History and Theory 46 (October 2007), 326-344 © Wesleyan University 2007 ISSN: 0018-2656

FlOreNtINe CIvIC HUmaNISm aNd tHe emergeNCe OF mOderN IdeOlOgy

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this article revisits the question of the modernity of the renaissance by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans baron’s interpretation of the movement. It engages two debates that are usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought, and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists’ political republicanism in fifteenth-century Florence. the article’s main con-tention is that humanist political discourse rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, a metaphysical and divine order or things, and thus undermined the traditional justifications for political hierarchies and power relations. this created the conditions of possibility for the distinctively modern aspiration for a social and political order based on liberty and equality. It also resulted in the birth of a distinctively modern form of ideology, one that legitimizes the social order by disguising its inequali-ties and structures of domination. Humanism, like modern political thought generally, thus simultaneously constructs and reflects the dialectic of emancipation and domination so central to modernity itself.

ever since burckhardt the question of the renaissance’s modernity has been cen-tral to renaissance studies. Indeed, the alleged modernity of the renaissance is the raison d’être of renaissance studies. Without its modern character, the ren-aissance would simply dissolve into an extended middle ages (as many medi-evalists would certainly welcome). the currently common academic label of “early modern” is revealing of the wish to evade the issue. but as is often the case with such attempts, it actually serves to highlight it. Ostensibly neutral, and certainly anachronistic, the early modern category poses itself as non-evaluative and distances itself from the self-understanding of contemporaries. expressly teleological, however, it uncannily testifies to the difficulty of disassociating Ren­aissance and modernity.

Part of the problem lies in modernity itself, for there is even less agreement about the nature of modernity than about the nature of the Renaissance. The defi-nitions are, however, closely linked. Perceptions of one usually involve explicit, or implicit, perceptions of the other. the present article intervenes in this discus-sion by examining the political language of Florentine civic humanism and by critically analyzing the debate over Hans baron’s famous interpretation of the movement. Specifically, the discussion to follow will engage two debates that are

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usually conducted separately: one concerning the originality of civic humanism in comparison to medieval thought; and the other concerning the political and social function of the civic humanists’ political republicanism in fifteenth­century Flor-ence. Humanism’s modernity, and by extension the modernity of the renaissance, should be sought at the intersection of these two debates.

I. barON’S CIvIC HUmaNISm

baron argues that the views developed and propagated by the Florentine civic humanists in the first decades of the fifteenth century constituted an intellectual and cultural revolution. the civic humanists rejected medieval perceptions of in-dividual and society, elaborating distinctively modern views instead. baron traces the changes that took place in various fields of knowledge and activity. Family life and economic activity present two subjects that reflect the originality and modernity of the humanists. While medieval high culture considered the renun-ciation of sexual activity, private property, and power as its ideal—one embedded in monastic life—the civic humanists affirmed family life as natural and as con-ducive to the fulfillment of our purpose as social animals. By the same token, the latter regarded economic activity and material wealth in a positive light, natural for the individual and necessary for the community. these views were informed by a conception of humanity fundamentally different from the medieval one. the civic humanists rejected the medieval preference—based on Christian, as well as classical, premises—for the vita contemplativa, the life of philosophical contem-plation, internal meditation, and prayer. They affirmed, instead, the vita activa, the active life of man as pater familias, as economic actor, and, above all, as engager in the public sphere. drawing on and reinterpreting aristotle and Cicero, the civic humanists argued that the vivere civile, the civic life, was essential to the realiza-tion of man’s humanitas.1

baron further maintains that the civic humanists created the modern discipline of history and, in fact, modern historical consciousness. leonardo bruni’s path-breaking Historiae florentini populi demonstrated a critical sensibility as it de-molished the fabulous medieval historical tales and realistically evaluated histori-cal events. baron contends that such a work was revealing of the fundamentally modern trait of humanist historical thought: the refusal to subordinate history to theology, and the consequent perception and representation of the past in essen-tially secular categories. this then made it possible to weave discrete historical facts into a coherent narrative and to link historical events by postulating causal

1. Hans baron, “the memory of Cicero’s roman Civic Spirit in the medieval Centuries and in the Florentine renaissance,” “the Florentine revival of the Philosophy of the active Political life,” “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of trecento Humanistic thought: the role of Petrarch,” “Franciscan Poverty and Civic Wealth in the Shaping of trecento Humanistic thought: the role of Florence,” “Civic Wealth and the New values of the renaissance: the Spirit of the Quattrocento,” in In Search of Florentine Civic Humanism: Essays on the Transition from Medieval to Modern Thought, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), I, 94-133, 134-57, 158-190, 191-225, and 226-257 respectively. many of the articles published in this book—whose subtitle clearly illustrates baron’s understanding of the historical significance of civic humanism—were origi-nally written in the 1930s and revised in the 1960s and 1970s. they thus represent baron’s mature views of issues that engaged him throughout his career.

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relationships among them. History was born as an organic concept, and notions of historical distance and anachronism emerged.2

Together with the affirmation of the vita activa and the appearance of historical consciousness, civic humanism promulgated a new understanding of the classi-cal world. according to baron, Petrarchean humanism of the fourteenth century was a nostalgic classicist literary movement steeped in medieval notions, most notably adherence to the ideal of the vita contemplativa. as such, the humanism of the trecento tended to fetishize the classical heritage and could, at best, slav-ishly imitate the original. In contrast, the synthesis of civic values and classicism in civic humanist thought gave birth to a new approach. the civic humanists em-ployed classical notions, texts, and genres as instruments for confronting issues and problems endemic to their own society. their imitation of classical literature was, consequently, critical and creative. Not surprisingly the civic humanists, in contrast to other humanists, developed a positive view of contemporary vernacu-lar literature and culture.3

these contributions by baron to the analysis of the renaissance are insight-ful, but his conclusions were neither unique nor new. It was burckhardt who had forcefully formulated the view that the modern individual and the modern percep-tion of reality emerged during the renaissance (though he paid less attention to humanism than to other aspect of contemporary culture).4 among the scholars of baron’s generation, eugenio garin elaborated a similar interpretation of human-ist thought, emphasizing its celebration of civic life and human activity, and un-derlining its historical consciousness.5 the uniqueness of baron’s interpretation, rather, lies in its focus on a specific type of humanism as the bearer of modernity: Florentine civic humanism. Humanism’s innovative and historically significant contributions, he argues, could only have emerged in a republican political con-text, and did so only in the beginning of the fifteenth century when the humanists became engaged in civic life and allied themselves with Florentine republican-ism.6 baron sees the republican political theory of the civic humanists as the key

2. Hans baron, “New Historical and Psychological Ways of thinking: From Petrarch to bruni and machiavelli,” “the Changed Perspective of the past in bruni’s Histories of the Florentine People,” “bruni’s Histories as expression of modern thought,” in In Search, I, 24-42, 43-67, and 68-93 respectively.

