Q&A with James Hankins, author of Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy

James Hankins challenges the view that the Renaissance was the seedbed of modern republicanism, with Machiavelli as exemplary thinker. What most concerned Renaissance political theorists, Hankins contends, was not reforming laws but shaping citizens. To secure the social good, they fostered virtue through a new program of education: the humanities.

N.B. Dit interview verscheen op de website van Harvard Press University.

With Virtue Politics, James Hankins has delivered a bold, revisionist account of the political thought of the Italian Renaissance—from Petrarch to Machiavelli—that reveals the all-important role of character in shaping society, both in citizens and in their leaders. We spoke to him about the importance of virtue to leadership in Renaissance Italy—and its relevance to our own time.

You have been working on Virtue Politics for over 10 years and suddenly the question of character and leadership is front and center on our political landscape. What qualities did the proponents of virtue politics think were essential to a virtuous leader? How did they conceive of or define political corruption? They had some pretty awful rulers. What do you think they would make of our impeachment proceedings?

Yes, one comfort of history is that, no matter how bad things seem at present, you can always find times in the past when they were even worse. The virtue politics of the Italian humanists took shape at a time when trust in the great institutions of the Middle Ages, above all the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire, was at an all-time low, and their legitimacy was being challenged on all sides. The city-states of northern Italy were infested by tyrants, the republics of central Italy were being torn apart by factionalism, and the whole peninsula was wracked with war and suffering from the consequences of financial collapse and the Black Death.

Things are not quite as bad as that in modern America!

But I think the humanists I study would have recognized some features of present-day politics all too well. They would have seen among our political leadership the same failures of self-control and fundamental decency as in their times, the same absence of fair and measured judgment, the same toxic partisanship and the same casual cruelty towards people outside one’s own party. They would have deplored, as we do, the appalling ignorance of history among our leaders and their inability to express themselves truthfully and with clarity and conviction.

What they longed for were leaders of high moral character and practical wisdom, leaders who spoke powerfully, with the authenticity of sincere and settled conviction, well-educated leaders who knew history and had formed their own characters by modelling themselves on the great men and women of classical antiquity. They understood that no matter how well designed laws and institutions were, they would not function well unless they were administered by people of courage, practical wisdom, and self-control with a strong commitment to justice. We want those things too from our leaders, but the Italian humanists, unlike modern Americans, were prepared to do something about reforming their leadership class. That something was to join the movement for what I call “virtue politics.”

What did the humanists think were the greatest threats to a virtuous society?

In the eyes of Petrarch, the great founder of Renaissance humanism, all the troubles of the time could be traced back to the moral collapse of humanity itself, its long slide into barbarism, avarice and irreligion. The humanists were the ones who invented the concept, or rather myth, of the Middle Ages, when the (idealized) civilization of antiquity was supposedly submerged under waves of barbarism and feudal oppression. Of course it was a screaming caricature, even a kind of rhetorical pose, to dismiss the great Christian civilization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries as “Gothic” or barbarous. Still, they had a point when they denounced teachers in medieval universities, especially law professors, as overly concerned with pre-professional training, teaching the ars nummaria or the arts of money-making, and too little concerned with the moral formation of their students. They also complained that law school was just plain boring. It was “the yawning science” (scientia oscitans). Many humanists were in fact law school dropouts and part of the appeal of the humanities, then as now, was that it was just a lot more fun than studying law. Serious lessons in fine behavior could be mixed in with literary pleasure in the way the Roman poet Horace advised in his Art of Poetry, “mixing the useful with the sweet.”

How did they define political tyranny, and what did they recommend that people living under a tyrannical leader do?

The humanists believed that there was an inverse relationship between tyranny and virtue. They followed Plato in defining tyranny as bad character in princes. For Plato the solution to tyranny was philosophy, but for them the antidote was virtue, acquired through the “studies of humanity,” the studia humanitatis, what we now call simply the humanities. Tyranny was any reckless, immoral use of power, and there could be tyranny in the people, in the rich, and in the laws as well as in princes. There could even be tyranny in your own heart if you failed to control your impulses with fixed dispositions to virtue—good character in other words.

At the same time, the humanists were for the most part conservative intellectuals. With some exceptions, they didn’t advocate revolutions or coups. For them, to replace one regime with another, one set of rulers with another, would not make the people better off unless the new leaders were men and women of virtue. The real path to reform lay through political education, an education in virtue of the kind advocated by the ancients. In short, the humanists were more concerned with good governors than good governments.

Were the Founding Fathers influenced by virtue politics?

