“Men, not walls, make the city”: Civic Humanism Rebooted

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Notes

^1. Perusing the I Tatti webpage, https://www.hup.harvard.edu/collection.php?cpk=1145, one is forced to reckon with the sad statistic that only 3 out of 93 currently published volumes appear “popular” enough to warrant a paperback edition: Petrarch’s Invectives, Boccaccio’s Famous Women, and Valla’s On the Donation of Constantine.

^2. Virtue Politics certainly serves as scholarly backing for Hankins’s ubiquitous and vociferous criticism in the public arena of current “woke culture” and what he sees as its wholesale jettisoning of Western intellectual accomplishments. See, for example, Hankins’s co-authored piece, “Civilization & Tradition,” in the September 2021 issue of The New Criterion: https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/9/civilization-tradition-11942.

^3. Michelet, “Renaissance and the Discovery of the World,” 26.

^4. It should be noted that once upon a time Hankins criticized the “lumping” or Whiggish tendency of Renaissance scholars, Eugenio Garin in particular (on whom more at the end of this review), to relate the humanists to the French philosophes or other later movements. See Hankins, “Renaissance Philosophy,” 286.

^5. Consciously or not, Virtue Politics pays tribute in its form to notable precedents such as Eugenio Garin’s Ritratti di umanisti and Paul Oskar Kristeller’s Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance.

^6. For the “democratic” Machiavelli, Hankins is conversing with, see, among others, McCormick and Pedullà.

^7. Hankins’s contention with the Baronian and more “popular” than Baron’s “republicanism” of the Cambridge school, as represented specifically by Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought, is moot to the extent that the latter has always appeared to experts as overtly “teleological,” drawing a straight line back and forth from present to past, and unfailingly appeared decontextualized despite the school’s emphasis on linguistic (and no other kind of) contextualization. As Hankins points out, Skinner has graciously conceded to the limits of his approach in response to recent criticism (see 63–65). Surely, Baron remains Hankins’s only worthy opponent and, as we shall see, kindred spirit.

^8. See Hankins, “Two Twentieth-Century Interpreters,” and “Renaissance Philosophy.”

^9. Baron was notoriously obsessed by what he perceived as his lack of accomplishment. See Rubini, “A ‘Crisis’ in the Making.”

^10. The relative merits of “civic humanism” have been endlessly debated, including by Hankins, with his contribution to a volume he edited, entirely dedicated to a reassessment. See Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism.

^11. See Rubini, Other Renaissance, chap. 4.

^12. Garin, cited in Rubini, Other Renaissance, 276.