Civic Humanism Research Articles

‘The Great Distinction of Our Nature’: Imagination and Commerce in the Later Wollstonecraft

This article elucidates a central but underexplored theme in Wollstonecraft's later writing: the distinction between the imagination and commerce. After the French Terror, Wollstonecraft begins to write of the imagination, rather than reason, as the defining feature of human nature. It is the imagination, she argues, that will enable the continuation of civilisational progress in the face of the retrogressive forces of commerce. This article argues that Wollstonecraft distinguishes between the two in accordance with three areas of concern: the distinction between humans and animals; the difference between higher and lower pleasures; the distinction between self-interest and social being. It also argues that Wollstonecraft's perspective in these three areas is shaped by her particular intellectual background, that is, by her reading of Rousseau, her civic humanism, and by her Socratic ethics.

Political Obligation and Self-Sufficiency in Leonardo Bruni's History of the Florentine People

Abstract Leonardo Bruni (1377–1444), chancellor of Florence, is today more famous as an initiator of civic humanism and a proponent of early modern republicanism than as a historian of medieval Florence. He owes this position most of all to Hans Baron, who argued that Florentine civic humanism—an exemplary mode of communal existence dedicated to the active life—as found particularly in Bruni's writings, stemmed from the resurgence of interest in antiquity, which pointed forward to a liberating, civilizing, and progressive modernity. Though James Hankins has recently argued that the dual theses of civic humanism and republicanism are mischaracterizations of the larger thrust of Italian Renaissance political thought, the scholarly literature overwhelmingly portrays Leonardo Bruni as incipiently modern and, by definition, un-medieval. But in emphasizing the role of antiquity in Bruni's “modern” thought, scholars have overlooked the importance of medieval history in the formulation and the content of Bruni's arguments. This article seeks to rectify this misappreciation by demonstrating how that quintessential medieval struggle, the conflict between popes and emperors, plays a central role in Bruni's political thought as it is found in the History of the Florentine People, written from 1415/16 to 1444.

Perfection as a value-regulatory principle of ethics of humanism and Renaissance culture of the 14th-16th centuries

The article presents and systematizes the fundamental concepts of a philosophical approach to the human perfection in the European spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries, namely, in the philosophical pursuits during the period of the Italian Renaissance and the establishment of civic humanism. The research is focused on the basic trends in the inception of the idea of human perfection as well as on its characteristics. Under the analysis are the essential traits of the philosophy of man in the treatises of a number of distinguished thinkers of the period of European Renaissance of the 14th-16th centuries. The article argues that the issues of the free will, natural structure, harmony as well as individual and social dialectics are indicative of a broad spectrum of the Philosophy of Man in the spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries. These issues point to the emergence and moulding of a social person, a citizen and a legal entity.
 A special emphasis in the research is laid on the importance and the need to seek the standards and ideals of human life and to provide a philosophical and ethical search for the implementation of the principles of human life and the revival of the standards of human perfection in its universal ascension to the ultimate truths.
 The author offers his own assessment of the formation and development of the issues related to a perfectly wise human being. The concusions are drawn pertaining to the evolution of the philosophy of man in the spiritual culture of the 14th-16th centuries.
 The author comes to the conclusion that, in general, the divine in human nature and man in the divine continuum in all the beauty of self-expression and harmony is one of the main elements of philosophical reflections on perfection as a valuable universe of humanistic ethics. Perfection as an invariant function of a person’s self-regulation in a degree comparison received much less development next to the ethical-aesthetic and spiritual foundations of the formation, development and regeneration of the Renaissance man.
 As a spiritual-intellectual, aesthetic, psychological complex, humanism was characteristic of the worldview and worldview of certain strata of society, in which the principle of perfection was a practical-humanistic regulatory-value principle. The function of theoretical internalization of the person in the philosophy of humanism undoubtedly had a place. The problems of free will, natural organization, harmony, the dialectic of the individual and the social testify to a wide range of intra-subjective philosophical analysis in the systems of the 11th and 11th centuries, and, at the same time, philosophical and ethical searches were aimed at realizing the principles of human life, on the revival of standards of human perfection in his universal ascent to higher truths.

