And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the

Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at History of Philosophy.

Net.

Today's episode, The Sweet Restraints of Liberty, Republicanism and civic humanism.

As we know, Italian Renaissance humanism was a pretty fractious movement, featuring heated debates in writing and physical confrontations in person.

There was plenty of character assassination and the occasional attempt at actual assassination.

Modern day research on humanism is by large a more placid affair.

In fact, I can't think of a single knife fight involving specialists in the field.

But it has not been without controversy, and one of the most prominent of the controversies has concerned the ideas put forward by a German historian of the Renaissance, named Hans Barren, who died in 1988.

His life's work centered on the idea of civic humanism in the original German

Birge humanismus, which he saw as a new and thrilling development in the history of political thought.

He traced this development to the turn of the 15th century, when the city of Florence was engaged in an existential struggle with Milan, which was ruled by the Visconti family.

Florentine intellectuals began to promote republicanism as the ideal form of political life, presenting liberty as the core value for which Florence was fighting against an enemy city whose system they saw as oligarchic, if not tyrannical.

The heroes of Baron's story are humanists like Colutio Salutati and above all Leonardo Bruni.

We have met them as experts in classical learning and rhetoric, but both

were Chancellor of Florence and emphatic in their endorsement of Republican ideals,

thus the term civic humanism. Baron was of course well aware that Petrov and other Italian intellectuals had anticipated these 15th century figures with their love of antiquity and cultivation of eloquence, but he believed that it was only in response to the conflict

with Milan that humanists started to use that eloquence for overtly political ends.

He pointed to their new ethic of practical engagement, as found in Salotati's

remark that virtuous activity is holier than idleness, or Bruni's comment, learning, literature, eloquence, none of these is equal to glory one in battle.

So while a Plato or Aristotle might be admirable, a good general is more useful to his city.

With this stress on the political involvement of the humanists, Baron was correcting an earlier

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