How To Avoid a Revolution: Francesco Patrizi of Siena on Stability in Republican Regimes
- patricklewisbaker
- Jan 1, 2022
- 2 min read
… One conviction Patrizi took from his Greek authorities, fundamental to what I have called the “virtue politics” of the Italian humanists, was that political institutions could not function well unless the princes and magistrates who inhabited them were well educated men of good character and practical wisdom. “The man who cannot govern himself cannot govern others” was a favorite classical adage with him as with other humanists. Unlike some other humanists, however, Patrizi did not adopt the view, common in his day, that institutions were irrelevant so long as rulers were virtuous. That view had been expressed by Isocrates in the Panathenaicus, but Patrizi recognized its superficiality. He posed the question how institutions could be designed to promote virtue among rulers and to protect the organs of the republic from wounds inflicted by ignorant, greedy and power-hungry persons. He devised a mode of public deliberation that privileged the voices of the best citizens. He proposed as his optimus status reipublicae, or best possible republic, a mixed constitution led by aristocrats, though his aristocracy was not defined by high birth but by good character and humane learning. He was nevertheless aware of the claims all good citizens have to participate in their own government and understood, like Aristotle, that broader participation by citizens in their government reinforces political stability. Citizens could not participate in government without some education. By a natural process of thought Patrizi became the first author in European history to advocate universal literacy among the citizen class as well as public funding for teachers of the liberal arts. In the De republica (to shorten for convenience the title of his major work) he outlines a detailed curriculum designed to foster virtue in citizen-rulers…