HUMANIST REPUBLICANISM: TOWARDS A NEW PARADIGM

Current representations of fifteenth-century political thought are still fundamentally based on Quentin Skinner's neo-republican paradigm. In recent years, however, historians have increasingly complained that the Cambridge School forced Medieval and Renaissance texts into an overmodernizing conceptual framework. This article aims to offer an alternative interpretation by reclaiming the specificity of 'weak' humanist republicanism (compared to the 'strong' republican theory that would rise only later, with the Enlightenment) and by describing it through eight adjectives - fluid, minoritari an. not anti-monarchical, anti-tyrannical, subsidiary, inegalitarian, pedagogical, ideologically defensive. In this picture, Machiavelli comes to represent a first (although partial) moment of discontinuity.