Civic humanism, a political ideology
developed in Florence, especially by Leonardo Bruni (1370-1444, Chancellor of
Florence 1427-1444), was a branch of Renaissance humanism that used ancient
sources and humanist principles in order to come out in favour of republican
government, particularly Florence’s republican government. Hans Baron argues
that the reason for the creation and popularity of Bruni’s civic humanism in
Florence was due, in particular, to Florence’s near-annexation by the Duke of
Milan, Giangaleazzo Visconti, in 1402. Florence was seen as the one city to
stand firm against Visconti’s aggressive tyranny, which bore fruit when
Giangalezzo died before he was able to conquer Florence[1].
Leonardo Bruni, in his Panegyric to the
City of Florence in 1402, used this event to ‘prove’ that Florence’s
foreign policy had always been to preserve liberty in Italy against tyrants and
that it was due to the “high morale” of Florence’s republican citizens that
Giangaleazzo was defeated[2]. This event helps explain why humanism took on
a particularly passionate republican tone in Florence, while it had a more
royalist tone in other Italian cities such as Milan or Mantua.
The origins of civic humanism,
however, are not to be the topic of this paper. Rather, we seek to examine the
contents of the ideology itself through an analysis of Bruni’s political works.
Specifically, we will focus on the communitarian and civic nationalist aspects
of Bruni’s civic humanism, a crucial aspect of his political thought. This was the
idea that the interests of the city collective/community were to be esteemed
above the interests of individuals, on the one hand, and above more
universalistic notions of morality and justice on the other hand. Bruni uses
ancient sources to pinpoint the city as the perfect unit for a community of
men. Because of this, he argues that service to the city-collective becomes one
of the highest virtues that individuals can strive for. He implies, further,
that morally, republican Florence could basically do no wrong to others,
because in a way, what served the interests of the Florentine community became,
almost de facto, a moral action.
Why was the city the favoured
political unit in Bruni’s political thought? First, we must realize that,
according to Bruni, the definition of a city is that it be a self-sufficient
community: “When it is not self-sufficient it should not be called a city,
since it is a property of a city to contain the means of satisfying whatever is
required to sustain life”[3].
Using the modern definition of a city as a particular urban area, this is
impossible, for doesn’t a city need a countryside to grow food for its
inhabitants in order for it to be self-sufficient? And indeed, Bruni identifies
not just “artisans” and “warriors”, but also “agriculturists” as the three
vital classes of people necessary to form a self-sufficient city[4].
Accordingly, in the Panegyric, Bruni
does not confine his praise of Florence solely to urban, metropolitan Florence.
He also considers the country houses, walled towns, and the agricultural
countryside surrounding Florence to be a key aspect of the Florentine ensemble. He praises the productive agricultural
countryside for making Florence self-sufficient and the walled towns that are
like “the stars” surrounding “the moon”, which is Florence[5].
Thus, though the urban, metropolitan city is the most important part of the
polity in Bruni’s thought, the polity also includes the surrounding towns and
countryside.
In political fact, as Baron argues,
the more medieval political order of Trecento Italy “with fragmented local
allegiances but a universal allegiance either to emperor or pope” had given way
in the Quattrocento to “a system of sovereign region-states each of which had
absorbed the abundance of local autonomies”[6].
It was the regional city-state of Florence that Bruni took as his ideal
political community. To justify this choice, Bruni, as noted above, defined
cities, with Aristotle and his followers, in his notes on his translation of
the pseudo-Aristotelian economics, as a “common society” whose inhabitants,
when pooled together, “can have enough to support a good standard of living”
and who “live under the same laws”[7].
This is why he made the point in the Panegyric
that Florence and its countryside were self-sufficient, making them
“independent of outside help either for necessities or even for luxuries”[8]. Of
course, this assertion was in no way true. Florence at that time relied heavily
on international banking and the international wool trade for its great wealth.
Nevertheless, Bruni had to claim that Florence was self-sufficient in order to
legitimize it as the perfect community of men, the polis of the ancient Greeks. By doing so, he was able to justify making
the interests of this particular collective supreme in his political thought.
Having identified his favoured
political collective, Bruni had to define the proper relationship between this
collective and the individual, and between this collective and other, rival
political collectives. Starting with the individual, Bruni often hinted that he
saw the individual mainly as an instrument to serve the interests of the city
collective. Of course, in Bruni’s original justification of the city as supreme
collective, he mentions that cities are formed in order to enable individuals
to live well. Nevertheless, because the city collective is such an important component
of the general happiness of individual citizens, its preservation and interests,
in Bruni’s thought, becomes even more important than the preservation and
interests of individuals themselves. This idea is expressed in the following
passage: “Since without cities there is no life for human beings, devotion to
country and the acceptance of death for its salvation are praised to the skies”[9]. And
again: “Foremost honor is deservedly given to his native land, for that is the
first and prerequisite basis of human happiness, to be put as object of
veneration ahead even of parents.”[10].
