To be published in the Beyond Reception: Renaissance Humanism and the Transformation of Classical

Antiquity, Patrick Baker, Johannes Helmrath, and Craig Kallendorf, eds.

One who rules through the power of Virtue

is analogous to the Pole Star: it simply
remains in its place and receives the
homage of the myriad lesser stars.

--Confucius, Analects 2.1.

The Virtue Politics of the Italian Humanists

James Hankins (Harvard University)

Logicians teach us that universal negatives – statements in the form “No X is the case” –
are hard to prove. Rhetoricians advise that to begin a speech with a dogmatic utterance is
unlikely to be an effective form of captatio benevolentiae, unless you happen to be the
pope, preaching to the converted. Nevertheless, this paper begins with what will for the
present have to be a dogmatic utterance cast in the form of a qualified universal negation.
It makes a claim about what is not a major theme in the political thought of Renaissance
humanism. It claims that the humanist defense of republican liberty, which leading
scholars for several generations have presented as central to humanist political thought –
authorities such as Hans Baron, Eugenio Garin, John Pocock, and Quentin Skinner – is at
best a minor theme in their writings, mostly appearing in propagandistic contexts. It sees
the foregrounding in modern scholarship of republican or neo-Roman liberty as
anachronistic, a result of a selection bias coming from modern political interests and
contexts. Of course the claim that republicanism is not a major theme in humanist
political thought is already qualified, and takes as read that there do exist a certain
number of sources where humanists praise city-states with popular or oligarchic regimes
of the kind moderns describe as “republican,” i.e. non-monarchical.1 The claim being
made here is that such sources should not be taken as typical or characteristic, and to do
so leads to serious distortions when assessing the humanist attitude to political order.

1 James Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic,” Political Theory 38.4
(2010): 452-82. The present paper is part of a book-length project on humanist virtue politics.
Later on I shall suggest that what counts as Renaissance republicanism or civic
humanism should be re-imagined as terms that are not specific to regimes.2 In any case,
the praise of particular regimes qua regimes does not turn out to be a theme richly
documented in Renaissance humanist sources, especially ones in Latin.
On the other hand, after studying over many years now some hundreds of formal
treatises, histories, orations, letters, dialogues, dramas and other works written by
humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli, I have concluded that scholars have unduly
neglected what I would myself claim to be the central theme of humanist political
writing, namely the theme of Virtue. So pervasive is this theme that I believe we are
justified in describing humanist thinking on politics as a kind of “virtue politics.” The
rest of this paper will explain what I mean by this term, and give some examples of its
implications, significance, and its impact on Renaissance culture. My hope and belief is
that my initial dogmatism will be vindicated by subsequent research, my own and that of
others.3 For once one becomes attuned to the subject, one realizes that theme of virtue is
ubiquitous, not only in the political writings of the Renaissance, but in its literature,
philosophy, art and even music. It is the master value of humanist politics (as

2 As an example one may adduce the problem of tyrannical government, the central problem of humanist
political thought. In this case the focus on “republicanism,” in the sense of a commitment to popular
government, will prima facie be inadequate since the power-sharing arrangements of popular communes
constitute only one set of safeguards against tyranny, and in fact are not much discussed in humanist
political literature. It also disguises the fact that respublica in its Roman sense of a legal and morally sound
state that defends citizens against arbitrary power is the lexical opposite of tyranny; in fact the instituta et
mores of the republic in the ancient sense are the primary prophylactics against tyranny in the eyes of most
humanists.
3 See my articles, “The Unpolitical Petrarch: Justifying the Life of Literary Retirement,” forthcoming in a
Festschrift for Jill Kraye, ed. Margaret Meserve and Anthony Ossa-Richardson (Brill); “Biondo Flavio on
the Roman Republic,” forthcoming in The Invention of Rome: Biondo’s Roma Triumphans and its Worlds”
proceedings of a conference at the British School in Rome, 26-28 November 2014, ed. Frances Muecke
(Geneva: Droz); “Boccaccio and the Political Thought of Renaissance Humanism,” forthcoming in A
Boccaccian Renaissance, ed. Martin Eisner and David Lummus (Notre Dame University Press), Devers
Series in Dante and Medieval Italian Literature; “Filelfo and Sparta,” to be published in a collection entitled
Francesco Filelfo, Man of Letters, ed. Jeroen De Keyser (Leiden: E. J. Brill); “Europe’s First Democrat?
Cyriac of Ancona and Book 6 of Polybius.” For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony
Grafton, Ann Blair and Anja-Silvia Goeing, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2016), 2: 692-710; “Machiavelli,
Civic Humanism, and the Humanist Politics of Virtue,” Italian Culture 32.2 (2014): 98-109. Other scholars
following a similar line of research include: Peter Stacey, Roman Monarchy and the Renaissance Prince
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Fulvio delle Donne, Alfonso il Magnanimo e l’invenzione
dell’umanesimo monarchico: Ideologia e strategie di legittimazione alla corte aragonese di Napoli (Rome:
Istituto storico italiano per il Medio Evo, 2015); and numerous articles of Guido Cappelli (available on
academia.edu), some of them now collected in his Maiestas. Politica e pensiero politico nella Napoli
aragonese (Rome: Carocci, 2016); Matthias Roick, Pontano’s Virtues: Aristotelian Moral and Political
Thought in the Renaissance (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).
Montesquieu already recognized),4 just as liberty is of classical liberalism or equality of
modern socialists or fairness of Rawlsian progressives.
The expression “virtue politics,” as those familiar with modern philosophical
ethics will recognize, is meant to recall the term “virtue ethics.” Virtue ethics is an
approach to moral philosophy, usually said to descend from Aristotle, that has been
revived in the modern academy by philosophers like Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard
Williams, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Julia Annas.5 In contrast to the other two leading
approaches to normative ethics in the modern world – deontology and utilitarianism –
virtue ethics emphasizes the need to develop, through reflection and practice, excellent
patterns of conduct (“the virtues”) so as to achieve the human good and human
flourishing (“happiness”). It thus distinguishes itself from other ethical theories that are
more concerned with (1) defining norms of practical action, or duties, based on maxims
common to all rational beings, as in Kant; or (2) with elaborating rules to be followed by
a subject who judges the moral value of actions primarily by their consequences, i.e. their
capacity to maximize goodness, as in the case of the utilitarians. “Virtue politics,” by
analogy with virtue ethics, focuses on improving the character and wisdom of the ruling
class with a view to bringing about a happy and flourishing commonwealth. It sees the
political legitimacy of the state as tightly linked with the virtue of rulers and especially
their sense of justice, defined as a preference for the common good over their own private
goods – their “other-directedness” as a modern might put it.
The issue of legitimacy is a key one in humanist texts. Not the legitimation of
rulers via law and institutional routines, which was rarely discussed by humanists in the
Trecento and Quattrocento, but moral legitimacy. For the humanists what gives rulers
legitimacy are personal qualities of character and intellect that win trust and obedience
from the ruled. Political legitimacy for humanists does not come from divine sanction or
from hereditary right or from the constitutional form of the polity or from the express

