Francesco Patrizi of Siena and Renaissance Virtue Politics
- Jun 17
- 2 min read
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 and equality could uphold meritocratic principles in government—how it could ensure that its rulers and political class generally were public-spirited, well educated men of virtue and wisdom.
Though almost unknown today, Patrizi’s influence in the later Renaissance, as shown by the printing history of his works, was enormous. In the sixteenth century his political writings were published more often than either Thomas More’s Utopia or Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince. True, printings of Machiavelli’s three great political treatises—The Prince, the Discourses, and The Art of War—slightly outnumbered the printings of Patrizi’s two major works, How to Found a Republic and On Kingship. But on the evidence of their printing history, Patrizi was arguably more influential among the more highly educated. Editions of Machiavelli were mostly in Italian, a European language of culture by the later sixteenth century, but Patrizi’s works were far better known in Latin, the international language of scholarship. They were also translated into Italian, French, Spanish and German, and epitomes of his works circulated in Latin, French, and English.
One reason for Patrizi’s popularity was his extraordinary learning. Patrizi was the first political theorist in European history to have access to almost the entire corpus of ancient Greek political thought we possess today…