3. Hans baron, The Crisis of the Early Modern Italian Renaissance, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 273-353.

4. Jacob burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, transl. S. g. C. middlemore (london: Phaidon Press, 1944).

5. See, for example, eugenio garin, Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance, transl. Peter munz (Oxford: b. blackwell, 1965); Medioevo e rinascimento (bari: laterza, 1961); La cultura filosofica del rinascimento italiano (Firenze: g. C. Sansoni, 1961).

6. baron was, of course, much more specific. In The Crisis and in subsequent debates he argued that civic humanism emerged during the war between Florence and milan under giangaleazzo visconti between 1400 and 1402, and especially during its immediate aftermath. this reductive interpretation (often known as “the baron thesis”) was rightly criticized on both empirical and theo-retical grounds. See albert rabil, “the Significance of ‘Civic Humanism’ in the Interpretation of the Italian renaissance,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations Forms and Legacy, ed. a. rabil, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), I, 152-154, 160-163. In retrospect, it is difficult to understand why baron and many of his critics found this specific thesis so important. In any event, it is of no consequence for the present discussion.

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to their thought, in the sense that it was a precondition for the maturation of those other humanist innovations mentioned above.7

the Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi written in 1428 by leonardo bruni, the main protagonist of baron’s interpretation, forcefully and succinctly presents republicanism.8 at the heart of republican political theory lays the con-cept of libertas: the liberty of the political body from external domination, as well as the liberty of each citizen. the citizen’s liberty was conceptualized as the liberty to participate in the political life of the community and to assert one-self—to acquire fame and glory—by means of this political activity.9 republican liberty entailed, therefore, not only such principles as equality before the law and freedom of speech in political assemblies, but an essential political equality. “the constitution we use for the government of the republic,” wrote bruni, “is designed for the liberty and equality of indeed all the citizens. Since it is egalitarian in all respects, it is called a ‘popular’ constitution.” Florence, in bruni’s description, is a community of full political participation: “The hope of attaining office and of rising oneself up is the same for all, provided only one puts in effort and has talent and a sound way of life.”10 For bruni “liberty is real”only under a popular regime. Moreover, only in free polities the “pursuit of the virtues may flourish without suspicion.” Only in them can people aspire to achieve personal excellence: “when a free people are offered this possibility of attaining offices, it is wonderful how effectively it stimulates the talents of the citizens.”11 Political liberty and the per-sonal excellence it inevitably brings about, bruni further argues, are the sources of the economic, military, and, above all, cultural greatness of Florence.12

the crucial role baron assigned to civic humanism’s republicanism gave a sharp edge as well as a controversial character to his interpretation. It is what distinguishes baron from garin. For while both stressed the same aspects of hu-manism, garin did not postulate any conceptual or historical dependence on re-

7. this, and not the senseless attempt to correlate the emergence of civic humanism with the fluc-tuations of the milanese war, should be considered the essential thesis of The Crisis.

8. leonardo bruni, Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. gordon griffiths, James Hankins, and david thompson (binghamton, Ny: medieval and renaissance texts and Studies, 1987), 121-127. See baron, The Crisis, 412-432. bruni’s notion of republicanism is also presented in his Panegyric to the City of Florence, transl. b. g. Kohl, in The Earthly Republic, ed. b. g. Kohl and r. g. Witt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 135-175, and his On Knighthood, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 127-145. For a suc-cinct description of the sources of republican political theory and its reformulation by Colluccio Salutati and bruni, see Nicolai rubinstein, “Florentina libertas,” Rinascimento, seconda serie, 26 (1986), 3-15.

9. It is therefore very different from the liberal notion of liberty that postulates a space in which the individual is protected from interference. the difference rests on different assumptions concerning the relation between the individual and society. While liberalism assumes the logical and ethical priority of the individual to society, republicanism sees the individual as inherently a social being (“the city is the beginning and the fulfillment of our life and of all human activities,” in bruni’s words in On Knighthood, 128). thus, while liberalism sees society as the site of a struggle between antagonistic individuals over objectively existing values, notably self-preservation and material goods, republican-ism sees it as the theater of an agonistic competition for intrinsically social values, notably honor, fame, and glory.

10. bruni, Oration, 124.11. Ibid., 125.12. Ibid., 125-126.

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publicanism. His thesis also puts baron in direct opposition to burckhardt, who considered renaissance principalities rather than republics as the most conducive environment for the development of renaissance culture, most notably the uni-versal individual.13

II. CIvIC HUmaNISm aNd lIberty

One critical response to baron’s interpretation relates directly to the question of civic humanism’s modernity by focusing on the relationship between the civic humanists and their medieval predecessors. Several scholars have argued that, contrary to baron’s claim, most of the ideas propounded by the civic humanists were not original but were, at best, new formulations of prevailing views from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. thus, Quentin Skinner demonstrated that republicanism was conceptualized and defended in all three major late-medieval political languages in Italy: the language of the roman law, the language of scho-lastic philosophy, and the pre-humanist language.14 James blythe established that scholastic philosophy anticipated civic humanist discourse on a much wider range of issues. In addition to a defense of the republican regime, there were scholastic philosophers who admired the roman republic and portrayed the emperors as usurpers of liberty, who held a non-theological perspective of the roman past, and who related virtue to political freedom and affirmed the vita activa.15 Since all these notions are central to baron’s interpretation, discovering them in preced-ing generations, in the discourse of medieval premodernity, would seem to refute his claims concerning the originality, and consequently the modernity, of civic humanism.

Skinner and blythe both focus, however, on discrete ideas.16 this methodology is problematic, not least because it tends to disregard the unstated presupposi-tions, the coherence, and the full range of implications of a discourse or theory. moreover, it is biased in favor of notions of historical continuity and gradual changes and against the possibility of historical rupture. these shortcomings are

13. burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2; See baron’s criticism of burckhardt in his “the limits of the Notion of ‘renaissance Individualism’: burckhardt after a Century,” in In Search, II, 155-181.

14. tracing the origins of republicanism is one of Skinner’s main concerns since he published The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I, 3-65. the most recent and comprehensive formulation appears in his Visions of Politics, 3 vols. (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2002) II: Renaissance Virtues, 10-117, esp. 10-38.

15. James m. blythe, “‘Civic Humanism’ and medieval Political thought,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, ed. James Hankins (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 30-74.

