Hans Baron has been called the 20th century’s answer to Jacob Burckhardt. Coming from a scholar as respected as John Najemy, this is high praise indeed. It should come as no surprise, then, that Baron’s best-known work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, “provoked more discussion and inspired more research than any other scholarly book on the Italian Renaissance of the 20th century (Witt 111). And, just as with Burckhardt, not all of that discussion has been laudatory, nor all of that research corroborative. Baron’s thesis on civic humanism has been critiqued from a variety of angles since its formulation, yet it also continues to have its defenders. It seems clear, however, that Baron’s thesis, if it is to be retained at all, requires substantial modification.
Baron’s thesis involves several components. First (and this is key, as it is presupposed for the second component of his thesis), he observes a drastic change from the still medievally inflected humanism of the Trecento to the more republican-minded civic humanism of the Quattrocento. In particular, Baron argues that early humanists were incapable of breaking free from the mindset that fused theology and the defense of monarchy; the civic humanism of the Quattrocento, first seen in the work of Leonardo Bruni, broke free from this paradigm and articulated a new ideal of republicanism and civic life. Second, this new form of humanism was triggered by the threat of despotism overrunning republicanism in the guise of Giangaleazzo Visconti of Milan conquering much of northern Italy. Baron contends that the conflict between Florence and Milan, seen as a battle between republicanism and despotism, strengthened republican sentiment in Florence and triggered Bruni’s expressions of a new republican ideal. Finally, Baron argues that the foundations of modern conceptions of democratic polity can be traced back to the civic humanism first expressed by Bruni. All three of these claims have been subjected to close scrutiny, the major themes of which are explored below.
The idea that 15th century humanism was fundamentally concerned with republicanism and was therefore a new phenomenon has been attacked from several viewpoints. One that Baron anticipates and dismisses rather summarily is the notion that Bruni was not the first to express republican sentiment in late medieval Italy. Blythe cites a number of historians who have shown that “there was extensive appreciation of the Roman Republic before Bruni, and even before Petrarch” (36). Perhaps the best known of these pre-Bruni writers was Ptolemy of Lucca. Blythe describes Ptolemy as “capable of providing a coherent critique of the Empire in terms of the decline of virtue and the incompatibility of any monarchy with the needs of any ‘virile and virtuous people’” (42). In other words, thinkers before Bruni had already criticized monarchy and defended republicanism, thus belying Baron’s claim to the novelty of Bruni’s ideas. Blythe has also shown that defense of the Empire and monarchy during the medieval period was not exclusively couched in the theological terms Baron proposed, thus disproving Baron’s argument that only with civic humanism did history begin to matter in political thought. Witt, in his rather ardent defense of the Baron thesis, downplays the influence of Ptolemy of Lucca and other writers who had expressed republican ideals prior to Bruni. He admits that it seems necessary to redefine Bruni’s uniqueness from “the first in Western European history to articulate an integrated theory of republicanism… [to] the first to develop in true humanist fashion a theory of republicanism set in historical perspective, together with a civic ethic embodying the theory as a way of life” (114). While this new formulation seems quite reasonable,¹ it is a far cry from the dramatic change in humanism and political thought from the Trecento to the Quattrocento described by Baron.
There are those who argue, however, that Bruni’s political beliefs were far from consistent, that the civic humanism proposed by Baron never even existed in the mind of its putative chief proponent. The chief support for this position lies in the apparent shifting of Bruni’s political loyalties. How devoted to republicanism could Bruni be if he later supported the Medicean regime in Florence and even entered the service of the papacy? Hankins, in articulating this position, echoes Kristeller’s conception of humanists as professional rhetoricians, arguing that the content of Bruni’s writing was meant to satisfy the demands of his employers and should not be seen as an expression of his own political beliefs. In response, Witt claims that Bruni’s seeming lack of devotion to republicanism, besides being overstate, is irrelevant to Baron’s thesis; what matters is not Bruni’s personal beliefs but rather how his writings were perceived in Florence. He cites Brucker’s finding that Florentine politicians “conceptualiz[ed] their positions in terms similar to those” expressed in Bruni’s Panegyric to the City of Florence soon after its publication to show that Bruni’s conception of republicanism was widely accepted among the Florentine political class.
Martines provides a convincing argument for why this should be the case. Pointing out that humanists came from and were employed by the ruling class of Florence, Martines demonstrates that it should come as no surprise that their work should find acceptance in that very class. Civic humanism helped propagate the illusion that Florentine government was still representative of all citizens of the republic. Najemy has shown that, in fact, Florentine politics after 1382 followed two main trends: an expansion of the number of citizens eligible for political office and a contraction of the oligarchic elite who held actual power. In other words, the Florentine government sought to create image of diffuse political power while actually concentrating real power in the hands of the few. Najemy is careful to point out that these developments were not in opposition but rather supported each other; non-elite members of the citizenry became increasingly passive and willing to concede power to the elite in exchange for the opportunity to hold political office. Thus, there was a peaceful coexistence of consensus politics and elitism. Witt uses this evidence to argue against claims of Bruni’s disloyalty to republicanism, but the more important conclusion to be drawn here is that the civic humanism of Bruni was marshaled in support of oligarchy, not to ensure the equality of all citizens that is superficially evident in Bruni’s work. By coupling a notion of political equality with a responsibility to be loyal to the government, Bruni’s political writings functioned as an implicit defense of oligarchy. In fact, as Jurdjevic has shown, civic humanism was used to justify the Medici rise to power in Florence, hardly a republican development.
