The Fruit of Liberty: Political Culture in the Florentine Renaissance, 1480–1550 by Nicholas Scott Baker (review)

This book offers a narrative political account of the Florentine ruling class from the perspective of a cultural historian interested in changing patterns of fashion and style, in the epistolaries of the city’s elite, and the rhetorical aspects of political writing. It covers a period that produced specific political experiences and framed new forms of historical and political consciousness that deeply influenced subsequent intellectual life.

When the Italian Wars began in 1494, a revolution in Florence overthrew the crypto-oligarchic regime of the Medici and established a government under the direction of the Great Council, a form of direct democracy unseen in Europe since ancient Athens. In 1512, a coup d’État restored the Medicean power, but the Great Council was re-introduced in 1527 after various conspiracies and wars only to be finally dissolved in 1530. Within the next few years, the advent of a hereditary monarchy, headed by the Medici, transformed Florence into a “court society” (189–227): “Blood was shed, fortunes were ruined, and lives destroyed. People fought and died in the struggle over the political culture of the city” (232).

Who instigated this struggle? What was their motive? Baker provides an intriguing, if not paradoxical, answer to the second question—“political agnosticism,” meaning indifference toward all things political, except for the distribution of offices and associated revenues. But this answer offers a clue to who the instigators were. The book’s index refers to “political agnosticism” under the heading of “office-holding class,” which often acquires further specification in the text, namely, “the patriciate” or “the elite.” Baker begins the book with an attempt to reconstruct the Florentine officeholding class from 1480 to 1550, but he eventually focuses on those prominent individuals who reached political maturity around 1510 and whose letters were preserved in the archives. Hence, the “political culture” on which he relies reflects the views and aspirations of a particular community. The members of this privileged social group, which included Francesco Guicciardini, Francesco Vettori, and Filippo de’ Nerli, came to consider any attachment to the idea of “liberty” as irrational, advocating both massive repression and the “necessity” of the principate. Unfortunately, The Fruits of Liberty does not reveal what men like Giovan Battista Busini, a republican always committed to popular freedom, might have said at the time about their position.

While being loosely inspired by Elias’ interpretation of French early modern history in The Court Society (New York, 1983), Baker’s interpretive framework remains in line with a solid tradition of Florentine studies influenced by the sociological elite theory, represented by the work of Ottokar and Brucker and “the ‘bottom-up’ perspective of the aristocracy” (351, note 98).¹ Thinking specifically about Hans Baron’s influential The Crisis of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1955), he imputes to the generation of scholars after World War II a “narrative that resounded with their own experiences,” reflecting a concern about the rise of dictatorships (233). But what can we infer from his book about the generation that was born after Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile? Is this new generation so acquainted with the idea of mass repression that it cannot distinguish between the antagonistic political programs of ancient times? In Baker’s narrative, one detects an echo of Fukuyama’s thesis about the end of history.²