Carolingian Roots of Western Humanistic Tradition: Renaissance Humanism, Christian Ethical Integration and Revival of the Humanities

When the term Carolingian Renaissance was minted in the 1830s by the French literary historian Ampère, the achievement of preserving and appropriating the classics was one of the reasons to use this very term — Renaissance. (…) The Carolingian achievement was indeed remarkable in this respect. A great number of manuscripts from the Carolingian period survive with ancient or late-ancient texts. The texts of only a few ancient authors (Virgil, Terence, Livy) survive in complete manuscripts from antiquity; for all other authors the oldest surviving manuscripts are from the Carolingian period, or even later. (…) Classical texts were part of the intellectual backbone of the average ninth-century scholar, who recognized quotes from Virgil, Terence, and Horace just as he would recognize quotes from the Bible. (Teeuwen 2015, 23-24¹)

THESIS

Carolingian scriptoria preserved most of the Latin classics, and the republican tradition that reached the founders ran through Renaissance civic humanism and English classical republicanism, which used those texts. Carolingian political thought itself was Christian and imperial. Although, not republican, this system supplied the educational substrate that later revivals would build upon, making the Carolingian contribution integral, though indirect, to the roots of neo-classical republicanism. The early American (U.S.) republic draws its deepest intellectual and moral roots from Rome — a continuous yet evolving synthesis of ancient classical thought, and not directly from the Carolingian line. Carolingian court and monastic scriptoria copied the Cicero, Livy, and Sallust on which later republican reading depended (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 97-99; Teeuwen 2015, 23-24), but the republican tradition that reached the American founders was the Atlantic one reconstructed by Pocock from Renaissance Florence through seventeenth-century England, not Carolingian imperial ideology (Pocock 1975, 506-52; Bailyn 1967, 26). No major historian on the founding such as Bailyn, Wood, Pocock, or Carl J. Richard in The Founders and the Classics (1994) treats Charlemagne, Alcuin, or the Carolingian Renaissance as a political model for the founders. The Carolingian connection is textual and prior: without those ninth-century copies, much of the Roman republican canon used in the Italian Renaissance and in eighteenth-century America would not have survived. So, I am laying out what the Carolingian renaissance was exactly for Christian intellectual history, and the aspects of the two distinct Renaissances.

I am arguing however that the Carolingian line is needed in the present-day to address the modern conflicts of Christianity with republicanism even in the American context. Scholarly and educational infrastructure and residual influences force us to acknowledge the role of the Carolingian Renaissance², the civic humanism of the Italian Renaissance, and the devout Christian humanism of the Northern Renaissance, which were mediated through Enlightenment-era developments in political philosophy and education.

J. G. A. Pocock’s thesis was that the Atlantic revival was Florentine, not Carolingian. His book’s argument, as he states it, is that the American Revolution was “the last great act of civic humanism of the Renaissance,” after the republican idea had passed from Machiavelli and other Florentines into Puritan England and then into Revolutionary and Federalist America (Pocock 1975)³. He puts the point this way: “The American Revolution, which to an older school of historians seemed a rationalist or naturalist breach with an old world [of Aristotelianism and Machiavellism] and its history, now appears to have been involved in a complex relation with both English and Renaissance cultural history…” (quoted in Soll 2010⁴, from Pocock).

Gordon S. Wood’s formulation was that “in the eighteenth century, to be enlightened was to be interested in antiquity, and to be interested in antiquity was to be interested in republicanism” (Wood, 1969, quoted in Engelsberg Ideas, 2023).

Bernard Bailyn limited even the classical role, and said nothing of the Carolingians:

The classics of the ancient world are everywhere in the literature of the Revolution, but they are illustrative, not determinative, of thought. They contributed a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought, a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs. (Bailyn 1967, 26)

Mortimer Sellers stated that the American founders’ own classical frame was Roman rather than Carolingian.

“The American Revolution was a Whig revolution, which made it also a neo-Roman revolution from the start. (…) The most important of the many classical influences on the American founding fathers was the political history of the Roman republic” (Sellers 2009, 1⁴).

For a fuller revival of the republican cause and of the Humanities, I am arguing for that grammar of thought and the eclecticism within both the Carolingian and republican lineage allows it against the diluted American presentation, especially through its modern democratic sloganism, political factionalism and contemporary Christian Zionist revisionism, hiding under a modern constructed “Judeo-Christian” assertion on the founding history.