This
theme appears in Bruni’s History of the
Florentine People too, where Bruni claims that Giano della Bella, the
leader of those agitating for the Ordinances of Justice, criticized the
Florentine people who “kept letting individuals suffer injustice” and who
“failed to realize that they were all as a group being threatened by shameful
servitude”[11].
By contrast, once the Ordinances were passed, the Florentine people exercised
their collective power by joining the first post-Ordinances Standard-Bearer of
Justice, Baldo Ruffoli, in exiling and destroying the properties of the clan of
a noble who murdered a common citizen[12].
In Bruni’s historical narrative, when individuals cared only about themselves,
they were ripe to be assaulted and enslaved by violent noblemen, but when they
came together as a collective, they were able to amass enough power to protect
their lives, liberty, and property from their rapacious enemies.
This idea also shaped Bruni’s ideas concerning
the accumulation of wealth. In general, Bruni was far friendlier towards the
accumulation of wealth than his medieval predecessors. In the Preface to his
translation of the Economics, Bruni
says that: “Wealth is indeed useful, since it is both an embellishment for
those who possess it, and the means by which they may exercise virtue”, and
then says that: “Therefore for our own sakes, and even more for love of our
children, we ought to strive as far as we honorably can to increase our wealth,
since it is included by the philosophers among the things that are good”[13]. It
would appear that Bruni has adopted a fairly individualistic, or at least
family-oriented, view of the virtues of accumulating wealth here, but in his
political orations, he takes a different stance. In his Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi, Bruni brags about the
wealth of Florentine citizens, but then says: “Evidence of it (Florence’s great
wealth) is this long Milanese war which has been waged at incredible cost, in
which we are spending over thirty-five hundred thousand (florins), and
nevertheless men are prompter in paying their levy now when the war is drawing
to a close than they were at is beginning”[14].
The relevant evidence of Florentine wealth for Bruni is here their ability to
spend on collective endeavours, not individual gratifications. Bruni chooses
not to brag about the luxuries that Florentine patricians can enjoy or the rich
estates that Florentines are able to leave to their children. Rather, it is the
promptness in paying taxes for a war effort of the city collective that
receives Bruni’s praise.
It
may be objected that in the Panegyric,
Bruni talks about the interior and exterior beauty of Florentine buildings,
perhaps indicating that he does praise wealth for its ability to buy luxuries[15]. However,
he does so in the context of praising Florence as a whole, rather than in order
to praise the good taste and wealth of individual Florentines. Bruni uses the
beauty of Florentine buildings as a praise of Florence as a collective, over
other, rival, city collectives. Bruni interprets city beautification not as an
individual affair, but as a collective affair, concerning the pride of the
whole city. Thus, in his political works at least, the accumulation of wealth,
and individual endeavours in general, are primarily to be instruments for
advancing the welfare of the city as a collective entity.
What of the relationship in Bruni’s
thought between Florence, Bruni’s favoured collective, and other political
collectives? In the Panegyric Bruni
writes: “Therefore, to you, also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right
dominion over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy (because
they were descended from the Romans and carried on their spirit). From this it
follows that all wars that are waged by the Florentine people are most just,
and this people can never lack justice in its wars since it necessarily wages
war for the defense or recovery of its own territory”[16].
This passage is quite bombastic and, admittedly, Bruni takes a more moderate
stance in other places, but it suggests his general attitude towards the perennial
justice of his collective’s cause. Later on in the Panegyric, Bruni asserts that Florence has always kept all its
promises to other states and that its primary goal was always to preserve the
liberty of the states of Italy[17].
Thus, Bruni did not really advocate that Florence conquer the whole world and
excuse this by claiming some shadowy inheritance rights from ancient Rome, as
the first passage quoted might suggest, but at no point does he assert that
anything republican Florence did in its foreign policy was unjust.
A good example of this is in Bruni’s
letter he wrote as chancellor, justifying Florence’s 1429 invasion of Lucca, A Rebuttal of the Critics of the People of
Florence for the Invasion of Lucca. Bruni writes: “I wish therefore to
state that the invasion of Lucca, until the people of Florence decided upon it,
was something I did not favor, and always counselled against; not, however,
because I thought it unjust or dishonorable, but because wars entail such
evils, desolations and other great misfortunes that the very thought of them
causes me instinctively to hold them in horror and to seek to avoid them. Yet,
when the decision was made, it was my duty and that of every citizen to accept
what the city had decided and ordained”[18].
