The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition

THE SCHEME OF VALUES and problems outlined in the last chapter was clearly not the sole ethos by which the Florentine citizen articulated his sense of civic patriotism. There were other languages, derived from Roman law and from the practical operation of Florentine institutions, in which this might be done and a set of active and participatory values put into words; and it has understandably been the intention of Riesenberg¹ and others to question whether the concept of “civic humanism” is needed at all to explain the rise of a civic consciousness and its articulation. In civil law and municipal statute, they have shown, the citizen's position was expressed in actual rather than theoretical terms, which did not encounter the problems with which this book is becoming concerned. In the chapters which follow, however, it will be argued that a language for which the term “civic humanism” may appropriately be used can be traced, deriving from the assertion of a republican vision of history, and employed for a variety of purposes among which by far the most important was that of asking whether the vivere civile and its values could indeed be held stable in time. This purpose was consciously pursued by the great thinkers of the last years of the Florentine republic, among them Guicciardini who, though trained in both civil and canon law, made remarkably little use of jurisprudence in his studies of civic morality and political institutions; while there is evidence² that in the daily delibera

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