16. although he warns against this methodology in “meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 8 (1969), 35-39, breaking up a discourse into its basic thematic com-ponents and than tracking down the continuities and changes of these components is a trademark of Skinner’s work. See, for example, his discussion of the relationship between the humanists and the pre-humanists, and between machiavelli and humanism, in The Foundations, I, 71-84, 152-189. blythe repeatedly refers to the “indicia,” “aspects,” and “elements” of baron’s civic humanism that appear in the writings of the scholastics (for example, “‘Civic Humanism,’” 32-33, 74).

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clear in the debate over the modernity of renaissance humanism.17 For baron and those who sharpened his insights and developed his conceptualization argue that the importance of humanism lay in its elaboration of a complete worldview that was based on distinct ontological and epistemological assumptions. the repub-licanism, as well as the other principal tenets of the civic humanists—historical consciousness, the affirmation of the vivere civile, and a non-fetishistic attitude to-ward the classical heritage—acquire their full significance only when seen as ex-pressions of a new way of understanding and representing reality. the originality and modernity of humanist political discourse lay in its non-metaphysical nature. It analyzed and represented human reality by concrete, historical, and pragmatic categories. It thus rejected the perception of social and political reality as being part of, or reflecting, an objective order of things (metaphysical and divine). In-stead, it assumed, though often only implicitly, that human reality was a historical and contingent product of human actions, intentions, and desires.18

17. they generate internal tensions in the works of blythe and Skinner. blythe recognizes—in con-trast to the main thrust of his argument—that “the civic consciousness of Fifteenth-century Florence . . . represents something considerably different from what existed before” (ibid., 32), and that in medieval writings “we have to dig to find those ideas that seem so close to those of civic human-ism” (ibid., 74). He fails, however, to give a theoretical account of those differences. Skinner, by contrast, emphatically insists on “the reality of the renaissance” (the title of the introductory chapter of Renaissance Virtues). He gives two characterizations of the notion of the renaissance: first, that “there was something that, for some people, was undoubtedly reborn and restored” (Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, 1, author’s emphases); second, that “the study of ancient moral and political philoso-phy” was the crucial element that makes it “not merely convenient but inescapable to speak of the distinctive contribution of renaissance humanism to the history of moral and political thought” (ibid., 4). there is a clear tension between these two accounts: only the former implies that the problemtiza-tion of one’s period in relation to the past and the underlying issue of historical consciousness are central to the understanding of the renaissance. Indeed, the latter definition undermines the former, as ancient moral and political philosophy was studied throughout the middle ages (not the least by the scholastics). In practice Skinner employs the latter definition, and his methodology—identify-ing the various conceptualizations and defenses of republican government—drives him relentlessly backward, undermining precisely the “reality of the renaissance.” Specifically, he shows that the elaboration of a political theory based of the roman moralists and historians was already made by the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries by those whom he calls “pre-humanists” (ibid., 18-30). by his own account, however, the preoccupation with the relations between the present and the past emerged only with Petrarch, who was clearly aware of the historical distance separating him from his beloved classical rome, and with subsequent generations of humanists who believed that the classical heritage was being restored in their time (ibid., 3-4). In Skinner’s terms, therefore, “the distinctive contribution of renaissance humanism” was fully realized before the renaissance. His description of the process of rebirth as “as a protracted and difficult one” (ibid., 2) does not resolve this conceptual problem.

18. See, for example, J. g. a. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 1-81; richard tuck, “Humanism and Political thought,” in The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe, ed. a. goodman and a. macKay (london: longman, 1990), 43-65; and William J. bouwsma, Venice and the Defense of Liberty: Renaissance Values in the Age of the Counter Reformation (berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 1-51. In his Introduction to Italian Humanism garin admi-rably demonstrates that the rejection of medieval metaphysics is the key to the understanding of humanism. the same characteristic is highlighted by many scholars, notably those who concentrate on the humanists’ historical consciousness or the central importance of rhetoric to humanism. See, for example, donald Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New york: Columbia University Press, 1970); Nancy S. Struever, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970); victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, Ny: Cornell University Press, 1985).

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a brief comparison between the civic humanists and the two scholastic philoso-phers most often associated with them further underscores the difference between the two worldviews. Ptolemy of lucca and marsilius of Padua were more inclined toward egalitarian and republican ideas and were less metaphysically rigid than other scholastics. blythe argues that Ptolemy’s important political work, De regi-mine principum, includes most of the elements of civic humanist thought.19 but Ptolemy failed to produce a coherent political theory. there was an irresolvable tension in his thought between its augustinian and its aristotelian strains. more significantly, there was a wide disparity between his specific republican insights and sympathies—which he doubtless acquired as a native of lucca—and his gen-eral theoretical presuppositions. Indeed, in order to bridge this gap Ptolemy some-times resorted to astrological considerations—a move indicative of his inability to disassociate the political world from an objective order of things.20

In contrast to Ptolemy, marsilius was a systematic thinker. His Defensor pacis is the most coherent and original political work produced in the middle ages, far more systematic than anything written by a humanist. the political theory elabo-rated in the Defensor pacis is based on radical egalitarian assumptions, certainly as radical as the most radical formulations of the civic humanists. marsilius ar-gues, for instance, that the legislative power—the term is similar to modern sov-ereignty—belongs to the people as a whole, who also nominate their rulers and retain the authority to depose them.21 He even devotes an entire chapter to contest-ing common anti-populist and anti-egalitarian arguments.22 marsilius, however, deemed all contemporary secular european regimes as legitimate, including not only the emperor but also the various Italian signori.23 Indeed, he considered aristocracy and monarchy, including hereditary monarchy, as legitimate forms of government.24 there is therefore an apparent contradiction between marsilius’s investment of political authority in the populus and his endorsement of monarchy and aristocracy. but this would be an anachronistic conclusion based on modern assumptions. the apparent contradiction vanishes when the metaphysical presup-positions of marsilius’s discourse are uncovered, notably the assumption that po-litical reality is anchored in a universal order of things. Under this assumption the common good was perceived as objectively given and as intelligible to universal reason. by now the notions of representation and delegation advanced by mar-

19. Ptolemy of lucca, On the Government of Rulers, transl. James m. blythe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); blythe, “‘Civic Humanism,’” 32.

20. blythe himself convincingly describes and analyzes these characteristics of Ptolemy’s work. See his Introduction to Ptolemy of lucca, On the Government, 21-30.

21. marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, transl. alan gewirth (New york: Harper and row, 1956), 44-49, 61-67. Strictly speaking, marsilius defines the people as “the whole body of citizens, or the weightier part thereof” (ibid., 45). However, he includes among the bearers of sovereignty most adult men, perhaps “all men who are not deformed or otherwise impeded” (ibid., 12). See alan gewirth, Marsilius of Padua and Medieval Political Thought (New york: Harper and row, 1951), 167-225; Cary J. Nederman, Community and Consent: The Secular Political Thought of Masiglio of Padua’s defensor Pacis (lanham,md: rowman and littlefield, 1995), 62-66, 85-88.