Adam Ferguson, Sir John Macpherson and the French Revolution: New Evidence and Perspectives

This article examines thirty-six new letters and one essay on the French Revolution written by Adam Ferguson, and uses them to reconstruct a discussion carried on among Ferguson, Hugh Blair and Sir John Macpherson during the revolutionary 1790s. The new evidence from Ferguson casts doubt on his identification as a ‘civic humanist’, and shows that he never welcomed the French Revolution, even in its early stages. Remarkably, Ferguson also briefly supported a European union based on arms and commerce. The examination of John Macpherson—a little known but interesting figure—shows that he had a sophisticated view of commercial society and a unique theory about the dangers of systemic financial risk. Finally, the conversation contained here primarily pertains to commercial society, public credit and perpetual peace, and adds a new Scottish angle to our understanding of these major idioms in eighteenth-century political thought.

From Medieval Corporatism to Civic Humanism: Merchant and Guild Culture in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Florence

From Medieval Corporatism to Civic Humanism: Merchant and Guild Culture in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Florence

Liberalism and republicanism, or wealth and virtue revisited

ABSTRACT The unquestionable achievement of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was to describe the retention of pre-modern values in a modern society. Pocock was notoriously accused of decentring Locke and side-lining the Liberal Tradition. A more pertinent critique had it that he failed to articulate how civic humanism in the context of increasingly commercial societies produced more than Jeremiahs or Cassandras. This article explains how Pocock responded to his various critics by inventing the term “commercial humanism” in an effort to clarify the way in which classical virtue was modified in modern commercial contexts, especially by natural jurists and republicans. Commercial humanism proved controversial but stimulated one of the most original scholars working in the history of political thought, István Hont, to undertake a prolonged engagement with Pocock's revisionist ideas, which ultimately allowed him to answer Pocock's critics better than Pocock, whose voice remained too in tune with those whose view of modern political thought he had rejected. For Hont, Pocock's labours in the history of political thought remained less relevant to present politics than they might become, once the depth of eighteenth-century analyses of the relationship between wealth and virtue was recovered.

The Roads Not Taken: Liberty, Sovereignty and the Idea of the Republic in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles, 1550–1660

AbstractIn the mid-sixteenth century, there were many parallels between the political cultures of Poland-Lithuania and the kingdoms of the British Isles, as thinkers inspired by the ideals of Renaissance civic humanism challenged traditional currents of thought. Across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania there were strong native traditions asserting the liberties of communities of the realm and the need to check unbridled royal authority through parliamentary assemblies. As the Reformation swept across the British Isles and Poland-Lithuania, traditional claims concerning the right to resist tyrannical authority were bolstered. Finally, in 1603, Scotland and England formed a loose political union as Poland and Lithuania had formed a loose political union in 1386, although it was not until 1707 that England and Scotland followed the example of the 1569 Lublin Union, when Poland and Lithuania established the first parliamentary union in European history. Despite these parallels, the fates of these composite polities were very different, and their political cultures diverged substantially. This article considers the idea of the Renaissance republic in Poland-Lithuania and the British Isles. It suggests why their roads diverged, and asks what made all the difference.

British Art for Australia, 1860-1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries, by Matthew C. Potter