Modern American presentation offers three substitutes for the grammar: democratic sloganism, in which “republic” means plebiscitary virtue; factional classicism, in which Rome is a mascot; and a mid-twentieth-century “Judeo-Christian” frame, later overlapped by Christian Zionist politics, presented as if it were founding history. Against that, a revival of republicanism and of the humanities needs both lineages in their own shape. The Carolingian lineage supplies the Christian discipline of copying, correcting, and schooling the arts. The republican lineage supplies the civic canon — Cicero, Livy, Sallust, Machiavelli, Harrington, the founders’ own reading — and the insistence that virtue and corruption are political problems, not campaign words. Neither lineage authorizes the slogan that now covers both.

Bailyn granted that the classics are everywhere in revolutionary literature, then denied them the decisive role by saying they supplied “a vivid vocabulary but not the logic or grammar of thought.” This thesis is that the grammar he could not find in colonial quotation is the longer practice of receiving classical texts inside a Christian intellectual order, and that twentieth-century American sloganism has kept the vocabulary and dropped the grammar. The present conflict between Christianity and republicanism cannot be answered from the diluted American vocabulary, and the usable grammar is the older eclecticism running through the program of Carolingian CORRECTIO and the Atlantic republican canon.

THE ART OF READING AND

That grammar is eclectic in a precise sense. The Carolingian program did not revive the Roman republic. It put grammar, rhetoric, and the liberal arts under correctio: a reform of Latin, liturgy, law, and clerical competence in service of a Christian empire. Alcuin’s circle read Virgil, Cicero, and the rhetorical handbooks, but as instruments, not as a constitution. The republican line that later reaches the founders is a different eclecticism: Florentine civic humanism, English classical republicans, and the founders’ own mixture of Cicero, Livy, Polybius, Locke, and common law. What the two share is not a political model. It is a refusal to let one slogan stand in for the canon. A text is copied, corrected, compared, and put to work. That is the opposite of democratic sloganism and of factional citation, which use a name such as Cato, the founders, “biblical values,” without the art of reading that made the name available.

Hence, I argue that a constructive post-partisan culture must be worked on and towards immediately — leaving behind the present pessimism to those who cannot imagine the transformation. This lineage at any rate frames republican government not merely as a set of institutions but as a way of life centered on civic virtue, human dignity, moral agency, and active participation in the commonwealth. Civic virtue here functions as both a political and spiritual imperative, tempered by Christian teachings on charity and stewardship.

In an age dominated by secular materialism, this heritage requires no new synthesis but already equips us to cultivate responsible citizens through a renewed commitment to classical liberal-arts education. Alternative classical studies schools, grounded in the trivium and quadrivium, can and should serve as the institutional foundation for this cultural renewal, forming individuals capable of harmonizing reason, faith, and communal responsibility.

THE HISTORICAL NARRATIVE FROM ANTIQUITY TO TRANSMISSION

“A tour of history’s great republics, ancient and modern, shows that civic education is the best defence against decay.” (Max Skjönsberg, Republics fall when they forget the past, Aug. 20, 2026)

The framers and ratifiers argued from a wide historical brief of Greek leagues, Rome, medieval and early-modern republics, and failed confederacies, because they thought constitutions were experiments already run elsewhere (Adams, Defence; Madison, Federalist 18-20). They also assumed citizens would share enough of that brief to judge those experiments (Jefferson to Yancey, 1816; the diffusion-of-knowledge bills). Bailyn and Wood’s histories simply document that habit. Ignorance of the trajectory does not make the Constitution mysterious, but it makes the reasons given for its parts inaudible.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” (Thomas Jefferson, Writings (Washington ed.), 14:384; also in the letter’s sequel: the people are the only safe depository of power, and must be instructed if they are to keep it.

Jefferson again in the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge (1779) later notes, that history is the study by which citizens learn how power corrupts and how free states have died.

Both Madison and Hamilton laid out the influences. Madison in Federalist No. 18-20, names the Amphictyonic league, Achaean league, Holy Roman and German, the Dutch republic, and Poland as influences on our system. Hamilton in Federalist No. 9 adds the Lycian confederacy. In these works, the Constitution is defended by a survey of other polities, not by invention from nothing.