It seems, therefore, that the first component of Baron’s thesis requires substantial revision. Civic humanism did not originate in Florence in the early 15th century, and the civic humanism that was present in Florence at that time was more of an idealized illusion of government than a reflection of the true workings of contemporary Florentine politics.
Discussion of the second component of Baron’s thesis (that which claims that civic humanism was triggered by the threat of posed by the despotic regime of Giangaleazzo Visconti in Milan) presupposed the validity of the first; if there was no such thing as a new form of humanism in the Quattrocento, there is no need to explain its emergence. Some scholars have accepted the core of Baron’s first claim but sought alternate causes. As discussed by Rabil, Seigel sought to discredit Baron’s claim of the Milan crisis as the trigger of civic humanism by disagreeing with Baron’s dating of several works key to Baron’s thesis, namely Bruni’s Panegyric and Dialogues. If, Seigel argued, these works predate the Milan crisis, it is absurd to point to that crisis as the trigger for ideas contained in those writings.² More recent scholarship, most notably that of Hankins and Fubini, has shown Baron’s dating of these works to after the Milan crisis to be correct.
Yet that the development of civic humanism occurred after the Milan crisis does not show that the latter caused the former. A number of other causes for the rise of civic humanism have been proposed. The majority of these reject Baron’s search for an external cause and instead look to the internal workings of Florence to find the trigger for civic humanism. Becker points to the “increased need for money to finance wars of expansion in which Florence was engaged throughout Tuscany” and the accompanying increase of state control that required an ideology that praised the state (Rabil 156-157). As mentioned before, Martines highlights the shift towards oligarchical government after 1382 and the ruling class origins of humanists to explain the rise of an ideology that exalted loyalty to the state. Even Witt, Baron’s most vociferous defender of recent years, has an account of the rise of civic humanism that differs from that of Baron. According to Witt, civic humanism was “closely associated with a revolt against Petrarchan eclecticism in the name of recovering what Poggio refers to as vetustas, the flavor of ancient style.” He goes on to argue that language evocative of Cicero “itself exercised a formative and clarifying role in the generation of the ideas [of civic humanism]…” (117-118). Given my lack of knowledge of the relevant humanist texts and my predisposition against monocausal explanations for historical developments, I am content in accepting that any or all of these proposed triggers for civic humanism led to its emergence in Quattrocento Florence.
Baron’s third claim, that the civic humanism that emerged in Florence in this period helped lay the foundation for what would become the republican polity that characterizes western Europe and North America, is by far the most ambitious. It seems to have attracted less scholarly attention than the other two components of his thesis. One possible explanation is the hesitance of historians of the Renaissance to engage with the question of the origins of modernity, smacking as it does of the teleological approach that permeates Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In any case, this component of Baron’s thesis found its greatest support in the work of Pocock, and his The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition in particular, where he sought to trace the connections between various instances of republican thought throughout the centuries. According to Pocock, these connections were so strong that by the time of the American Revolution, “[n]ot all American were schooled in… [the] tradition [of classical republicanism] but there was… no alternative tradition in which to be schooled” (quoted in Connell 23). In other words, the ideology of the American Revolution can be traced back to the civic humanism described by Baron. On the other hand, more recent work, by scholars such as Appleby, Diggins, and Rahe, has shown that the Founding Fathers were primarily Lockean in their political beliefs and found fault with classical republicanism (Connell 26-27). This appears to sound the death knell for the third component of Baron’s thesis, for if the genesis of the key ideology of the American Revolution is found in the writings of Locke, not in the tradition classical republicanism, of which Bruni formed a vital link, Baron’s claim that civic humanism led directly to the later republicanism of the United States is necessarily false.
It seems, therefore, that all three components of Baron’s thesis on civic humanism have been disproved to some extent. What is left after removing the questionable aspects of Baron’s thesis, however, is hardly minimal. Baron’s description of a society that valued active participation in civic life and espoused classical political ideals remains well-established. Baron’s error was one of ambition, in reaching too far in his claims. This seems a serious “sin” than the opposite, not reaching far enough and leaving questions unanswered, as it provides future scholars a jumping off point for future research.
- Danny Loss, October 2003
Notes
- Hankins disagrees, arguing that civic humanism should not be considered an exclusively republican program, but should rather be seen as an attempt “at the reform of political communities… by improving the moral behavior of their ruling elites,” and therefore a program that could take place in despotisms as well as republics. See “The ‘Baron Thesis after Forty Years,” p. 330.
- Actually, as Rabil points out, Seigel was most concerned with proving that there was no such thing as civic humanism. The dating issue is but one of Siegel’s arguments against the Baron thesis.
Bibliography
- Baron, Hans. The crisis of the early Italian Renaissance: civic humanism and republican liberty in an age of classicism and tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955.
- Blythe, James. “‘Civic humanism’ and medieval political thought.” Renaissance Civic Humanism. Ed. James Hankins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 30-74.
- Connell, William J. “The republican idea.” Renaissance Civic Humanism. Ed. James Hankins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 14-29.
- Hankins, James, “The ‘Baron Thesis’ after Forty Years, and Some Recent Studies of Leonardo Bruni,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995): 309-338.
- Jurdkevic, Mark. “Civic Humanism and the Rise of the Medici.” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999): 994-1020.
- Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979.
- ---. The social world of the Florentine humanists, 1390-1460. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963.
- Najemy, John. Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Electoral Politics, 1280-1400. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982. Epilogue.
- Rabil, Alfred. “The Significance of Civic Humanism.” Renaissance humanism: foundations, forms, and legacy. Ed. Alfred Rabil. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988. 1: 141-174.
- Witt, Ronald. “The Crisis after Forty Years.” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 110-118.