4 Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois, author’s forward: “la vertu [politique] …est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le
gouvernement républicain, comme l’honneur est le ressort qui fait mouvoir le monarchie.” See also Book
III, chapter iii.
5 For an overview, see Rosalind Hursthouse, “Virtue Ethics,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Fall 2013 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = http://plato.stanford.edu. For a more extended treatment
see Julia Annas, Intelligent Virtue, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). My term “virtue politics”
overlaps a good deal with the concept of “political meritocracy” in modern political science, where it is
associated with Chinese neo-Confucianism (see note 48, below).
consent of the governed. What ultimately makes a regime legitimate is power well
exercised, what I call “legitimacy of exercise.”6 Power can be legitimately exercised only
by those who have “true nobility,” a humanist term of art for a merit-based claim to rule.7
The connection between natural nobility, the acquisition of virtue and entitlement to rule
others was made by the leading political authorities of the ancient world, Aristotle
(Politics 1.2, 1252a 31) and Cicero (De legibus 3.4), and often repeated by quattrocento
literati. It was a commonplace that the ancient Romans gained their empire thanks to their
virtue and lost it through their vices.8 “Virtue is the only and unique giver of true
nobility,” says the scholar-poet Cristoforo Landino, citing Plato as his source:

[true] nobility [i.e., based on virtue] is a kind of health-bringing constellation and

the highest support of the state. … All the greatest dignities and highest
magistracies should be handed over and entrusted to those who are more noble;
… and because the country itself especially belongs to the nobles, it should be
committed to their care.9

6 The locus classicus for this form of legitimacy comes in Petrarch’s Invective against a Man of High Rank
with No Knowledge or Virtue, in Petrarca, Invectives, ed. and tr. David Marsh (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2003), 180-222, where Petrarch argues that the legal differences between tyranny and
“legitimate” rule are irrelevant, and that what counts is how you exercise power and the way you live your
life: excessive luxury in princes, for example, is disqualifying: “The most virtuous and innocent ruler – or
more correctly the least harmful one – is the one who is most sparing and moderate in exploiting his
privilege” (hac licentia parcius modestiusque utitur).
7 For the medieval background of the theme of true nobility, see Andrea A. Robiglio, “The Thinker as a
Noble Man (bene natus) and Preliminary Remarks on the Medieval Concepts of Nobility,” Vivarium, 44
(2006): 205-47 and idem, “La nobiltà di spada in Dante: un appunto su Il Convivio IV xiv 11,” in Joannes
Bartuschat and Andrea Robiglio (eds.), Il Convivio di Dante (Ravenna: Longo, 2015), 191-204. My claim
here is that the theme of true nobility is central to the construction of virtue politics in a way that it is not
for, say, Dante’s political theory, where legitimacy is understood as of divine origin and residing in the
Roman emperor, and true nobility is ultimately a quality conferred on someone by God.
8 For example, Bartolomeo Platina, De laudibus bonarum artium (to Pius II), in Florence, Biblioteca
Nazionale Centrale MS Magl. IX 140, f. 84r-v: “Non te latet, beatissime pater, Kartaginem foedifragam et
crudelem corruisse, Corinthum petulantem et superbam incendio consumptam, urbem Romae, imperio
orbis terrarum potitam, auaritia et libidine ciuium suorum eo loci redactam, ut quae ante caeteris nationibus
imperitare consueuerat, nunc omnibus cum dedecore et turpitudine pareat.” See note 19, below and
Hankins, “Flavio Biondo and the Roman Republic,” for Biondo’s argument to the same effect.
9 Landino, De vera nobilitate, quoted in Knowledge, Goodness and Power: The Debate over Nobility
among Quattrocento Italian Humanists, ed. and tr. Albert Rabil, Jr. (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and
Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991), 212. Latin text in Cristoforo Landino, De vera nobilitate, Maria
Teresa Liaci (ed.) (Florence: Olschki, 1970), 49: “Ex quibus quidem rebus huc rem perducit: salutare
quoddam sidus et summum rei publicae columen esse nobilitatem … atque propterea nobilioribus …
omnes maximas dignitates maximosque magistratus demandandos committendosque censet [Plato], et
quoniam ipsa patria maxime nobilium est, eam in maximis gravissimisque periculis illis comendandum
iubet. Soli enim nobiles iccirco patriam maxime curant, quoniam illi suam maxime eam putent.”
In an honorable republic, says Buonaccorso da Montemagno – the most popular
quattrocento writer on true nobility – nothing is owed to anyone by virtue of their family
connections, even if their parents served the state well. Only those with learning, wisdom
and virtue deserve to rule.10 Leonardo of Chios contrasts true and false nobility, i.e., the
humanist conception and the traditional, hereditary conception, as follows:

Nobility is of two kinds: One is ostentatious, has a high opinion of itself, is (as
often as not) possessed along with wealth, ancient lineage, pomposity, and
hereditary right. The other is a purer nobility, not to be judged by the common
crowd, without contempt for poverty, replete with every virtue, and without
dishonor. The first kind, proceeding from ambition, encompasses the whole
world. The second arises from the root of virtue, as though its strength had sprung
from innate principles of nature, and it belongs most fillingly to those few who
are strong in mind and dynamic in action. Whoever has this nobility, endowed as
he is with wisdom and virtue, is better suited to govern the republic or to perform
significant individual deeds.11

The humanist view, then, is that access to power should properly depend on
meritocratic criteria. The wealthy and well born may exercise power, but they only do so
legitimately when they are also virtuous. More radically, most humanists from Petrarch
onwards insist that even persons of humble birth can merit a place in the ruling class via
the acquisition of virtue.12 Boccaccio in his De casibus virorum illustrium insists that
true, natural nobility can be found in all social ranks, from farmers and craftsmen to the
rich and well born. He gives a litany of examples from Roman history – the novi homines

10 Ibid., 40-52. The text was generally (but falsely) attributed to Leonardo Bruni, which could only have
increased its authority; it was widely circulated in the original Latin as well as in Italian, German, French
and English. The statement quoted above is put in the mouth of the interlocutor whose opinion appears to
be endorsed by Buonaccorso himself.
11 Ibid, 118-19. Rabil’s translation based on the Latin text in Caroli Poggi De nobilitate liber
disceptatorius, et Leonardo Chiensis De vera nobilitate tractatus apologeticus cum eorum vita et
annotationibus Abbatis Michaelis Justiniani (Avellino: heredes Camilli Caballi, 1657), which I was not
able to consult. [There are copies at Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin and BNC Roma, BN France.]
12 Francesco Petrarca, Selected Letters, tr. Elaine Fantham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2016), 1: 223 (III.5.5 = Fam. ), 148-150 (VI.6.20-23 = Fam.); De remediis 1.16.
Marius and Cicero, the emperors Vespasian and Aurelian, the farmer Regulus and
Verginius, the defender of Roman liberty against the tyrannical Appius Claudius – all of
whom achieved excellence as generals and statesmen despite their humble birth.13 The
list was often repeated in the Quattrocento. Biondo Flavio in Roma Triumphans argues
that ancient Roman greatness in general was to a large extent a result of her readiness to
accept into the ruling class virtuous men from the lower classes and from outside Rome,
even outside Italy. Indeed, the Roma Triumphans – a text I have elsewhere described as
holding a position in humanist literature analogous to that held by the Encyclopédie of
Diderot in the Enlightenment – makes the innate virtue and piety of Romans the key to
understanding the success of the greatest empire in history.14
The humanists of the Quattrocento may indeed be credited with inventing a new
form of equality not found in modern political theory – nor in ancient for that matter.
Modern political theorists recognize various competing conceptions of equality such as
equality of opportunity, equality of economic outcomes or equality in “capabilities.”
Ancient statemen like Pericles in the famous funeral oration reported by Thucydides
praised the equal right of adult male citizens to participate in self-government, while
Cicero praised equality of citizen rights under law as the basis of liberty.15 The humanists
champion a different ideal of equality: equality in the capacity for virtue. The political
writer and papal biographer Bartolomeo Platina writes:

