Anyone paying attention will notice that there’s more than a little hypocrisy at work in the most maudlin reactions to President Trump. Most of his hysterical critics seem to be guilty, at least in spirit, of the very accusations they make of him. They coarsen discourse. They appeal to base tribalism. They tend to oversimplify complex issues for the sake of achieving emotional catharsis. And even as they accuse Trump of being an artifact of the internet age, these critics operate within the claustrophobic temporality of social media. Everything is a crisis, and every crisis is unprecedented. Absent a desire to reexamine the powers of the presidency or instill virtue in our leaders, the #Resistance seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, a way of ignoring America’s problems by pinning them on the bad orange man.
This hypocrisy is what makes historian James Hankin’s latest book, Virtue Politics: Soulcraft and Statecraft in Renaissance Italy, so timely. Hankins, an intellectual historian and Harvard professor whose main focus is on the Italian Renaissance, has written a book that is not only the fruit of a long and accomplished career but that also offers a rich and deep perspective on two time periods simultaneously: the Italian Renaissance and our own. Which is another way of saying that Virtue Politics gives readers a cleareyed account of how the most creative minds of the Italian Renaissance addressed the permanent problems of human nature, virtue, tyranny, and political decay.
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