Adams in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787-88) provides a catalogue of republics and mixed states such as San Marino, Swiss cantons, United Provinces, Venice, ancient democracies, Carthage⁵, and Italian cities whose self-government he traces to Charlemagne’s grant of laws after the barbarian kingdoms (Defence, vol. 3, on Pistoia and the Tuscan cities). The Ottoman Empire although appears in the period’s constitutional literature mainly as a foil of undivided sovereignty and military despotism, but not as a model to copy. Gordon Wood called the Defence “the finest fruit of the American Enlightenment.”

The classical foundations of republicanism originate in antiquity, particularly in the works of Aristotle and Cicero. Aristotle’s concept of eudaimonia (human flourishing) bound individual virtue to active participation in the polis, while Cicero, in De Re Publica and De Officiis, portrayed justice as a divine harmony binding society through natural law, rhetoric, and mixed government. These ideas emphasized liberty as non-domination, the prevention of corruption, and the cultivation of prudence, justice, and civic duty, all core republican concerns that later traditions would adapt.

The Carolingian Renaissance (late eighth to early ninth-century) provided the crucial institutional bridge by preserving and standardizing classical learning amid the fragmentation following Rome’s fall. Alcuin of York (c. 735-804), invited by Charlemagne⁶, reorganized education around the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy).

As the leading intellectual architect of this revival, Alcuin ensured the transmission of patristic and pagan texts through monastic and cathedral schools, framing the liberal arts as preparation for divine wisdom while emphasizing scriptural study and liturgical reform⁸. L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson document the concrete copies Alcuin kept⁹. Of the Tours manuscript of Cicero’s speeches (London, British Library, Add. 47678), written while Alcuin was abbot of Saint-Martin between 796-804, they write that “it can hardly be doubted that its parent had been the copy in the palace library.” They add that the fifth-century Puteanus of Livy’s third decade (Paris, BnF, lat. 5730), “the source of all the later manuscripts,” was copied at Tours (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 97). Of Corbie after the mid-ninth century they list, among books copied from palace exemplars, “a large collection of Cicero’s philosophical works, the first and third decades of Livy, Sallust, … Caesar’s Gallic War, the Ad Herennium” (Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 98-99). Cicero, Livy, Sallust and Caesar are the authors later used as republican authorities.

Though imperial and monastic rather than republican in character, this system supplied the educational substrate that later revivals would build upon, making the Carolingian contribution integral, though indirect, to the roots of American republicanism.

“Educational officials, including Alcuin, sponsored the reproduction of large numbers of classical Latin texts, and scholars believe that, without these reproductions, most of the texts would have been lost permanently” (“Carolingian Renaissance,” Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Carolingian handwritten script (minuscule) was later taken by Italian humanists for an ancient Roman hand and became the model of humanist handwritten script.

The Italian Renaissance, beginning in the mid-fourteenth century with Francesco Petrarch, marked a decisive turn toward the active recovery of classical texts and the celebration of human dignity, reason, creativity, and moral agency. Petrarch’s emphasis on inner virtue and eloquent expression laid the groundwork for civic humanism, which Hans Baron identified as crystallizing in Florence after 1402 amid threats from Milanese tyranny. Thinkers such as Leonardo Bruni advanced an ideal of the active life (vita activa) in the republic, where citizens exercised liberty through participatory governance, rhetoric, and historical study (Baron 1955/1966). This secular appreciation of human potential was eclectic, incorporating Neoplatonic, Stoic, and even Hermetic elements through Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, which enabled a flexible, allegorical (“analogetic”) interpretation of myths and symbols as expressions of soul experiences and universal truths. Such syncretism, i.e., selecting virtuous elements across pagan and Christian sources fostered a non-dogmatic spirituality that enriched rather than supplanted civic commitment.

The Northern Renaissance, emerging in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, tempered and elevated this Italian legacy through a devout integration of classical sources with Christian ethics. Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) exemplified this in works such as The Education of a Christian Prince and his advocacy for docta pietas (learned piety): a moral philosophy combining scholarly rigor with pious living, where humanity acts as stewards of divine creation (Erasmus 1516; see also the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Erasmus). Northern humanists reframed civic virtue as a sacred duty, blending Aristotelian eudaimonia with Christian charity and the active pursuit of the common good. This synthesis positioned political engagement as a form of spiritual practice, nurturing inner being while fulfilling obligations to the res publica.

