The subject of this dissertation is how the Renaissance humanists of the Italian peninsula conceptualized the formation of the civitas, their term for “state.” Its results point towards a need to re-configure to some degree our historical account of the modern concept of the state. When investigating the origins of this concept, intellectual historians and political theorists alike emphasize the innovations of the mid-seventeenth century. It was at this time, they argue, that the term “state” came to refer to a “fictional person” that, acting through a duly-authorized representative, is responsible for preserving human society. This dissertation shows, however, that the belief that the integrity of human society depends on the institution of an entity called the “state” had already existed for centuries prior to this. It does so by re-constructing a tradition of thinking about the formation of political society indebted to the political, philosophical and rhetorical works of the Roman author Cicero. It argues that this tradition was established by the humanist intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance, then Europe’s leading scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity. According to this tradition, the civitas is the name of a distinctive association established specifically to order and maintain a pre-existing social life. It is, moreover, the name of a kind of abstract person, brought to life by a representative and believed to be the subject of sovereignty. Yet not only did the humanists develop such a theory; the dissertation also demonstrates that this theory became itself an object of debate, with later generations of humanists, most notably Machiavelli, articulating alternatives in response to it. However, shaped as they were by the terms of this Ciceronian theory, these alternatives nevertheless continued to endorse certain key tenets of it, most importantly that the “state” is the name of a kind of body and that this body is instituted to maintain human society. The dissertation concludes by showing that these different ways of thinking about states would go on to shape some of the political thinking of the seventeenth century.

This dissertation challenges several orthodoxies prevailing around the historical development of the concept of representation from Roman antiquity into early modern political thought. My aim is not just to revise our understanding of the known intellectual pathways of the concept’s transmission, but to firmly demonstrate that the principal language used to talk about political representation through to the seventeenth century was not repraesentatio or its cognates, but rather a distinctly Ciceronian set of terms, which were closely associated with the idea of “bearing persons” in different spheres of public life. The classical expression of those ideas are found in their most influential form in Cicero’s De officiis, where he argued that the particular duty of a magistrate was “to bear the person of the city [se gerere personam civitatis].” Cicero’s language of representation reappeared most conspicuously in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651), but, as I show, Augustine and Aquinas first appropriated this vocabulary for their own theories of political representation. I substantiate my argument about the perpetuity of Ciceronian representation by illustrating how, in their apologetics against the conciliarists, the Dominican theologians Juan de Torquemada and Cardinal Cajetan exploited numerous Augustinian locutions about St. Peter bearing the persona ecclesiae, enshrining a device of classical republican ideology in a monarchical theory of papal absolutism. I then map out a new understanding of the place of representation in second-scholastic sources, principally with reference to the work of the Dominican theologian Francisco de Vitoria, for whom, representation works within a wider set of theoretical preoccupations about human sociability, the origins of civil association, and the government of empire. Vitoria justifies the use of representation in the international sphere on account of the “possible insanity” of the American Indians, taking them collectively as a single juridical person in need of tutela. I illuminate this pattern of use established by Vitoria and continued by his Jesuit successors Francisco Suárez and Luis de Molina through to the Política Indiana (1648) of the Salamantine jurist Juan de Solórzano y Pereira, considering the very practical dimensions of Spanish imperial rule which formed the context of these questions about representation.

This doctoral dissertation is concerned with a body of Renaissance republican thinking about empire that developed in Italy between c. 1375 and c. 1515. It shows that Renaissance humanists––intellectuals dedicated to restoring the cultural products of Greco-Roman antiquity– –drew from Roman sources a conceptual apparatus with which they described the Florentine Republic’s subjection of neighbouring peoples in terms that avoided the idea of slavery. I argue that of particular importance to this humanist ideological project was the Roman concept of the imperial protectorate: a vision of an empire formed between a patron state and its dependent, yet free, clients. Moreover, I find that Florentine humanists claimed that their republic could liberate foreign peoples from servitude, and thus export to them an accommodated version of republican freedom. After examining these earlier humanist approaches, this dissertation brings to light a radically divergent Renaissance conception of empire: Machiavelli’s theory of the imperial republic. I demonstrate that Machiavelli reappraises his humanist predecessors’ assumptions to produce a theory of empire which accepts that imperial rule almost invariably involves the domination and enslavement of foreign subjects. Altogether, this dissertation reveals that the Italian Renaissance transmits not only a range of Roman notions of empire as revived by early Florentine humanism, but also Machiavelli’s revisionist theory. This dual Renaissance legacy has implications for how we study later theorists who were heirs to the same problem of reconciling liberty and empire.