It is characteristic of nobility to follow the right, rejoice in duties, have command

of desires and restrain avarice. Whoever does this, even if he were by some
chance born from the lowest human condition, merits being called and regarded
as noble. Is this not why we reproach Nature, the parent of us all (as certain
perverse persons do), for making some of us noble and others ignoble [i.e.,
through mere heredity]? Assuming that Nature offers to all an equal [physical and
mental] constitution, regardless of family, power, or wealth, the sons of private

13 Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.”

14 Hankins, “Biondo Flavio on the Roman Republic.”
15 Kurt Raaflaub, The Discovery of Freedom in Ancient Greece (Chicago: University of Chicago Press; on
the Roman conception of liberty in Cicero’s time, an older work is still the most illuminating: Chaim
Wirzubski, Libertas as a Political Ideal during the Late Republic and Early Principate (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1950, 1968). The idea that all humans have an equal capacity for virtue – by
no means held by all humanists – probably reflects Christian anthropological conceptions.
 persons and the offspring of princes and kings, as far as the mind is concerned, are
born the same way, though the latter be born in purple clothing and palaces, the
former in rags and huts. … Seneca … says that Socrates was neither a patrician
nor a Roman knight; philosophy did not find him noble but made him noble.16

Virtue can be learned, and therefore any normal rational person of whatever origin can
learn it, at least in principle. Poggio Bracciolini even makes the striking claim –
astonishing by the lights of ancient virtue ethics – that “virtue is ready to hand, and
comes to all those who embrace it.” For him, it is only the hereditary nobility, who are
inclined to rest on the laurels of their ancestors, who find it hard.17
This is not say that humanist virtue politics can be construed as egalitarian in
anything approaching the modern sense of that word. Like all premodern political
thinkers, the humanists accepted that some degree of hierarchy in politics was natural and
necessary. There always needed to be an elite, whether a republican political class, the
optimates, with its magistrates or a monarch with his ministers. But the elite should be an
open one, accessible to all men of virtue and wisdom, whatever their social or national
origin.18 A political hierarchy should be able to justify itself in moral and rational terms,
not rely merely on its inherited wealth and status. Here the humanists differed somewhat
from one of their basic authorities – Aristotle – who in the Politics reports without demur
that people believe nobility (eugeneia) to depend in part on lineage and the long
possession of wealth.19

16 Knowledge, Goodness and Power, 282 (translation modified). For the Latin text, cited from the edition
of Cologne: Eucharius Cervicornus, 1529), p. 172 (sign. dd iiii v): “Nobilitatis enim proprium est recta
sequi, gaudere officio, cupiditatibus imperare, auaritiam coercere. Hoc qui facit, etiam si ex infima sorte
hominum natus fuerit, is merito suo nobilis haberi et dici potest. Neque est cur parentem rerum omnium
naturam (ut quidam improbi faciunt) reprehendimus, quod hos nobiles, illos uero ignobiles faciat?
Aequalem siquidem omnibus temperamentum praestat, non genus, non potentiam, non opes inspiciens,
eadem [enim], quoad animum pertinet, nascendi ratio in privatorum hominum filiis est quae in principum
ac regum natis, licet ii in purpura et magnis domibus, illi in centonibus et casulis plerunque nascantur. ….
Seneca ... philosophus insignis … ‘Non fuit,’ inquit, Socrates patricius, non eques Romanus, quem tamen
philosophia non accepit, sed nobilem reddidit.’” The Senecan quotation is from Epistulae morales 44.2.
17 Poggio Bracciolini, De vera nobilitate, ed. Davide Canfora (Rome: Storia e letteratura, 2002), 36:
“Virtus enim omnibus est in promptu; eius efficitur propria, qui illam amplectitur.” Elsewhere in the same
dialogue Poggio claims that nobility, which is “the radiance of virtue,” “belongs to us through our own will
and power and cannot be withdrawn or taken from us against our will.”
18 For Cicero’s classic praise of an elite “open to the industry and virtue of all citizens,” see his Pro Sestio
137.
19 Aristotle, Politics 5.1, 1301b. Compare 4.8, 1294a, where Aristotle is more dismissive of “gentle birth”
as an element in true aristocracy. What Aristotle’s real views were is debated in Poggio’s De nobilitate,
 The humanist conception of the path to virtue – how one acquires virtue – also in
some key respects contrasts with Aristotle’s. Whereas Aristotle saw the acquisition of
virtue as a matter of practice, philosophical reflection and habit, aided by good birth,
wealth, good upbringing and good friends, the humanists as a rule see liberal education –
full stop – as the path to virtue. The path to virtue runs through the humanities or studia
humanitatis. This is the new and powerful justification for the study of classical literature
offered by humanist educators in the fifteenth century. They held that training in the
classics, especially the language arts of grammar and rhetoric, plus poetry, history, moral
philosophy, and other humane studies, would instill noble mores, ingenui mores, and
practical wisdom, prudentia – all the qualities needed for excellence in government.
Moral philosophy and history, precept and example, couched in the noble language
learned from the ancient poets and orators, would give future rulers both the moral
character to govern well and the eloquence needed for the finest form of leadership.
Educators who taught the humanities were thus performing a public service. By
training the elite in the humanities, noble virtue would radiate down to the populace in
general, who would benefit from and imitate the wisdom and moral excellence of their
leaders. The great humanist educator Guarino of Verona provides a vivid example of this
kind of thinking. Writing to his disciple and countryman Gian Nicola Salerno, a
humanistically educated podestà whose superexcellent virtue (Guarino writes) had just
reduced the rebellious Bolognese to order, the famous educator declares that the judge
should give credit to his education in the Muses, who have taught him the arts of ruling
cities.

