Anyone paying attention will notice that there’s more than a little hypocrisy at work in the most maudlin reactions to President Trump. Most of his hysterical critics seem to be guilty, at least in spirit, of the very accusations they make of him. They coarsen discourse. They appeal to base tribalism. They tend to oversimplify complex issues for the sake of achieving emotional catharsis. And even as they accuse Trump of being an artifact of the internet age, these critics operate within the claustrophobic temporality of social media. Everything is a crisis, and every crisis is unprecedented. Absent a desire to reexamine the powers of the presidency or instill virtue in our leaders, the #Resistance seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, a way of ignoring America’s problems by pinning them on the bad orange man.
This hypocrisy is what makes historian James Hankin’s latest book, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, so timely. Hankins, an intellectual historian and Harvard professor whose main focus is on the Italian Renaissance, has written a book that is not only the fruit of a long and accomplished career but that also offers a rich and deep perspective on two time periods simultaneously: the Italian Renaissance and our own. Which is another way of saying that Virtue Politics gives readers a cleareyed account of how the most creative minds of the Italian Renaissance addressed the permanent problems of human nature, virtue, tyranny, and political decay.
Most historians would cringe at being paid the compliment of relevance. But the strength of Virtue Politics is that it is relevant without trying to be. Hankins, building the book from his 2010 Carlyle Lectures at Oxford University, doesn’t force Virtue Politics into the frame of current events, which he very easily could have done. Instead, he explores psychological and political realities that apply as much to our own time as to the past. He also carefully threads the needle between educating a general readership and appealing to his academic colleagues. Here and there, you’ll find references to “Skinner’s Foundations” or the historiography of the “Cambridge School,” but these are the exception. By avoiding specialized esoteric jargon, Hankins has written a book that the generally educated person can comprehend. In that sense, Virtue Politics isn’t just about Renaissance humanism but also demonstrates one of its most important values: the reinvigoration of public life through eloquence and common sense.
What Hankins means by “virtue politics” is a method of reorienting political leadership through virtue, or “a personal commitment to give fellow citizens what they deserve.” And what makes a regime virtuous is “power well exercised” toward cultivation of the common good. Hankins writes that virtue politics is “not so much a theory as it is a project for political and civilizational renewal. It is a program for the reform of Christendom’s social, political, and religious leadership, to instill in it the charism of worldly virtue and spur it to action with the silver trumpet of eloquence.” We tend to associate Renaissance political thought with an interest in different forms of government, the republic foremost among them. But as Hankins explains in Virtue Politics, this is mistaken. Humanists of the Italian quattrocento understood that good laws don’t matter if the men enforcing them are corrupt. What good is having the perfect constitution if no one follows it? There are echoes here of the 19th-century American critic Orestes Brownson’s idea of the “unwritten constitution,” the pre-political culture without which written rules are dead letters and political stability impossible. For Italian humanists, the soil that needed tilling was the spirit and mind of Italy’s leadership class. Hankins writes:
Believing in a sort of radical egalitarianism of virtue, humanists hoped that through a deep education in the classics, or what would come to be called the humanities, people could cultivate virtue within themselves. This would happen through the education of the young, of course, but it would also entail the development of a wider adult culture that celebrated virtue. “The humanist’s aim,” Hankins tells us, “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.”
Virtue Politics is studded with brilliant characters, but the hero of the book is the poet Petrarch (1304-1374), one of the earliest humanist scholars. Through him, Hankins explores some of the most pressing issues of the Renaissance. Humanism was a reaction to a series of crises: the rise of the Ottoman Turks, the Black Death, the Hundred Years War, the financial collapse of the 1340s, the Great Schism in the church, the rise of petty tyrants among the city-states of Northern Italy. Petrarch was a man sensitive to his time and so confronted the issue of tyrants with existential verve. He not only thought and wrote about tyranny, which he conceived of as the reorientation of power away from the common good no matter what the form of government might be, but also directly served leaders, including a few considered tyrants by other humanists. “What counts for Petrarch,” writes Hankins, “is the way that power is exercised, the moral authority of the person who wields authority, not compliance with legal formulae,” reminding us that humanism was as much an anti-legalistic movement as it was a pro-classics movement and that Petrarch’s responses always came down on the side of cultivation of the human spirit.
If Petrarch is the protagonist of Virtue Politics, then Machiavelli might be the villain. Born a couple of generations after Petrarch, Machiavelli saw firsthand that the instillation of humanist thought as conventional wisdom was not enough to prevent Italy’s humiliation at the hands of invading French forces. What good is virtue, Machiavelli wondered, if you don’t have the military prowess to keep the state in the first place? Italian leaders needed more than Cicero. “Educated by humanists,” writes Hankins, “the prince already knows how to be good; now he must learn from Machiavelli how not to be good.” And so, Renaissance thought moves from Petrarchan virtue to Machiavellian power politics, from justice to necessity, and from the desire to learn how to weather the vicissitudes of fate to an illusion that we can control fate itself. In Machiavelli, we see that the humanist project couldn’t last without something deeper to sustain it. What are Roman laws without Roman gods? What is Greek philosophy without the mysteries and oracles? The metaphysical and philosophical problems which humanists tried to sidestep will always be with us. Why is there something instead of nothing? What is the nature of the supernatural? It’s through these questions that our notions of justice and rationality are ultimately created and sustained.
We see ourselves in Virtue Politics. Petrarch’s wondering whether a man is obligated to serve the public and Machiavelli’s weighing a citizen army against professional soldiers are concerns that are still with us. They’re so familiar because, at root, they’re the permanent problems of politics. They hector us whether we’re grappling with them or not. Perhaps they bother us more when we try to ignore them. Our current political class and its obsession with technocratic solutions, jargon-laden overspecialization, and its ideological unwillingness to understand Trump echo the very same failures that humanist education was designed to guard against. And as Virtue Politics shows us, we have much to learn from the minds who successfully wrestled with these issues in the past. We have just as much to learn from their failures.
Scott Beauchamp is the author of Did You Kill Anyone? and the novel Meatyard: 77 Photographs. He lives in Maine.
