The Complicated Politics of Virtue

James Hankins’ Virtue Politics is an accomplished study of the Renaissance humanists’ political thought. He begins with Petrarch, concludes with Machiavelli, and considers the work of Leonardo Bruni, Biondo Flavio, Leon Battista Alberti, Francesco Patrizi, and others. He also includes several thematic chapters.

For students of the history of political thought, Hankins’ most important claim is that Quentin Skinner and others are wrong when they argue that a clear republican tradition, or a preference for republican government, existed among humanist thinkers before Machiavelli. They did not exclusively prefer republics to monarchies. Indeed, their focus was not on regime type or on legality, and they disliked the legalism of their time. When Renaissance thinkers decried tyranny, for example, their concern was not about lawless, one-man rule as such, but immoral or vicious actions and harm to the common good. These could arise (or be corrected) in any regime. They believed that the heart of good government was virtue among the rulers, and that the road to such virtue was serious literary, historical, and philosophical study. Character, not form of government, was central.

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