22. marsilius, Defensor pacis, 49-55.23. See antony black, Political Thought in Europe, 1250–1450 (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge

University Press, 1992), 60; Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought: From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Oxford: blackwell Publishers 2000), 140.

24. marsilius, Defensor pacis, 33.

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silius and the other medieval populists are readily understood. the ruler—be it the one, the few, or the many—could truly represent the populs, que multitude of rational individuals, insofar as it stood in for the common good.25 Indeed, as antony black shows, for marsilius and the other medieval populists, the term populus referred “to an abstract entity whose authority can be exercised by a cer-tain variety of human agents.”26

the civic humanists’ conceptualization of a popular regime was very different. Bruni explicitly disqualifies monarchy and aristocracy, and asserts that a popular regime is “the only legitimate” one. the assumptions behind his arguments are of even more importance. “What king has there ever been who would carry out all the acts involved in government for the sake of his people, and desire nothing for his own sake?” he asks and then adds: “Kings, the historian says, are more suspi-cious of the good than of evil man, and are always fearful of another’s virtue. Nor is it very different under the rule of the few.”27 by shifting the focus of the discus-sion from the abstract to the concrete, the medieval notion of representation is un-dermined. more generally, the empirical, psychological, and historical arguments imply that the political world was a human artifact rather than an epiphenomenon of objective transcendent reality.

We can now understand why, although scholastic discourse was generally more systematic and coherent than humanist discourse, it was the latter that theoreti-cally grounded and organically related such notions as active citizenship, the identification of true nobility with virtue, and a concrete and historical percep-tion of politics. these ideas and ways of looking at the world tended to disagree with the fundamental metaphysical premise of scholastic philosophy—indeed of mainstream Western philosophy—namely, that behind phenomenal reality there lies an intelligible and unchangeable substance. the rejection of this assumption by the humanists, and the consequent substitution of theological and metaphysical categories by historical and concrete ones, provided the theoretical basis for the perception of historical changes and of humans—active humans—as the agents of these changes.

this helps to account for the relationship between the premises of humanist discourse and the notions of liberty and equality that underlay the republicanism of the civic humanists. For this a basic distinction between the modern and the medieval manner of legitimizing the political order must first be made. Medieval political thought—and premodern political thought and imagination in general—explained and legitimized power relations and political and social inequalities and hierarchies by anchoring them in an objective—natural, cosmic, or divine—order of things. this view was common to the various medieval political theories, dis-tinct as they were in their content, presuppositions, methods of inquiry, and modes of argumentation.

25. See the detailed and perceptive discussion by Nederman in Community and Consent, 73-94. See also Coleman, A History, 154-155.

26. antony black, “the Commune in Political theory in the late middle ages,” in Theorien kom-munaler Ordnung in Europa, ed. Peter blickle (munich: r. Oldenbourg, 1996), 106. Coleman makes the same point in A History, 166-167.

27. bruni, Oration, 125.

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What may be termed “medieval aristocratic ideology” could be considered as the zero-degree of traditional premodern political thought. the central social and political categories of aristocratic ideology were those of the nobles who ruled and the commoners who obeyed. this distinction, which permeated medieval so-ciety, was considered correct simply because it had “always” existed and was, therefore, “natural.” the ideologies of the sacral monarchy of the early middle ages and the papal plenitude of power anchored the hierarchies and power rela-tions of their respective social and political visions directly in divine will. So did Augustinian political thought, which justified the existing relations of power and authority—any existing relations—in the same way.28 Finally and most impor-tantly, scholastic political philosophy, the most sophisticated medieval political language, shared the same assumption. It certainly could contain different po-litical views and theories, both those that supported papal supremacy and those that opposed it, for instance, and both monarchical political theories as well as republican ones. However, notwithstanding their varying content, all these po-litical theories legitimized social hierarchies and power relations by anchoring them in the very structure of reality as understood by their versions of Christened aristotelian metaphysics.

this legitimizing discourse was of course immanently related to the assump-tions of medieval political discourse: political relations of power and subordina-tion were presented as objectively given (and thus legitimate), just as the social order in general was perceived as moored in an objective order.29

as humanist discourse rejected this last assumption it could no longer legitimize the political order by presenting it as partaking in a transcendent order of being. the humanists had to elaborate a different legitimizing language. based on the presuppositions of their own discourse, they employed for this purpose utilitarian, pragmatic, and historical arguments. this language (just like the scholastic one) could accommodate itself to many different political contexts and theories. thus, Salutati and bruni’s fellow humanists who supported the Italian signori—among them Uberto and Pier Candido decembrio, Pier Paolo vergerio, and giovanni Conversino—argued that one-man rule was preferable to the rule of the many as it was more efficient, more able to prevent social strife and to promote internal harmony, more oriented toward great deeds, more capable of unifying Italy, and even more supportive of good learning.30 In fact, most humanists who wrote about politics adhered to the dominant ideology of their polities and reflected it in their writings.31 this is clear, for example, for the many advice-books for princes and

28. In contrast to all other political theories, augustinianism denied the intrinsic moral value of the political order. Indeed, it deemed the political realm irredeemably corrupt. at the same time, it divinely sanctioned the powers that be, arguing that they were ordained by god to prevent anarchy and destruction.

29. the inherent connection between the “aristocratic”—that is non-egalitarian—nature of classi-cal and medieval political thought and its metaphysical assumptions was clearly demonstrated by leo Strauss in his Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 120-164.

30. See baron, The Crisis, 70-73, 132-145. 31. See, for example, John d’amico, Renaissance Humanism in Papal Rome (baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983); Jerry bentley, Politics and Culture in Renaissance Naples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); margaret King, Venetian Humanism in an Age of Patrician Dominance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986); and gary Ianziti, Humanistic

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for courtiers written by humanists, which presupposed that monarchic govern-ment was the best one.32

Humanist political language was not, therefore, necessarily populist or egalitar-ian. Nevertheless, its undermining of the objective, transcendent underpinning of political reality created the conditions of possibility for an entirely new perception of political and social relations. It opened the way to perceive power relations, hierarchies, and inequality as arbitrary and therefore unjustified. Having lost their objective status, power relations could now be effectively challenged. moreover, when the social and political order is perceived as a contingent and changeable product of human actions, notions of political equality and liberty become plau-sible, if only because the metaphysical impediments to free and equal social order are eliminated. Liberty and equality are therefore inscribed, if only as potentials, in modern political discourse in a way that they were not in premodern thought and imagination. Civic humanism can be seen as the first discourse that realized the emancipatory potential of modern political thought. baron’s fundamental in-sight is thus vindicated, albeit in a qualified and nuanced manner.

