Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections. James Hankins
James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections (Ideas in Context Series, 57.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. x + 314 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-521-78090. This volume of the Cambridge series Ideas in Context examines the historical and intellectual context of classical republicanism from the late Middle Ages through Florentine Renaissance humanism to American republicanism (for the latter see especially William J.Connell 's discussion, 20-24, 26-27 and Cary Nederman's, 268-69). The opinions of Quentin Skinner, the General Editor of the series, feature throughout the volume, especially in Paul A.Rahe's discussion of Machiavelli; Skinner himself has not written a contribution. The whole is an assessment of the state of studies in the history of the Renaissance state and an evaluation of the concept of "civic humanism" in understanding it. The volume's editor, James Hankins' whose own works on its themes are well known, states that its aim, above all, is to challenge that complacency which historians of Renaissance political thought have exhibited in not challenging the views of civic humanism established by Hans Baron in 1955 and J.C.A. Pocock twenty years later: " . . . to stir up new debate on civic humanism among scholars of the Italian Renaissance, to take stock of where recent research has brought us, and to press further along the various paths of exploration and reappraisal that have opened up in the last two decades" (7-8).