Professor of History at Harvard, founder and General Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library, James Hankins is one of our great living scholars. People forget what that means and what it costs. One thing it means, let me tell you, is that Hankins’s Harvard colleagues have not recognized him with an endowed chair. Ha ha ha! they say. In the same department, President Emerita Drew Gilpin Faust treads the boards as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor. Ha ha ha! says the President Emerita, author of Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury (“A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America”).

In Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy: The Virtuous Republic of Francesco Patrizi of Siena, Hankins returns us to the Renaissance in order to explore the fate of political meritocracy. I will get to the historical subject matter of the book in a moment, but we should note that it is largely philosophical in nature, its arc extending from Plato to the present day. Confronting the present failures of American meritocracy, Hankins comes to sound like Christopher Lasch in The Revolt of the Elites. He adduces a grim sociological phenomenon known as “The Iron Law of Meritocracy.” It holds that a generation of meritocratic elites will revolt against the system that lifted them up and impose a new anti-meritocratic system that stifles difference and dissent. 

Needless to say, American meritocracy would be in dire peril insofar as “The Iron Law” generates a byzantine, nepotistic system of management, let us call it “Administration,” that is anti-meritocratic and irrational as Mad King George.

Hankins’s obscure subject, surprising at first, but increasingly compelling and satisfying as we go on, is the Renaissance poet, magistrate, political philosopher, prelate, and close friend of the humanist Pope Pius II, Francesco Patrizi (1413–94). 

The historical Patrizi was recognized as a beacon of learning at a time when the humanist ferment in Italy, sparked by Petrarch (1304–1374), converged with the high tide of the Italian Renaissance. This was the famous quattrocento, the time of Ficino and Botticelli, the era of magnificent city-republics, preeminently Venice, Florence, and Siena, of kings and warlords and papal armies, of glittering ambassadorial missions, of the end of the Byzantine Empire and the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. 

Wielding his Latin quill, Patrizi wrote celebrated poems and two major political treatises, How to Found a Republic and On Kingship and the Education of a King, the De republica and the De regno, respectively. To understand these works, we need to get a handle on their personal and historical circumstances. Hankins supplies this in his opening chapter, “The Formation of a Political Philosopher.” 

We learn that the Sienese philosopher enjoyed the benefits of a world-class education, as the new discipline of Greek was finding its sea legs. Patrizi’s legendary teacher, Francesco Filelfo, was a Homeric scholar who extended the high standards of earlier Hellenists like Leonardo Bruni and Guarino of Verona. In his early thirties, Patrizi taught as a professor of rhetoric at the Sienese Studio (the Sienese Academy), where he transmitted Latin and Greek to his own pupils. From there, he “rose quickly in the republic’s cursus honorum.” The Latin phrase aptly reminds us of the career of Cicero. 

In his forties, Patrizi barely survived a power crisis among Siena’s elite. His friend and patron Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini (later Pius II) could not prevent his being tortured but intervened to stop his execution; thanks to the powerful cardinal, the terms of Patrizi’s exile from his native city were considerably eased. In his fifties, now a bishop (his wife died young, but we have little information about her), Patrizi almost lost his life to a violent rebellion in Foligno, in the Papal State, having been appointed governor by Pius II.

The middle part of Political Meritocracy in Renaissance Italy comprises extensive and graceful cribs on the De republica, written during the 1460s, and the De regno, which occupied Patrizi in the following decade. Hankins translates rich swaths of the original Latin texts, and he attends closely to Patrizi’s frequent borrowings from classical and contemporary sources. It is fortunate that Hankins has Aristotle’s Politics by heart, because Patrizi often works from it without acknowledgment. For that matter, the Italian humanists often had their fingers in one another’s pies, likewise without citing names and sources. Hankins is undeterred. The relevant source material is displayed in crystal archives under warm, radiant lamps. 

At one point, Hankins simply catalogs the results of his “preliminary research on Patrizi’s sources in the De republica,” beginning with “Agricultural treatises. In Latin: Cato the Elder, Columella, Varro,” and ending, a page and a half later, with “Technical treatises, including medical works and natural philosophy. In Greek: Hippocrates. In Latin: Celsus Cornelius, Pliny the Elder, Vitruvius.” One recalls that the Aldine Press would not be founded until 1494, the year of Patrizi’s death. Old books were hard to come by, and Patrizi must have gone to considerable lengths to obtain them—one thinks of the young Beatles bussing around Liverpool to find someone to teach them new guitar chords. The riches of the world emerged when not everything was available on a screen.