III. CIvIC HUmaNISm aNd IdeOlOgy

this conclusion, however, does not exhaust the debate over baron’s interpreta-tion of civic humanism. For bruni and the other civic humanists not only—not even primarily—propagated a general republican political theory, but also de-scribed Florence as the embodiment of republican ideals. this inevitably raises questions about the relationship between these two aspects of their work, and specifically about the accuracy of their description of Florence. Baron accepted bruni and his friend’s portrayal of Florence, arguing that the innovative theories and views of the civic humanists could only have developed “in the society of a free city,”33 and he accepted their portrayal of Florence as such a city. baron has been rightly criticized at the methodological level for his uncritical acceptance of the civic humanists’ depiction of Florence and for his failure to check if their political ideas were actually embedded in the Florentine political system.34 Such an examination does, in fact, undermine his interpretation. For Florence at the be-ginning of the quattrocento was not a polity of full political participation; rather, it was ruled by an oligarchy. baron could counter with the claim that it would be anachronistic to evaluate renaissance republics by modern standards.35 this is not convincing, however. Historians are agreed that the Florentine republic, like practically all other republics in Italy, was becoming increasingly oligarchic in

Historiography under the Sforzas: Politics and Propaganda in Fifteenth-Century Milan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).

32. giovanni Pontano’s advice-book for the future king alfonso II of Naples is a typical example of this genre. See Ad Alfonsum Calabriae ducem de principe liber, in Prosatory Latini del Quattrocento, ed. eugenio garin (milan: r. ricciardi, 1952), 1023-1063. See also Skinner, The Foundations, I, 113-128.

33. baron, The Crisis, 6.34. See gennaro Sasso, “‘Florentina libertas’ e rinascimento italiano nell’opera di Hans baron,”

Rivista storica Italiana 69 (1957), 250-276.35. Hans baron, “a defense of the view of the Quattrocento First Offered in the Crisis of early

Italian renaissance,” in In Search, II, 194.

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comparison to the golden period of the medieval commune. after the collapse of the popular government of 1378–1382, the erosion of political participation became a clear and irreversible trend. The flowering of civic humanism—and the days of bruni’s chancellorship of Florence—came in the early decades of the fifteenth century, precisely when the oligarchy of a few rich families consolidated its hold on power.36

In fact bruni himself implicitly acknowledged that his usual description of Florence was inadequate. In his On the Florentine Constitution, bruni admits that Florence’s constitution was not democratic, but rather a mixture of democracy and aristocracy.37 He further acknowledges, and even justifies, the evolution of Florence toward a more oligarchic regime. When mercenaries replaced the citi-zens as soldiers, he says, “it seemed that political power should no longer be in the multitude, but in the hands of the aristocrats and the wealthy, because they contributed so much to the community,” and thus “the power of the people gradu-ally dissolved.”38 modern historians implicated the civic humanists themselves in this change. most telling is John Najemy’s reconstruction of the fourteenth-cen-tury struggle between two interpretations of the Florentine medieval republican legacy: the traditional, and more egalitarian, “corporatist” vision held by the guild community, or the popolo; and the “consensual” oligarchic vision to which the upper classes subscribed. Najemy concludes that the republicanism of the civic humanists was an elaborate expression of the latter.39

by now baron’s interpretation can be turned on its head. rather than defenders of liberty, of equality, and of widespread political participation, the civic human-ists were the ideologues of the narrow Florentine oligarchy, opposing and defeat-ing the genuine Florentine popular spirit on its behalf. and they were effective ideologues. lauro martines has argued that the republicanism of the civic human-ists served to unify the small ruling elite and, by creating the appearance of a wide participatory government, to attract the loyalty of the political classes of the popu-lace. In contrast to other Italian city-states, Florence could thus successfully op-pose giangaleazzo visconti and resist for several decades the internal process that brought about one-family rule.40 Najemy’s sophisticated analysis leads to similar conclusions: civic humanism’s republicanism was instrumental in consolidating the rule of the Florentine oligarchy, particularly by attracting the crucial support of non-elite guildsmen for the oligarchy. It did this by projecting a false image of

36. See, for example, Ferdinand Schevill, History of Florence: From the Founding of the City through the Renaissance (New york: F. Ungar, 1961), 336-353, and gene brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), 14-101, 248-318. For the wider Italian picture, see daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics, 3rd ed. (london: longman, 1988), 158-172.

37. leonardo bruni, On the Florentine Constitution, in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 171. 38. Ibid., 174.39. John m. Najemy, Corporatism and Consensus in Florentine Politics, 1280–1400 (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 1982).40. lauro martines, The Social World of the Florentine Humanists 1390–1460 (london:

routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 271-286. Strangely, both martines and baron chose not to see the deep incongruity between their interpretations, preferring to describe them as complementary (ibid., 273-274; baron, “a defense,” 199, n. 2). From a wider perspective martines defines humanism, in his Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (New york: a. a. Knopf, 1979), 191-217, as “a program for the ruling class” (the title of the chapter on humanism).

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Florence as a unified political body characterized by wide participation. It stressed that public offices were open to every citizen, while obscuring the fact that these offices were devoid of real political power. It celebrated the notion of the virtuous citizen, but defined him as detached from any specific class identification and as obedient to the ruling elite. It highlighted the unity of the Florentine political body and thus masked the very unequal distribution of power in Florence.41

there are, therefore, two diametrically opposed interpretations of civic human-ism. One accepts civic humanism’s self-presentation as a movement of cultural renewal and underscores the innovative solutions offered by the civic humanists for the social, political, and intellectual problems of concern to contemporaries. this interpretation emphasizes the progressive, even emancipatory, dimensions of civic humanism. It sees in it the origin of such central modern values as the posi-tive image of the human being and the affirmation of human activity, an orientation toward the future, and the belief in equality and liberty. the second interpretation, in contrast, is suspicious of the humanists’ self-image and rhetoric. It views the republicanism of the civic humanists as the ideology of the Florentine oligarchy, an instrument for reproducing the established political order.

these two interpretations are irreconcilable. but I want to suggest that they can be superseded. In order to do this, the distinction between modern and premodern ways of legitimizing the political and social order must be further developed. medieval legitimizing discourse explicitly presented—indeed, it celebrated—the power relations and the social and political inequalities and hierarchies of the social and political order it defended. this is true of all the various medieval po-litical ideologies discussed above: the aristocratic, the sacral monarchy, the papal plenitude of power, the augustinian, and the scholastic.