Reviewed by: British Art for Australia, 1860–1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries by Matthew C. Potter Sarah Scott (bio) British Art for Australia, 1860–1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries, by Matthew C. Potter; pp. x + 254. London and New York: Routledge, 2019, £120.00, $160.00. British Art for Australia, 1860–1953: The Acquisition of Artworks from the United Kingdom by Australian National Galleries by Matthew C. Potter provides a detailed study into the acquisitions of the Australian national galleries in Sydney, Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, and Adelaide, an area of study that has not previously been covered in any detail. In so doing it gives insight into British-Australian relations more broadly and challenges the assumption that "British art was forced on Australia as cast offs" (227). Instead, Potter suggests that the acquisition of works required "complex transcultural negotiations" that led to "the Australian colonists freely taking inspiration from U. K. examples in order to establish their own identities" (42). British models were central not only to the shape of the collections but also to the establishment of governing structures and the architectural and curatorial approaches of the national galleries themselves. Potter identifies when and how the national galleries were established and gives a brief history of the relevant bequests to the galleries, looking into how these shaped the opportunities available to, and the collections formed by, these institutions. The book is divided into two sections. In the first part, Potter looks at "structural and contextual themes" and examines how British values were reflected in the acquisitions of works for the national galleries, in addition to the impact and constraints of the global market on the purchase of British artworks for Australia (10). The book is most engaging when it pursues the ideologies behind the purchases of pictures for the national galleries. [End Page 277] For this reason, I found the second thematic part of the book more interesting than the first. Here Potter examines the acquisitions of British Old Masters and landscape painting, Pre-Raphaelite art, and British modernism by the national galleries. The dominance of British art within the collections, Potter suggests, was not so much due to a desire by British advisors and buyers to "dump" second rate art on the dominions but because Australians saw themselves as British-Australians (5). As British immigrants or first generation Australians, the population still had a strong sentimental attachment to Britain, even if this diminished over the course of the time under investigation in this volume. Many of the works acquired, such as the first Pre-Raphaelite work to enter an Australian collection, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III (1847–51) by Ford Maddox Brown, were seen to be of educational value, illustrating in this case "the birth of the English language in the person of Chaucer" (176). Civic humanism was also an ideology that supported the acquisition of British art. Gallery acquisitions of British art reflected changing attitudes toward what it meant to be British and the nature of Britishness. The debates surrounding identity came to the fore around the attempted acquisition of works like Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50) by John Everett Millais. Frank Rinder, the selector for the Felton Bequest, was particularly influential given that the Bequest of £378,033 to the National Gallery of Victoria allowed the gallery to purchase works of art that were not within the budget of other, less wealthy Australian galleries. He argued that British paintings such as Christ in the House of his Parents would be capable of promoting a "spiritual entente" between the center and the Antipodes of the Empire (186). Rinder also argued that Australians' sacrifices during the First World War made Australia eligible for the picture. Ultimately, though, the National Art Collections Fund and the Tate Gallery opposed the NGV's attempts to acquire the picture. The war poet Siegfried Sassoon and other celebrities supported this stance, with Sassoon arguing, "It would indeed be a great pity if the picture were allowed to go out of England" (qtd. in Potter 187). The volume summarizes an enormous amount...

