Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy
James Hankins
Sep 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Paul Brion
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23 hr 33 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Corrupt and reckless tyrants sowing discord and ruling through fear; elites who prized wealth and status over the common good; military leaders waging endless wars. Their solution was simple and radical. They would rebuild their city, and their civilization, by transforming the moral character of its citizens. Soulcraft, they believed, was a precondition of successful statecraft. A dazzlingly ambitious reappraisal of Renaissance political thought by one of our generation's foremost intellectual historians, Virtue Politics challenges the traditional narrative that looks to the Renaissance as the seedbed of modern republicanism and sees Machiavelli as its exemplary thinker. James Hankins reveals that what most concerned the humanists was not reforming laws or institutions so much as shaping citizens. If character mattered more than constitutions, it would have to be nurtured through a new program of education they called the studia humanitatis: the humanities. We owe liberal arts education and much else besides to the bold experiment of these passionate and principled thinkers. The questions they asked would have a profound impact on later debates about good government and seem as vital today as they did then.
About the author
James Hankins is professor of history at Harvard University and founder and general editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library. He is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy and Renaissance Civic Humanism and is widely regarded as one of the world's leading authorities on humanist political thought.
Paul Brion has a passion for storytelling. He believes that audiobooks-our most current form of the oral tradition-are the purest of the interactive and co-creative arts. An autodidact with eclectic interests, he enjoys learning about a wide variety of subjects, as he has an avaricious hunger for knowledge.
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