[In the following excerpt, Kerrigan and Braden analyze Burkhardt's understanding of Renaissance individualism and posit that, in Burckhardt's view, the concept of honor provides the only counterbalance to the destructiveness of unbridled individualism.]

In the offing [in the stories about the spiteful wit Pietro Aretino] is one of Burckhardt's most troubled points about the individualism that he is sometimes taken merely to celebrate. Emperors aspire to uniqueness. A private selfhood that adopts in metaphorical form the authority and autonomy of political imperialism will adopt its aggression as well, a chronic irritability in the vicinity of others like itself. Part of what Burckhardt is establishing with his central contrast between the Renaissance and the Middle Ages is that representatives of the former will have a radical difficulty recognizing and working any secure common ground among them. Within the full picture of the period as Burckhardt understands it, that difficulty proves lethal.

The public part of the picture is the story that prompts the first modern political narrative, the story of how Italy lost control of its own destiny to become a battleground for foreign powers. Francesco Guicciardini's History of Italy begins with a celebration of the comparative peace achieved among the more important Italian states in the later fifteenth century, though it is not so much a settlement as an edgy balance of power:

This alliance easily curbed the cupidity of the Venetian Senate, but it did not unite the allies in sincere and faithful friendship, insofar as, full of emulation and jealousy among themselves, they did not cease to assiduously observe what the others were doing, each of them reciprocally aborting all the plans whereby any of the others might become more powerful or renowned.

With the death of Lorenzo de' Medici—replaced by his erratic son Piero—and of Innocent VIII—replaced by the Borgia pope Alexander VI—the "pestiferous thirst for domination" which continues to animate the principals slips once more out of communal control to bring on what becomes known as the calamita d'Italia Italy's disaster. Lodovico Sforza thinks he is only strengthening his own hand against a perceived detente between Florence and Naples when he invites Charles VIII of France to make good on his claim to the Neapolitan throne. Before events play themselves out, Sforza is dead in a French prison and all of Italy, except a weakened Venice, is under the domination of Emperor Charles V. Guicciardini's political thought generally is much occupied with the ambition of il particulare, the political individual, whose drive is both an indispensable resource and a civic menace:

Citizens who seek honor and glory in their city are praise worthy and useful.… Would to God our republic were full of such ambition! But citizens whose only goal is power are dangerous. For men who make power their idol cannot be restrained by any considerations of honor or justice, and they will step on anything and everything to attain that goal.

The History tells how the tragic potential of that drive came to dominate the Italian scene.

In the long view, Burckhardt sees the calamita as a greater disaster than even Guicciardini realized: the effectively suicidal end to the Italian Renaissance. Despite its organization into topics, "The State as a Work of Art" takes on conventional narrative form as it moves toward this conclusion, which for Burckhardt is a bitter lesson about the inability of Renaissance Italians to make common cause:

When … in the political intercourse of the fifteenth century the common fatherland is sometimes emphatically named it is done in most cases to annoy some other Italian state. The first decades of the sixteenth century, the years when the Renaissance attained its fullest bloom, were not favorable to a revival of patriotism; the enjoyment of intellectual and artistic pleasures, the comforts and elegancies of life, and the supreme interests of self-development, destroyed or hampered the love of country. But those deeply serious and sorrowful appeals to national sentiment were not heard again till later, when the time for unity had gone by, when the country was inundated with Frenchmen and Spaniards, and when a German army had conquered Rome.

Individualism cannot defend its own nest.

This is the story that Burckhardt has to tell, the diachronic dimension recoverable from what is for the most part offered as a synchronic Bildung [image]. It was the diachronic dimension of Hegel's philosophy that most directly irritated Burckhardt, and there are good reasons for remarking on the general absence from the Civilization of any serious interest in the processes of historical change: "He regarded various aspects of the Renaissance, from politics to poetry, as objective historical entities whose temporal and spatial boundaries were clearly delimited. He was interested neither in where those entities came from nor in the directions in which they were tending." Yet we would argue that in at least one important regard Burckhardt's book is in the grip of an inclusive narrative, effaced to some degree because it is so painful a story. Burckhardt's Renaissance destroys itself in following out the very logic of its own genius. The political fable has roots in received historiographic wisdom, but Burckhardt replicates it with striking originality on other levels, to make it a central part of his idea about the age.