Rhetoric’s Renaissance

In 2005, Art Walzer graciously invited me to join an NCA panel celebrating the recent publication of Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Southern Illinois University Press, eds. Linda Ferreira-Buckley and S. Michael Halloran). After my clumsy talk about Blair’s bourgeois rhetorical style, I listened to Art’s sophisticated claim that Blair occupies a pivotal place in the canon because he negotiated the turn from civic humanism to civil society by transmogrifying ancient civic virtue into modern Christian politeness. Enthralled, I committed to reading Art’s work on George Campbell, an erudite exploration of abstruse rhetorical theory and Enlightenment emotional psychology. Art had made Blair into the Anglican Quintilian, Campbell into a Humean Aristotle. Up until that point, I had ignored British belletrism because it seemed like a moribund scholarly field. Art made the Scottish Enlightenment blossom.To date, I have avoided the Renaissance because it looked like a stripped scholarly mine, pored over and picked through so often that nothing of intellectual value could remain. Walzer and Sullivan’s Critical Edition of Four Works on Counsel, however, finds new gems in an old pit. Accepting The Boke Named the Governour as Elyot’s most significant text, they discuss his lesser-known works as extrapolations on the proper form and function of magisterial counsel. The Governour, they explain, envisions a “semi-professional class of governor/counsels driven by vocations and prepared by a curriculum” (19). The works featured in this collection, when read through the lenses provided by Walzer and Sullivan’s robust critical apparatus, show us how the counselor should behave. These works serve either as examples of good counsel (To Nicocles and The Defense of Good Women) or as theories of good counsel (Pasquill the Playne and Of that Knowlage).Walzer and Sullivan emphasize the historical contexts, explaining how Elyot’s own experiences in the Henrician court colored his thoughts on the counselor’s office and potential. Two moments are illustrative. Walzer and Sullivan discuss Elyot’s positive experiences while Clerk of the Council under Cardinal Wolsey. In this capacity, Elyot witnessed a productive debate about policies that might prevent the hoarding of grain. Their deliberation resulted in wise policy. Later, while serving as Henry’s royal ambassador to Charles V, Elyot struggled in his efforts to advance the English king’s petition for a legal divorce from Catherine. This frustrating experience ended with Elyot’s early dismissal. Elyot’s hope for good counsel, a hope fed by positive experiences under Wolsey, led to optimistic works like Elyot’s translation of Isocrates’s To Nicocles and his Defense of Good Women. Elyot’s vain and interrupted attempt to persuade Charles V contributed to the jaded perspective dominating a Lucianic dialogue between the Greek rhetorician (Gnatho), who says only things that will be well-received, and the Roman parrhesiast (Pasquill), who speaks the eternal truth without regard for audience. The tension between these two figures is further compounded by the prelate (Harpocrates) who maintains his silence because at court, more often than not, silence is in season. Even this pasquinade has a sunny third act, however, for Walzer and Sullivan argue that, though the characters are unable to decide which option is best (suitable silence, conciliating rhetoric, or blunt truth), they do model “prudential reasoning” in their conversation (171).I’ve highlighted one instance where Walzer and Sullivan describe the historical circumstance to illuminate the rhetorical works. Their collection is filled with such moments. Because of this careful attention to historical context, Critical Editions of Four Works on Counsel transcends the English Renaissance. Walzer and Sullivan can explore the problem of counsel as a transhistorical, rhetorical problem. The tension between rhetoric and parrhesia comes forth in every one of Elyot’s minor works. By dutifully noting Elyot’s classical inheritance, Walzer and Sullivan can demonstrate that the problem of counsel is not peculiar to courtly life in the fifteenth century. Elyot becomes the Renaissance Cicero, balancing wisdom and eloquence in a philosophia civilor. He was the Henrician Quintilian, educating the ideal counselor (80). He turns into the English Aristotle worried that a rhetoric aimed only at expediency and not informed by prudence will lead to malice (86). And, for me, this is deja vu all over again. A figure whom I imagined as intellectually obscure, historically peculiar, and completely uninteresting has bloomed into the paradigmatic rhetor.Walzer’s corpus is filled with careful historical scholarship, every book, every article claiming a broader philosophical relevance for a figure or an era that might otherwise seem unimportant or over-examined: Thomas Malthus, Marcus Quintilian, Richard Whately, et alii. If I had to characterize Art Walzer as a scholar, based on his ability to find something appropriate to say about anyone, anywhere, I might borrow an epithet given to another Renaissance counselor. I might say Art Walzer is a rhetorician for all seasons.

Seeing What Is Said: Teaching Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince Through Its Images

ABSTRACTThis multidisciplinary pedagogy offers eight allegorical images in support of a visually contextual reading of The Prince. Responding to the pedagogical problem of students treating the text as an ahistorical manual for action addressed to them, our approach resituates The Prince in its visual cultural context. This allows us to specify Machiavelli’s innovations as a theorist in terms of the importance of plurality and particularity in regard to political action. An online supplemental appendix provides access to databases and additional resources. Exploring Machiavelli’s politicized moral concepts of prudence, parsimony, liberality, fortune, and impetuosity using these images, we show his masterful invocation and redeployment of the cultural codes of his time. In presenting a visual history of concepts, we hope to move students beyond common contemporary ideological biases and literal readings and to alert them to the complex stories and relationships evident in the visual history of civic humanism.

A Fatherland of Free Men. Virility and ‘Frailty’ in Spanish Liberalism (1808–1814)

AbstractThe ideal of the patriotic citizen‐soldier familiar from civic humanism re‐emerged in Spain in the context of the Napoleonic Wars. Spaniards were required to uphold a model of masculinity that was continually threatened by ‘effeminacy’. The study of this model is approached through an analysis of literary texts: the main neoclassical tragedies and the main liberal patriotic collections of the period. The article thus allows us to explore Spanish revolutionary subjectivities in the early ‐nineteenth century and the political dynamics to which they gave rise and so provides insights into how citizenship, national identity and the categories of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ were built in Spain in a period marked by a deep revolutionary break.