Modern political thought also legitimizes specific relations of power and forms of domination, ones often much more subtle than those of the medieval systems. However, modern ideology operates differently from premodern legitimizing discourse. as the critical tradition from marx onward has amply demonstrated, modern ideology does not reveal the power relations it wants to justify, but rather disguises them. Indeed, the concealment of crucial aspects of reality is essential to the functioning of a modern ideology. this mode of operation is by no means accidental. We have seen that liberty and equality are inscribed in modern politi-cal thought. For this reason modern political thought must base the legitimizing discourses it produces on these notions. It must, in other words, depict the social and political order it seeks to legitimize as free and equal. For this reason, modern ideology, in contrast to medieval legitimizing discourse, must veil unequal power relations.

realizing this opens the door on a new perspective on the modernity of civic humanism. the republicanism of the civic humanists was indeed a modern ideol-ogy precisely because the legitimizing discourse it produced operated in a distinc-tively modern manner, namely, by disguising the true nature of political reality.

41. John Najemy, “Civic Humanism and Florentine Politics,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism, 75-104. In the same line of argumentation mark Jurdjevic demonstrated the support of some civic humanists of Cosimo de’ medici’s regime. See his “Civic Humanism and the rise of the medici,” Renaissance Quarterly 52 (1999), 994-1020.

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again, a comparison between bruni and marsilius is revealing. both advanced egalitarian notions such as popular sovereignty and wide political participation, but at the same time both supported regimes that were far from popular. the difference between them lies in the different ways they combined their general principles with their concrete political views. For marsilius the contradiction was only apparent: the metaphysical premises of his discourse allowed him to see and present the monarch or the aristocrats as truly representing the people as a whole. the humanist rejection of the scholastic metaphysical grounding of the political order did away with the medieval notions of delegation and representation. bruni did not possess the conceptual resources to argue that the Florentine oligarchy represented the Florentine people as a whole. He had to disguise the true nature of Florentine political reality and argue that the Florentine regime was actually a popular one.42 In this way, his legitimizing discourse is distinctively modern ideology.

Far from disproving the modernity of humanist political discourse, martines and Najemy’s critical insights reveal an essential element of it. martines and Najemy seem to suggest, however, that civic humanism’s republicanism is reducible to a legitimizing discourse, that it is nothing more than an expression of the interests of the Florentine oligarchy at the beginning of the quattrocento. Such a reduction, however, is impossible in the case of modern political language. bruni’s conten-tion that “true liberty” consists of “not to have to fear violence or injury from any man, and for the citizens to be able to enjoy equality of the law and a government that is equally accessible to all,”43 for instance, inherently exceeds any appro-priation by an oligarchic ideology. even if we accept the ideological function of bruni’s call for liberty and equality as primary in the Florentine context at the beginning of the quattrocento, this call by its very nature always contained a subversive and liberating potential. examination of the mode of operation of the republican language leads to the same conclusion. as ideology, republicanism functioned by disguising the true nature of Florentine politics. but the bluff could

42. my argument regards civic humanism’s political language and not the consciousness of the civic humanists. the distinction is important, as it has been argued that the civic humanists, as pro-fessional rhetoricians, did not actually adhere to the republican views they advanced in their works. See Jerrold e. Seigel, “‘Civic Humanism’ or Ciceronian rhetoric? the Culture of Petrarch and bruni,” Past and Present 34 (1966), 3-48; James Hankins, “the ‘baron thesis’ after Forty years and Some recent Studies of leonardo bruni,” Journal of the History of Ideas 56 (1995), 324-330; idem, “rhetoric, History, and Ideology: the Civic Panegyrics of leonardo bruni,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism, 143-178. this interpretation rests on the distinction—prominent in renaissance studies in the english-speaking world due to Kristeller’s pervasive influence—between philosophy, associ-ated with truth, authenticity, seriousness etc., and rhetoric, associated with insincerity, playfulness, dissimulation, and so forth. this distinction was undermined in recent decades in practically all the disciplines of the human sciences. moreover, even if accepted for the sake of the argument, Siegel and Hankins’s conclusions are of no consequence for the discussion of civic humanism’s political language. In fact, paradoxically, they strengthen it: an insincere adherence to political theory attests to the theory’s importance more than a sincere one. For while sincerity may be related to social mar-ginality or idiosyncrasy, insincerity is, by definition, related to prevalent notions and sentiments. If the civic humanists propagated a political theory to which they did not adhere, they did so only because this theory—or at least its basic values and notions—was widely accepted.

43. bruni, Oration, 125.

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be called, and in such a case the gap between reality and ideal would inevitably undermine the position of the regime.

A brief examination of Florentine politics in the fifteenth and sixteenth cen-turies shows that these theoretical options were fully realized. Civic humanism was certainly the official ideology of the ruling elite during the first decades of the quattrocento. but even in this period, republicanism’s political meaning and function were not unambiguous. the adoption of the language of civic human-ism by the Florentine oligarchy inevitably limited the reggimento’s exercise of power. It propagated a civic ethos and sentiment that obliged the elite to allow some degree of political voice to the popolo.44 matters became clearer in the suc-ceeding period. the medici, who came to power in 1434, found it advisable not to change the form of government in Florence for a century because of the vigor of the republican ethos. the republican regime of that period is often described as a façade for medici power. this is no doubt true in some respects. Nevertheless, the republican form of government did actually limit the power of the ruling family, especially when compared to that of other Italian signori.45

more importantly, the republicanism of the civic humanists was the political language adopted by the opposition to medici rule. alamanno rinuccini’s dia-logue, De libertate, written in 1479, presents an example of the conceptual basis of this opposition.46 the two wise interlocutors in the dialogue, eleutherius (the lover of liberty, the persona of rinuccini himself) and alitheus (the truthful), virtually rehearse the political philosophy developed by the civic humanists sev-eral decades earlier. Needless to say, liberty is their central analytical concept and political ideal. It is immanently connected to equality among all citizens, to freedom of speech in political assemblies, to personal virtue, and to the collec-tive excellence of the community.47 Florence’s historical mission as the model of liberty in Italy, and its many wars against tyrants are also emphasized.48 the close correspondence between Rinuccini’s republicanism and that of Bruni is signifi-cant in light of their distinct political roles: while the republicanism of the civic humanists was primarily an ideology of the ruling elite, rinuccini promoted the language of opposition to power. Indeed, in his work republicanism served as the basis for a devastating attack on the medici regime. While bruni and his friends presented their Florence as embodying the republican ideal, rinuccini described Florence as the opposite. this contention was all the more effective because it in-cluded a comparison between Florence’s alleged free past and its present servility. In the past, justice ruled; in the present, corruption prevails. then, “the wisdom, the eloquence, and the fervent patriotism” shone; now, as political participation

44. Coleman, A History, 239-240; brucker, The Civic World, 302-318.45. In his conclusive study of The Government of Florence Under the Medici (1434 to 1494)

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), Nicolai rubinstein makes it clear that Florentine republican institu-tions and tradition limited the power of the medici, the consummate political skills of Cosimo and lorenzo notwithstanding (esp. 128-135, 218-228). thus Cosimo’s authority, for example, “was of [an] entirely different kind from that of a despot” (129).

