Virtue Politics and its limits: a review essay

James Hankins’s Virtue Politics is by far the richest and most comprehensive book ever written on the political thought of the Italian humanists. The book critically and insightfully examines numerous thinkers and works, many of which have received only sporadic attention in the context of humanist political thought. The book thus significantly broadens the scope of existing research. At the same time, building on and occasionally revising the author’s research from previous decades, it provides an original and precise conceptual definition of humanist political thought as a form of virtue politics. Hankins’s volume is sure to become the primary reference point for any research on the subject for at least the next few decades, and it will doubtless provide the theoretical framework for many such research initiatives. As one would expect, Hankins, in elaborating such an ambitious argument, critically engages the dominant interpretive currents: the republican interpretation within the field of the history of political thought and Kristeller’s paradigm for the intellectual history of Renaissance humanism. Virtue Politics thus deserves a careful and critical assessment, a reading that highlights not only its many virtues but also its limitations. In the book’s first chapter, Hankins reconstructs humanism as a comprehensive cultural reform program which the humanists and their adherents alike perceived to be an attempt at wide-ranging political and social reform. Such an understanding of Renaissance humanism is, of course, familiar. Hankins elaborates his version of this conception by employing the notion of paideuma, “an intentional form of elite culture that seeks power within a society with the aim of altering the moral attitudes and behaviors of society’s members, especially its leadership class.” Paideuma produces paideia or institutio: “a set of social technologies designed to alter minds and hearts, which constitute its soulcraft” (2). Hankins’s choice of the rather unfamiliar notion