Quattrocento Humanism and the Question of the Vivere Civile

In the last few decades, a near consensus has been reached among scholars of humanism concerning humanist political thought. The humanists, they believe, were not committed to a specific political ideology, but rather to “virtue politics,” as defined by James Hankins, which in effect meant the education of the ruling elite. The humanists allied themselves with the powerful, and hence, in this view, the basic conservativism of humanist political thought. This reconstruction adequately describes mainstream humanist political thought from Petrarch to Erasmus and beyond. It tends, however, to systematically ignore the more radical notions and views propagated by a small number of humanists as well as the internal strains of humanist political discourse. The present research offers a different conceptualization of humanist political discourse, which can provide full theoretical account for precisely these aspects of humanism in the writings of quattrocento Florentine humanists, chiefly Leon Battista Alberti, Aurelio Lippo Brandolini and Bartolomeo Scala.

 Humanist political discourse rejected the basic premise of mainstream classical and medieval political thought, namely that human reality reflected or partook in the rational, unchangeable and hierarchic order of the cosmos. It presupposed instead that the political world was a human artifact, the product of human actions and desires. Exploring the implications of this assumption undermined traditional political thought and engendered innovative notions and theories. By rejecting the hierarchical perception of human reality, humanist political discourse could coherently elaborate a conclusive version of the vivere civile and particularly of the concept of the citizen, that is, the individual who is free to fashion his polity together with his fellow, and equal, citizens. At the same time, disjoining the human world from the objective rational order of things undermined the notion of human natural sociability. Only few humanist works pursued the inevitably unsettling implications of this challenge to classical and medieval anthropology. If the basic premise is that men are selfish, lustful power-seekers, asocial or even anti-social creatures, this undermines the ethical value and even the very likelihood of the vivere civile. One alternative offered was to divert the individual’s energy to economic activity aimed at accumulating wealth. A more somber conclusion from the same premises was the exploration of tyranny as a viable political option. Beyond that, and in more general terms, the recognition of the irreducibly contingent dimension of human reality had a relativizing effect that led to the contemplation of previously unacceptable or even unknown possibilities. At the same time, it engendered awareness of the fragility and finiteness of any political order and the impossibility of providing it with ultimate theoretical and ethical grounding.