46. alamanno rinuccini, Liberty, in Humanism & Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century Florence, transl. and ed. renée Neu Watkins (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1978).

47. Ibid., 205-207.48. Ibid., 208-210.

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declined “thanks to the arrogance of a few overbearing individuals,” these are all gone.49 the work culminates in a personal diatribe against lorenzo de’ medici, as rinuccini (in the persona of eleutherius) recounts his own disastrous personal experience with lorenzo, portraying the Magnifico as a tyrant whose “cruel op-pression of the citizens” devastated the Florentines and their community.50

It is most significant that De libertate addresses the function of modern ideol-ogy, showing how it can be undermined. the dialogue’s simpleton, microtoxus (the Short-range Shooter) represents the mystifying force of ideology. at the beginning of the work he expresses his surprise that eleutherius has decided to quit political life and cultivate the freedom of his mind in his rural abode. “Why should he alone, among so many thousands, be unable to find freedom in the city?” microtoxus asks, and adds, “particularly in the one city which professes to uphold liberty most among the states of Italy! She has spared neither treasure nor risk to defend not only her own freedom and the freedom of her citizens but also the freedom of many other Italian cities.”51 He later piously also mentions that “the word liberty is actually written in gold on one of [Florence’s] banners.”52 but his interlocutors soon wake him from his ideological self-delusions. In a move typical of the critique-of-ideology—modern ideology—alitheus argues that “the fine words and the golden letters clash with the facts” and adds that his friend’s arguments just compound his sorrow, “for I see so many of my fellow citizens are fooled and are wholly detached from reality.”53 the mode of operation of modern ideology is highlighted, and its mystifying force undone, as its attempt to disguise political reality is uncovered.

rinuccini’s dialogue expressed a widespread sentiment in Florence. twice, in 1494 and in 1527, revolts informed by republican political thought ousted the medici (who, in both cases, were reinstated by foreign power) in favor of regimes based on wide participation. The first of these republics, which lasted eighteen years, was the setting for the most sophisticated critical reflection and re­elabora-tion of republican political theory to take place in the renaissance, carried out by machiavelli, guicciardini, and giannotti.54 Florentine history thus demonstrates that republicanism was by no means just the ideology of the ruling oligarchy, an instrument for restricting political participation. It equally served those opposed to power and as such it advanced the ethos of liberty and equality.55

49. Ibid., 204-205.50. Ibid., 219-221.51. Ibid., 195.52. Ibid., 197.53. Ibid. 54. See Felix gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth-Century

Florence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 114-330; Skinner, Visions of Politics, II, 118-159.

55. Unsurprisingly, the same equivocality characterizes republicanism in contemporary politi-cal discourse. Contemporary adherents of republicanism—among them prominent historians of the republican tradition such as Skinner and Pocock—seek to contest an ever-more aggressive and intel-lectually impoverished neo-liberalism by propagating republican values of social solidarity, active citizenship, and “positive liberty” without succumbing to the collectivist values and practices of socialism and its teleological and utopian tendencies. From a different perspective, post-structuralist political theorists employ republican language as a substitute for the rationalism of the enlightenment and its quasi-metaphysical notions (such as “natural law” and “natural right”). See, for example, the

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Iv. CIvIC HUmaNISm aNd mOderNIty

Civic humanism’s political language was therefore modern in that it displayed modernity’s two faces, the emancipatory and the ideological. It propagated the distinctively modern notions of liberty and equality, as baron argued. at the same time, as martines and Najemy demonstrate, it also produced a legitimizing dis-course that functioned by disguising reality.

but—its modernity understood in these terms—is civic humanism the source of political modernity or just its manifestation or symptom? In his well-known thesis, Pocock argued that the thought of bruni and his friends, as it was reinter-preted by machiavelli and guicciardini, was the fountainhead of a republican tra-dition that flourished in seventeenth­century England, eighteenth­century North america, and beyond.56 to the extent that this reconstruction is valid, civic hu-manism is the source of a modern political language and, perhaps more important, of some modern political imagery and yearnings, notably the quest for meaningful political participation. among modern political languages, however, republican-ism is of relatively minor importance; it is certainly less important than liberalism and socialism, for example.

In any event, the analysis above highlights the structural characteristics of mo-dernity. It sees the liberating and the ideological dimensions of Florentine repub-licanism as embedded in the very structure of their language, in the disjointing of the social and political order from the objective metaphysical and divine order of things. the key to the modernity of civic humanism’s political language is, in other words, its anti-metaphysical nature. Humanist discourse rejected the onto-theo-logical foundations of the mainstream tradition of Western philosophy, namely the postulation of the existence of an intelligible and immutable layer of reality that sustained phenomenal reality. Indeed, it undermined the fundamental premises of the premodern worldview generally. this worldview perceived reality as an intel-ligible and rational whole. the kosmos—to use the greek term that best conveys the premodern view—was all­inclusive, ordered, and unified. The physical, the su-pernatural, and the social facets of reality (in the modern, anachronistic, meanings of these terms) were inherently related to one another, parts of a harmonious and meaningful totality, ruled by immanent logos or transcendent god.57

remark of ernesto laclau that the condition for a democratic society is “a multiple ‘civic republican-ism’” in his “Community and its Paradoxes: richard rorty’s ‘liberal Utopia,’” in Emancipation(s) (london: verso, 1996), 120. However, the fact that modern republicanism was already associated with blair’s third Way in britain and the Clinton administration in the United States ought to alert us to a possibly new ideological appropriation of the republican tradition: its use in masking the retreat from more self-confident and tangible “old” labour and New deal convictions and policies.

56. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. In his Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570–1640 (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1995), markku Peltonen argues that he found the missing link in Pocock’s genealogy by unearthing the existence of republicanism in late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth-century england. On republicanism as the ideology of the american revolution, see also gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). For a general survey of the historiography of republicanism, see William J. Connell, “the republican Idea,” in Renaissance Civic Humanism, 14-29.

