Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
even more Florence, traded in commodities produced in their own cities, such as Florentine textiles; and great merchant dynasties did invest in production. But substantial wealth and power depended on command of trading networks, which in turn depended not simply on the quality or price of goods produced at home but on superiority in controlling and negotiating markets, to say nothing of dynastic connections, patronage, personal networks among patrician families, and leading positions in ruling oligarchies.
Even where, as in Florence, wealth was heavily invested in production, it was no less dependent on ‘extra-economic’ factors, not least on office in the city-state’s administration. The career of the Medici speaks volumes: they began in the wool trade, then moved on to achieve their greatest wealth, with the help of family connections and personal networks among the Florentine patriciate, not as producers but as bankers to European princes and popes. Three Medici themselves became popes. The dynasty finally reached the summit of its ambition as effectively rulers of the Florentine republic, leaving the wool trade far behind.
In Renaissance Florence, in other words, political and economic power were inextricably connected in the feudal manner; and this was true not only for city elites. The guilds that organized the wool trade and other occupations were principal players not only in the economic sphere, protecting the interests of their members and sheltering them from competition, but also in the political domain. The guilds themselves had autonomous corporate powers, governed by charters and systems of rules that had the force of law. It may even be misleading to speak of citizenship in the republic, since active membership in the civic community did not reside in individuals but in these corporate entities.
Internal conflicts in the city-states were shaped by this unity of political and economic power. Economic rivalries among merchant families could never simply take the form of competition in the marketplace but were always political rivalries at the same time. The pursuit of high office and the dominance of any family depended on its standing in a complex network of patrons and clients, inevitably embroiled in factional struggles, often with support from foreign powers. It has even been suggested that this helps to explain the remarkable cultural richness of these city-states and their patronage of the arts, creating not only great wealth but a climate of competitive achievement and conspicuous consumption – especially in times and places where, as in the Florentine republic, artisanal guilds played a major political role.
In Venice, which remained an oligarchy even when ostensibly ruled by one man, the Doge, it was largely a matter of rivalry among noble families. In Florence, other strains and conflicts were also at work. Patrician family connections or membership in major guilds afforded the only consistent access to the political sphere; and political battles throughout the history of Florence often revolved around the political standing of lesser guilds. There were constant struggles over access to the political domain among signori, rich merchants and guildsmen, as well as between major and lesser guilds. Outside the guilds, the popolo minuto, the ‘little people’ or labouring classes, including large numbers of skilled and unskilled workers in the wool trade, were completely excluded from the political sphere, except for one brief democratic moment, the Revolt of the Ciompi in 1378, one of the most famous incidents in Florentine history. The ciompi rebels briefly seized control of the government and then, with support from some members of the minor guilds, obtained guild privileges, which meant access to the political domain – only to lose it soon thereafter when the popolo grasso, their wealthy ‘fat’ compatriots, now with the help of the minor guilds, deprived them of guild and political privileges.
This episode would long remain, for better or worse, a vivid memory in the consciousness of the republic, not least for Machiavelli; and it illustrates most dramatically the distinctiveness of the civic domain in the Italian city-states. When, just three years later, the English peasant revolt erupted, its leader, Wat Tyler, is reported to have said, ‘No lord should have lordship save civilly’, and all men should be equal but the king. He was advocating not the peasant’s access to the civic domain but rather certain rights of property against the claims of lords and, perhaps, access to common-law courts to protect those property rights. The contrasts between this English case and the Revolt of the Ciompi are striking. For English peasants the issue is lordship, not citizenship; but, while the Italian case may seem in this respect less ‘feudal’, it is distinctive not because it presages some modern principle of individual autonomy and citizenship. The issue for the ciompi, no less than for the English peasantry, is the exclusive extra-economic powers and privileges, or ‘politically constituted property’, of their superiors. We might even be tempted to say that the English assertion of property rights against the claims of lordship have more in common with modern conceptions of citizenship than do the demands of Florentine labouring classes for a share in corporate privileges.
What singles out the Italian case, and what helps to explain the particularities of Renaissance Italian political thought, is that ‘politically constituted property’ is indeed political – that is to say, the extra-economic rights and privileges upon which economic power rests derive from the civic community, depending not on individual powers of lordship but on membership in the civic corporation. Social conflicts play themselves out on the civic terrain, not only in open struggle or organized rebellion but in the daily transactions of civic life, in an urban setting where all contenders, as individuals and as collective entities, are always face to face as citizens or aspirants to civic status. The inextricable connection between economic power and ‘extra-economic’ force means that economic rivalries, or social conflicts over property and inequalities of wealth, are inseparably struggles over civic power, always on the brink of open war.
‘Civic Humanism’ and Machiavelli
This very particular configuration of the civic domain produced distinctive traditions of political ideas. The designation ‘civic humanism’ to describe the main currents has become conventional among many historians of political thought. For the German historian Hans Baron, who coined the phrase, ‘civic humanism’ was a specifically Florentine conjunction of cultural humanism, with its educational ambitions, and the city republic’s defence of civic liberty against imperial domination. This, in his view, marked a decisive break from medieval religion and feudal hierarchy, towards modern ideals of political liberty, economic progress, secularism and intellectual creativity. Although he would, over several decades, develop and modify his views on civic humanism – and would later be more inclined than he was at first to include Machiavelli in that tradition – his original intention in identifying this historic rupture was not only historiographical but also political. He was seeking to promote a conception of modernity as the advance of human autonomy, at a time when, in Weimar Germany, such ideas were under threat from anti-democratic strains of German nationalism.
Baron’s idea would later find its way into the anglophone academy, adapted to various Anglo-American ‘republican’ traditions (the most notable example being John Pocock’s ‘Machiavellian moment’). Recent scholarship has, nonetheless, tended to correct Baron’s exaggeration of the rupture between medieval and Renaissance political thought. More attention has been given to the continuities between scholasticism and humanism, indeed their coexistence and revival in the later Renaissance. Yet these corrections have failed to dispel the notion that ‘republican’ political theory, especially in its humanist mode, somehow points us towards the modern world. We shall in subsequent chapters raise questions about the very idea of ‘republicanism’, especially in its application to seventeenth-century English thinkers; but, for the moment, it is enough to say that, even if we acknowledge the existence of something like a ‘civic humanist’ tradition, it is profoundly misleading to characterize the political ideas of the Italian Renaissance – and of Machiavelli in particular – as a breakthrough to modernity. The very characteristics that give a ‘modern’ appearance to ideas like Machiavelli’s are rooted in a dying political form that would soon give way to ‘modern’ states. These states would generate their own political predicaments, together with modes of discourse designed to confront them in ways that ‘civic humanist’ or ‘republican’ ideas were unable to do.
There are, to be sure, significant differences between Machiavelli and, say, Marsilius of Padua two centuries before.3 These differences can even be characterized, without too much exaggeration, as having something to do with the contrasts between scholasticism and humanism. But much depends on