italians needed a firm hand, and they were happy to provide it themselves. The Roman Republic didn't wait to turn into an empire to adopt an imperialist foreign policy, and the humanists were good enough historians to know it, so they enthusiastically endorsed wars of conquest and subjugation and pretended that the cities brought under the sphere of Florentine control were enjoying freedom. Thus, Salutati wrote that the subject cities had been freed from their tyrants and were now bound only by the sweet restraints of liberty. Bruni went so far as to see Florence's inheritance from Rome as a kind of natural right to rule over other cities across the whole world. This looks like hypocrisy, real freedom for Florence, fake freedom for everyone else. But the humanist point can be understood more sympathetically if we reflect that the value of liberty could mean at least two things in this period. First, there was the idea of freedom from arbitrary and tyrannical rule. By instituting a system of laws, the Florentines could claim to be offering that to their subject cities. Second though, there was the more positive idea of liberty as self-rule or self-determination. That form of liberty was reserved for the Republic of Florence alone. But it's not only that some humanists were less than fully committed and consistent republicans, it's also that quite a few of them were not republicans at all. In previous episodes, we've charted the close connections between humanism and de Medici, who gave financial, political, and social support to such figures as Ficino and Pico. Baron gets around this by ignoring the political dimensions of the revival of Platonism. He dismisses this movement since it exhibits little of the political consciousness of city-state citizens. It is a Platonism rooted primarily in art and religion. But this seems wrong, given the way that Medici rule was explicitly connected to Plato's own writings on politics. A better approach would be to use the term civic humanism, if we use it at all, for the whole range of efforts to merge the humanist agenda with a political agenda, whether or not the agenda was republican in spirit. We can complicate this picture still further by noting that the Medici themselves made frequent use of republican language, always posing as simply unusually influential citizens within a government that ensured liberty for all. The point was made even at the level of images, as with a medal, produced in the memory of Cosimo de Medici, that pictured him on one side with the motto public peace and liberty on the reverse. And it was made at the level of words too, the words that the humanists could produce so well with their expertise in rhetoric. In a critical review of Hans Baron's thesis and responses to it, James Hankins has proposed that the whole history of republicanism among humanists should be taken as rhetorical. Already Salutati and Bruni, according to Hankins, were providing a decent covering of populist rhetoric to conceal the growing concentration of power in the hands of a few. Nor were the Florentines the only ones to use liberty as a window dressing. In the city of Lucca, that was done almost literally. In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes visited there and saw that the word libertas was written in large characters on the turrets of the city even though, he said, people there had no more liberty than the people of Constantinople. And back in our period, Lucca, no less than Florence, already adopted a fairly oligarchic notion of what a republic could be. But should we really settle for the cynical conclusion that the humanists' enthusiasm for the republican ideal was like a botox injection? Mere lip service? What about Bruni's forthright declaration in his funeral oration for Nani Strotzi that a government of the people is the only legitimate constitution, since the other options fall prey to the wickedness of flawed men, either the few men of an oligarchy, or the one man of a monarchy? The aforementioned James Hankins, who has forcefully pressed the case for a merely rhetorical reading of republican rhetoric, suggests that we may be misled by a false cognate here. The word legitimate in Bruni's Latin could mean something more like real, as opposed to the shadowy and false benefits of kingship. Bruni's point might be that, although in principle the best kind of constitution is indeed rule by the few or by one, in practice it's too hard to find a few good men, or one good man, so we have to settle for a republic. But here's yet another consideration. Even if the rhetoric used by Bruni and others was a kind of myth or propaganda, the choice of propaganda makes a difference. On this telling, what was distinctively new or even modern about the humanists' political writings was not that they were republicans, as Baron thought, but that they found it necessary to pretend to be republicans. Why would this have been? Well, that takes us to one final major correction of Baron's thesis, which is that the sort of rhetoric he noticed in Bruni and others was not in fact all that new. As several scholars, above all Quentin Skinner, have noted, the history of republican discourse is as old as the history of humanism itself. We know from earlier episodes that that history goes well back into the Middle Ages, with the so-called dicta tores honing their skills of eloquence by writing showpieces in increasingly refined Latin. And, as Skinner showed in a survey of this literature, republican ideals went far back in Italian history, in the halls of power, and on the page. As early as 1085, the city of Pisa had a government with rotating consulships to prevent the emergence of an autocratic ruler, and by the end of the 12th century, the major Italian cities had adopted such a system and also carved out relative independence from the Holy Roman Empire. There was still the problem that the medievalists were bound to Roman law, which of course assumed that ultimate power would lie in the hands of an emperor. But the 14th century jurist, Bartolus of Saxo-Ferrato, said that the theoretical authority of empire was legally irrelevant when the facts on the ground meant that cities were independent of imperial control. At the same time, the cities had to withstand pressure from the papacy. So, republicanism developed among these earlier humanists as a kind of third option. Never mind the famous two swords of mainstream medieval political thought, and the struggle between secular imperial rule and the theocratic rule of the pope, we cities will do just fine on our own as republics. As usual, the thinkers of what we are calling the Renaissance were not doing something completely new. Rather, the later humanists used their improved understanding of classical literature to find new justifications and expressions for political ideas that their medieval forebears had already explored. Bruni was right that his ideas echoed those of the past, it's just that the past in question was more recent than he cared to admit. The extensive debate over Hans Baron's account of civic humanism raises one last question, why is this all so important? One answer is that the controversy concerns the roots of our own political institutions. When people argue over Renaissance republicanism, they tend to have one eye on later republics, like the United States. Another answer is of more immediate relevance to us. Everything we've just discussed provides the background and context for the most famous political thinker of the Italian Renaissance, indeed the most famous thinker of the Italian Renaissance, full stop. So much so, that I don't even need to say his name, but I'll give you a hint. Like a man who has just been for a walk in the snow, he's responsible for the prince. That's next time here on the History of Philosophy, without any gaps.