Name: Arpan Kr. Saha
M.A (English)
PG-II (Semester 3); Roll no- 2
Renaissance Political Thought
Civic Humanism or Civic Republicanism is a political concept that arose in the Renaissance in what was called the Regnum Italicum, or the Kingdom of Italy. It was heavily influenced by the writings of Aristotle, Cicero and Justinian’s Body of Civil Law. It was mainly articulated in the city of Florence during the fourteenth century.
However there were influences of other earlier legal practitioners like Bartolus and thinkers like Marsiglio on the concept.
One of the main features of the concept was how it continuously tried to define changing notions of being a subject and the features of righteous government that looked after the bene comune or public good. The thinkers sought to instil and encourage prudence, temperance, justice and virtuous behaviour in the ruling class/monarch, because right from the twelfth century onwards, the Kingdom of Italy was a disputed territory that was turning into an arena of perpetual injustice and violence as three main parties (The Holy Roman Empire which was mainly German then, the Catholic Church and the libertarian city-states who guarded their freedom and right to rule themselves fiercely) vied for power in it while the common good was continually neglected.
The ideals of humanism that were extended to the political sphere included most importantly liberty and freedom of the individual which made it possible for a human being to reach his fullest potential. “Civic humanism places a great emphasis on Man as actively engaged in the world as the centre of power. In their writings and speeches, the humanists formulated an ideology for the Florentine citizenry, which, while derived from classical sources, was also firmly rooted in the realities of the city’s experience.” (qtd.‘Civic Humanism’)
So it was a very topical political concept dealing with a very specific place, time and politics.
Thinkers like Leonardo Bruni and Bartolus de Saxoferrato considered the Ancient Roman Republic as a model state instead of the Holy Roman Empire, the Emperor of which continually tried to annex the Regnum Italicumwanting to exercise the merum imperiumor total rule. Now because of an absenteeism of any monarch in Italy Proper, there arose despots and tyrants who misgoverned cities. This tyranny was the main political position that all these thinkers opposed; be it secular tyranny of the Emperor or the religious tyranny of the Church, who sought to augment its territory in the ensuing chaos by choosing sides in the confrontations.
Bruni was also one of the first thinkers to talk about the qualities that were necessary for such humanistic atmospheres. He was of the opinion that virtue or virtu was of the essence in the Florentine citizen. In ‘An Isagogue of Moral Philosophy’, he says:
Man is naturally constituted to perform a certain activity proper to himself alone. But this activity cannot be the simple act of living, since that is shared with the plants; nor is it sensation, since even the brute animals possess sensation. It is, rather, life and action according to reason. Whoever uses his reason with ability and excellence fulfils proper work for which he was naturally constituted. To live and act well: that is the highest good of man we are seeking…. (Bruni, 271).
He advocated a certain type of individualism that brought forth his politics of bene commune; Bruni understood very well that the individual citizen was the one who made the collective republic possible.
“Recovering the ancient meaning of virtus as an active, virile and civic capacity, Italian and Florentine republicans claimed that for a freedom-loving, spirited and virtuous people the Republic is the only suitable form of government. Despotic rule, on the other hand, befits corrupt and servile minds.” (Hornqvist, ‘Virtue’)
All the thinkers, from Bruni to Bartolus de Saxoferrato understood that tyranny was the worst of all evils. Tyranny was heavy handed in its dismissal of collective will and hence stood against everything the Renaissance ethic stood for: individual liberty and creativity.
Such ideas of superiority of the Republic over the despotic regimes of the Empire came from continuous borrowings and readings of Aristotle and Cicero.
Bartolus very succinctly said:
A tyrant is the worst of all of the forms of government […] Woe then to that city which has many tyrants with no common ground. This warning should be made, that the rule of several bad men or of a perverse people does not last long, but easily turns into a one-man tyranny; we often see this actually happen. (Treatise, 7)
So again bene commune becomes the main goal of said politics. And that common good does not without individual freedom.
Individual greatness is part of cultural greatness. And cultural greatness is the product of many generations working always with the future in view. […] Human beings achieve personal greatness by having in mind the greatness of the community of which they are a part. (Rabil, 32)
Brunifurther extolled the virtues of the individual:
[A]ll virtue is a constant disposition of the mind which is commonly called a habit. For example, we know horses are created by nature in such a way that they are capable of galloping, wheeling about in a racecourse, and bearing a knight. Yet they cannot execute these manoeuvres perfectly unless they are first broken, then trained, and finally so practiced in them that they can do them proficiently. It is then that they seem to have a degree of perfection in them. In the same way, men are by nature born capable, through training and practice, of the habits of justice, temperance, and the other virtues. Thus, what was by nature imperfect can be perfected by long practice. We may conclude, then, that every real virtue is a habit, acquired by training and mental discipline, and its exercise is presently brought to perfection through experience and knowledge […] [T]he moral virtues treat of actions and dispositions while the intellectual virtues are more concerned with the apprehension of truth. There are five intellectual virtues: wisdom, knowledge, prudence, understanding, and art. The number of moral virtues is larger. Every human passion which goads or pulls at us is resisted by an opposing virtue. Whence it follows that all moral virtues by definition require effort. It is, for instance a difficult matter to bridle lust, hold your temper, and keep in check your avarice. It is the same with all our passions. Whatever we are naturally prone to do, the virtues oppose…. (274).