The lengthy third section on "The Revival of Antiquity" ends, unexpectedly, with a section on the "Fall of the Humanists in the Sixteenth Century":

After a brilliant succession of poet-scholars had … filled Italy and the world with the worship of antiquity, had determined the forms of education and culture, had often taken the lead in political affairs, and had, to no small extent, reproduced ancient literature—at length in the sixteenth century …the whole class fell into deep and general disgrace.

This is not a standard topic in the study of humanism. It is not there in the work of Burckhardt's contemporary Georg Voigt, and no particular consensus has evolved that any such phenomenon took place, aside from a general stagging of Italian culture under Spanish domination.

The early sixteenth century is if anything now remembered as the time when the alliance with printing celebrated and exploited by Erasmus enabled the movement to jump the Alps and achieve a new level of security and influence. Part of what concerns Burckhardt is the inevitably depersonalizing character of this success: "The spread of printed editions of the classics, and of large and well-arranged handbooks and dictionaries, went far to free the people from the necessity of personal intercourse with the humanists." A modern commentator might see no more here than the inevitable obsolescence of a certain style of heroic entrepreneurship. Burckhardt, however, detects something more virulent at work in a few extended attacks on the moral character of humanists as a group. The term umanista indeed makes its debut in Italian literature in the satire of Ariosto that Burckhardt cites:

Senza quel vizio son pochi umanisti
che fe' a Dio forza, non che persüase,
di far Gomorra e i suoi vicini tristi …
Ride il volgo, se sente un ch'abbia vena
di poesia, e poi dice:—E gran periglio
a dormir seco e volgierli la schiena.

Few humanists are without that vice which did not so much persuade, as forced, God to render Gomorrah and her neighbor wretched! … The vulgar laugh when they hear of someone who possesses a vein of poetry, and then they say, "It is a great peril to turn your back if you sleep next to him."

It is still possible to be unimpressed, especially since the most extensive text Burckhardt has to adduce is labeled by its own author a rhetorical progymnasma, or exercise. Burckhardt, however, is alert to a mirroring here of Italy's national fate: the generalized accusations of the sixteenth century merely repeat the ad hominem internal polemics of the fifteenth century as a brief against the whole profession. "The first to make these charges were certainly the humanists themselves. Of all men who ever formed a class, they had the least sense of their common interests, and least respected what there was of this sense." Like the signori, they are collectively betrayed by their incurable competitiveness.

The point opens onto something less vulnerable than some of the claims that lead up to it. The core of the chapter is Burckhardt's intuitive but compelling delineation of the psychic cost of the typical humanist career:

For an ambitious youth, the fame and the brilliant position of the humanists were a perilous temptation; it seemed to him that he too "through inborn nobility could no longer regard the low and common things of life." He was thus led to plunge into a life of excitement and vicissitude, in which exhausting studies, tutorships, secretaryships, professorships, offices in princely households, mortal enmities and perils, luxury and beggary, boundless admiration and boundless contempt, followed confusedly one upon the other, and in which the most solid worth and learning were often pushed aside by superficial impudence. But the worst of all was that the position of the humanist was almost incompatible with a fixed home, since it either made frequent changes of dwelling necessary for a livelihood, or so affected the mind of the individual that he could never be happy for long in one place.

Burckhardt had earlier quoted as if with approval the humanists' own boast about their homeless independence. Here that condition reappears not as a strength but as a curse. Burckhardt is probing a pathology that is built into the very structure of the individualism which he elsewhere praises:

Such men can hardly be conceived to exist without an inordinate pride. They needed it, if only to keep their heads above water, and were confirmed in it by the admiration which alternated with hatred in the treatment they received from the world. They are the most striking examples and victims of an unbridled subjectivity.

