Abstract
One of this book’s tasks is to unsettle the Westphalia narrative of International Relations that identifies the Peace of Westphalia as the symbolic moment when medieval international relations gave way to the modern international system of sovereign territorial states. This modern/ medieval dichotomy has heuristic value in that it isolates the modern states system from the limitless text of history. Nevertheless, it is ideological for it reinforces the Western myth of progress: it legitimizes the international system by aligning it with the progressive values of modernity that signified man’s escape from the Middle Age mire of religion and superstition. However, serious study of the Renaissance, during which thought seems to be reaching to modernity while being constrained by the grammars and vocabularies of medieval Christianity, collapses this neat opposition between the Medieval and the Modern. In the Renaissance modernity advances and retreats like the wash of an incoming tide as reason and myth, science and superstition battle it out for supremacy. Study of the Renaissance shows that modern thought, culture, and politics did not emerge suddenly phoenix-like out of medieval darkness and so undermines the Westphalian chronological rupture between medieval and modern international politics. My concern in this chapter is with the Renaissance critique of hierarchy. However, before addressing this aspect of Renaissance thought consideration must be given to the meaning of the Renaissance per se.
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Notes
Wallace K Ferguson, The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press, 1948);
also Ferguson, “The Reinter pretation of the Renaissance,” (1956), reprinted in Wallace K. Ferguson, Renaissance Studies (London, Ontario: University of Western Ontario, 1963), pp. 17–30.
See also Johan Huizinga, “The Problem of the Renaissance” (1920) in Huizinga, Men and Ideas: History, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, tr. J. S. Holmes and H. van Marle (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 243–87.
Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (Stockholm: Almquist and Wiksell, 1960), p. 10.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History, tr. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), pp. 410–411.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (London: Phaidon Press, 1995).
Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. vii.
Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), p. 5.
Dana B. Durand, “Tradition and Innovation in Fifteenth Century Italy: ‘Il Primato dell’ Italia’ in the Field of Science,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 1943, pp. 1–20.
Lynn Thorndike, “Renaissance or Prenaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 1943, pp. 63–74.
Hans Baron, “Towards a More Positive Evaluation of the Fifteenth-Century Renaissance,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 4, 1943, pp. 21–49.
Federico Chabod, “Il Rinascimento,” (1942) in Chabod, Rinascimento, pp. 73–109, at p. 83. My translation.
E. H. Gombrich, “The Renaissance-Period or Movement?” in Background to the English Renaissance: Introductory Lectures, ed. J. B. Trapp (London: Gray-Mills Publishing, 1974), pp. 9–30.
Wallace K. Ferguson, “The Interpretation of the Renaissance: Suggestions for a Synthesis,” (1948) in Ferguson, Renaissance Studies, pp. 125–35.
William J. Bouwsma, “The Renaissance and the Drama of Western History,” The American Historical Review, 84:1, 1979, pp. 1–15 at p. 5.
Peter Burke, The Italian Renaissance: Culture and Society in Italy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986), p. 201. In Botticelli ’s Primavera the space between the earth and moon is filled with nymphs, wood spirits, and demons.
John Hale, The Civilization of Europe in the Renaissance (London: Harper Collins, 1993), p. 562.
Arthur Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of the Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 101.
Paul Oskar Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, tr. V. Conant (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 74–75.
Paul Oskar Kristeller, Eight Philosophers of the Italian Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964), p. 43.
Charles Trinkaus, “Mar silio Ficino and the Idea of Human Autonomy,” in G. Garfagnini (ed.) Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone: Studi e documenti (Firenze: Leo S. Olschki, 1986), pp. 197–210.
Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Ficino and Pomponazzi on the Place of Man in the Universe,” in Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and the Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 102–10, at pp. 109–10.
R. B. J. Walker, “Sovereignty, Identity, Community: Reflections on the Horizons of Contemporary Political Practice,” in R. B. J. Walker and Saul H. Mendlovitz (eds.), Contending Sovereignties: Redefining Political Community (Boulder: Lynne Reinner, 1990), pp. 159–85, at p. 175.
Alexandre Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), p. 2.
Nicholas Copernicus, De revolutionibus orbium coelestium, reprinted in Michael J. Crowe, Theories of the World from Antiquity to the Copernican Revolution (New York: Dover, 1990), pp. 102–34.
Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (London: Unwin Paperbacks, 1979), p. 513; and Lovejoy, Great Chain of Being, pp. 103–4.
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). For Pocock, paradigms are language structures whose function is to define and determine the commonly held view of politics in a society, thereby licensing some forms of political belief and action and restricting others.
J. H. Hexter, “The Machiavellian Moment,” History and Theory, 16:3, 1977, pp. 306–37, at p. 316.
Gennaro Sasso, “Machiavelli e la teoria dell’Anacyclosis,” Rivista Storica Italiana, 70:1, 1958, pp. 333–73.
See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Levio, ed. Gennaro Sasso and Giorgio Inglese (Milano: Biblioteca Universale Rizzoli, 1984), I:ii. For a useful comparison of Polybius and Machiavelli, see Leslie J. Wa lker, “Notes on Book I,” in The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. Walker (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1950), pp. 6–13.
Felix Gilbert, Machiavelli and Guicciardini: Politics and History in Sixteenth Century Florence (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965), p. 199.
Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1927), p. 19.
Anthony J. Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 65. Car y J. Neder man, “Amazing Gr ace: For tune, God, and Free Will in Machiavelli’s Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 60:4, 1999, pp. 617–38 argues against Par el that Christian providentialism still underscores Machiavelli’s concept of fortuna.
Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Arthur L. Burd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), XVI, pp. 365–67 and p. 358. These and subsequent quotations are my translations.
Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 236.
Giuseppe Prezzolini, Machiavelli: Anticristo (Rome: Gherardo Casini, 1954), p. 30. My translation. Compare Strauss’s view of Il Principe as “immoral and irreligious” and Machiavelli as a “teacher of evil with Sebastian De Grazia’s claim that the many references to God “[s]cattered about his writings… like poppies in a field of chick peas” indicates that scholastic categories of knowledge and Christian cultural norms pervade Machiavelli’s writing to the extent that he “discourses about God always in the conventional reverent attitude.”
Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli (Seattle: University of Washing ton Press, 1969), pp. 9–10 and p. 12;
and Sebastian de Grazia, Machiavelli in Hell (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), pp. 58–59.
J. Samuel Preus, “Machiavelli’s Functional Analysis of Religion: Context and Object,” Journal of the History of Ideas, XL:2, 1979, pp. 171–90.
Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Berlin, Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas, ed. Henry Hardy (London: The Hogarth Press, 1979), pp. 25–79.
Bernard Guillemain, Machiavel: L’anthropologie politique (Geneva: Librairie Droz S.A., 1977), p. 328. My translation.
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© 2010 Jeremy Larkins
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Larkins, J. (2010). The Renaissance Critique of Hierarchy. In: From Hierarchy to Anarchy. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101555_6
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