Hence you have demonstrated that the Muses not only govern stringed
instruments and the lyre, but also republics … . How much should we value, how
much should we praise that learning, those arts, in which he who is going to be a
statesman is educated! Once provided with justice, goodness, prudence and
modesty, he can share the fruit [of these virtues] with everyone, and their utility

passim, where an effort is made to defend the self-sufficiency of virtue in Stoic terms and to devalue
Aristotle’s contrary opinion on the importance of external goods; the interlocutor who defends the humanist
view claims that when Aristotle said that nobility depended on on externa (listed [ed. Canfora, p. 27] as
“divitias, genus, patria, corporis et fortune adiumenta”) he was merely following the opinion of the crowd,
and that this was not a real philosophical opinion (ibid., p. 26, repeated on p. 29).
 commonly spreads to everyone. Philosophical studies do not have the same utility
when imbued in private persons. […]

The liberally educated statesman is “nurtured by Jove” to prefer, not his own advantage
and benefits, but those of the people entrusted to him: “he rules empires not by violence
and arms, as tyrants do, but with affability and mercy (clementia),” imitating the duces of
the bees, who, themselve unarmed, requires no stingers to govern the hive.

With good reason, then, did antiquity extol those who educated statesmen, since
in this way they reformed the mores and customs of the many by means of a
single person: as, for example, Anaxagoras taught Pericles, Plato Dion,
Pythagoras the Italian princes, Athenodorus Cato, Panaetius Scipio, Apollonius
Cicero and Caesar; and, even in this age, Manuel Chrysoloras, a great man and a
great philosopher, educated many men.20

Such passages are easily multiplied, and this is no surprise, given that the theme of moral
rearmament via the study of literature and philosophy was a prominent one in the most
famous text, De officiis, of the humanists’ favorite ancient author, Cicero. There and
elsewhere Cicero presented his philosophical writings as a way of reawakening the
moribund mores et instituta of ancient Rome – the native virtues that had made her great
– after the moral and political disasters of the civil wars.21
20 Letter of Guarino to Gian Nicola Salerno (1419), in Epistolario di Guarino Veronese, ed. R. Sabbadini,
vol. 1 (Venice: C. Ferrari: 1915), p. 263-64 (Ep. 159): “Quo effectum est ut Musas ipsas non modo
chordarum et citharae sed rerum etiam publicarum moderatrices esse demonstres. … Quanti igitur facienda,
quam laudanda ea doctrina, illae artes quibus instituitur is qui futurus est in re publica princeps. Nam ille
iustitia bonitate prudentia modestia praeditus communem universis afferre fructum potest in omnesque
disseminari utilitas solet. Ceterum si philosophiae studia privatum intrent hominem, non itidem […]. Iure
itaque illos extollit antiquitas qui primores erudierunt, quoniam una in persona plurimorum mores et
instituta reformarentur, ut Anaxagoras Periclem, Plato Dionem, Pythagoras principes italicos, Athenodorus
Catonem, Paneatius Scipionem, Apollonius Ciceronem et Caesarem, plurimos etiam hac aetate Manuel
Chrysoloras, magnus et vir et philosophus.” See also Guarino’s letter to the same correspondent on the
latter’s assumption of the office of podestà of Mantua, ibid., pp. 107-8 (Ep. 50). On this theme see also
Guido Cappelli, ‘Lo stato umanistico’, p. 3 ff., who notes that the idea of imitatio is a reflection in politics
of the humanists’ literary methods. Also highly relevant is Platina’s oration De laudibus bonarum artium
directed to Pius II, of which I am preparing an edition from the five surviving manuscripts (see note 8
above). The devaluing of the contemplative life in comparison with the active life reflects De officiis 1.28.
21 See A. A. Long, “Cicero’s Politics in the De officiis,” in Justice and Generosity: Studies in Hellenistic
Political Philosophy, ed. Andrew Laks and Malcolm Schofield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995), pp. 213-40. Ann Vasaly finds a similar purpose in Livy; see her monograph Livy’s Political
 Niccolò Perotti perhaps perceived a parallel between the Roman civil wars and
the decline of Christendom, since in the preface to his translation of Polybius’ Histories,
dedicated to Pope Nicholas V, he described how, after the fall of Rome, the destruction of
the humanities (optimae artes et disciplinae), with their many examples of noble conduct,
had resulted in laziness and self-indulgence on the part of Rome’s leaders, and their
torpidity had inevitably affected the whole citizen body.

It is an established fact that such as are the city’s leading men, such also is the rest
of the city, and whatever moral alterations appear among leaders are always
followed in the people. Since their leaders were illiterate, therefore, the rest were
untaught and uneducated as well. [He goes on to complain that in medieval times
there were no rewards or honor for anyone inclined to study.] For just as a
temperate climate brings forth rich and plentiful fruit, so also the prince’s
humanity, honor and generosity produces the liberal arts and fine minds.22

So too the great humanist printer Aldus Manutius prefaced his edition of
Plutarch’s Moralia with an elaborate compliment to his friend Jacopo Antiquario,
praising him for his saintly character and learning, qualities which his example had
spread throughout his entire household.

As your guest in Milan I saw you were endowed with every virtue; I admired not
just your saintliness but also that of your young nephew Antiquario, your
brother’s son, who displayed such modesty and love of good literature – for he

Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 127. The idea that the ruler’s vices always
trickle down to the populace is found in Cicero’s Laws, 3.31-32; see also next note.
22 Perotti, preface to his Polybius translation, quoted in the article on Polybius by Jeroen De Keyser
forthcoming in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum, vol. 11, ed. Greti Dinkova-Bruun (Toronto:
Pontifical Institute Press), from Cesena, Biblioteca Malatestiana MS S.12.2: “Est enim ita comparatum ut
qualescunque summi civitatis viri fuerint, talis quoque sit reliqua civitas, et quaecumque morum immutatio
in principibus exterit, eadem semper in populo sequatur. Quoniam ergo illiterati principes erant, caeteri
quoque rudes erant atque indocti. If anyone was inclined to studia, there were no rewards or honor. Nam
sicuti temperies ac clementia aeris copiam atque ubertatem frugum, ita humanitas et honor et beneficentia
principis bonas artes excellentiaque ingenia producit.” Perotti goes on to give credit to Nicholas that today
“ita vigeant studia litterarum et tot se ingenia hominum proferant atque ostentent.” Perotti is surely
following here Cicero, Laws 3.14: “quaecumque mutatio morum in principibus extiterit, eandem in populo
secutam.” The same passage of Cicero is echoed to, to the same effect, in Aldus Manutius’ preface to his
1513 edition of Plato’s complete works; see Manutius, The Greek Classics, ed. Wilson, p. 234.
 already knew Latin and Greek – that he looked to me as if he would soon be very
expert and learned, just like you. I also admired your staff and the whole
household, entirely modest and saintly, like its master. So I would affirm the truth
of the saying: whatever the qualities of heads of families, masters, noblemen,
princes, heads of state, such will be the qualities of a household, the staff and
servants, the states and peoples themselves. This view is expressed elegantly, as
always, by Cicero in his books On the Laws. […] So I would wish all men who
have command over others, “to whom peoples have been entrusted and such great
affairs are a concern,” to be of excellent character, my dear Antiquario, and very
like yourself; certainly the whole of humanity would soon live a blessed
existence, by general consensus crime and all vices would be banished.23

