When read as Marsiglio asks us to read it, the Defensor minor looks a great deal less like a change of heart on its author's part than an extension and application of the principles that he had formulated fifteen years earlier in the Defensor pacis. The inconsistency some scholars have detected turns out to be based on a sort of false expectation about Marsiglio's political theory, namely, that it must ultimately advocate a single system of government or form of rule (...) in preference to others. For most other political theorists of the Latin Middle Ages this expectation would be warranted. But just as in so many other instances, Marsiglio frustrates our expectations: his approach is distinctive among his contemporaries for exactly the �generic� quality of its argument. This �generic� feature of his thought did not change with time. The Defensor minor illustrates how the �generic� framework can be applied as required in order to lend polemical support to a given temporal ruler. This means, quite simply, that the Defensor minor does not reflect any great change of heart about or pragmatic renunciation of Marsiglio's �true� republican principles. Certainly, Marsiglio's generic account of politics could be adapted in support of a republican regime, such as existed in many of the medieval Italian cities. (shrink)

Although it has become commonplace to regard Marsiglio of Padua's Defensor Pacis (completed in 1324) as a quintessential work of medieval Aristotelian political theory, this view has been challenged for various reasons in recent years. Some scholarship has pointed to the superficial quality of Marsiglio's appeal to Aristotle's �authority�. Others have emphasized Marsiglio's decisive reliance on sources and doctrines which were quite at odds with his overtly Aristotelian commitments. A revealing measure of the depth of his Aristotelianism is perhaps his (...) failure to cite Aristotle's authority at all in the Defensor Minor, an abbreviated version of the Defensor Pacis composed about 1340.4 At minimum, it seems necessary to reconsider the claim (pioneered already by Albertus Pighius in the sixteenth century) that Marsiglio was �homo magis aristotelicus quam christianus�.5 Indeed, it may be true to say that the assumption of Marsiglio's fidelity to Aristotle has acted as a filter, screening out interesting or original features of his thought because they are cloaked in outwardly Aristotelian language. In this paper, I would like to test this hypothesis with reference to Marsiglio's alleged application of the basic principles of Aristotelian moral psychology (in particular, Aristotle's doctrine of hexis) within the Defensor's account of the constituent parts of the political community. In both his Ethics and his Politics, Aristotle had employed the idea of hexis (often translated as �habit�, but more properly denoting �state� or �firm disposition�) to explain the way in which moral and civil virtues come to be instilled in persons. Thus, hexis served as the foundation for his conception of ethical and political education. Marsiglio seems to use the Latin rendering of hexis, habitus, in a very similar manner. He argues that the different parts of the community, ranging from the rulers and priests to the warriors and farmers, each have a set of characteristics unique to their function. These functional properties are, he says, a result of the differing kinds of habitus which typify each part of the community. (shrink)

Nicholas Oresme's mid-fourteenth-century treatise De moneta falls outside the conventional genres of late medieval scholastic writing: it is neither a commentary, a summa, nor a publicistic tract. Historians of political thought have largely shunned the work. Instead, De moneta has primarily been the object of attention among historians of economic thought. Despite the fact that De moneta certainly contains technical economic analysis of the nature of money in an Aristotelian mode, both the circumstances of its composition and the main lines (...) of its argument suggest that it deserves treatment as a profoundly political work. Oresme's intention is clearly to advise his countrymen in a pragmatic fashion about a matter of public policy. His specialized economic analysis is merely a propedeutic to his main point. In this sense, the political theory contained in De moneta merits serious attention as an attempt to bring economic concerns to bear on the duties of rulers and the needs of their subjects. (shrink)

Little attempt has been made to explore Machiavelli's attitude towards the psychological dimension of virtue. Yet such an exploration bears surprising fruit. Machiavelli proves to rely very heavily upon the psychological premises of his predecessors. In particular, he upholds the view that human action arises out of a set of personal characteristics which are firmly rooted and relatively insusceptible to variation or erasure. Thus, Machiavelli believes that how one behaves reflects the sort of psychological attributes with which one is endowed. (...) This position echoes the view maintained by the classical and Christian moralists of whom he is regarded as an implacable foe. To the extent that Machiavelli steps away from previous psychological teachings, he does so only in the political implications which he draws from the psychology of moral character. He concludes that psychology tends to favour republics over principalities: a republican regime is better prepared than a monarchy to cope with the limitations imposed by the fixed character traits of human beings. (shrink)