A Cultural History of Democracy in the Renaissance by Virginia Cox;Joanne Paul;

Author:Virginia Cox;Joanne Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

CHAPTER SEVEN

Human Diversity and Democracy in the Renaissance

PETER STAMATOV

For all its intellectual glories, the Renaissance lies in the extensive fallows of democratic dormancy—a stretch of time disconnected from the long-arched historical and intellectual bridge between Aristotelian antiquity and modern liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the period can usefully be seen as a democratic laboratory of sorts: a laboratory of cultural models, practices, and institutions aiming at the recognition and dignified treatment of the bearers of consolidating and proliferating identity designations that separated individuals into national, ethnic, racial, and religious categories. And, because of that, the Renaissance bestowed on modern democracy important historical legacies that configured its shape.

An important driving force of the larger democratic project in history is, as John Dunn writes, the “determination and longing to be treated with respect and some degree of consideration” (2019: xxiii). This is an impulse, in other words, toward the recognition of the dignity of human beings regardless of their outward characteristics, whether these characteristics be considered innate and “biological” or imposed by convention and culture. This democratic impulse toward the recognition of human dignity is, however, in a tense dialectical relationship with human communities’ inherent tendency to make distinctions among and within themselves—and to differentially allocate resources, material or symbolic, according to these distinctions. On the one hand, the egalitarian democratic impulse is at cross-purposes with the establishment and preservation of distinctions between humans—at least within the bounds of the political unit—because such distinctions invariably tend to cluster into cultural and political hierarchies in which different human characteristics are associated with differential levels of cultural prestige and political power. On the other hand—and precisely because of such invidious distinctions—the democratic impulse is inevitably directed toward the redress of the injuries on subordinate identities that hierarchies inflict and thus works to symbolically recognize, valorize, and affirm the dignity of these subordinate identities. Yet—to close off the dialectical circle—in this affirmatory work distinctions, albeit different types of distinctions or distinctions of a different hue, are being maintained in tension with the primary universalizing thrust of the democratic impulse.

The democratic impulse is thus intrinsically engaged with distinctions and differences: it seeks to remove them or redefine the cultural and political value of existing categories of distinction. In both cases, however, the democratic impulse aspires to be transformative. It seeks to change, contest, and redefine. Both the distinction-destroying and the distinction-upholding forces of the democratic project relate to and target existing categories and classifications as a challenge and as a stake of symbolic struggles. These struggles can be over various aspects of social categories: who belongs and who does not belong to a class of people, how boundaries between identity categories should be drawn and redrawn, but also—and perhaps most fundamentally—what material and symbolic resources should be granted to different categories of people.

It is in such confrontations with hierarchies of distinction that we can locate the Renaissance’s democratic relevance. Observed from the heights of democratic triumphs in recent history, the epoch of the Renaissance could be easily dismissed

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