Absolutely. By the time the Founding Fathers were writing, in the eighteenth century, the ancient and Renaissance belief that the virtue and wisdom of leaders was fundamental to good government had long been taken for granted. All the Founding Fathers from Washington on down accepted this. Washington in his youth embraced the ancient adage, beloved of the humanists, that “the person who cannot rule himself cannot rule others.” The need for virtue is what Benjamin Franklin was talking about in his famous response, after the Constitutional Convention, to the question, What kind of government have you given us, Mr. Franklin? He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” He meant that republican government required a high standard of behavior and respect for law, and its success would depend ultimately on the character and wisdom of citizens and magistrates. Jefferson’s advocacy of a “natural aristocracy” of talent and virtue, which he contrasted with the “artificial aristocracy” of wealth and lineage, was a pure expression of Renaissance virtue politics. One thing common to Renaissance humanists and the American Founders was a hatred of the idea that political authority should be treated like a piece of property, to be handed down to one’s heirs or purchased from kings.

You suggest that Renaissance political thinkers played a key role in introducing the concept of meritocracy. How and why?

Well, you know, the word “meritocracy” is of quite recent coinage, usually traced to a satiric novel by Michael Young called The Rise of the Meritocracy, published in 1958. For Young the term was a negative one. But the positive ideal of meritocracy has been around since antiquity, and has been found in many historical societies, most famously in imperial China with its examination system and its Confucian ideal of rule by the meritorious. It just refers to any means of “elevating the worthy” in the Confucian phrase, to ensure that political leaders were chosen from among well educated people having personal probity and practical wisdom.

In ancient Greece and Rome meritocracy (or aristocracy, as they would have said) was a political ideal of some in the ruling classes, promoted by philosophers like Plato and Aristotle, statesmen like Cicero and Stoic moralists like Seneca. The innovation of the Italian humanists was to say that meritorious governance should be a feature of all governments, no matter what their formal constitution. Virtuous administration of the state could and should be a feature of kingdoms, popular republics, aristocratic republics like Venice, even ecclesiastical governments. Several popes, for a time in the mid-fifteenth century, were among the most enthusiastic advocates of virtue politics. The most famous example was the humanist pope Pius II.

Historically, meritocracy has been promoted in three ways, via education, political institutions or culture. For the Italian humanists, education was the most important, and they shared the confidence of the ancient philosophers and moralists that virtue could be taught. We have lost this confidence today, especially in universities, which in my opinion is one reason for the decline of the humanities since the middle of the twentieth century.

The humanists also paid great attention to the role of culture in promoting virtue. They wanted what I call in the book a “virtuous environment”—classical architecture, painting, sculpture, inscriptions, even music, that would remind Italians of their glorious Roman forebears and encourage them to behave with the kind of moral excellence that would win them deathless fame.

For reasons I explain in the book, it was only gradually that the humanists came to appreciate the role of customs, laws, and institutions in corroborating virtue. This was an aspect of moral formation that Machiavelli understood better than earlier Renaissance humanists. But most historical societies that have aimed at meritorious governance have appreciated the importance of customs, laws and institutions. The ancient Romans, for example, wanted their Senate to consist of former magistrates who had extensive practical experience of government. They would have been horrified by the modern American practice of wealthy men with little or no experience of government in effect purchasing public office. The Romans also had a magistrate known as the censor whose job was to prevent unworthy people from serving as senators.

Historians of political thought have traditionally looked to the Italian city-states of Florence and Venice as early models of republican government. You argue that civic engagement was actually less important than virtuous leadership. Why? What did republican forms of government look like in the Renaissance and why were people afraid of democracy?

I wouldn’t put it quite that way. It’s true that for several generations modern historians of political thought have identified the republican ‘ideology’ of the Renaissance as its most significant contribution to the tradition that evolved into modern liberal democracy in the nineteenth century. I argue that this is an anachronistic and teleological way of looking at Renaissance political thought, and that it leads to multiple distortions of the best-known sources and to overlooking the vast body of humanist political thought that has nothing to do with so-called republicanism. I start by showing that the word respublica was not used the way modern political theorists use the term: it did not mean a government legitimated by the will of the people. I try to draw attention to other aspects of humanist political thought neglected by the exclusive focus on republicanism: humanist ideas of the moral economy, virtuous military life and the morality of war, their views on cosmopolitanism vs. nativism and international relations, as well as their teachings on law, political deliberation and good citizenship.

