Reimagining the Republic: Institutional Renewal & Virtue in Early Modern Europe

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

In the Essays, David Hume famously asked “whether there be any essential difference between one form of government and another and whether every form may not become good or bad, according as it is well or ill administered.” There has been no shortage of democratic theorists who have taken up Hume’s question concerning the primacy of character or the form of government. Since modern popular regimes first gained credence, they have invited a close examination of the relationship between virtue and democratic institutions, and of the dependence of democracies on institutions capable of shaping public morality. It is in moments of democratic retrenchment, however, that we are most acutely confronted with the imbrication of moral character and institutional forms; the aspiration of democratic institutions to channel ambition and counteract vice is tested.

This panel turns to the early modern period, in which the foundations of modern democratic ideals and institutions were first laid. It takes up a series of debates concerning the legitimacy and the moral basis of popular institutions. At this formative moment, democratic ideals emerged amidst a series of fiercely contested political disputes, in which clashes over the very possibility of virtuous governance motivated new arguments over conscience, natural right, obligations, and supererogatory virtue. Revisiting these disputes not only illuminates the contingency of our own institutional arrangements, but also provides fertile ground for cultivating democratic renewal. How, then, did early modern thinkers conceive of the relationship between popular institutions, moral theory, obligation and political action? How did their views on questions of virtue, moral perfection, conscience and obligation influence and shape an emerging desire for more republican institutions and widespread participation? And what were the moral preconditions required for popular institutions to succeed?

There is no shortage of episodes from this period of political upheaval that illuminate possibilities for democratic renewal. On this panel, a first paper examines Jean Calvin’s popular rejoinder to the moral hazards of princely rule that occupied the northern humanists. While Calvin’s turn to lesser magistrates as a popular remedy for tyranny is, by now, axiomatic to early modern scholars, the paradoxical status of humanist oration, pedagogy, and counsel within his early writings reveals a subtle investigation into the possibilities for popular institutions to shape a virtuous prince. A second paper takes up debates over the King’s “ownership” or dominium of his kingdom, instigated by “Monarchomachs” during France’s Wars of Religion to neuter monarchical claims and pave the way for more republican visions of sovereignty. A third paper examines how early modern Jesuit scholastics understood the relationship between the individual ‘conscientia’ and the authority of political and religious institutions, with particular emphasis on the ways the conscience may be legitimately “bound,” or laid with external obligations. A fourth paper explores the paradoxical democratization of moral perfection in Luther’s criticism of monasticism and his characterization of worldly professions as divine “vocations.” It argues that Lutheran “vocation” replaced medieval supererogation as the structuring concept for understanding the relationship between obligation and perfection; as a result, perfection became mundane but morally necessary. A final paper provides a reappraisal of the relation between institutions and virtue in republican historiography. By investigating the connections between Hume’s and Harrington’s theories of the rule of law, it questions the extent to which republicanism as a politics of virtue can be distinguished from non-republican theories of institutions.

Sub Unit

• Division 1: Political Thought and Philosophy

Individual Presentations

• Bridling the Prince: Humanist Counsel & Its Perils in Calvin's Seneca Commentary - Nicholas Barden, Georgetown University

• Owning the Republic: Administration and Dominion in the French Wars of Religion - Amy Chandran, Harvard University

• Bound in Conscience: Public Institutions and the Early Modern Forum Conscientiae - Evelyn Boyden, Harvard University

• Luther’s Idea of Vocation and the Democratization of Perfection - Haidun Liu, Harvard University

• Harrington, Hume, and the Dilemmas of Republicanism - Gio Maria Tessarolo

Chair

• Samuel Garrett Zeitlin University College London

Discussants

• Samuel Garrett Zeitlin University College London

• Sarah Helene Gustafson Catholic University