The original detachment from group identity that made Renaissance individualism possible comes in the end to a willful and deathly solitude. Burckhardt's revision of Hegel's dialectic issues not in the higher realm of unendende Subjectivitat, [unbounded subjectivity] but in an entfesselte Subjectivitat [rootless subjectivity] that is actually a kind of suicide.

This intelligent ambivalence exerts pressure on the rest of Burckhardt's book and indeed much of his historical thought. The theorist of "der Staat als Kunstwerk" is also an impressive prophet of the state's demonic extremity in our own century, from which he recoils in horror: "Power is of its nature evil, whoever wields it. It is not a stability but a lust, and ipso facto insatiable, therefore unhappy in itself and doomed to make others unhappy." From his lecture notes we sense a deep pessimism about the modem world that the Renaissance initiates, as well as a strong attraction to the medieval dispensation that he became famous for scorning. Even within the Civilization Burckhardt does not imagine Renaissance man merely outgrowing the bonds that obligate him to others like himself. That those bonds become more difficult to recognize and respect was the age's great danger, the problem that most desperately needed to be solved.

The book's last section, "Morality and Religion," takes up directly the means by which combative individualism might be made social and accountable; it proves the most troubled section, awkwardly apologetic at the outset:

The ultimate truth with respect to the character, the conscience, and the guilt of a people remains for ever a secret.… We must leave those who find a pleasure in passing sweeping censures on whole nations to do so as they like. The peoples of Europe can maltreat, but happily not judge, one another.

This is defensive prologue to Burckhardt's concession that the cliche of Italian wickedness in the Renaissance is neither inaccurate nor irrelevant: "It cannot be denied that Italy at the beginning of the sixteenth century found itself in the midst of a grave moral crisis, out of which the best men saw hardly any escape." By the end of the chapter, the formulation has become even more acute: "The fundamental vice of this character was at the same time a condition of its greatness—namely, developed individualism.… In face of all objective facts, of laws and restraints of whatever kind, he retains the feeling of his own sovereignty". The health and indeed survival of any individualistic civilization depends upon some external responsibility gaining purchase on that unfriendly surface. But so posed, the need seems almost a contradiction in terms.

Burckhardt himself highlights "the sentiment of honor" as "that moral force which was then the strongest bulwark against evil," and indeed one of the most important legacies of the Renaissance to later times: "This is that enigmatic mixture of conscience and egoism which often survives in modern after he has lost, whether by his own fault or not, faith, love, and hope.… It has become, in a far wider sense than is commonly believed, a decisive test of conduct in the minds of the cultivated Europeans of our own day." Not itself a moral code, honor is a means by which personal pride can be enlisted on the side of morality, protecting that morality against anomie, even to the point of thriving on it. The term indeed has a special aura in Renaissance culture, and it prompts some extravagant language. Burckhardt specifically quotes Rabelais on the Abbey of Théléme:

In their rules there was only one clause:

DO WHAT YOU WILL

because people who are free, well-born, well-bred, and easy in honest company have a natural spur and instinct which drives them to virtuous deeds and deflects them from vice; and this they called honor.

Such honor implants the dictates of conscience so deeply into the individual psyche that no external constraints are necessary. Morality coincides precisely with impulse and desire, so that "Fais ce que voudras" is an injunction that does not threaten the social and civic fabric but is its great source of strength.

The briefness of Burckhardt's discussion of the matter, though, entails a recognition that the ideal is an intrinsically treacherous one. "This sense of honor," he concedes, "is compatible with much selfishness and great vices, and may be the victim of astonishing illusions." The mysterious chemistry that allows egoism to be shaped by conscience also allows conscience to be shaped by egoism. Burckhardt moves on to the most conspicuous specific, the cult of revenge:

This personal need of vengeance felt by the cultivated and highly placed Italian, resting on the solid basis of an analogous popular custom, naturally displays itself under a thousand different aspects, and receives the unqualified approval of public opinion.… Only there must be art in the vengeance, and the satisfaction must be compounded of the material injury and moral humiliation of the offender. A mere brutal, clumsy triumph of force was held by public opinion no satisfaction. The whole man with his sense of fame and of scorn, not only his fist, must be victorious.

