Dante As Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia
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Dante as Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia Francis R. Hittinger IV Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2016 © 2016 Francis R. Hittinger IV All rights reserved ABSTRACT Dante as Critic of Medieval Political Economy in Convivio and Monarchia Francis R. Hittinger IV Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) has traditionally been viewed through the lens of his poetic masterpiece, the Commedia. While his so-called “minor” works, including the overtly political book four of Convivio and the treatise Monarchia, have been studied, much of this work tends to read Dante through the theologized, over-determined hermeneutic of the narrative of his poetic journey through the afterlife. Also, because of the overwhelming temptation to associate Dante’s place in intellectual history with his clerical contemporaries in Paris and Bologna, a similar trend (often combined with the first) reads Dante as merely an idiosyncratic but minor epigone of the scholastics in his non-poetic work. The latter vein of interpretation is very common and tends to generate interpretations of Dante’s political thought which see it as a predominantly abstract encounter with scholastic theology and philosophy in the context of the high medieval church-state conflicts, particularly in the contentious age of Popes Boniface VIII, Clement V, and John XXII and their bloody disputes with claimants to the Holy Roman throne and French and Aragonese monarchies over political control of northern Italian territories. While this kind of reading is not unwarranted—for Dante’s Monarchia does make strong claims in the late medieval church-state conflict and deploys a philosophical lexicon current with scholastic intellectuals of the time—many scholars have read Dante’s monarchical theory in Convivio and Monarchia exclusively as a response to and dialogue with the major scholastic and juridical writers, particularly of the “mirrors of princes genre,” on both sides of these political conflicts between Church-State claims to authority. This is not completely wrong, but in so doing many have, conversely, failed to understand that Dante is making a coherent and unique normative argument. Such readings fail to read Dante 1) as a real Florentine politician, 2) as an enthusiastic follower of Aristotelian paradigms (not merely a scholastic Aristotelian), 3) as a committed political secularist, and 4) as contextualized within the rich municipal, social, economic, and political histories of Florence and Medieval Italy. This study thus moves away from previous approaches to Dante’s political thought and does a close re-reading of Convivio and Monarchia in a properly historicized framework, inspired by the work of Ernst Curtius and modern historicist methodology, contextualizing it in 13th and 14th century history. In particular, the study departs from Dante’s denunciation of greed in his lyrics, Commedia, Convivio, and Monarchia to establish the fact —through extensive research in economic history, commercial development, economic thought, political history, social history in medieval Italy etc.— that far from being a merely abstract denunciation of mammon or usury, like that found in the Bible and other theological writings, it is a unique and acerbic response to broad changes that can only be construed, on the basis of historical scholarship, in terms of the emergence of early capitalism in Florentine society around the early to mid 13th century. During Dante’s life, greed became a serious object of social discourse, with voices expressing both approbation and disapprobation, because of the monetization, urbanization, and commercialization of northern Italy. Moreover, during this period the Florentine state is effectively transformed from a bourgeois merchants’ republic to an oligarchy of the wealthy. The rise of a mega-wealthy, nouveau riche economic elite resulted in many social dislocations and factional conflicts. Through an examination of the economic and social development of the Florentine state and the role its powerful banks and firms played in it—from its early popolo governments, ordinances of justice, white and black Ghibelline crises, through the early 14th century Mercanzia—I thus adjust the typical church-empire historiographical binary to show that Dante’s monarchical theory is in fact a meaningful response not only to the broader ideological claims of the church-empire (spiritual-secular) conflict, but in fact, is also a response to the latter’s imbrication within the political and economic development of early capitalism. My investigation includes extensive research on the relationship between banking, commerce, and papal and Florentine-state political phenomena. Thus, having pointed out the existence of a historical object we might call medieval Italian “political economy” as interlaced with traditional historiographies of Church- Imperial-City-State politics in 13th and 14th century Italy (chapters 2 and 3), and the history of the historiography of capitalism during the same period (chapter 4), I carefully examine Aristotle in terms of Dante (chapter 5). In particular, I show that Aristotle’s conception of justice, chrematistic wealth-getting and monetary accumulation (natural vs. unnatural), and the moral teloi of the human being and state in the Politics and Nicomachean Ethics moor and inform Dante’s main claims and denunciations of greed in regards to his own time: Aristotle presents an alternative model to his contemporary status quo. By understanding Dante’s political works as an Aristotelian inspired critique of political economy (Dante cites “the philosopher” hundreds of times) I show that Dante is responding to emergent capitalism as an institutionalization of greed which leads to infinite and unsolvable regressions of conflict which only one universal monarchical authority can stop, provided that such a monarch acts according to properly Aristotelian philosophical conceptions. Chapter 1 serves as an initial overview of the whole study, also positioning it in relation to debates within the field of Dante studies; chapter 2 examines the international and political situation of Florence and Italy during Dante’s time; chapter 3 proposes a new historiography of this history and examines it as the development of “political economy”; chapter 4 explores the emergence of capitalism in Florence and Italy in the 13th and 14th centuries (also motioning to debates about the nature and definition of “political economy” and “capitalism”); finally, chapter 5 examines Aristotle’s critique of political economy in the Ethics and Politics, then pivots to Dante’s deployment of such Aristotle’s paradigms in Convivio and Monarchia to both denounce the injustices generated by the intertwinement of politics and acquisitive monetary wealth-getting and to articulate a monarchical political model for stopping the deleterious effects of greed. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ......................................................................................................................... ii Chapter 1. Dante's Political Thought as Political Economic Thought: Criticism, Historicism, and New Avenues for Research ............................................ 1 1. Introduction: Greed, Wealth, and Political Economy ........................................................ 2 2. Dante's Political Thought ................................................................................................................ 18 3. Critical Reception ................................................................................................................................ 56 Chapter 2. Papato, Impero, Commune, Banchiere: The History of International, Italian, and Florentine Political Development in the 13th - Early 14th Centuries ...................................................................................................................... 86 1. International and Italian Political Situation ........................................................................ 90 2. The Political Conditions of Florence ...................................................................................... 100 3. Dante's Entry into Politics and the Period up to and following his Exile .......... 118 Chapter 3. Florentine Political History as History of Political Economy ... 130 1. The Primo Popolo, Ghibelline Restoration, and Victory of the Guelfs (Florentine Bankers, French Monarchy, and Pope) ........................................................... 136 3. Priorate of the Guilds and Secondo Popolo (1282) to Ordinamenti di Giustizia (1293-1295) ................................................................................................................................................. 143 4. Papal Intertwinement with Florentine (and Tuscan) Capitalism, and the Political Economy of White and Black Guelfism (1281-1304) ........................................ 150 5. The Consolidation of Political Economic Interests in the post-1308 Mercanzia as an Effective Rule of Corporations over the city of Florence ..................................... 170 Chapter 4. Capitalism or 'c'apitalism? A Brief History of the Historiography of Capitalism and its Origins in 13th and 14th Century Italy ................................. 180 Chapter 5. Aristotle’s Paradigm and Dante’s Critique of Political Economy in Monarchia and Convivio: Wealth-getting, Greed, Chrematistic states,