Civic Humanism (SEP)

Although widely and commonly confused with republicanism, civic humanism forms a separate and distinct phenomenon in the history of Western political thought. Republicanism is a political philosophy that defends a concept of freedom as non-domination, and identifies the institutions that protect it (Pettit 1999). In particular, republicanism stands against two alternative theories of politics. The first is despotism, especially as manifested in any form of one-man rule; a republic is self-governing, and so are its denizens. The second is liberalism, which posits the primacy of the autonomous individual vis-à-vis public order and government; the republican values civic engagement in order to realize a form of liberty achievable only in and through the community. Republican theorists sometimes refer to writings by historically antecedent authors, such as Aristotle or Machiavelli, but their concern is not primarily accurate interpretation. Rather, to the extent that they show an interest in the past, it is as a source of ideas that they find useful.

By contrast, civic humanism is a historiographical construct. As conventionally employed by scholars, the term refers to a group of thinkers who emerged during the period of the Italian Renaissance, especially in Florence, and who were committed to public engagement (in theory as well as practice) and whose values were fundamentally antithetical to the medieval past. The “invention” of civic humanism is primarily associated with Hans Baron (1900–1988), the famed German-American historian (Fubini 1992). Although he first used the phrase in its original German form (Bürgerhumanismus) as early as 1925, its popularity stems from the publication in 1955 of his classic book The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (revised 1966). In this volume, as well as in later writings that built upon it (many collected in Baron 1968 and 1988), he developed what has come to be called the “Baron thesis” (Witt 1996; Hankins 1995). Baron was not, however, the first scholar to propose that the form of humanism that emerged during the fifteenth century in the Italian cities mainly promoted the civic vita activa rather than the literary and philological pursuits ordinarily ascribed to the humanists. In two books from 1952 and 1954, written and published in Italian, Eugenio Garin defended a position almost identical to that of Baron’s: Renaissance humanism, especially as propounded in Florence, reflects a pronounced shift from the emphasis on contemplation typical of the Middle Ages to the priority of civil action to attain a common good (Garin 1947 [1965]). (If not for purely contingent reasons, the historiographical label for civic humanism might readily have been “the Garin thesis”.) In the present context, it should be noted that some advocates of civic humanism were disposed toward republicanism, but the latter is not entailed by the former.

Read the rest here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/humanism-civic/