On virtue – Noel Malcolm in TLS:

‘It’s a safe bet to say that Francesco Patrizi of Siena is the most important Renaissance political thinker you have never read – or, very possibly, have never even heard of. (Forget, if you ever knew about, the sixteenth-century philosopher Francesco Patrizi: he was from Croatia, and had nothing to do with this one.) After 1978, when Quentin Skinner devoted some thoughtful pages to his writings, the Sienese Patrizi relapsed into near-total obscurity until just four years ago, when James Hankins gave him a chapter in his indispensable study of Italian humanist political thought, Virtue Politics. But clearly, as Hankins’s new book shows, there was more to say – 430 pages’ worth, to be precise.’

(…)

‘Why the bestseller status in the first place? Humanism celebrated classical learning, of course, and Patrizi had plenty of that; but his unique selling point was his deep immersion in Greek texts, many of which (Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius and the political works of Plato, among others) were unknown to medieval authors and still daunting to Renaissance readers. He pioneered a new way of processing all these texts, by weaving their anecdotes, aperçus, historical details and biographical facts into a dense tissue of argument-by-example – a style that many admired and imitated, including Lipsius and Grotius, but that sooner or later began to bore early modern readers almost as much as it wearies us today.’

(…)

‘All citizens would be entitled to stand for office. A public assembly would pick the ones who were suitable; from that pool they would be selected only by lot, to eliminate bribery and string-pulling; and thereafter they would rise through the administrative system on the basis of good performance, becoming members of a meritocratic ruling class. (This is one of the points on which, it is argued, More’s Utopia may have been influenced by Patrizi.) So the ideal polity would be – in Hankins’s words, revising the account he gave in Virtue Politics – not a “popular regime, self-ruled by its citizens”, but a “mixed regime of free and equal citizens ruled by virtuous magistrates”.’

(…)
‘With his déformation professionelle as a humanist scholar, Patrizi just assumes that immersing yourself in the classics will make you virtuous – a questionable proposition, then as now. As for the contents of virtue itself, these are sometimes enumerated (magnanimity, temperance, justice and so on), but there is no underlying ethical theory that could tell us how to choose between different interpretations of them, or indeed between different virtues when they clash.’ (…)
‘But at the same time we have to think about the reasons why this whole style of political theorizing declined at last and fell by the wayside, never to be revived.’

Read the review here.

It was pleasant meeting Francesco Patrizi of Siena with the help of Noel Malcolm, as far as meeting Patrizi of Siena are the right words. Where do we find virtuous magistrates? Magistrates that remain virtuous. As rare as the enlightened tyrant.

But the lottery remains an appealing. Actually, with every election cycle it comes more appealing.