Along with a pervasive concern for what Hankins calls “virtue politics,” two major throughlines connect the De republica to the De regno, establishing affinities and coherence between Patrizi’s conceptions of the ideal republic and the ideal monarchy. The first is Patrizi’s abiding and prescient concern with meritocracy. Hankins knows that “the modern term ‘meritocracy,’ invented as recently as 1958 by the British sociologist and politician Michael Young,” fits imperfectly in the Renaissance humanist milieu. “Yet,” writes Hankins, “some such term is surely needed”: 

Quattrocento humanist usage takes political merit to be a function of “true nobility,”… an attribute of persons who deserve to rule others because they possess good character and good classical education, including education in “eloquence,” meaning high-level communication skills. The opposite of true nobility is a merely hereditary nobility, consisting of persons who have done nothing to deserve rule over others, and whose rule will therefore be experienced as tyranny by the ruled. 

For Patrizi, the good republic and the good monarchy experience much the same need for meritocratic arrangements within a broader culture that honors the virtues. Hankins variously refers to this kind of culture as “inclusivist” and “organic.” For instance, Patrizi invokes “the organic principle that the best republic needs to act in concert like a single body.” Patrizi’s thinking here is a fusion of Aristotle’s respect for the middle class with the humanism of Petrarch and Boccaccio, who championed the “potential for virtue in all social classes.” It is an original synthesis. 

The second major throughline from the De republica to the De regno is the way that Patrizi writes—what Hankins calls his “historico-prudential mode.” In the work of all true humanists, style and content are mutually and reciprocally expressive. Patrizi’s method descends from Petrarch, and I wonder if it influenced Montaigne. It is not scholastic: Patrizi, for instance, has no just war theory. The idea of this mode of writing is to marshal “historical examples and authorities … to prove some moral point.” Patrizi is characteristically exhaustive in his use of citations, and very much drawn to debate. Hankins does not say whether he read Coluccio Salutati, but he certainly learned about argumentation from Cicero.

The magnificent range of Patrizi’s original contributions includes his “discussion of how urban planning can support a free civil life.” (Too bad the Department of City Planning didn’t consult Patrizi before it greenlighted those nauseating skyscrapers on Billionaires’ Row in Manhattan.) Patrizi’s “sustained discussion of citizenship—the first by a political theorist since Aristotle”—leads him to promote universal citizen literacy and public funding for teaching the liberal arts, all of which pioneer new ground. Most importantly, his “meritocratic proposals for choosing magistrates and conducting public deliberation are unexampled in humanist writing in the Renaissance.” Holding to his organicist views of justice and citizenship, he “counsels against engaging in offensive wars for empire.” He differs profoundly in this respect from Machiavelli. 

Hankins attributes Patrizi’s current obscurity to numerous factors: his unsystematic writing, his immersion in Greek and Latin texts, his steady commitment to practical wisdom, phronesis, as opposed to what Machiavelli is said to represent: “pseudo-scientific policy nostrums, a bag of political tricks or modi that rulers can turn to their profit.” As for the rise and fall of reputations, I have another theory. It seems to me that sometimes, when Clio, the muse of history, is off visiting her sister muses, the goddess Fortuna sneaks in and plays Snakes and Ladders with the library books. John Donne, one of the foremost English poets, drifted out of sight for centuries, until his revival during the reign of George V.

Hankins betrays a shade of hope in his vision of the poor, bare, forked animal. He questions Machiavelli’s realism, which “started from the assumption that human beings could be counted on to do the self-interested action, and that appeals to moral principle or religion were either manipulative or delusional.” On the other hand, he admits that virtue politics assume a relatively optimistic or “semi-Pelagian” view of human nature. This dilemma is an end game we know all too well. Jonathan Swift may have summed up the humanist legacy in his pathetic description of Gulliver’s retreating to the company of his horses because they reminded him of the noble Houyhnhnms. 

Hankins, the misfit and sage, is a humanist to the core, a believer in true meritocracy, a time traveler, a navigator among languages, and a comparatist who combines exquisite breadth and peerless depth. His is a voice in the wilderness, not least because of its prophetic timbre. He thus bears a striking resemblance to his subject. What he says about Francesco Patrizi of Siena can be said of himself, and I substitute his name here with the utmost respect: “In a time when the study of history is disappearing from our schools, replaced by pre-packaged ‘narratives’ designed to promote political messaging, Hankins can remind us of the priceless value of seeing ourselves and our times through the eyes of historical periods and places other than our own.”

 $    €     £    ¥    ₣

Speaking of “pre-packaged ‘narratives’ designed to promote political messaging,” we are pleased to remind you that Harvard President Emerita and Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Drew Gilpin Faust’s Necessary Trouble: Growing Up at Midcentury will be available from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux in August. “A memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.”

Ha ha ha!