Renaissance political thought was civic, but not necessarily ‘republican’ in our sense. All Renaissance humanists, whatever the nature of the regimes they served, held that the interests of individuals should be subordinated to the common good, and that good citizens—in monarchies as well as republics—had a duty to serve their country. They weren’t necessarily opponents of mercenary armies, as is often said, but they did want all soldiers to act with virtue and to serve loyally the cities that hired them. They developed a specially tailored form of humanistic education for military captains, and thus were the ancestors of modern advocates for a liberally-educated officer corps.

The Renaissance humanists are famous for overhauling existing educational institutions and pushing for what we would call the humanistic disciplines. What was the goal of a humanistic education? How did their educational aims differ from ours? How much of the original conception of a humanistic education is left in our modern universities?

Very little, I would say. In modern universities the humanities are regarded as vaguely “enriching”; they will help you lead a fuller life, enjoy museums, good music and good literature; they will help you score status points over people who know less than you, be an “interesting” person, but they won’t make you morally better. There are also many professors who believe that the humanities should be instrumentalized to teach social justice or identity politics, and I suppose such people believe they are making their students ‘better’ in the sense of embracing political ideologies they themselves believe to be socially beneficial. But for Renaissance humanists, education was intended to liberate, not indoctrinate. It was meant to impart traditional virtues or excellences of character—for example courage, practical wisdom, self-control, and a commitment to treating others justly—combined with the ability to express oneself precisely and with eloquence. Statesmen can’t be leaders if they can’t convince others to follow them, and they can’t be good leaders unless they are good people. That was the educational doctrine of the Renaissance in a nutshell. The leaders of society should be students of language, history, poetry and philosophy. These studies would make them “more humane”: they were litterae humaniores, which is still the name of an Oxford degree. The opposite of humanitas was immanitas, a cruel, violent, ignorant and beastly character. That was what the humanists wanted to eradicate.

Political partisanship was a big problem in the Renaissance. What did Machiavelli think the solution was? Does he have lessons to teach us today?

One way of seeing what Machiavelli was doing is to look at how he applied the political teaching of Aristotle, an author he knew well. The humanist proponents of virtue emphasized the part of Aristotle’s teaching which aimed to train future leaders in ethical behavior. Their idea of solving the problem of factionalism was to exclude immoral people from political life. Machiavelli, who I paint in the book as a critic of virtue politics, emphasized the solutions to factionalism that Aristotle presents in the Politics. Machiavelli thinks trying to make political leaders morally better is a hopeless exercise—politicians are always going to put their own interests ahead of the common good—so the best a political theorist can do is to call for balancing the interests of rich and poor through careful constitutional arrangements. If everybody in a city is given a voice and some degree of political power, the society will be more stable. If Florence’s constitution can be brought to resemble more the political and military order of the ancient Roman republic, its citizens will begin to display the virtù of the Romans, a word that in Machiavelli’s usage means power and manly effectiveness. If that happens, Florence will not only be more stable, but it will begin to dominate the peoples around it, as the Roman republic did. Machiavelli thought that was a good thing: it was “glorious.” Winning glory was what great republics did.

Why are the Chinese so interested in your arguments about virtue politics?

For about six years I’ve been travelling around various cities and universities in China giving lectures on the resemblances between Renaissance virtue politics and Confucian ideals of government in imperial China. I usually get good audiences, and the last time I spoke on the mainland, at Shandong University in Qingdao, there were several hundred people there, rather to my surprise. Some of this comparative material made its way into the conclusion of my book.

One reason for the interest in virtue politics in China is this: Western political theorists for well over a century have been trying to tell the Chinese that they should be more like the West. They should become Marxists or liberal democrats. Then some guy from Harvard comes by and tells them that, in one of the central periods of Western history, there was a tradition of political thought that was essentially a failed version—because it never really caught on in later Western history—of a form of governance that the Chinese did supremely well for many centuries, political meritocracy. Many mainland Chinese now regard political meritocracy on the Confucian model as an essentially Chinese approach to politics. In the hands of theorists like Daniel A. Bell, political meritocracy has been presented in recent years as the Chinese alternative to Western liberal democracy.

So the tradition of virtue politics in the ancient West and in the Renaissance shows, I believe, that eastern and western political traditions are not as mutually exclusive as they are often thought to be. Last year, with the backing of the Harvard Global Institute, Peter Bol (in East Asian Studies) and I organized a pair of conferences, at Harvard and in Shanghai, to explore the comparative study of meritocracy east and west. This coming term we are giving a course together on “Political Meritocracy in Comparative Historical Perspective” which will compare the imperial Chinese experience of trying to secure a well-educated, moral ruling class based on the principle of merit with similar attempts in Western societies. I think the subject could become an exciting new field of research which has a built-in global perspective. So I hope the publication of Virtue Politics will give a further impetus to this new line of research and reflection.