God’s City: ‘Civic Humanism’ and the Self-Construction of the Ecclesia in Late Fifteenth- and Early Sixteenth-Century England

This article considers one element within the long tradition of the church’s self-identification as a city. It focuses on England, c. 1450 to c. 1510, and considers how the civic rhetoric developed by Italian humanists, pre-eminently Leonardo Bruni, was refracted through an ecclesiastical lens and so appropriated for English clerical use. It describes how two useful elements were quarried from recent writings imported from Italy: the first was the emphasis on the city and its buildings as a locus of virtue; the second was that, because of its virtue, that city was under attack. The discussion begins with the time of social unrest in the mid-fifteenth century,in the wake of which Thomas Chaundler wrote his praise of Thomas Bekynton, bishop of Bath and Wells, and his building works in his episcopal city. It ends in the first years of the sixteenth century with the relations between Christopher Urswick, dean of Windsor, and Thomas Goldstone, prior of Christ Church, Canterbury. Their re-use of older texts, specifically the Speculum regis Edwardi III, which they assumed to be by Archbishop Simon Islip, and more recent humanist ones, by Celso Maffei and Goldstone’s predecessor as prior, William Sellyng, identified other enemies who attacked the church: invoking the name of Thomas Becket, they saw those oppressing them to be not rebels against authority but those in authority. This allows us to reflect on how a few English readers of humanist civic rhetoric found in it potentially radical force.

Las ideas políticas en el Renacimiento

James Hankins es uno de los mas importantes especialistas en la historia del pensamiento politico de los humanistas del Renacimiento. Su libro sobre el platonismo del Renacimiento es de referencia obligada para los estudios sobre la epoca, asi como sus articulos sobre Leonardo Bruni y el “humanismo civico”. En este reciente libro reune el trabajo de muchos anos. Consta de veintiun capitulos y tres apendices. Los dos primeros son traducciones de textos latinos al ingles. El primero de ellos es un pasaje del De vita solitaria de Petrarca. El segundo es un pasaje de la Historia de Bruni y el tercero es una lista de ediciones de Francesco Patrizi.

Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution by Christine Levecq

Reviewed by: Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution by Christine Levecq Ryan Hanley Christine Levecq, Black Cosmopolitans: Race, Religion and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution ( Charlottesville: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2019). Pp. 304. $45.00 cloth. Many eighteenth-century Black intellectuals, both free and enslaved, led lives characterized by continuous travel around the Atlantic world and beyond. The textual and ideological effects of Black writers' being in constant motion, and of their voluntary and involuntary transplantation between vastly different cultural milieux, have preoccupied scholars for decades. Yet for all this attention, there has been a notable paucity of work which takes seriously the concept of cosmopolitanism in terms of our understanding of these most globally mobile of thinkers. Christine Levecq's illuminating study takes on the challenge of understanding eighteenth-century Black cosmopolitanism on its own terms, drawing particular attention to the effects of a highly mobile lifestyle on Black authors' engagement with the republican and civic humanist traditions. The book is arranged into an introduction and three quite substantial chapters, each focusing on the life and work of one Black cosmopolitan in the context of his predominating interests. Jacobus Capitein (c.1717–c.1747) is perhaps best known for the troublingly committed defence of slavery given in his 1742 postgraduate dissertation at the University of Leiden, published in both Latin and Dutch. Enslaved as a child and sold to a Dutch West India Company trader in 1725, he was brought to the Netherlands, educated in the Dutch tradition, and trained as a minister and missionary at Leiden. Less well-known, but reconstructed with admirable attention to detail here, is what happened after he graduated and travelled to work as a minister at the slave fort of Elmina on the Gold Coast in October 1742. Faced with the horrific realities he witnessed there as much as mistreatment from his colleagues, it appears that, without declaring himself anything like opposed to the slave trade, Capitein began to emphasize an ideology of racial equality. Judging by the material cited by [End Page 504] Levecq, this appears to have been a subtle process, chiefly centered on the issues of mixed marriages and of teaching local African people. Despite his best efforts, his personal circumstances at Elmina grew chaotic, and he died, deeply in debt, in 1747, further entrenching a rather unflattering image that has dogged him ever since. Levecq's stated intention for this chapter is to "if not dispel, at least modify his image as a mouthpiece for Western colonialism" (20), in pursuit of which she even goes so far as to paint Capitein as a radical figure pushing the racially egalitarian potential of proslavery Calvinist thought. Reviewing the impressively broad range of evidence Levecq has brought to bear in service to this argument, I would personally be inclined towards a more timid modification than the frontal challenge she sometimes aims for. "His untimely death cut the process short," she suggests, "but it seems that Capitein was on his way to developing a more inclusive, multiracial form of cosmopolitanism" (59–60). I would like to think that she is correct, but it is difficult to justify reassessing an individual's existing work on the basis of what we think they might have written had they lived longer. The rereading of Capitein's dissertation in the context of the Dutch Calvinist tradition is, however, on much sturdier ground; Levecq reconstructs his theological influences to convincingly demonstrate that his dissertation served as a justification for the missionary work of the slave-holding West Indian Company, rather than as an "embrace of the institution of slavery" itself (57). This book is similarly strong on the multivalent influences of "race" in shaping the experiences of these figures as they navigated the Atlantic world. This is particularly true of the second chapter on Jean-Baptiste Belley (c.1746–1805), a formerly enslaved Senegalese man and leader in the early years of the Haitian Revolution who in 1793 became the first Black representative in the French National Convention. Levecq skilfully picks apart the nuances of how Belley navigated both St. Dominguan and French society as a "non-mixed" Black man, paying particular...