A perennial problem, perhaps the most challenging problem, for all political
meritocracies is inducing non-elite citizens to accept the authority of their presumed
betters. A claim to superior wisdom and virtue is not so easily recognized as a claim to be
a legitimate heir or to be duly elected according to law. In humanist virtue-politics, the
solution to this problem looks to the force of example and eloquence: the commands of
the ruling class are accepted because the ruled are imprinted in some way with the virtues
of their betters, enough to recognize that what is being commanded is right and just and
to their benefit. From a modern perspective this claim, or rather hope, might seem naïve,
but the idealism that animates it is palpable.24

It will be obvious that the virtue politics of the Italian humanists has deep roots in
the ancient world, and its sources can be found, not only in the sources so far mentioned,
Aristotle and Cicero, but in Plato, Sallust, Livy and the Roman Stoics as well. In a sense
the humanists were reviving and carrying on the work of the ancient philosophical
schools, some of which, some of the time – like the early Academy, the Lyceum and the

23 Ibid. 201, quoting De legibus 3.31-32 and Homer, Iliad 2.25.

24 The question is explicitly posed by Cicero in De officiis 2.20, and leads to his famous discussion of why
it is better for a ruler to be loved than feared.
Stoics – emphasized the reform of politics through philosophical study and moral virtue
of rulers. They embraced the proverbial maxim of ancient statesmen that a man cannot
rule others who cannot rule himself.25 At the same time, humanist virtue politics presents
a striking contrast with the political thought of the medieval schools. The scholastic
tradition of the High Middle Ages, the work of jurists and theologians, had been
concerned with a wholly different set of issues: the status and scope of politics in a fallen
world, the correct juridical relations between church and state, the nature and extent of
ecclesiastical authority, whether and how plenitude of power should be limited—by
consent or other means—the nature of law and justifications for coercion, the moral
status of property, and the legal and constitutional conditions that need to be met for a
government to be called legitimate.26 Scholastic thinking about politics was lawyerly,
abstract and written in a specialist language addressed mostly to fellow scholastics. The
humanists, by contrast, thought about politics through the prism of classical history,
poetry and a more accessible, Ciceronian form of moral philosophy. Their writings and
speeches were addressed to the educated reader or listener – the reader whom the
humanists themselves had trained in classical Latin. The classical past – concrete
historical experience as preserved by the great writers of the past – was the best guide to
the art of effective government. Much of the moral literature the humanists produced was
designed to make ancient wisdom accessible to the political leaders of their own time.27
The virtue politics of the Italian humanists had effects that lasted for several
centuries in European culture, but the political writings of the humanists have not been
widely valued as a tradition or even noticed in the standard modern histories of Western
political thought. This is no doubt because the humanists’ message was directed to a
broadly literate social elite and for that reason did not aim at a high level of theoretical
elaboration or rejoice in the kind of technical argumentation that engages the attention of

25 “Absurdum est ut alios regat qui seipsum regere nescit,” a proverbial saying.
26 For an overview see Joseph Canning, A History of Medieval Political Thought, 300-1450 (London:
Routledge, 1996); a good short introduction is John Kilkullen, “Medieval Political Thought,” The Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2016), Edward N. Zalta, ed., online at http://plato.stanford.edu.
27 As one example among many, one may mention Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae, his most
popular work in Latin and his ethical masterpiece: in the preface to his patron, the tyrant Azzo of Correggio
(who for Petrarch was no tyrant), Petrarch states that he wants to do for Azzo what Seneca did for his
brother, the statesman and proconsul Gallio: Azzo has the desire to know but not the time to read, so
Petrarch is providing him with all the moral teachings from antiquity he needs to know in “short and
precise formulations” so that he can stock his memory without laboring endlessly over old books.
modern academic historians. There is also a widespread tendency to regard Machiavelli
as the representative voice of Renaissance political theory, whereas from the point of the
tradition I have been discussing he is an outlier, indeed a fierce critic of virtue politics.28
At the same time, a writer like Francesco Patrizi of Siena, the voice of conventional
humanist wisdom in Renaissance political thought – printings of whose works far
outnumbered those of Machiavelli in the sixteenth century – has been completely
ignored.29 The all-too obvious reason for this is that his works are very long, very learned,
and in Latin.
There is, however, one fascinating parallel to humanist virtue politics, a tradition
found not in the West but which flourished 5000 miles away in China. This is the
Confucian tradition, the governing philosophy of China for nearly two millenia, from the
Han dynasty down to the founding of the Chinese republic in 1912. Like the humanists,
Confucius saw the great political disorders of his time as the result of moral decay. For
him, the way to reform politics was to return to antiquity, the political order of the ancient
Shang and Zhou dynasties. This could be done by studying the old literary classics,
principally the Odes, that Confucius is said to have edited. Study of the ancient classics
brought wen, cultural refinement and strengthened de, sometimes translated as “virtue,” a
kind of charismatic goodness. De allowed a ruler to rule by “effortless action,” wu wei,
rather than coercion. Rank for Confucius should depend on merit and ren, sometimes
translated as humanity, goodness or benevolence – compassion or empathy for others.
The gentleman, junzi, was the man of self-cultivation who studied literature, acquired
culture and behaved with goodness. Gentlemanly ideals had nothing to do with hereditary
rank and indeed Confucian education was intended to replace the hereditary nobility with
a class of officials who owed their position to education, wisdom and virtue. This
mandarin class served a ruler whose own mandate to rule, the Mandate of Heaven, ming
tian, depended on his selfless service to his subjects and his maintenance of the rites, li,
which regulated proper human interactions – a word that could be translated as mores,
little morals, or the rules of conduct.30

28 Hankins, “Machiavelli and the Humanist Politics of Virtue.”

29 Hankins, “Exclusivist Republicanism,” pp. 468-69.
30 I develop these parallels in a forthcoming article comparing Petrarchan and Confucian literati,
coauthored with Prof. Lin Guo of Shanghai University.
 The parallels with what the humanists were trying to achieve is striking. As in the
Confucian tradition, humanist virtue politics understands the failure to achieve good
government as a problem of human character rather than as a legal and constitutional
problem. They knew that prohibitions don’t teach; “example is the school of mankind and
they will learn at no other” (Edmund Burke). Abuse of power or tyranny, a perennial
problem in all political communities, they see primarily as a failure of human excellence.
Instead of looking to the legal definitions of a Bartolus to determine when a ruler was
behaving tyrannically, humanists read Tacitus to understand the psychology of political
corruption.31 The solution to the problem of rulers who abused their power was not to
spin legal theories of consent or to elaborate arguments for legitimate resistance to
tyranny. Tyrants could not be stopped by passing laws or quoting legal maxims. The
humanist way of addressing tyranny was to surround the ruler with men of virtue whose
charisma would influence him to do what was right, as Petrarch maintains in his Invective
against a Man of High Rank, and as Castiglione taught in the Courtier.32
Above all, a corrupt ruling class could not be contained by popular agitation.
Allowing the vulgar to influence government either through tumult, power-sharing or
consultation only made things worse.33 Nor could the problem be solved by bringing in a
strong man, some condottiere who would enforce peace when civil order broke down –
the preferred solution of fourteenth century city-states in crisis. Coercion did not make
men better. The humanists knew from the De officiis, their greatest textbook of political
virtue, that society could not be knit together by brute power alone.34 Moreover, the
strategies of legitimation used by many Renaissance tyrants – managed communal
elections, staged ceremonies of acclamation, loyalty oaths, the corruption and cooptation
of guild leadership, the acquisition of imperial and papal vicariates, the purchase of titles

