Trust in Renaissance Electoral Politics

In the first installment of a two-part special issue of this journal, entitled "Patterns of Social Capital," a number of historians discussed Putnam's analysis of the pre-conditions for strong democratic institutions in Italy. His argument had potential applications for a number of fields, judging from the variety of perspectives offered: Muir and Brucker on early modern Italy, McIntosh on early modern England, Grew on Enlightenment Italy, Greene on the American colonies, Rosenband on European industrialization, and Rotberg on social capital in a global context. Social scientists rep- resenting a wide range of interests and methodologies clearly find Putnam's book provocative.¹

The utility and appeal of the relationship that Putnam proposed between voluntary forms of public association, political cooperation, and self-sustaining democracy seemed to transcend the particularities of the Italian experience. According to Putnam, the virtuous cycles that generated and sustained social capital, in which fledgling trust nourished cooperation and eventually stronger forms of trust and richer funds of social capital, could be identified through close analysis of modern and medieval Italian political culture. But the model that Putnam proposed and the insights into the nature of the democratic institutions so acquired seemed eminently exportable, both as a category of historical analysis and as a potential guide for future practice.

For Italianists, the book raised a number of important and controversial questions about the development of Italian history and the long-term significance of Italy's urban, civic traditions. Many historians of medieval and early modern Italy must have been surprised to encounter a revival, from the unexpected field of political science, of an argument about the importance of medieval Italy that strongly echoed the Annales school (without the annaliste vocabulary): Significant developments in 1970s Italy were explicable only by understanding the deep structural impact of the medieval civic mentalité. The irony is that Annaliste historiography failed to make any serious inroads in Italian scholarship. Moreover, the most important methodological challenge to its principles came from the microstorici, a group of Italian historians centered around the University of Bologna, located within the social- capital rich region of Emilia-Romagna.²

More than methodology is at stake, however. Putnam's larger argument about institutional culture hinges critically on a persuasive connection between the political habits of Renaissance and late twentieth-century Italians. His model must provide an effective interpretation of the Italian experience before it can be tested in other contexts. Brucker and Muir seem to show little agreement regarding the historicity of Making Democracy Work. Brucker, echoing the reservations of Becker in this journal's review of the book, expressed serious doubt about a number of Putnam's theses, particularly Putnam's ideas that the late medieval communes were pillars of trust and cooperation and that the historical roots of the regional differences that Putnam charted in the 1970s went back so far. Brucker, like Becker, traced these roots back to Italy's half-hearted and incomplete process of unification. Muir, though critical of several aspects of Putnam's analysis, concurred that the roots of civil society were precisely in the medieval communal experience. He pointed to three crucial developments: civic religion, legal procedure, and the spread of courtly manners of aristocratic conduct. Both historians are eminently qualified to evaluate Putnam's account of late medieval Italian civism, and both arguments are compelling.³

The problem is that one response to Putnam's Italian premise is a wholesale rejection, whereas the other, notwithstanding signi- ficant modifications, is a sympathetic assessment. How far back do the roots of Italian civil society go? Brucker considered the question from the Florentine perspective, and Muir from the Venetian. Did Venetian political culture exhibit substantially greater degrees of trust and cooperation than did Florence? Venetian historiography certainly suggests otherwise. The subject warrants further discussion, and some key terms stand in need of clarification and revision.⁴

Despite this controversy, there is considerably more agreement between Putnam, Brucker, and Muir than at...