Impeachment and the Renaissance
- sofiapbaker
- Dec 22, 2019
- 1 min read
It’s common for historians to write books for the anniversaries of famous events, like the recent 500th anniversary of the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation or the 100th of the Russian Revolution. But it doesn’t always work out that way.
A book I have been working on in one way or another for the better part of a quarter-century has become suddenly, horribly relevant in a way I never anticipated. For this I can thank the impeachment of President Trump. As I watch America’s elected officials, one after another, disgracing the public stage, crazed with partisanship, driven by incontinent rage to enact their lawless impulses, I can’t help but think that we are reliving the crisis of 14th-century Italy, the convulsion that gave rise to the Renaissance.
This may sound far-fetched. But it was precisely the collapse of institutions and the twin diseases of violent partisanship and tyranny that drove the great political thinkers of the Renaissance to invent a new instrument of statecraft…