These strands later converged in the Atlantic republican tradition. Anglo-American republican tradition within this is already a synthesis and composition of philosophy of government that is meant to prioritize the common good, civic virtue, and human potential, drawing from classical sources to adapt to modern governance. Its core structure is a mixed government that blends elements of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy to prevent domination and corruption, as emphasized by thinkers like Cicero and Machiavelli, who advocated for rule of law, separation of powers, and popular sovereignty. J.G.A. Pocock’s seminal analysis traced the “Machiavellian moment,” or the confrontation with temporal instability and the need for virtuous renewal, from Florentine thought through English commonwealthmen (e.g., Harrington, Sidney) to the American founders (Pocock 1975). Colonial and early national education reinforced this: the liberal-arts curriculum at institutions like Harvard and Yale, modeled on the trivium/quadrivium and heavy in Cicero, Plutarch, and classical history, trained founders in rhetoric, virtue, and mixed government. Figures such as Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Rush explicitly linked classical education to republican survival, viewing it as essential for countering corruption and fostering moral agency.

THE CHRISTIANITY-REPUBLICANISM CONFLICT AND “JUDEO-CHRISTIANITY”

The Christianity-republicanism conflict was studied by Pocock. Civic virtue, Christian values, and commercial society pull against one another; and the American Revolution is, on his account, the last great act of Renaissance civic humanism, not a resolution of that pull. A purpose of the Carolingian line is to address the conflict only as a mode of reception. It shows a Christian culture that neither discarded the pagan canon nor pretended the canon was already a gospel polity. But it does not show a Christian republic. It shows that a Christian republican revival needs a premodern example of classical learning under Christian discipline, rather than a postwar civil religion.

The “Judeo-Christian” assertion on the founding does not survive contact with the founding record. Mark Silk (Silk 1984, 65-85) showed that the phrase was descriptive in the late nineteenth century and became a political term only in the 1930s, first against fascist antisemitism, then as a Cold War contrast with “godless” communism. Eisenhower’s 1952 Freedoms Foundation line, that American government makes no sense unless founded in religious faith, “and I don’t care what it is,” and that “with us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept” is the familiar crest of that usage. K. Healan Gaston’s Imagining Judeo-Christian America (Gaston 2019) dates the religio-political use, as a modifier of American democracy, to the early 1930s and after, not before.

The founding biblical-political resource was something else. Eric Nelson’s The Hebrew Republic argues that Protestant Christian Hebraists from Grotius, Selden, Cunaeus to James Harrington (Oceana) used rabbinic and biblical constitutional materials to rethink liberty, distribution, and toleration, and that this Hebraic republicanism entered the tradition the founders inherited. That is a seventeenth-century scholarly eclecticism. It is not a twentieth-century “Judeo-Christian” civil religion, and it is not Christian Zionism. Political Christian Zionism, in the dispensationalist sense associated with Darby and later with the Scofield apparatus, is a nineteenth-century system read back onto a founding that did not use it as constitutional grammar. Some Protestants in the revolutionary age held restorationist hopes; those hopes were not the design of the republic. Treating them as the hidden meaning of 1776 or 1787 is revisionism by anachronism, and yet the present-day prominent American conservative commentators have confidently based their programs on this position.

The Carolingian Renaissance is not a cause of the American founding. However, let us say that it is a necessary exhibit for anyone who wants Christianity and republican letters to inhabit one curriculum again, and who refuses to let a twentieth-century “Judeo-Christian” construction, or a later Christian Zionist politics, stand in for either the founders or the longer canon.

CHRISTIAN ETHICAL AND SPIRITUAL INTEGRATION

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM focus on individual agency and eloquence serves education in the humanities, with the purpose to equip citizens to participate actively in public life, reflecting Petrarch’s and Bruni’s ideals of reforming society. The history and ideas born from Northern Humanism provides a layer of moral prudence and social equality, tempering Italian individualism with Erasmus-inspired ideals of ethical governance rooted in piety and communal welfare.

The immense value of the Carolingian Renaissance is that it contributed a model of centralized yet culturally unified authority, as seen in Charlemagne’s promotion of liberal arts for doctrinal understanding and imperial stability, standardizing practices like grammar and script to foster intellectual cohesion. This an example of a recovered period of classical Eclecticism, which acted as the binding method, selectively integrating the best from Aristotle’s polity, Roman republicanism, and Renaissance innovations to create adaptive policies, e.g., combining property-based personality with humanist education to ensure anti-corruption and self-government. This would manifest as a humanism-infused republicanism where freedom is non-domination, virtue is cultivated through eclectic classical study, and politics serves human flourishing rather than divine or autocratic mandates.

