The idea of Republicanism in early modern Europe

Much of history is a bit of a puzzle to me. I read about short moments in human history, and get excited (as no doubt do many other readers) by some of it making sense; but then later I start to ask what came before, and what happened afterwards, and it’s all a bit of a fog. It’s a bit like piecing  a jigsaw together; but occasionally, a book or a thinker comes along who seems to provide another piece of the jigsaw.

Years ago I was fascinated by the idea that the Italian Renaissance was to some extent inspired by ideas of republicanism. Some early republican histories glorified the city’s independence and, well, republicanism. It made sense, that a movement that was modern in many ways drew inspiration from what we today would think of as the more modern political system. Of course, it wasn’t quite as simple as that – the republican moment in Rome was ended for all time with the assassination of Caesar and the end of the Roman Republic. But it was possible to draw a convincing picture, and Hans Baron drew it, of a republican Italian city state of Florence displaying Renaissance ideas and political republicanism, up to the seizure of power by the Medici in the early 15^th century. But what happened to republicanism after that? Did it die with the end of republican Florence? 

A fascinating TLS review from 2009 (Richard Bourke, review of J G A Pocock, Political Thought and History, Sept 25 2009) suggests what happened.

Pocock shared with [Quentin] Skinner a particular interest in the resurgence of “republican” political thought in Western European history … they also share an ambition to track the fate of the ideal of citizenship associated with republican politics after the decline of the Italian city-states … from the sixteenth century. However, both scholars … vary in their understanding of the crisis of republican politics.
 While Skinner’s work has focused on the devastating impact of Thomas Hobbes on the fortunes of the republican ideal of liberty, Pocock … has been concerned … with rival visions of politics … an antithesis between civilized corruption and natural purity, radical philosophes like Diderot pitted the image of innocent nature against the accumulated degeneracy of civilization, and in the process helped to inaugurate the anti-historial mentality of subsequent revolutionary politics.

Quite how the idea of republicanism became a pitched battle between Diderot’s North American Indian and the over-sophisticated Europeans is a something I cannot explain. But at least there is a suggestion in the work of Pocock that there might be some kind of link – and that the dream of republicanism did not die in Florence the day the Medici took power. Of course, if the grand idea of republican civic values just petered out when confronted by Diderot fashionable attachment to primitive innocence, then I do start to have doubts about the Enlightenment - did they really know what they were talking about?