57. the premodern worldview and its formulation in classical and medieval philosophy was reconstructed from different theoretical—and ideological—perspectives. See, for example, Charles

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From this structural perspective civic humanism is primarily a symptom of mo-dernity rather than its source. Indeed, this perspective enables an accurate account for the relationship between renaissance humanism and other late medieval and early modern genealogies of modernity, namely fourteenth-century nominalism and the Protestant reformation.58 those who see nominalism or the reformation as the origin of modernity highlight the characteristics underscored in the discus-sion of humanism above: an anti-metaphysical dimension that undermined and fragmented the unified premodern perception of reality. Nominalism separated philosophy from theology, and metaphysics from natural philosophy, and con-cluded that “our world is contingent, not an ontologically necessary outflow or reflection of eternal structures of being.”59 Protestant theology also disjoined the divine and the non-divine. It led to the disenchantment of the natural world and to the perception of the social world as inherently corrupt.60

taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 3-11; louis dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: yale University Press, 1993), 15-42; leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 120-164; eric voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. 2: The Middle Ages to Aquinas, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 20, ed. Peter von Sivers (Columbia: University of missouri Press, 1999); alasdair macIntyre, After Virtue (Notre dame, IN: University of Notre dame Press, 1981), 49-59; and Peter berger, The Social Reality of Religion (london: Faber, 1969), 3-28. Some of these scholars highlight the tension between the greek conception of reality as inherently divine and rational and the Christian (or rather monotheistic) separation between god and his creation, and argue that the seeds of the modern disintegration of the unified premodern world were inherent in the Judeo-Christian perception. but even they agree that the mainstream Christian theology until the late middle ages emphasized that “through his wisdom, support, and grace, [god] continued to be present in the world” (dupré, Passage to Modernity, 3). Creation was thus invested with rationality, harmony, and unity. See also berger, The Social Reality, 113-124.

58. the similarity between these discourses might also be attributed to direct influences. there are, however, serious theoretical problems with the notion of “influence” as it was employed in the tradi-tional history of ideas. Particularly, it was convincingly demonstrated that the meaning of an “idea” is determined by its specific discursive context, and that, therefore, ideas cannot migrate from one discourse to another without changing their meaning. moreover, the notion of influence seems super-fluous in our case, as full reconstructions of the discourses mentioned are possible in their own terms, without assuming influences of other discourses. there is, of course, a vast literature on the new theoretical and methodological developments in the field of intellectual history that undermine the traditional history of ideas. For lucid introductory presentations, see dominic laCapra, “rethinking Intellectual History and reading texts,” History and Theory 19 (1980), 245-276; John e. toews, “Intellectual History after the linguistic turn: the autonomy of meaning and the Irreducibility of experience,” American Historical Review 92 (1987), 879-907.

59. See, for example, Heiko a. Oberman, “the Shape of late medieval thought: the birthpangs of the modern era,” in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, ed. Charles trinkaus and Heiko Oberman (leiden: brill, 1974), 12-15; eric voegelin, History of Political Ideas, vol. 3: The Later Middle Ages, in The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 21, ed. david Walsh (Columbia: University of missouri Press, 1999), 103-26; Hans blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, transl. robert m. Wallace (Cambridge, ma: mIt Press, 1983), 145-203. the citation is from Oberman, “the Shape,” 13.

60. See berger, The Social Reality, 105-113; William bouwsma, “renaissance and reformation: an essay in their affinities and Connections,” in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era, ed. Heiko a. Oberman (leiden: e. J. brill, 1974), 127-149; Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven: yale University Press, 1980), 239-244. the separation between the divine and the profane also brought about the desire to reintegrate them, which is also one of the characteristics of late medieval and early modern europe. See, for example, Oberman, “the Shape,” 11. Some of the most powerful reconstructions of the Protestant origins of modernity highlight precisely the seemingly paradoxical sanctification of reality as a response to the radical reduction of the realm of the sacred in Protestant

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In contrast to other structural approaches, however, the one offered here does not preclude a genuine historical examination; indeed, it specifically leaves ample room for an account of historical change. the discourses of nominalism, humanism, and Protestant theology can be reconstructed in the cultural setting of late medieval and early modern europe. Specifically, the shared premises of these discourses can be accounted for by examining how these movements elaborated their basic notions and defined their identities against their common enemy, namely, scholastic realism. true, their motivations and aims, as well as the issues at the focus of each confrontation with scholastic realism, were different. the nominalist criticism of realism was the result of an internal dynamics of scholas-tic philosophy, and it concentrated on the philosophical question of the existence of universals and the theological question of god’s omnipotence. the humanists rejected the scholastic intellectual program as a whole and offered their own. Specifically, as we have seen, the humanists’ political language, historical con-sciousness, and image of humans as active citizens contradicted the fundamental premises of scholastic philosophy. the Protestant reformers attacked the very idea of synthesis between reason and faith. but different as these three discourses were, all three confrontations ended up rejecting the metaphysical premises of scholastic realism and the premodern worldview generally. the unified and har-monious kosmos disintegrated, as dimensions of reality—the divine, the natural, and the social—were separated from one another and fields of knowledge—natu-ral philosophy, political thought, history—gained their autonomy. modernity is the outcome of this process of disintegration. No Foucauldain break between two incommensurable epistemes should therefore be postulated.61 On the contrary, the discourses discussed above emerged through intellectual confrontations within struggles for cultural hegemony, which were well understood by contemporaries and reconstructable by historians.

as the civic humanists, in contrast to the nominalists before them and the Prot-estant reformers after them, were predominantly interested in political thought (in the wider sense of the term), it is not surprising that their republicanism was the first distinct expression of modern political thought. the civic humanists’ notions of liberty and equality were quite limited and their legitimizing discourse was rather crude. later political languages, notably those generated by the enlighten-ment and romanticism, elaborated much more far-reaching conceptualizations

theology. In max Weber’s famous theory, the reformation greatly increased “the moral emphasis on the religious sanction of organized worldly labour in a calling.” See The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, transl. talcott Parsons (london: Unwin Paperbacks, 1985), 79-92 (the citation is from page 83). In The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1965), michael Walzer analyzed how the Calvinists, their bleak per-ception of humanity notwithstanding, attempted to shape—often by revolutionary means—the social and political world in accordance with god’s Word.

61. Foucault’s notion of episteme—together with the encompassing project of an archeology of knowledge—was rightly criticized for its formalist, even transcendental, tendencies and its inability to account for historical change. See, for example, Hubert l. dreyfus and Paul rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 79-103; béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, transl. edward Pile (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 38-69. as is well known, Foucault himself abandoned these concepts and methodologies in his later works.

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of liberty and equality, even as they produced more subtle ideological discourses that employed sophisticated mechanisms for veiling the realities of power. If the foregoing analysis is valid, however, the dialectic of emancipation and domi-nation inherent in the modern undermining of the metaphysical foundation of human reality is already present in the discourse of Florentine civic humanism. In this way, this humanism marked the beginning of the emergence of modern political ideology.

Ben Gurion University