REPUBLICAN HERITAGE is already a living synthesis of classical wisdom, Christian humanism, and liberal-arts education that prioritizes human dignity, civic virtue, and transcendent insight over materialist reductionism. It combines the Renaissance recovery of antiquity, the harmonizing role of Christian ethics, the value of eclecticism and syncretism, and the enduring need for classical education to cultivate responsible citizens. This is a synthesis that can already be read within the tradition against both the overly rationalist-materialist strand of the Enlightenment expression and the modern Christian Nationalist.

A study and adaptation of the Carolingian Renaissance’s revival of scriptural studies and liturgical reforms under Alcuin would form the foundational layer, utilizing education in the liberal arts such as grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy to deepen insight and even in its certain spheres unify believers through meticulously preserved ancient texts, standardized liturgical practices, and monastic scholarship, thereby creating a structured yet accessible path to divine understanding that echoes the Carolingian emphasis on intellectual cohesion for spiritual harmony of Christian thought.

Italian Renaissance Humanism’s secular appreciation of human dignity, which celebrated the individual’s capacity for reason, creativity, and moral agency through the recovery and study of classical texts is tempered by Northern Humanism’s devout integration of these classical sources with Christian ethics, as exemplified in Erasmus’s advocacy for a moral philosophy that combines pious living with scholarly rigor, positioning humanity not merely as rational beings but as stewards of divine creation entrusted with the responsibility to cultivate virtue as a sacred moral duty. This is briefly explained in an introduction to Comparative Civic Humanism on Seven Regional Currents and Lineages.

CORE SYNTHESIS OF BALANCED HARMONIZATION AND ECLECTICISM

The Enlightenment era of neo-classical republicanism led to various conflicting positions and attitudes towards Christianity, but outside of the rationalist-materialist frame, there were continued efforts to harmonize classical wisdom with Christian humanism without rigid dogmatism or reduction to any single strand. This is the enduring legacy of that effort, which we inherit.

Civic republicanism reinforces social bonds through anti-domination and civic participation; and the idea is that this would minimize (not claim to obliterate) corruption and empowering the weak through property rights and common good pursuits. Eclecticism enabled mixing social elements, e.g., Roman civic duty with Renaissance genre scenes creates inclusive norms, blending elite patronage with the realism of the common citizen for a society that values both individual achievement and collective welfare. A recovery of this synthesis would result in a socially dynamic structure, with education as the equalizer, art as moral mirror, and virtue as the glue holding diverse classes together.

Eclecticism therefore served as the integrative mechanism, because before this period, Renaissance figures selectively combined Platonic ideals of the soul, Stoic emphasis on inner virtue and justice, and Christian theology to create a flexible framework for civic piety. Here, Pagan revivalism and Christian theology meet outside of previous hostilities. The allegorical method of interpreting myths and symbols, drawing on Neoplatonic revivalism and traditions such as Kabbalah and Hermeticism among elite humanists allowed discernment of “universal truths” across sources, promoting a spirituality that transcends narrow constraints. This remained anchored in Mediterranean wisdom; thus, it was never a rejection of European or Christian particularity but an enrichment of it, facilitating the view of political life as a path to human flourishing under divine order. This took different trajectories throughout the Enlightenment in its process of secularization, whereas during the Carolingian renaissance, reform was oriented towards sanctification.

It would lastly, manifest as an engaged polity where citizens actively shape their community through virtuous participation, supported by eclectic cultural revival. This would find a culture rediscovering the value of virtue, patriotism, and self-rule, driving public involvement with mixed (not factional) institutions ensuring checks on power and promotion of the res publica. The incorporation and understanding of the value of Renaissance Humanism, both Italian and Northern, would fuel this through education in rhetoric and history, preparing citizens for eloquent debate and ethical action, as Petrarch and Erasmus envisioned. Instead of plastering the “Noahide laws” in the schools, our politicians would go across the country like philosophers teaching about the depths and value of the representative democratic synthesis we inherit, and the importance of this philosophy of self-governent, not uniform conformity to some singular or group of wills.

