| This dissertation argues that the emergence of philosophical liberalism in the seventeenth century can be read as a response to a crisis within Renaissance culture, a crisis which pitted the hermeneutically oriented and republican-leaning proponents of civic humanism against an array of positivistically oriented critics. These critics held that civic humanism's ontology of praxis, anchored in the classical rhetorical tradition of Aristotle and Cicero, tended, under conditions of increasingly radical cultural pluralism, to lead first to irreconcilable interpretive conflicts and then to devastating political conflicts. The extended cultural conversation between civic humanists and their positivist critics---a conversation which constitutes the "prehistory of liberalism"---was often couched in terms of the "discourse of speculation," a discourse which combined, in an unstable yet productive fashion, the imagery of speculative narration and of specular presence. Exploring contemporary philosophical debates between communitarian partisans of virtue and "liberal" partisans of justice, I argue that "liberalism" proper just is an enduringly stable configuration of the same speculative and specular ideological motifs that had been articulated variously throughout the long course of the prehistory of liberalism. I locate the origins of this prehistory in the emergence of Florentine civic humanism around 1400, and trace the dissemination of the ontological premises of civic humanist culture through the pedagogical projects of thinkers like Bruni and Agricola, the latter of whom established the humanistic curriculum that was eventually institutionalized in the grammar schools of Tudor England. Finally, I argue that Shakespeare's 1594 narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece , which is closely affiliated with the Elizabethan political and cultural avant garde that gathered around Sir Philip Sidney and the Earl of Essex, imitates Augustine's critique of the exemplary republican matron Lucretia in order to illustrate the weaknesses of either an exclusively hermeneutic or an exclusively positivist politics. In thus insisting that we "imagine" the "whole," he anticipates the strategy that would be adopted two decades later by Hugo Grotius, the first of the truly liberal political theorists. |
