Civic Humanism Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Civic humanism is a political and philosophical orientation emphasizing the value and importance of the practical and moral virtues that may be inculcated in and passed along by citizens through their active participation in the political life of their polity. Its central aim is to defend and promote the qualities believed as necessary for communities to effectively, responsibly, and independently govern themselves; those qualities include the virtues of patience, tolerance, patriotism, self-sacrifice, duty, a commitment to the law, and forgiveness.

Civic humanism is closely entwined with ideals of education and moral formation that are most often associated with the humanist beliefs of Renaissance thinkers, as well as with the classical republican ideas of ancient Greece and Rome. In fact, civic humanism and classical republicanism are sometimes used interchangeably, as each are taken to refer to a view of public life that celebrates the role of, and places great seriousness upon, the duties and activities of citizenship. A variety of communitarian ideologies use civic humanist arguments extensively in advancing their beliefs.

Debate Over Origins

It is often claimed that civic humanism took shape as an intellectual orientation in Florence during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. It is certainly correct that, during these years, new translations of Greek and Roman philosophical and literary classics inspired many to reject the scholastic model of education that had become standard throughout much of Western Europe during the Middle Ages. As a result, a new model developed, the studia humanitatis, which connected the Christian improvement of oneself and one’s community with the spread of knowledge of languages, grammar, rhetoric, philosophy, and history.

However, it is historically questionable as to what degree this movement involved a specific “civic humanist” orientation as a political and philosophical expression of its own. Both civic humanism and classical republicanism, as they are understood and used today, emerged through historiographic reconstruction: German and English scholars throughout the twentieth century (including Hans Baron, J. G. A. Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and Bernard Bailyn) looked to the traditions and behaviors of Renaissance Italy as a way to tie together a wide variety of political aspirations and philosophical convictions that, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, periodically revived to inspire, guide, or frustrate different political actors. Civic humanism as an orientation, then, is a well-understood descriptive term uniting such figures across history as Francesco Petrarch, Thomas More, James Harrington, Giambattista Vico, and Baron de Montesquieu, not to mention many leaders of the American Revolution; yet, as a historical matter, the label itself probably owes more to the modern desire to assemble a genealogy of communitarian and republican thinkers. This modern assemblage aims more to support various attacks upon increasingly dominant liberal and individualist orientations than to align with anything that was actually expressed historically.

Modern Interpretations

Those who advocate civic humanism today most often to do so in conjunction with a push for educational as opposed to political reforms, thus grounding the orientation more firmly in its purported origin in the classic learning of the Renaissance. (Classical republicanism, by contrast, is usually, when the two terms are distinguished at least, more explicitly used as a tool of political critique.) The civic humanist argument generally asserts that human flourishing and happiness are most likely to be realized through autonomous (though not necessarily individualistic) moral action; yet, human beings are generally incapable of such responsible and independent moral choices without training in the language and worldview of classical authors. In addition, people need practical opportunities to see the value of those classical teachings in their own lives and the lives of others, and perhaps to put them into effect themselves. This would suggest the vital importance of an education in moral ideas, and similarly the importance of bringing those ideas to bear through direct service to and participation in political life. Both of these implications resonate with broadly communitarian perspectives: First, human beings are most likely to find fulfillment through participation in their respective groups, communities, or polities. Second, effective and responsible participation is most likely to occur when citizens are familiar with the history and traditions of their own communities.

Civic humanism may be linked to civic education of one sort or another, the reigning notion being that schools are, among other things, sites of character formation, and that if one assumes—as most advocates of civic humanism do—that responsible self-government depends upon, among other things, forming the necessary character attributes amongst the citizens, then clearly there must be a civic component to the education of the community members (and presumably future participating citizens). Interestingly, in the United States, the close identification of the civic humanism tradition with America’s founding has made the label, in the minds of some, a more conservative project. This attaches to protecting the sort of traditional political and social arrangements, and divisions, that existed in eighteenth-century American life; as such, a traditional civic humanism may be hostile to more inclusive or progressive educational projects. As a result, civic education advocates who sympathize with liberal, democratic, or egalitarian goals rarely use the civic humanist label. On the other hand, those who often reject modern public schooling in favor of educating their children at home or through private religious schools, believing that the necessary character formation will be more likely to take place in those environments than others, closely embrace the label. Either way, however, both sides of the divide carry the essence of the civic humanist ideal forward: being a citizen in a free society requires a willingness to be involved in democratic discussion, to be tolerant of decisions one disagrees with, and to patriotically support one’s country and its laws.

Bibliography:

Appleby, Joyce. Liberalism and the Republican Imagination: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Bailyn, Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967.
Baron, Hans. The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republicanism in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966.
McDonough, Kevin, and Walter Feinberg, eds. Citizenship and Education in Liberal-Democratic Societies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Pocock, J. G. A. The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
Smith, Rogers. Civic Ideals. New Haven:Yale University Press, 1997.
Vetterli, Richard, and Gary Bryner. In Search of the Republic: Public Virtue and the Roots of American Government: Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987.