The value of understanding the influence of the Carolingian Renaissance on the American founders’ synthesis would lead to expression that combines civic infrastructure through patronage of arts, architecture, and learning centers, like Charlemagne’s Aachen palace, which embodied unified public spaces for cultural exchange. Diverse civic elements, e.g., Athenian democracy with Roman forums and Renaissance innovations for adaptive public institutions could be integrated through classical eclectic approach, such as any degree of deliberate eclectic architectural revivalism blending classical columns with humanist motifs to inspire communal pride. Ultimately, civics would emphasize active citizenship, where the approach of eclectic synthesis to traditions foster resilient communities committed to liberty, virtue, and shared prosperity.

While scholars rightly debate the precise weight of all these elements, Hans Baron’s civic-humanism thesis has been qualified by James Hankins and others, who note that many humanists served monarchs and that “virtue politics” extended beyond strict republicanism. Pocock’s narrative, while influential, coexists with liberal and Protestant influences in the American founding. Nonetheless, the core insight endures: republicanism falls without sustained concern for human welfare, family, community, and transcendent virtue. Excise charity, moderation, or the liberal arts, and the system loses its animating spirit.

THE HISTORIANS’ ADVICE

A recovery of classical civic republicanism is our primary lens here, and its victory will be a victory for many other related schools as well. That follows from the anthropology, and we ought to dig deeper into the synthesis and eclecticism. It is language, history, philosophy, rhetoric, and the slow work of institutions that treat a young person as a future peer in self-rule and self-government rather than as a client, a consumer, or a culture-war recruit. That arena is a controlled arena, and we must teach the generations against the present partisan order, and against the thinking of those stuck in it. Degenerated civics and a collapsed political vocabulary are therefore not separate crises from the exile of the humanities nor this heritage. They are the same exile seen from the forum.

Hannah Arendt in On Revolution (1963) on the American foundation reminds us, that the Founders thought in a tradition of political examples, Rome especially⁹, and tried to stabilize freedom by institutions rather than by a single will.

In all of Gordon S. Wood (Bancroft, Pulitzer, National Humanities Medal under Obama) remarks on founding education repeatedly advises us, that a republic requires an educated people; and every major founder drafted some plan of public instruction. Classical republicanism was a working language, not mere ornament (see The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, 1969). Bernard Bailyn in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution on Sources and Traditions taught the same about that Revolutionary generation and their reading diet, because they assumed political argument was a learned craft. Carl J. Richard in The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 1994/1995) acknowledges that college and grammar-school course served the political education. Thucydides, Livy, Plutarch, Cicero were not hobbies. Meyer Reinhold’s Classica Americana (Wayne State, 1984) made the same point. Caroline Winterer in The Culture of Classicism (Johns Hopkins, 2002), traced how that curriculum was the public culture of the early republic.

THE REPUBLICAN RECOVERY OF THE HUMANITIES

If a renewed value for the Humanities is revived, then it ought to be carried by a regenerated republican cause, which regains a purpose older than “employability” and older than the seminar’ as a machine for unmasking’s regime of diagnosis. Republican letters asked what kind of soul can bear liberty without becoming a factional instrument. Poetry, history, moral philosophy, and oratory were civic arts because they trained judgment, measure, and the capacity to see a common thing. Petrarch’s revival of letters was already a republican act: the dead were summoned so the living could speak as citizens rather than as courtiers. A victory for the tradition would not baptize every current humanities department. It would restore the humanities as citizen formation against ignorance, corruption, and domination, which is the duty assigned to every republican thinker.

The classics are not a heritage brand for a civilizational fortress. They are the first archive of the questions the recovery puts first: mixed constitution in Polybius and Cicero; corruption and libertas in Sallust and Livy; law and office in Roman republican practice; the Presocratic and Stoic roots the site refuses to treat as optional preface. When the classics are taught only as “Western Civilizational” property, or only as a text to be indicted, both uses are captures. Black classicists already proved the point the other way using the republican idiom as weapons against domination, not as a deed to a complexion. A republican victory would make that use normal again. Greek and Latin would cease to be luxury electives for the professionally established and return, at least in ambition, to the status they had in early Black republican education and in the civic schools of the early American republic: instruments of speech and self-command. Then perhaps, you will not feel it so difficult to act, speak and write as those before us have rose to.