31 See Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.” On Bartolus’s legalistic definition of nobility as a
principle target of humanist polemics concerning “true nobility,” see Landino, De vera nobilitate, ed. Liaci,
45-46.
32 Petrarca, Invectives (cited in note 6) and James Hankins, ““Renaissance Philosophy and Book IV of Il
Cortegiano,” in Baldesar Castiglione: The Book of the Courtier, ed. Daniel Javitch. Norton Critical
Editions (New York: Norton, 2002), pp. 377-388; an expanded version is printed in Hankins, Humanism
and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003-2004), 1:
493-509.
33 This sentiment, often implicit, is made explicit in the first paragraph of Platina’s De principe, ed.
Giacomo Ferraù (Palermo: Edizioni “Il Vespro”, 1979), p. 53.
34 See especially De officiis 2.21-35, a key passage for virtue politics. At 2.23 he writes “Fear is a poor
watchman even in the short run, but benevolence keeps faithful guard forever”
of nobility, invented claims to high descent – all of these strategies were in the end
transparently fraudulent; none of them would or could create a true community.35
Ultimately, for a stable political order to take root, fraud and force would have to be
replaced by loyalty, trust and mutual interest. It would require changing hearts and minds;
it called for all the arts of persuasion. For the humanists, this required government by the
wise and the good, men whose speech carried weight and whose lives compelled
admiration. Virtue was charismatic.36 Men would not willingly obey magistrates who
served their own interests rather than the common good. Rulers needed moral training
that would make them other-directed and a grasp of history that would give them
practical wisdom, prudentia. It is no accident that the most famous political quotation of
the Renaissance was Plato’s famous dictum in the Republic: that states will not be happy
unless philosophers ruled, or rulers become philosophers.37 A close runner-up was another
quotation from Plato’s Letters reported by Cicero in the De officiis: that we are not born
for ourselves alone, but for our family, our friends and our country.38
Many city-states in the Renaissance tried to solve the problems of tyranny and
corruption by passing more laws, insulating judicial processes from local influence, or
setting up police magistracies concerned with public morals. But the humanists knew that
this would not help. They had read their Tacitus: corruptissima respublica plurimae leges
(Annales 3.27). In any case, laws were useless against the powerful. As an interlocutor in
one of Poggio’s dialogues says,

Only the little people and the lower orders of a city are controlled by your laws ...
the more powerful civic leaders transgress their power. Anacharsis justly
compared the laws to a spider’s web, which captures the weak but is broken by
the strong. … Away then with these laws and rights of yours, that are … obeyed
only by private persons and little folk who need their protection against the

35 For such strategies see Communes and Despots in Medieval and Renaissance Italy , ed. John E. Law and
Bernadette Paton (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
36 See for example Petrarch’s remarks in the De remediis, praefatio and 2.190, explaining how the virtues,
especially courage, automatically inspire respect and love in good men, bewilderment in evil ones. A
similar description of how virtue inspires obedience may be found in Giovanni Pontano, De principe, ed.
Guido M. Cappelli (Rome: Salerno Editrice, 2003), pp. 2-6.
37 Republic 5.473d.
38 De officiis 1.22.
 powerful! ... Grave, prudent and sober men do not need the laws; they declare a
law of right living for themselves, being trained by nature and study to virtue and
good behavior. The powerful spit upon and trample the laws as things suited to
weak, mercenary, working-class, acquisitive, base and poverty-striken folk, who
are better ruled by violence and the fear of punishment than by laws.39

Laws and legal coercion didn’t work against the powerful: they either didn’t need them,
being already virtuous, or held them in contempt as restraining only the weak. It is
difficult, indeed, to exaggerate the disgust most humanists felt towards contemporary
legal culture. They respected Roman law as a repository of ancient prudence; they
believed unreservedly in natural and divine law; but they treated the actual practice of
law in their own time as desperately corrupt, a source of civil discord and inhumanity, as
a means of obscuring rather than revealing true justice. The law as practiced was a
conspiracy against the public good, corrupted by money, indifferent to right and wrong,
tying up true justice in the webs of pettifoggery and useless technicalities. In some ways
their objections resembled those of modern legal reformers like Philip K. Howard,
founder of the Common Good.40 Like Howard, humanists complained that the sheer
multitude of laws and the procedural obstacles to applying the law fairly undermined
moral freedom and humanity and ensured bad outcomes. Like Howard, the humanists
rejected the premise that the law can dictate correct behavior by specific rules. Like Plato
and Aristotle, the humanists believed that the best judge was a wise and good man whom
philosophy had trained to understand natural law and apply it in accordance with his
discretion. For them, the sound Roman maxim that societies should be ruled by laws, not
men, was problematic: it depended on the laws, and it depended on the men.41