Burckhardt gives several vivid examples of the vendetta als Kunstwerk: "After dinner he told him whose liver it was." The code is to prove one of Italy's most notorious exports, with private vengeance becoming a major concern for the governments of England, France, and Spain, and a dominant theme on their tragic stages. Burckhardt partly obscures the urgency of his point by ascribing this and other aberrations (such as gambling) to an unusually strong imagination (the Italian imagination kept the picture of the wrong alive with frightful vividness"). But the usually invoked motive for vengeance is honor, within whose cultus justice is effectively equated with self-respect. Renaissance literature gives some of its most memorable attention to the Herostratic potential of this noble word:

—O thou Othello, that was once so good,
Fall'n in the practice of a damned slave,
What shall be said to thee?
—Why, any thing:
An honorable murderer, if you will;
For nought I did in hate, but all in honor.
(Othello 5.2.291-95)

Such demeanor had an authority and allure that troubled the very possibility of Renaissance civilization:

When a murder was committed the sympathies of the people, before the circumstances of the case were known, ranged themselves instinctively on the side of the murderer. A proud, manly bearing before and at the execution excited such admiration that the narrator often forgets to tell us for what offence the criminal was put to death. But when we add to this inward contempt of law and to the countless grudges and enmities which called for satisfaction the impunity which crime enjoyed during times of political disturbance we can only wonder that the State and society were not utterly dissolved.

Burckhardt's Italy is a Theleme gone mad, in which "Fais ce que voudras" is, as we would normally expect, a call to anarchy.

Attempts were made in the Renaissance to define honor with enough care to avoid such consequences, primarily by internalizing it and (as Burckhardt does) distinguishing it from fame. But the ethical need it tries to fill finds a more decisive answer outside Burckhardt's territory. Burckhardt himself wonders why Italy did not produce a Reformation, and gives the "plausible answer": "The Italian mind … never went farther than the denial of hierarchy, while the origin and vigor of the German Reformation was due to its positive religious doctrines, most of all to the doctrines of justification by faith and of the inefficacy of good works." That is to beg the question of causality, but the contrast is revealing. For it is in Protestant religious experience that conscience and egoism are reconciled by a mystery deeper than that of honor. Luther's account of Christian freedom is boldly paradoxical: "A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all." These contrary propositions are interwoven in justification by faith, which begins with the acceptance of the harshest of moral judgments on oneself: "The moment you begin to have faith you learn that all things in you are altogether blameworthy, sinful, and damnable." Yet the certainty of never being able to merit salvation by any action or achievement is met by the promise of salvation sola fide, an inward emotional state which is everything: "a splendid privilege and hard to attain, a truly omnipotent power, a spiritual dominion in which there is nothing so good and nothing so evil but that it shall work together for good to me, if only I believe." Humiliation and submission, if sufficiently extreme, recover a primal sense of strength and confidence: "Who then can comprehend the lofty dignity of the Christian? By virtue of his royal power he rules over all things, death, life, and sin, and through his priestly glory is omnipotent with God because he does the things which God asks and desires." Selfishness here is both harshly straitened and grandiosely satisfied. Protestant theologians will develop the traditional Christian attack on individual pride with new force and sophistication; but as they do so, they also intensify the role of the individual conscience, and translate the institutional church into subjective terms that give individualism a new and potent dimension. The Italian project, we might say, was incomplete in subjectivizing only the state. The Reformation, subjectivizing the church as well, in this regard completes the Renaissance.

To put it that way is to gesture toward the telos for a general European Renaissance within which Burckhardt's Italy is only the opening chapter.