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"Hankins, James"
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BONFIRE OF THE VERITIES
The book tells us a little of Ahmari's own remarkable path to Christian faith, from a middle-class family of Westernized Iranians under the mullahs, to American freedom, to questioning whether America was too free in the wrong ways, to acceptance of Roman Catholicism as the source of a more demanding but more genuine freedom. A master storyteller, Ahmari tells how a smug young man at Oxford, made secure in his apostasy and sinfulness by the belief that his ideas were modern and scientific, was surprised by joy, a joy he eventually recognized as God's grace. Ahmari takes us back to the racist world of early-twentieth-century America, where casual contempt for people with darker skin was a ubiquitous feature of society and upheld by law and custom. Too often, this way of life was tolerated by Christians and justified in language drawn from the Bible and Christian tradition.
Journal Article
Virtue politics : soulcraft and statecraft in Renaissance Italy
\"Convulsed by a civilizational crisis, the great thinkers of the Renaissance set out to reconceive the nature of society. Everywhere they saw problems. 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 at once simple and radical. \"Men, not walls, make a city,\" as Thucydides so memorably said. 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-Should a good man serve a corrupt regime? What virtues are necessary in a leader? What is the source of political legitimacy? Is wealth concentration detrimental to social cohesion? Should citizens be expected to fight for their country?-would have a profound impact on later debates about good government and seem as vital today as they did then\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
PIETAS
Only readers of old literature are aware of the richer and nobler senses of the words in the premodern West, as in the Confucian East, where the virtue of piety (|M or li is the Chinese correlative) was regarded as the lynchpin of the social and political virtues. If we have normal moral responses, we feel grateful for all the things we have been given that we have done nothing to deserve: the love and nurture of parents and family; the kindness of friends and benefactors; the benefits of a well-ordered society; the freedoms we enjoy thanks to the sacrifices of our countrymen; the beauty and bounty of nature, which God pours down upon us every day. Pietas is cultivated, or used to be cultivated, in civil religion: public prayers, oaths, the Pledge of Allegiance, sacred symbols on our coinage and inscriptions, buildings such as the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. To speak of our \"Founding Fathers\" exemplifies the virtue of piety in civic life, fusing the due reverence we give our natural parents with the proper gratitude we have for those who labored on battlefields and in legislative chambers to give birth to our nation. Imperial China, lacking the tradition of civil law that knits Western societies together, relied all the more on the virtue and humanity of magistrates, reinforced by strict observance of pious rites, in order to maintain order and due hierarchy in the Middle Kingdom. Since the late seventeenth century, the idea has grown in the West that the state should tolerate impiety, especially toward God, in the interest of freedom of thought.
Journal Article
Exclusivist Republicanism and the Non-Monarchical Republic
The idea that a republic is the only legitimate form of government and that non-elective monarchy and hereditary political privileges are by definition illegitimate is an artifact of late eighteenth century republicanism, though it has roots in the \"godly republics\" of the seventeenth century. It presupposes understanding a republic (respublica) to be a non-monarchical form of government. The latter definition is a discursive practice that goes back only to the fifteenth century and is not found in Roman or medieval sources. This article explains how the definition emerged in Renaissance Italy.
Journal Article
IMPRUDENT EXPERTISE
[...]every university had a list of required Greek and Arabic texts in astrology that aspiring doctors had to master. If celestial bodies exerted an influence on individual bodies, it was obvious that the body politic must be subject to them as well. [...]princes and republics, too, required the services of professional astrologers. Premodern medicine had negative utility in the sense that it killed more than it cured, but doctors already knew how to dress up their ignorance in pseudo-Greek terminology and the confident citation of recognized authorities. Predictions that turned out to be false could even be dangerous to the practitioner's own health, as the court astrologer who predicted long life for King Edward VI discovered.
Journal Article
THE FORGOTTEN VIRTUE
[...]says Machiavelli, human behavior is a constant, and there has always been about the same amount of goodness and wickedness in the world. Machiavelli confesses that even he himself might be wrong in his belief that he lived in a time of decline. Since he in fact lived in a period when Europe was on the brink of dominating the rest of the world, one has to concede his point. [...]the individuals who finish the course and develop the kind of supreme human excellences Aristotle calls for will necessarily be few. [...]we offer help to the indigent, water to the thirsty, directions to travelers, all out of a sense of right action toward our kind instilled in us by natural affection.
Journal Article