Humanist Virtue and Constitutional Structure

Roger Berkowitz
James Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51 that, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” For Madison, John Adams, and many of the American Founders, the goal was to develop a science of government that would create checks and balances, multiple competing power structures, that would protect freedom and liberty even when the people might democratically elect craven and corrupt leaders–which undoubtedly they would. In Hannah Arendt’s account of the American founding in On Revolution, she argues that the great innovation of the American constitutional system was its absolute rejection of sovereignty and its embrace of multiple layers and levels of institutions, each with its own base of power. This dispersion of power throughout the different branches of the federal government, state governments, counties, and local governments, combined with the American experience of power in the practice of town hall meetings and civic associations, meant that it would be exceedingly difficult for one demagogue or one movement to take full control of the country and impose a single or totalitarian rule. The constitution of freedom, in Arendt’s telling, is fundamentally based in a constitutional structure that repels absolute rule. 

At the same time, however, Arendt and the Founders also believed in the importance of what is sometimes called republican or civic virtue. The American foundation of freedom equally was a product of a particular experience of people in the new United States, one born of the habit and practice of self-government in town halls, state constitutional conventions, and civic associations. For Arendt, the experience of freedom, of constituting and self-governing, was an essential factor in the emergence of a free political system.  The great threat to freedom Arendt perceived in the United States was that, first, the U.S. Constitution did not institutionalize spaces for the practice of freedom for everyday citizens, and second, that the drive for bourgeois wealth and success tended to overwhelm the love of political action, so that the civic virtue of the people would be lost. 

Erin Maglaque wades into the debate over whether freedom is to be protected by constitutional structure or civic virtue in her critical review of James Hankins’ writing on the essential role of civic virtue. Maglaque is rightly critical of the partisan way civic virtue is being mobilized today to discredit public schools and elevate a particular western view of culture. At the same time, Maglaque respects the humanist impulse that sees education as an essential way to nurture active citizenship. She writes:

The humanist movement of moral and political reform is what James Hankins, a Harvard historian and the foremost scholar of Renaissance Italian humanism and political thought, has termed “virtue politics.” In the vast lost continent of Renaissance Latin literature—not only little-read political treatises but poetry, satire, comedy, commentaries on ancient texts, orations given at graduations and funerals, historical writing, marriage tracts, and the voluminous correspondence among scholars spanning Italy—Hankins has discovered generations of men dedicated to the renewal of virtue in their own corrupted and factional society. He argues in his landmark book Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy (2019) that humanist scholars sought to inculcate justice, goodness, prudence, and modesty in the ruling class through a moral and political program of liberal education.

With Virtue Politics, Hankins departed significantly from the decades-long consensus on what humanism was and what united its many participants. Historians of the Renaissance have long considered it to be a movement of literary style; the common denominator was said to be an interest in a particular set of philological and textual methods aimed at recovering and restoring the literary heritage of antiquity. By contrast, for historians of political thought such as Eugenio Garin, J.G.A. Pocock, and Quentin Skinner, humanism meant republican humanism: the elaboration of a genealogy of liberty, an ideal that historians could trace from Tacitus to the Renaissance republican city-states and its culmination in early American republican thought.

Hankins rejects both arguments—that humanism was either a kind of literary antiquarianism or a one-note republican political philosophy. The movement was grander and nobler in its common purpose to revive virtue through education. Although humanists were united in their moral and political vision, they undertook a hugely varied program of writing, not just in lots of genres but across a dizzying number of subjects: one of Hankins’s objections to the Pocock and Skinner school of thought is that humanists didn’t write only about liberty but also about topics like citizenship, immigration, wealth and inequality, laws and the legal profession, moral character, corruption, marriage and gender relations, and, critically, what it means to pursue a liberal education….

Those of us who teach the humanities in higher education are accustomed to making the case that a liberal arts degree matters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Undergraduate student enrollment across humanities subjects is down. Fewer students are studying history, and even fewer of those are studying premodern or European history. We mostly don’t appeal to the ethical values of a liberal arts degree or a history major anymore because we are forced to sell ourselves in the language of “employability.” Hankins is rightly critical of this nakedly market-driven (and failing) strategy. As a response to the crisis of the humanities, classical education almost makes sense—it is almost a relief. Read Plato to become a better person. Study history to become a moral leader.

If one believes that what makes a good person is a timeless and universal set of qualities and values—prudence, piety, eloquence—then making such a case for the humanities is straightforward, even obvious. But whether or not one agrees with Hankins’s politics, to believe that virtue is an ahistorical human quality is frankly terrible history. What virtue means, and has meant, is not historically stable. Hankins should know that; he’s argued as much in Virtue Politics, in a deft analysis of the way that Machiavelli transformed the earlier humanist virtue of prudence into virtù, something more like an aggressive and manly political effectiveness. But in his public writing, Hankins argues that humanist virtue can be uprooted from the fifteenth century and transplanted to the twenty-first, from the tiny city-states of northern Italy to the sprawling democracy of the United States.