On Virtue Politics

The Golden Thread (Substack), June 22, 2026 Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413-1494) was the most important political philosopher in the tradition of humanist virtue politics as well as a fine Latin poet (click here for an overview of his ideas). His short letter-treatise on How To Be a Good Magistrate (De gerendo magistratu) offers a striking contrast with Machiavelli’s approach to the exercise of political power. Patrizi in fact had far more practical experience in government

The Golden Thread (Substack), June 17, 2026 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 politics.’ 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 an

First Things , April 9, 2024 When I was at All Souls College at Oxford some years ago I had a conversation during a Saturday evening...

The Good Society , vol. 31, no. 1 (2022) The teaching of virtue in the Renaissance was certainly more generic and more bookish. The texts...

Principia: A Journal of Classical Education 2.1 (Spring 2023) Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413–1494) was the most important political...

Law and Liberty , May 11, 2022 In contemporary America, the most glamorous of the virtues is undoubtedly justice. On battlefields,...

Nordic Journal of Renaissance Studies 18 (2022) … One conviction Patrizi took from his Greek authorities, fundamental to what I have...

First Things , October 11, 2021 Last weekend I attended the “Higher Education Summit,” an annual gathering sponsored by the Classical...

First Things , November 1, 2020 The words “piety” and “pious” have an archaic ring; moderns find them hard to use without irony or a...

First Things , December 1, 2018 At present there is a great deal of handwringing about civility. On campus, students in screaming packs...