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes

Spinoza's Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear by Justin Steinberg

Reviewed by: Spinoza's Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear by Justin Steinberg Michael A. Rosenthal Justin Steinberg. Spinoza's Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. xv + 235. Cloth, $105.00. In this ambitious and important book, Justin Steinberg attempts to explain the significance of the project for both contemporary political philosophy and the history of political thought. He argues that Spinoza offers a much-needed antidote against "ideal theory" in political philosophy. He also wants to expand our horizons concerning the context of Spinoza's political thought, primarily by noting the influence of Renaissance Civic Humanism. He argues for two main theses: the political works are continuous with the Ethics; and the role of the state is to help perfect the individual. The first chapter, "Metaphysical Psychology and Ingenia Formation," argues that (i) there is a human essence, which is nonetheless plastic, that is, can be formed within a range of possibilities depending on the circumstances in which this essence is instantiated; (ii) that this plastic essence constitutes the unique ingenium or genius of an individual or people; and (iii) that the state has a duty and interest to form this ingenium. In the second chapter, "Eliminating Juridical Constraints and Naturalizing Rights," Steinberg builds on earlier interpretations of Spinoza's political theory as republican and argues against John G. A. Pocock's view that Spinoza is essentially a natural law theorist. Steinberg's central claim in this chapter is that Spinoza adopts natural law only to undermine it. The main claim of the third chapter, "The Continuity Thesis and the Aim of Government," is that the aim of the state is to liberate or empower its citizens, not only physically but also intellectually and emotionally. In chapter four, "The Politics of Hope and Fear," the author convincingly shows how fear can be overcome through hope in Spinoza's politics. Steinberg raises several difficulties for his reading: the "inseparable counterparts challenge," the "equal constraints challenge," and the "equal willingness challenge." After discussing the nature of fear and hope, he shows how it is possible to respond to each of these challenges. The main point emphasized in conclusion is that "affective welfare is a very important dimension along which to measure civic success" (98). [End Page 614] In chapter five, "Statecraft and Taming Fortuna," the author emphasizes the importance of fortune in Spinoza's political philosophy. I found his distinction between two models of responding to fortune—the Stoic model of inner control and the Civic Humanist model of active engagement—very helpful. The second model is crucial to the broader claim that the state has an interest in and can actively shape the nature of individuals in the state, in its project of trying to master the vicissitudes of the external world. In chapter six, "From Superstition and Persecution to True Religion and Toleration," Steinberg draws from the now substantial literature on the political context of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) to show that Spinoza's critique of Scripture aimed to undermine the authority of the clergy to bolster the more tolerant secular regime. In this way, a certain degree of religious freedom can be justified on prudential grounds, depending on the contingent nature (the ingenium) of the people governed. The most original and stimulating chapter, in my view, is chapter seven, "The Affective and Epistemic Case for Democracy." Some of Steinberg's best work has been on the "epistemic" case for democracy, and he does a nice job expanding it and then situating it in his broader argument. It supports some of his broader claims, like the continuity thesis and the case for perfectionism. He recognizes that some of his claims border on an idealization (section 7.3), though he is right to qualify that in light of his commitment to realism (see 177). One criticism is that it is not obvious that Spinoza's commitment to democracy in the TTP is "beyond dispute" (158). It certainly plays a role in his political theory, but he seems to discard it as an idealization. Steinberg argues for an interesting and controversial view in chapter eight, "Salvation, Eternity, and the State...

