Rhetoric and Politics in Italian Humanism

The development of Italian humanism, from the close of the fourteenth, all through the fifteenth and up to the middle of the sixteenth century, ran parallel to a process of political transformation which affected the public life and civil organization of the Italian States. The last flashes of the life of the communes gave place to the signories, and these in turn were superseded by the political, social, and spiritual subjection to Spain which marked the consolidation and end of the principalities.' The humanists, in the character of political theorists searching for the ideal state and the perfect ruler, of jurists, historians, panegyrists, or orators pleading for one side or another, often turned their attention to contemporary events which they praised, condemned, observed, and interpreted. This political preoccupation of humanists culminates in the work of Machiavelli and Guicciardini who, however, by their very greatness and the precision of their thought, rise superior to the humanism in which they are rooted. If the Machiavellian conception of the autonomy of politics goes beyond the motives which are generally called " humanist," and if Machiavelli's moral seriousness might oblige us to place him almost in opposition to the world of the letterati and pedanti who cultivated the beautiful form,2 it is impossible to separate from the humanist tradition the Florentine secretary's aspiration towards Italian unity and national renewal by means of a return to Roman civil virtue ; again, his pragmatic conception of political life and of history no less than his distinction between " Virtue " and " Fortune " are of purely humanist type.3 The same is true of Guicciardini whose impulses as a historian, and whose ideas on political life, are deeply rooted in the Florentine humanists' preoccupation with the grand and the sublime in human passions.4 Until recently the attention of historians has been so fixed upon Machiavelli and Guicciardini that they have neglected the political thought of the lesser humanists, relegating all their eloquent imaginings, their learned constructions, their impassioned pleadings to that world of useless, if highsounding, words, of abstract affirmation and unpractical idealism, which goes under the name of " rhetoric." They dismissed as rhetorical the stoic