By extending qualities that make a human, human, Bruni enumerated subtly the qualities of the citizen who through the same humanistic virtues or qualities made possible the republic.
So any citizen which embodies the said qualities was human and hence fit to inhabit his space in the republic.
Dante’s teacher, BrunettoLattini deftly recognises this organic connection:
“The city is a gathering of people formed to live justly. Thus they are not called citizens of the same commune because they were accepted together inside the same walls, but rather citizens are those who have agreed to live justly under one law.”
So the geographical space does not matter as much as the equality does which results from the extolled qualities of humanism in the citizen/individual. If every individual ideally embodies the same set of human qualities, it de facto makes them equals in the eyes of the civic law.
Further extending the concept of equality in the eyes of the law to happiness, Bruni says:
The proper activity of man can therefore only consist in rational activity. This rational activity you take to be contemplation and happiness, which is wrong; for on that view everyone would be happy.All men have reason and act with it; very few possess perfect virtue. The proper activity of man and happiness are therefore not the same thing. So your exposition is incorrect and the contemplative life is not the proper life of man, but the active life. A man does not contemplate qua man, but rather qua something divine and separate. Justice, temperance, fortitude, and the other moral virtues he exercises as a man. The life, then, of moral virtue is properly the life of man. (293)
Activity that arises from the possession of certain human or rather civil qualities that made one fit to be a citizen of erstwhile Florence and its republican climate were the proper life so to say.
Thinkers like Palmieri offered the corollary to this rule, that is, how the citizen becomes an enemy of the republic himself:
[The civil life] is the most perfect life a man can achieve given the inherent limitations of the human condition. But living in a republic requires moderation and restraint. The citizen, he reminds us, is not to aspire beyond the civil order, but to remain satisfied with living in fair and equal terms with his fellow-citizens and with the authority and the dignity conferred by public office. If he were to rebel against this order and seek despotic power for himself or his family, he would do away with the very conditions under which he could flourish and prosper. In that case, he would stop being a citizen and become an enemy of the republic and himself. (Hornqvist, ‘The Citizen’)
So the polemics between the rule of a tyrant and the rule of the republic which arose from the citizen’s human conduct was thus established. The citizen was pedagogically trained to be part of a civil community. This was done by drawing from Aristotle’s Politics where he talks of man’s being as a political animal and talks of how “to be able to fulfil his human potential, his telos or natural destination, the Greek philosopher argued that the individual needed to live in a political community, where he could interact with his fellow-citizens and work for justice and the common good of the republic.” (qtd. Hornqvist,‘The Citizen’)
So in a way the social interaction of man where he can execute his humanity and his humanitarian pedagogical training in pursuit of the ideals that the republic holds dear, like the bene comune and justice which is again a manifestation of equality in the eyes of the ius or law.
The citizen hence becomes a part of a major political system, that of the community. This community was the embodiment of the Florentine libertarianism, the nucleus of political power. The community was the one who elected the Podesta, or officer who ruled as the magistrate for a fixed period of time only with the complete consent of the electoral community.
This electoral community in theory represented the entire citizen body of the city state that is ideally all citizens who demonstrated the human qualities.
But in practice, this was not the case.
The humanists represented in their politics, a certain version of the Renaissance individual; who was certainly entitled and educated and was wealthy enough to exercise even as an individual a certain degree of authority on his minions. Women and slaves (plebeians) were barred from this electoral body as Marsiglio quotes Aristotle in his Defensorpacis. (1)
Even Bruni, talks of how ambition in the burgher class, who had a certain degree of education because they could afford it:
There are in this city the most talented men, who easily surpass the limits of other men in whatever they do. Whether they follow the military profession, or devote themselves to the task of governing the commonwealth, or to certain studies or to the pursuit of knowledge, or to commerce –in everything they undertake and in every activity they far surpass all other mortals, nor do they yield first place in any field to any other nation. They are patient in their labor, ready to meet danger, ambitious for glory, strong in counsel, industrious, generous, elegant, pleasant, affable, and above all, urbane. (Bruni, 121)
The aim of the ideology thus was seeking self-government for the city-state but in a way restricting the political ability to a certain class of individual.
So there did exist a certain degree of hierarchy when it came to Florentine liberal politics.
And it were these signori specifically who most fiercely defended their collective authority against any possibility of tyranny, be it internal or from the Holy Roman Empire.
Before Leonardo Bruni’s time there was another advocate of this particular notion of the community as being the nucleus of power in Italy. This was the anti-clerical Marsiglio of Padua. Where Bruni and Bartolus extolled the virtue of individual equality in the eyes of law as the foundation stone of the community that could and should strive for political power and the right to govern itself as opposed to secular tyranny, Marsiglio had extolled the virtues of the resultant community as a political power polemically opposed to the rising imperialistic ventures of the Pope.