Dame Scotia and the Commonweal: Vernacular Humanism inThe Complaynt of Scotland(1550)

Robert Wedderburn’s Complaynt of Scotland (Paris, 1550) has attracted surprisingly little attention from modern scholars. Although available in an accessible critical edition since 1979, no analysis of its context, sources and polemical purposes has been undertaken in recent scholarship. This article redresses this imbalance, reading the Complaynt as part of the ideological warfare that accompanied the English crown’s ‘Rough Wooing’ of Scotland in the 1540s and examining its author’s remarkable re-working of Alain Chartier’s Quadrilogue Invectif (1422) in the context of sixteenth-century vernacular humanism. It also highlights the extent to which Ciceronian civic humanism informed Wedderburn’s understanding of the Scottish ‘commonweal’ and explores his detailed argument about the origins of social rank and the nature of ‘true nobility’.

Retórica y valores humanistas en los Diálogos de Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda

The philosophical dialogue, whose definitive model was established by Plato since the golden age of Greek philosophy, fulfills specific philosophical purposes that it achieves thanks to its particular form, and which are different from those of other means of philosophical expression, such as the essay or the treaty. These peculiarities of the philosophical dialogue, as a particularly appropriate means to express rhetorical virtues, made it very popular among Renaissance humanists, who defended the irreducible unity of form and content, against the precepts of Scholasticism, which assumed that the form was a simple inconsequential wrapper for what really mattered, the factual content. Thus, the humanists made philosophical dialogue not only a means to demonstrate their own particular theses, but a demonstration, in itself, of the rhetorical capacity inherent in dialogue to express philosophical nuances unattainable for the rigid discourses of strict rationalism. This article analyzes the specific characteristics of the form of the Philosophical Dialogues of Juan Gines de Sepulveda, one of the most notable humanists of the Spanish Renaissance, and the way he deals with modern issues such as personal ambition of fame and glory, or the relationship between active life and passive life, matters of great interest to pragmatic and civic Humanism.

Confucian democracy as popular sovereignty

ABSTRACTIs Confucian democracy philosophically justifiable? In recent decades, prominent Confucian theorists have answered this question in the negative, arguing that the political system that is consistent with Confucianism is political meritocracy or elite rule. This position presupposes an antithetical relation between democracy and Confucianism. In order to counter such a position, this article proposes a philosophically justifiable normative conception of Confucian democracy. By carefully examining democracy theories of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Carl Schmitt in the civic humanist republican tradition and Confucian political philosophy in the Mencian tradition, this article demonstrates that the substantive value of democracy as popular sovereignty is a fundamental idea undergirding and safeguarding the ideal Confucian politics.

Thomas More as author of Margaret Roper's letter to Alice Alington

Why would Sir Thomas More write a letter to Alice Alington under the name of Margaret More Roper? To answer that question, this essay examines the political and familial circumstances of the letter's composition, its artfully concealed design of forensic oratory, and use of indirect argument. A careful analysis of the letter's rhetorical strategy will reveal further that More crafted his defense of conscience with allusion to the question of counsel from Utopia, whether or not a philosopher should enter into a king's service. In the Alington letter, from More's position as an imprisoned, former Chancellor of England, he revised civic humanism's call for political engagement into a powerful statement of defiance against King Henry VIII.