Patrizi and Virtue Politics

Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-1494) was the greatest political philosopher of the Italian Renaissance before the generation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) and Francesco Guicciardini (1483-1540). He is the principal exponent of the humanist tradition of ‘virtue poltiics.’ As such, he was the first Western political philosopher since antiquity to devote sustained attention to the question of how a republic devoted to liberty and equality could uphold meritocratic principles in government—how it could ensure that its rulers and political class generally were public-spirited, well educated men of virtue and wisdom.
 

Though almost unknown today, Patrizi’s influence in the later Renaissance, as shown by the printing history of his works, was enormous. In the sixteenth century his political writings were published more often than either More’s Utopia or Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince. True, printings of Machiavelli’s three great political treatises—The Prince, the Discourses, and The Art of War—slightly outnumbered the printings of Patrizi’s two major works, How to Found a Republic and On Kingship. But on the evidence of their printing history, Patrizi was arguably more influential among the more highly educated. Editions of Machiavelli were mostly in Italian, a European language of culture by the later sixteenth century, but Patrizi’s works were far better known in Latin, the international language of scholarship. They were also translated into Italian, French, Spanish and German, and epitomes of his works circulated in Latin, French, and English.

One reason for Patrizi’s popularity was his extraordinary learning. Patrizi was the first political theorist in European history to have access to almost the entire corpus of ancient Greek political thought we possess today. A highly accomplished Hellenist himself, he was able to study and synthesize the newly available Greek literature that was rapidly filling the shelves of Italian libraries during the quattrocento, both in the original and in new Latin translations made by his fellow humanists. Medieval scholastics had been able to study Aristotle’s Politics after the Dominican friar William of Moerbeke translated it into Latin around 1260, and the encounter with Aristotle made a deep impression on theorists from Thomas Aquinas to Marsilius of Padua. But the translation movement of the Renaissance vastly extended the Latin West’s access to the heritage of ancient Greece. The medievals had not possessed any of the political works of Plato, Xenophon, Isocrates, Polybius, Dio Chrysostom, or Plutarch. They had no access to the political history of the Greeks written by Herodotus, Thucydides, or Xenophon, or to the Greek historians of the Roman Empire such as Polybius, Appian, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Diodorus Siculus, and Arrian. Patrizi read and excerpted all these authors, and many other Greek and Latin writers as well.

One conviction Patrizi took from his Greek authorities, fundamental to virtue politics, was that political institutions could not function well unless the princes and magistrates who inhabited them were well educated men of good character and practical wisdom. ‘The man who cannot govern himself cannot govern others’ was a favorite classical adage with him as with other humanists. Unlike some other humanists, however, Patrizi did not adopt the view, common in his day, that institutions were irrelevant so long as rulers were virtuous. Patrizi recognized the superficiality of this view. He posed the question how institutions could be designed to promote virtue among rulers and to protect the organs of the republic from wounds inflicted by ignorant, greedy and power-hungry persons. He devised a mode of public deliberation that privileged the voices of the best citizens. He proposed as his optimus status reipublicae, or best possible republic, a mixed constitution led by aristocrats, though his necessary condition for membership in the aristocracy was not high birth but good character and humane learning. He was nevertheless aware of the claims all good citizens have to participate in their own government and understood, like Aristotle, that broader participation by citizens in their government reinforces political stability. Citizens could not participate in government without some education. By a natural process of thought Patrizi became the first author in European history to advocate universal literacy among the citizen class as well as public funding for teachers of the liberal arts. In the De republica he outlines a detailed curriculum designed to foster virtue in citizen-rulers.

Patrizi went so far as to say that no one should be considered a citizen who did not possess basic literacy. He was in fact the first political thinker since Aristotle to devote sustained attention to the concept of citizenship in both its republican and royal varieties. To provide equal justice for all citizens, the best republic had to be built on the rule of law: the law must always stand above and limit the will of magistrates. The principles of law, however, were to be drawn from nature and tradition—above all, the tradition of Roman law—and not from revelation. Religious law was its own distinct system and should be administered by priests, not enforced by the state. Patrizi calls for reformation of the legal system to protect it from the influence of wealth; hence both prosecutors and defense attorneys should work for honor alone or be paid by the state. He did not propose an independent judiciary but relied on an elaborate system of appeal to prevent corruption.

Like other humanists, Patrizi advocated a moral economy, one in which the pursuit of mercantile profit was to be subordinated to the needs of family and community (Hankins 2019, 206-15). The moral economy, Patrizi thought, could be achieved by educating merchants and bankers in the virtues of frugality and generosity and teaching them to avoid greed and luxury. The republic could help by building strong civic norms of acceptable behavior. Among these norms Patrizi emphasizes the importance of work for all citizens and the avoidance of idleness. No one should live entirely on rents or devote himsef wholly to pleasure. Patrizi defends private property but says it must be limited; and the rich should be prevented from taking advantage of the poor. Patrizi proposed a scheme of agrarian reform whereby state lands would be leased on a long-term basis to the rural poor in order to prevent them from falling under the power of wealthy landowners. According to the Sienese philosopher, the income from its land leases would give the state financial independence and allow it to keep taxes low and avoid reliance on forced loans from the rich, which always came at a price.

A true representative of the larger Renaissance movement, Patrizi was also an advocate of the ‘virtuous environment’ (Hankins 2019, 51-54). Following the lead of Leon Batttista Alberti and of his patron, Pope Pius II, Patrizi was the first political theorist to explore the potential of urban planning to shape civic values and to facilitate a free way of life. Drawing on the expertise of architects and on classical antiquity for inspiration, magistrates and founders of new cities should make their cities strong and beautiful. Public and private spaces should remind citizens of their glorious Roman ancestors. The fine arts were to be cultivated with a view to encouraging virtue, piety, and love of country. The city should also encourage the study of poetry, oratory, history and philosophy to ennoble the minds of its citizens.