39 Poggio Bracciolini, Historia tripartita, in his Opera omnia, ed. Riccardo Fubini, 4 vols. (Turin: Bottega
d’Erasmo, 1964-1969), 1: 48-49. Quoted from the translation in James Hankins, “Humanism and the
origins of modern political thought,” in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism, ed. Jill
Kraye (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 123.
40 Philip K. Howard, Life without Lawyers: Restoring Responsibility in America (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2009).
41 See for example the debate in Bartolomeo Scala’s dialogue On Laws and Courts (De legibus et iudiciis,
tr. David Marsh) in Scala, Essays and Dialogues, tr. Renée Neu Watkins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 158-231 (esp. §29); for Boccaccio’s hostility to contemporary legal education see
Hankins, “Boccaccio and Political Thought.”
 Since laws and institutions were inadequate safeguards against corruption, the
only real bulwark against abuse of power in the ruling class was for that class to police
itself, informally, via persuasion, not coercion. The best members of the elite had to
convince rulers and their fellow aristocrats to behave well. This could be done by
education: by bringing up the next generation in the humanist tradition of moral self-
cultivation, or by helping one’s own children acquire virtue by study of the classics. But
the humanist movement’s ambitions went well beyond education of the young; they
sought to colonize the symbolic environment of the adult world as well. Their ultimate
goal was to forge a wider culture that celebrated classical virtue and shamed those who
fell short of its ideals.
Hence the leading role played in humanist culture by eloquence and the arts of
persuasion. Eloquence was the most important vehicle for the self-policing of the elite. It
was the trumpet of virtue. The epideiktic rhetoric of the humanists aimed to make men
want to be virtuous by praising good conduct and character and blaming bad in the most
lively colors.42 Thanks to humanist influence in government and society, during the
period from the 1390s to the 1430s, occasions for public oratory gradually became more
numerous. Eventually it became the practice in quattrocento Italy to hold ceremonial
orations, mostly in Latin but sometimes in Italian, at all the important junctures of public
and private life: at weddings and funerals, on taking up public office, on beginning a
course at a university, at the beginning of ambassadorial missions or before battles. In
Florence, for example, the practice began in 1415 for a member of the government to
make a speech on justice, usually filled with classical and biblical authorities, whenever a
foreign judge took up his six-month term of office in the city.43 These speeches praised
members of the ruling class for their virtues, even when they had given little evidence of
them – in this following Aristotle’s advice that praising men above their merits was a way
of motivating them to improve their behavior. But their larger purpose was to
communicate the moral expectations of the community to persons who were taking on
new public and private responsibilities. Accountability – punishing those who fell below
the standards expected of the elite – was left to invectives or to the pages of humanist
42 In general see the acute remarks of John M. McManamon, Funeral Oratory and the Cultural Ideals of
Renaissance Humanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), chapter 2.
43 See Uwe Neumahr, Die Protestatio de Iustitia in der Florentiner Hochkultur: eine Redegattung
(Hamburg: Lit, 2002).
histories. The ultimate punishment of those who abused power was social rejection by
one’s peers and eternal infamy.
To put this in modern terms, humanist eloquence was meant as a kind of social
technology, incentivizing good behavior through the use of praise and blame—as
opposed to repressing bad behavior by using the legal and coercive powers of
government. To use Albert Hirschmann’s analytic framework, the humanists aimed to
neutralize corrupt passions and appetites, the desire for personal gain or for revenge, by
stimulating a countervailing passion: the desire for honor and admiration from the
community.44 It involved replacing the existing honor code of the aristocratic classes,
derived from feudal and chivalric sources, with a new honor code (or “honor world,” to
use Anthony Appiah’s useful expression45), inspired by an idealized version of Graeco-
Roman antiquity. Future statesmen were to be immersed in classical history, poetry and
moral philosophy – a moral universe where the highest praise and the highest rewards
were lavished on public servants. The political class was to be exhorted to a Sallustian
competition for virtue. The humanists understood that the classical ideal of virtue
depended on cultivating a certain sense of self: that one is the kind of person that doesn’t
do certain things; that one’s dignity and honor within a community depends on not acting,
or not being seen to act, out of self-interest, catering to one’s own appetites, but on
serving the community. The humanists’ aim was to build up a critical mass of true
noblemen and noblewomen who in turn would create the presumption that meritorious
behavior would be rewarded with high status and malicious behavior with shame and
degradation.
To build up their neo-classical honor world the humanists also enlisted the arts in
celebration of antique virtue. It became the goal of humanist culture to saturate the civic
and courtly environment with images, inscriptions and even music that kept the rewards
of human excellence, and the consequences of bad behavior, continually before the senses
and the minds of the elite. The new, classicizing architecture of the quattrocento and the
design of the built environment in general had the effect of bringing Rome alive again; to
walk down a neoclassical courtyard lined with statues of the mightly dead was meant to
44 Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before its
Triumph, new ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2013 [original ed. 1977]).
45 Anthony Appiah, The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010),
19-22.
inspire in the living a desire for similar deeds. In the council chambers of kings and
republics the humanistically educated man could read on the walls and ceilings
inscriptions selected from his boyhood reading that would remind him of his obligation to
act wisely and well; and pictures and statues and architecture all reinforced the message.
The inscriptional practices of the ancient world were renewed in the quattrocento, but
with a difference: in addition to commemorating civic generosity, Renaissance
inscriptions also taught political lessons. One quotation from Sallust, often found on the
walls of Renaissance council chambers, gives the flavor: Concordia res parvae crescunt,
discordia maximae dilabuntur. “Small states grow with concord; discord causes great
ones to dissolve.” Most painting in the Renaissance continued to have religious subjects,
but in the course of the Quattrocento the representation of classical subjects, almost
always with a moralizing message, became increasingly common.
Even music was brought to bear on the project of classicizing the environment.
Though humanists had little to do with the great polyphonic music we associate with
Renaissance today – Dufay, Josquin, Isaac and the rest – the humanists did work out a
new style of music criticism which celebrated the ancient ideal of moral music found in
the last book of Aristotle’s Politics, and they insisted that music had a proper civic
function of supporting virtuous behavior. The humanists also championed a revival of the
ancient singer of tales – a genre of musical literature now completely lost – which they
reconstructed from their knowledge of ancient literature. We know of a fairly large
number of musicians from the mid-Quattrocento to the early sixteenth century who
practiced the humanist art song – the performance of Latin poetry, classical or modern,
often improvised, to the lira da braccio. As we learn from Raffaele Brandolini, the most
famous of these singers, the goal was to reform and elevate the forms of entertainment
used by civic and courtly elites. Such entertainments would no longer feature clowns,
tumblers, mimes, and singers of love songs; there would henceforth be no drums and
cymbals, trumpets and horns playing music of the hunt. These the humanists tried to
stigmatize as vulgar or potentially immoral. Instead, the leisure hours of the upper classes
would be transformed into occasions for the celebration of classical virtue.46

46 James Hankins, “Humanism and Music in Italy,” in The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-century Music,
ed. Anna Maria Busse-Berger and Jesse Rodin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 231-62.
 *

Let me sum up by trying to assess the long-term historical significance of the

humanist tradition of virtue politics. To do this I shall take my bearings from the analytic
framework elaborated in Francis Fukuyama’s recent works on the origins of modern
political institutions.47 Fukuyama identifies three elements, three categories of
institutions, which distinguish the best-functioning modern states from premodern states
and failed states. The first is the presence of an impersonal political order – the state –
that replaced tribal and patrimonial orders in premodern societies. The modern state has,
in Weber’s expression, a monopoly of the means of violence and well-defined property
rights, but it also has servants of the state, civil servants and magistrates, who are meant
to privilege its interests, and presumptively the interests of society as a whole, while
fighting against the natural human tendency to favor family and friends – what Fukuyama
labels patrimonialism and clientism. The second element is the rule of law, which for him
means simply a system where the ruling class, even kings, are forced to comply with
written laws; there is no one free from the laws or above them, and judicial discretion is
carefully limited by due process. The third element that for Fukuyama characterizes
modern political institutions is accountability – a form of legitimacy where rulers are held
accountable to “parliaments, assemblies, and other bodies representing a broader
proportion of the population,” and where they “subject their sovereignty to the will of the
larger population as expressed through elections.”
It hardly needs saying that Fukuyama’s criteria of political modernity – which for
him also define a normatively superior stage in human development – have not been
universally accepted. Chinese neo-Confucian theorists in particular have pushed back
against the idea that electoral democracy is a necessary condition of modernity or the
only way in which accountability can be achieved in a good society.48 The idea that
servants of the state automatically favor the interests of the whole against the part is also

