Partial Rhetoric: Florentine Civic Republicanism and the Premodern State

In the genealogy of western deliberative democracy the city-states of late medieval and Renaissance Italy are often cited as central to the transition from classical republicanism to modern day Atlantic republicanism. Assuming the terms of their own self-description, these self-determining communities and their respective chanceries have been presented as champions of the twin-virtues of liberty and civic participation in the face of the tyrannical and imperialistic ambitions of would-be oppressors and, consequently, as central to the emergence of modern liberalism and western notions of state. Such assumptions underpin the historiography of republican political thought from Hans Baron's classic 'The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: civic humanism and republican liberty in the age of classicism and tyranny' (1955) to JGA Pocock's 'The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition' (1975) and Quentin Skinner's 'The Foundations of Modern Political Thought' (1978). These texts were instrumental in cementing the significance of republican and neo-Roman political writing to modern ideas of the state as well as testifying to the new method of the so-called 'Cambridge School' which championed a mode of writing about the history of political thought which became known as 'contextualism' due to its concern to place texts, understood as situated speech acts, in contexts.
The current project seeks to radically critique both the representation of this republican tradition and the methodology which underpins its articulation by throwing into perspective the exclusive focus placed on the consensual dimension of this form of social ordering and the privileging granted to concepts of liberty and civic participation. Starting with an examination of the reception of the controversially inflected classical civic arts in late medieval Italy, the study shows how conflict and opposition were the basis of forensic, deliberative and demonstrative rhetoric. When turned outwards in self-defence against shared enemies such rhetorics served to bind communities closer together yet significantly when turned inwards they supplied the tools for verbal conflict, stigmatization and exclusion. The aim is to direct attention to the manner in which much speech activity took place outside the legitimating institutions of the communal law courts, civic assemblies and ritual public performances and the manner in which those in authority sought to control wayward or threatening speech. The tension between control and evasion is charted by examining the circulation of the word in the verbal economy of late medieval and Renaissance Florence, and by placing the various types of speech act in their performance contexts within the city's fabric rather than in the context of their literary or linguistic registers. Through examining the interrelation between speech, place and authority this study focuses on the neglected rhetorical tradition of dissensus and subjugation within the republican tradition, arguing that the rhetoric of communal political imagination in late medieval and Renaissance Florence, in having no means of conceptualizing legitimate opposition or tolerating party politics, was resolutely pre-modern. As such it questions the notion of an unbroken civic republican genealogy in a manner which simultaneously questions the moral superiority of western notions of the liberal democratic state. In focusing attention on the partiality of all political rhetorics it shows how those denied an active political 'part' or voice found solace in different registers and literary forms, from the discourses of medieval consolation literature, as practiced by Boccaccio, to the spectral community of Dante-exile's speaking ghosts. All bear witness to the limits placed on both participation and on liberty by those in authority who, in holding the literal and metaphorical high ground, could silence those who spoke out of place.

I will pursue two main avenues to ensure that my research findings benefit a broader audience both within the Academy and beyond.

In terms of media coverage, the critique of the linear narrative of Atlantic Republicanism and the focus on the oppressive strand within its rhetoric provides an innovative historical perspective on what has been characterised by recent political commentators as the 'grammar of hostility' and 'impulse towards polarization' that has become such a concern in debates over the fragmentation of community, especially in America. Similarly, in demonstrating the genealogy of the process whereby the stereotyping of a threatening Other can serve to reinforce the identificatory boundaries of political forms my work addresses contemporary political rhetorics and their discourses of inclusion and exclusion.

Such critical readings can help set contemporary preoccupations in perspective and inform future thinking, both ideologically and in policy terms. I would seek to place position pieces with political commentary publications such as The Spectator and New Statesman. I would also explore other public dissemination possibilities in conjunction with the University's Press Office. I also intend to explore the publication of a pamphlet under the auspices of a think tank such as the Adam Smith Institute, CentreForum, or Fabian Society along the lines of Bruce Holsinger's 'Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror' (2007) published by Prickly Paradigm Press. The historical perspective offered by my work should also appeal to ResPublica, a non governmental think tank concerned with the revival of civic communitarianism.

In terms of the wider academic community both within and beyond the UK, I am seeking to establish a collaborative network, for which funding is being sought from the ESF, on 'The State, Language and Power' which aims to bring together political and social scientists with historians of political thought to evaluate the place and space of voice within contemporary political discourse to coincide with the five hundredth anniversary in 2013 of the writing of Machiavelli's 'The Prince' (a text I translated and edited for Everyman). Negotiations are currently underway to stage an exhibition centred on the text and its legacy at the John Rylands Library at Deansgate in Manchester drawing specifically on the library's special collections of political tracts.

As Chair of Italian I have worked with the Friends of the John Rylands Library and given a number of public lectures, including 'Dante in Manchester' and 'Manufacturing the Renaissance', which charted the accession of parts of the library's collection in examining the history of Manchester's self-description in the Victorian period as the Florence of the North, combining trade, learning and the arts in the process of civic regeneration.