‘Virtue Politics’ Review: Of Soulcraft And Statecraft

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From The Wall Street Journal:

What characteristics are necessary for a political career? How do you recognize an unfit ruler? Should you oppose or try to reform him? These questions are central to recent debates about liberalism, conservatism and meritocracy—and perhaps even impeachment.

Yet they are also very old questions. As Harvard professor James Hankins shows in “Virtue Politics,” a magisterial study of “soulcraft and statecraft,” humanist scholars in the Italian Renaissance were concerned with many of the same puzzles that obsess us today. While acknowledging the variety of responses that they offered, Mr. Hankins focuses on a particular kind of answer. He calls it “virtue politics”: the attempt to reform civic life by improving the morality of the ruling elite.

Virtue politics was not invented in the 15th century. As Mr. Hankins shows, it drew on intellectual currents that extend back to ancient Greece, classical Rome and the Church Fathers of the early Christian era. In different ways, Aristotle, Cicero and Augustine all argued that virtue was the basis of political achievement.

But the central figure in Mr. Hankins’s account is Francesco Petrarca, better known as Petrarch. He is remembered today mostly as a poet and an editor of Latin texts. Mr. Hankins contends that he was also a significant political thinker. According to Mr. Hankins, Petrarch saw his literary and scholarly endeavors as a step toward saving Italy—and perhaps all of Christendom—from misgovernment. Learning to speak and write beautifully was not simply a cultural achievement but also, he believed, a political necessity.

Borrowing a term from German ethnologist Leo Frobenius, Mr. Hankins describes this enterprise as paideuma—an “intentional form of elite culture,” as he writes, “that seeks power within a society with the aim of altering the moral attitudes and behaviors of society’s members, especially its leadership class.” The humanists’ task was to institutionalize and propagate this paideuma through writing, speaking and teaching.

On the intellectual level, Petrarch and his followers sought to rescue classical antiquity, especially pagan Rome, from Christians’ historical suspicion. Although the Romans had not known the true God, humanists argued, their political success was based on their superiority in virtue. When it came to personal rectitude and public spirit, the Romans often exceeded ostensible Christians. The humanists had to acknowledge that not all Romans met this lofty standard. But they adopted Cicero—the statesman, lawyer and philosopher—as its personification.

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True nobility was closely related to the humanist conception of the good government. Unsatisfactory rulers might secure desirable outcomes from selfish motives. Those with true nobility would pursue the right goals for the right reasons. In this respect, humanist political thought had a perfectionist quality. The test of legitimacy was not simply performance, but good character.

Mr. Hankins shows that the humanists’ obsession with character explains their surprising indifference to particular forms of government. If rulers lacked authentic virtue, they believed, it did not matter what institutions framed their power.

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Indeed, a ruler of true nobility, in the humanists’ view, should be cherished even if he came to power in an irregular manner. Despite their admiration for Cicero, some humanists defended Julius Caesar —who invaded Italy, against the senate’s order, and ruled as dictator for life. To these writers, Caesar’s outstanding character and good intentions outweighed his questionable methods. “Can a man raised to power through his own merits, a man who showed such a humane spirit, not to his partisans alone but also to his opponents because they were his fellow citizens—can he rightly be called a tyrant?” asked the Florentine statesman Coluccio Salutati “I do not see how this can be maintained, unless indeed we are to pass judgment arbitrarily.”

Such humanist defenses of Caesar’s virtue are superficially similar to Machiavelli’s infamous account of the virtù of a prince—the capacity for amoral calculation that, in Machiavelli’s view, must guide the effective prince (a generic term that includes any aspirant to power). Mr. Hankins devotes his last three chapters to exploring the differences. If Petrarch is the hero of “Virtue Politics,” Machiavelli is its villain.

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In this respect, Machiavelli prefigures our current predicament. The Renaissance tradition remained influential well into modern times. Particularly in New England, humanist arguments about virtue were often blended with Protestant theology in an amalgam that historian Mark Noll calls “Christian republicanism.” John Adams believed Petrarch showed that “tyranny can scarcely be practiced upon a virtuous and wise people.”

Yet virtue politics was eclipsed by modern constitutionalism. In their emphasis on the separation of powers, Locke and Montesquieu and the other Enlightenment philosophers whose ideas inspired the American Founders shared Machiavelli’s doubts about the sufficiency of virtue. English scholars like Edward Coke and William Blackstone also promoted a greater appreciation for the role of law. We can see the legacy of this shift in the ambiguity of the impeachment process, which appeals both to virtue and to legality.

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Mr. Hankins makes an explicit plea to the modern successors of the elite that the humanists tried to cultivate. Those who enjoy cultural or political influence should consider carefully whether they are worthy of such power.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (sorry if you run into a paywall)