Marsiglio’s tract DefensorPaciscame out in 1324 amidst a lot of controversy. The tract became the manifesto of what would later be called Caesaropapism. It sought to vehemently reprimand the Church for its bull UnamSanctam (1302). The bull forwarded the notion of plenitudopotestatisor plenitude of power; it outrageously proclaimed Extra Ecclesiamnullasalus (outside the Church there is no salvation) and sought to put the Church at the pinnacle of all political power in Europe in possession of authority over both temporal and spiritual matters.
Defensorpacison the other hand, besides the ostensibly transferring of power from religious to secular hands, put the community on the pedestal.
Marsiglio talks of “coercive jurisdiction” that is executive power and the power to exert jurisprudence and how the Church had no right to it: “[Christ] also taught by word and showed by example that all, whether priests or not, should be subject in reality and in person to the coercive judgment of the princes of this world.” (2)
It being clearly said, Marsiglio goes on to attribute this same power to the community of citizens. He also attributed certain spiritual powers to the community: “The general council of Christians or its majority alone has the authority to define doubtful passages of the divine law, and to determine those that are to be regarded as articles of the Christian faith, belief in which is essential to salvation; and no partial council or single person of any position has the authority to decide these questions.” (7)
Using Marsiglio’s terms, the “human legislator” or the Christian legislator was the supreme seat of power.
No mortal has the right to dispense with the commands or prohibitions of the new divine law; but the general council and the Christian “legislator” alone have the right to prohibit things which are permitted by the new law, under penalties in this world or the next, and no partial council or single person of any position has that right […] The whole body of citizens or its majority alone is the human “legislator.”The “legislator” alone or the one who rules by its authority has the power to dispense with human laws. (7)
The community, not only equal in the eyes of secular law but also equal in faith, thus embodied one single entity: the legislator. This body not only had complete authority over themselves, but also gave counsel to princes and had authority to curb the powers of the Church when it tries to exploit the people unfairly.
No prince, still more, no partial council or single person of any position, has full authority and control over other persons, laymen or clergy, without the authorization of the “legislator” […]No bishop or priest has coercive authority or jurisdiction over any layman or clergyman, even if he is a heretic. The prince who rules by the authority of the “legislator” has jurisdiction over the persons and possessions of every single mortal of every station, whether lay or clerical, and over every body of laymen or clergy. (Marsiglio, 8)
The main political essence of civic humanism thus was to oppose a single tyrant’s rule. The focus was to distribute the power amongst a group of people who fit the bill of citizenship. These abiding citizens were fitter to represent the community as a whole in the sphere of day-to-day governance as they represented more interests than a single person could look after in the first place. The virtues of the citizen if he could manage to apply them in his political existence and life in general, would de factoguarantee the just administration of the domain as the same virtues were expected from all citizens under the law. In that way, ideally it was really with the “virtuous citizens” that the essence of political power rested in the libertarian city-states.
In conclusion, the right to rule oneself was a city’s right by habit as the Italian cities had been doing for a long time (a concession Bartolus too allows them) and that right lay with the electoral community of the city. Marsiglio’s opinion too is but a variation of the same theme if we consider virtue and faith as an interconnected concept; then the community which abides by God’s doctrine has the right to interpret it and also to keep a check on both the Church which was to function merely as a “turnkey” to the divine judged, God but also through the prince which has their approval, exercise secular jurisdiction. (4)
Secular and religious power thus lay with the community that was built by citizens who were armed with the enabling and ennobling humanism of the time, which was built on the virtues of justice, temperance and the seeds of libertarianism.
Works Cited
- Bartolus of Sassoferrato, ‘Treatise on City Government’. Web. Accessed 15 October 2017.
- Bruni, Leonardo. The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni: Selected Texts, trans. and introductions by Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson, (Binghamton, 1987). ARTH courses. Web.
3. Hornqvist, Mikael. “The Common Good: Civic Humanism: The Florentine Legacy”. Web.
http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/civic-benecommune.htm. Accessed 15 October 2017.
- – “Virtue, Civic Humanism: The Florentine Legacy”. Web. http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/civic-virtue.htm. Accessed 15 October 2017.
- – “The Citizen: Civic Humanism: The Florentine Legacy”. Web. http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/civic-citizen.htm. Accessed 15 October 2017.
- – “The Political Participation: Civic Humanism: The Florentine Legacy”. Web. http://www2.idehist.uu.se/distans/ilmh/Ren/civic-pol-part.htm. Accessed 15 October 2017.
- Marsilius of Padua, DefensorPacis, Part III, ch. ii; in Goldet, MonarchiaSancti Romani Imperii, 11, pp. 309 ff. trans in Oliver J. Thatcher,and Edgar Holmes McNeal, eds., A Source Book for Medieval History, (NewYork: Scribners, 1905), pp. 317-324
- Rabil, Albert Jr. “The Significance of ‘Civic Humanism’ in the Interpretation of the Italian Renaissance: Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol 1, Humanism in Italy,ed. Albert J. Rabil Jr, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1988, chapter 7, pp. 141-79, reprinted in The Renaissance in Europe: A Reader, ed. Keith Whitlock, Yale University Press, New Haven, 2000, pp.31-54. ARTH courses. Web. Accessed 15 October 2017.
Renaissance Political Thought 