Virtue Politics
Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy
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- £36.99
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- £36.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Helen and Howard Marraro Prize
A Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year
“Perhaps the greatest study ever written of Renaissance political thought.”
—Jeffrey Collins, Times Literary Supplement
“Magisterial…Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.”
—Wall Street Journal
“Puts the politics back into humanism in an extraordinarily deep and far-reaching way…For generations to come, all who write about the political thought of Italian humanism will have to refer to it; its influence will be…nothing less than transformative.”
—Noel Malcolm, American Affairs
“[A] masterpiece…It is only Hankins’s tireless exploration of forgotten documents…and extraordinary endeavors of editing, translation, and exposition that allow us to reconstruct—almost for the first time in 550 years—[the humanists’] three compelling arguments for why a strong moral character and habits of truth are vital for governing well. Yet they are as relevant to contemporary democracy in Britain, and in the United States, as to Machiavelli.”
—Rory Stewart, Times Literary Supplement
“The lessons for today are clear and profound.”
—Robert D. Kaplan
Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; religious leaders preoccupied with self-advancement while feuding armies waged endless wars. Their solution was at once simple and radical. “Men, not walls, make a city,” as Thucydides so memorably said. They would rebuild the fabric of society by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft.
A landmark reappraisal of Renaissance political thought, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than laws, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the precursor to our embattled humanities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Harvard University history professor Hankins, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, illuminates the political theories of Italian Renaissance humanists in this exhaustive study. Modern scholars of the era have focused on anachronistic "ideas of liberty" and neglected other important strains of humanist thought, Hankins contends. Renaissance theorists conceived of freedom as a "fruit of virtue," rather than a "natural right," he claims, linking the concept of "virtue politics" to widespread corruption in 15th- and 16th-century Italy. Such philosophers as Flavio Biondo and Leonardo Brundi, Hankins writes, sought systematic political reform by reviving classical Greek and Roman culture, displacing heredity as the primary source of authority, and positing that laws were dependent on the "moral character" of rulers. Turning to Florentine statesman Niccol Machiavelli, Hankins argues that his masterworks The Prince and Discourses are not as contradictory as they seem. In the former, Hankins writes, a "prudent ruler" foregoes his aspirations to moral probity in order to save his regime from external and internal threats. In the latter, a different set of needs ("to achieve great and long-lasting security and empire") requires a more classically humanistic approach. Hankins's clear chronology of events and tireless research lend credence to his analysis. This is a worthy contribution to the field of Renaissance studies.