47 Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From prehuman times to the French Revolution (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), and idem, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial
Revolution to the Globalizatin of Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014).
48 Daniel A. Bell, The China Model: Political Meritocracy and the Limits of Democracy (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2015).
an idea one may be permitted to doubt.49 But for the purpose of this discussion
Fukuyama’s criteria can provide a framework for assessing the humanists’ version of
political meritocracy.
Weighed in Fukuyama’s scale of modernity, it can, I believe, plausibly be claimed
that humanist virtue politics contributed to the rise of modern political institutions in
some respects, while in others its influence was more ambiguous. The humanists
arguably contributed to state formation by promoting the idea of a meritocratic elite,
persons educated to exercise power well, whose social status and political authority was
dependent on merit, understood as moral goodness, practical wisdom, learning and a
commitment to the common good. Virtue politics represented a strong challenge to
hereditary, patrimonial forms of power – at least in principle – as well as clientage
systems based on family influence. In this respect at least virtue politics contributed to
the emergence of the modern impersonal state. Its contribution should not be overstated,
since most humanists tended to think of political authority as entrusted to individuals by a
sovereign people or a prince rather than seeing magistrates as representing an abstract
entity, the state, to which powers had been granted permanently via a social contract of
some kind.50 Still, the humanist idea of meritocracy can be seen as a kind of halfway
house to a more modern conception of the state and an impartial bureacracy serving the
public interest.51
The contribution of humanist virtue politics to the rule of law is more difficult to
assess. The humanists understood the rule of law to be a key feature of Roman
civilization and as such they embraced it as a necessary feature of a good society
modeled on ancient Rome. At the same time, however, the humanists were heir to the
Greek philosophical tradition which tended to see written law as an inferior substitute for
a wise and good ruler, and in that sense a second-best source of political order. Since the

49 Randy T. Simmons, Beyond Politics: The Roots of Government Culture, revised edition (Oakland, CA:
The Independent Institute, 2011).
50 See Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Bell, J. Farr
and R. L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90-131, with the comments in Malcolm
Schofield, “Cicero’s Definition of Res publica,” in his Saving the City: Philosopher-Kings and other
Classical Paradigms (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 178-94, at 181. The less formalized humanist view
may well be the sounder one, given the well-known tendency of government servants to identify their
interests with the state as against the people.
51 Alison Brown, Bartolomeo Scala, 1430-1497, Chancellor of Florencce: The Humanist as Bureaucrat
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), esp. chapter 14, “Scala and the State.”
humanists considered the law of their own times as morally corrupt, irrational, opaque,
and excessively technical, too often serving the interests of the part rather than the whole,
they often found themselves defending the need for princes and republican magistrates to
exercise wide discretionary powers – discretionary powers that all too easily could
become a license for arbitrary rule and even tyranny.52 That is how some humanist writers
found themselves advocating positions similar to that of Jean Bodin, who wanted the king
to be subject to the laws of religion but otherwise to have unrestricted authority over the
civil laws and the legal system. Like Bodin, many humanists were skeptical of Aristotle’s
theory of the mixed constitution as a means of restraining tyranny and self-dealing,
however much they admired the rest of his ethical teachings. In sixteenth-century terms,
they more commonly favored absolutists than political Aristotelians. In their defense, I
would say that, given their context and wider assumptions, the humanists could hardly
have embraced unreservedly the sovereignty of law. The rule of law over men is the
doctrine of societies that have learned the hard way that human virtue is not to be trusted.
The humanists were pushing in the other direction, responding to what they saw as the
dysfunctional institutions of their time. They wanted the legal system to be responsive to
human virtue and prudence; they feared its manipulation by the powerful who benefited
from the expensive mystifications of legal science.
In this respect I am not sure the humanists were entirely wrong. There is surely
something to be said for insisting on high moral character from those who make the laws,
and for allowing such persons wide discretion in administering them. The humanists were
also right to stress the importance of laws that can be understood and respected by those
who are obliged to obey them. I am also not quite sure about the last of Fukuyama’s
marks of the modern state – democratic accountability. Influential humanists such as
Leonardo Bruni and Flavio Biondo expressed a preference for the Roman system of
electing magistrates, which they believed would produce more virtuous magistrates than
the militantly anti-meritocratic system of choosing magistrates by lot, a common practice
in the late medieval popular commune.53 The humanists generally agreed with Tacitus
that sorte et urna mores non discerni (Histories 4.7), moral qualities are made invisible
52 See Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power under the Visconti and the
Sforza, 1329-1535 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), whose work suggests that it was the lawyers
rather than the humanists of Renaissance Milan who ultimately did more to restrain the tyrannical power of
the princeps.
through lotteries for office and secret ballots. In their preference for elections they were
largely channeling Cicero, who entertained the conviction that the Roman people had
chosen him as a magistrate because they respected his virtue and wisdom. A number of
humanist political thinkers also favored elective monarchies.54 But with our wider
experience of democracy and elections today it is hard to regard as anything other than
naïve the idea that elections favor the most virtuous candidates. When modern theorists
favor electoral democracy they most often do so on negative grounds, echoing E. M.
Forster’s Two Cheers for Democracy. Democracy is preferable because it “admits variety
and permits criticism.”55 Democracy is the least bad constitution because it offers the
weaker members of society some recourse against exploitation and abuse by their rulers.
At best it accords a small measure of dignity to ordinary citizens via partipation in self-
rule. Few believe that democracy elevates leaders of proven virtue and wisdom.
The humanists in general did not think of elections as opportunities for an
electorate to exercise accountability over its officials. They did, however, think that other
means were available to hold rulers to account. As discussed, that was one function of the
humanist rhetoric of praise and blame, in orations, semi-private correspondence, and in
historical and biographical writing. The humanists understood that public esteem and
public shame can be powerful tools to shape behavior. This form of accountability can
reasonably be seen as the predecessor of the modern idea of a free press. The humanists
understood free speech as a virtue – speaking truth to power – not as a right, and in this
respect too they anticipated the modern ideal of the journalist who uncovers wrong-doing
without fear or favor. It would be useless to argue that the humanists had either better or
worse success in upholding this ideal; that would be the rashest of generalizations and no
historian will ever be in a position to make it. Real courage to speak out against tyranny
when the speaker is in the tyrant’s power is always vanishingly rare, given our human
nature. Yet it is also human nature to hold up better ideals for ourselves, and the virtue of
53 James Hankins, “Leonardo Bruni, Dante, and Virtue Politics,” forthcoming in the Bollettino del Istituto
storico italiano per il Medio Evo, and Hankins, “Biondo Flavio on the Roman Republic.”
54 For example Petrarch in the De remediis 2.78, where he praises the elective kingship of Taprobane (Sri
Lanka), which supposedly produces a king chosen for his virtue; Petrarch takes the occasion to attack the
principle of hereditary monarchy. The passage significantly alters its source, Pliny, Natural History 6.89.
55 Forster, “What I Believe,” in Two Cheers for Democracy (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World,
1951): “So two cheers for Democracy: one because it admits variety and two because it permits criticism.
Two cheers are quite enough: there is no occasion to give three.”
free speech in the best sense was one that humanists cherished, even if they may have
honored it more in the breach than the observance.
In any case we are also all too aware of the failures of democratic accountability
in our time, and we understand all too well the wisdom of Thomas Jefferson’s remark that
a successful republic cannot survive without a virtuous people. Here too, I think, we may
have something to learn from the humanists – that a successful republic cannot be simply
a system of procedures for adjusting interests, employing institutional means devoid of
any moral orientation. We too need to find better ways to educate the young in the core
values of our society and our civilization, and to persuade adult citizens to act in the
public interest.