In this passage, Bruni expresses his personal disapproval of the war, but
quickly reassures us of two things. First, that the war could not possibly be
unjust, even though you would think that the justice of something that involved
“evils, desolations and other great misfortunes” would at least be questioned
for that reason alone. Second, that even though he was personally opposed, once
the city collective had decided something, it was his duty as an individual to
put away his misgivings and support the city wholeheartedly. This suggests that
for Bruni, the justice of something that the city collective had decided was
unquestionable. Another passage, from De
Militia, lends support to this view: “we should consider man’s true duties
only those which have been established by its (the city’s) constitution and
ordinance”[19].
Conspicuously absent from this statement is the religious view that man’s
primary duties are assigned by God or that man has certain moral duties to his
fellow men, regardless of which political collective they belong to. Rather,
the city collective becomes the ultimate source of men’s duties, and thus of
justice as well.
Another example of Bruni’s
city-centered conception of justice is found in De Militia. He says that the main function of the warrior, or miles, is to defend citizens against
evil[20].
Bruni says that the miles should not
just defend citizens against evil coming from foreign powers, but he should
also “help his country by word and deed when it is being troubled by wicked
citizens” by protecting the weak against the aggression of the strong[21].
However, Bruni also praises Romulus for attaching great importance to his armed
forces, or militia, confirmed in
Romulus’s supposed last words to Julius Proculus: “tell the Romans it is the
will of the gods that my Rome should be the capital of the world. Let them
therefore cultivate and master the art of the military, and pass it on to their
posterity, so that no human power will be able to resist Roman arms”[22].
Despite what Bruni says about the miles being
defenders of citizens against evil, he praises the attitude of a ruler who
wanted to strengthen the militia in
order that his city could become lord of the world, hardly a defensive
undertaking. The paradox is resolved however, when we realize that Bruni
assigned to the miles the duty of
protecting their own citizens against
evil, he said nothing about any other collective’s citizens. In Bruni’s
thought, the warriors, like other citizens, have duties only to their
particular city collective, not to God or to a more universal morality or
justice. This allows them, without contradiction, to defend their own citizens
against evil, while aggressing against the citizens of other political
collectives, because they owe these outsiders no protection.
Thus, the idea that the perfect
political collective was the city-state and that both the individual citizen
and more universal considerations of morality and justice should be subordinate
to the interests of this city collective was an important aspect of Leonardo
Bruni’s civic humanist political thought. This communitarian worldview would
take a place beside the more religious, Christian-universalist worldview
characteristic of medieval thought and the more individualist worldview that
would later emerge in the thought of some Enlightenment and classical liberal
thinkers in the array of Europeans’ potential political philosophies. As such,
an elucidation of this aspect of Bruni’s thought helps place him, as a
political thinker, within the broader trajectory of European intellectual
history.
[1] Hans
Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian
Renaissance (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1955), 33.
[2] Leonardo
Bruni, “Panegyric to the City of Florence,” in The Earthly Republic, ed. Benjamin Kohl and Ronald Witt, trans.
Benjamin Kohl (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 165-167.
[3] Leonardo
Bruni, “On Knighthood (De Militia),”
in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed.
Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, David Thomson, trans. Gordon Griffiths
(Binghamton, New York: Centre for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies State
University of New York at Binghamton, 1987), 129.
[4] Bruni, De Militia, 129.
[5] Bruni, Panegyric, 144-145.
[6]
Baron, 9.
[7] Leonardo
Bruni, “Bruni’s Translation and Notes on the Economics: Bruni’s Notes to Book
I, Chapter 1,” in The Humanism of
Leonardo Bruni, 309.
[8] Bruni, Panegyric, 145.
[9] Bruni, De Militia, 130.
[10]
Bruni, “Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi,” in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 123.
[11]Leonardo
Bruni, History of the Florentine People
,vol I, trans. James Hankins (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001),
361.
[12]
Bruni, History of the Florentine People Vol I, 373.
[13] Leonardo
Bruni, “Preface to Book I of the Aristotelian Treatise on Economics, or Family
Estate Management, addressed to Cosimo de’ Medici,” in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, 305-306.
[14]
Bruni, Oration for the Funeral of Nanni Strozzi, 127.
[15] Bruni, Panegyric, 140.
[16] Bruni, Panegyric, 150.
[17] Bruni, Panegyric, 161, 165-166.
[18] Leonardo
Bruni, “A Rebuttal of the Critics of the People of Florence for the Invasion of
Lucca,” in The Humanism of Leonardo
Bruni, 146.
[19] Bruni, De Militia, 128.
[20] Bruni, De Militia, 131.
[21] Bruni, De Militia, 139-140.
[22] Bruni, De Militia, 134-135.