Language studies follow for the same reason. A citizen who cannot hear Cicero, Machiavelli, Mazzini, or Douglass in their actual grain will receive them only through the slogans of the present axis. Latin and Greek, Italian of the Risorgimento, the English of early American and Black republican oratory, even the older civic vocabularies buried under “democracy” as a feel word: these are not ornaments. They are how non-domination was argued before it was translated into tax charts and identity inventories, yet we indict what we cannot ourselves reproduce. Recover the thing and you must recover the tongues in which the thing was precise. Translating old texts alone will not save a tradition whose enemies copied its words and then claimed to have invented freedom.

Forgotten institutions are the body of the same soul. Lyceums and mechanics institutes, classical academies and normal schools that still taught rhetoric, town meetings and ward associations that were schools of office, mutual aid and producer societies that aimed at independence rather than clientage, the early Black churches and debating societies that trained public speech, Carbonari and Mazzinian networks that treated moral association as the seed of a republic, even the neglected civic side of fraternal orders: these were intermediate bodies that kept power from becoming a direct relation between isolated persons and a distant will.

The humanities, the classics, and language study do not survive long as museum wings of a managerial society or as chapels of a single ideology y’know. They survive when a public still believes that letters make citizens. Forgotten institutions do not return because a foundation funds a replica. They return when people again need places in which to practice non domination. A victory for the republican tradition would be a victory for those schools and houses because it would give them a common end that is neither the fortress West nor the program of the professional class: the formation of persons who can share rule, bear law, and refuse to treat polish, pedigree, or party as a title to command.

THE AMERICAN CONNECTION AND MODERN IMPERATIVE

The modern imperative for the recovery of American republicanism is in the renewal of education, and the advance, not the decline, of civic education.

This history of integrative wisdom embodies a heritage which directly shaped American republicanism. The founders’ classical educations rooted in Cicero’s vision of justice as societal harmony and Alcuin’s transmitted liberal arts infused the Constitution with commitments to mixed government, civic virtue, and resistance to tyranny. As Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn have shown, fears of corruption echoed Renaissance republicanism, while biblical and Christian social teachings supplied the ethical glue of charity and covenant (Wood 1969; Bailyn 1967). Republican engagement thus became, in the founders’ view, both a political duty and a form of moral-spiritual cultivation.

In today’s secularized-materialist society, these influences face profound challenges: the humanities are marginalized, liberal-arts education devalued, and civic life reduced to procedural individualism or economic utility. Yet the heritage already contains the antidote. Classical studies schools focused on reviving grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and the quadrivium alongside great texts provide the foundation for a new civic culture. They ignite the “primordial gnosis” of innate wisdom: the intuitive grasp of nature’s interconnectedness, human dignity, and our stewardship role. Education here is not prestige or nostalgia but civilizational renewal, forming citizens who discern universal truths eclectically, practice charity as civic duty, and view the res publica as a sacred trust.

Charlemagne’s correctio was a program of right-making: one Latin, one liturgy, one written standard of law and morals, schools to produce clerks who could read the rule they enforced, missi to check counts and bishops, the Admonitio generalis as a mirror for a Christian people. It was imperial and ecclesial at once. The king-emperor claimed not pagan numen but a ministry under God. The price was hostility to rival cults and a church-court complex that later republicans would not want. What traveled, when it traveled, was not that hostility. It was the idea that a polity is a moral-literary artifact: texts must be correct, officers must be examinable, worship and schooling (or their civic substitutes) must be uniform enough that a large territory can share a public language. The Carolingian Renaissance is the first European draft of that artifact after Rome.

Later republicanisms took the draft through other rooms. Italian civic humanists recovered correctio morum from Sallust and Cicero more than from Alcuin, yet they lived in a world whose schools, script, and legal Latin were Carolingian grandchildren. Conciliarists and city statutes treated reform of clergy and magistrates as a public duty without needing a new baptism of Saxons. Calvinist and magisterial-Protestant “reformation of manners” kept the Carolingian pairing of literacy, discipline, and common rule, while swapping Rome’s pagan and much of Rome’s papal inheritance for the Bible and consistory. Dutch and English commonwealths added mixed constitution and consent. By the time Harrington, Milton, and the American founders speak, correctio has been split: standardization of law and education remains; anti-pagan correctio is dropped, because the civic model is again Rome, Israel-as-republic, and a people who may not be forced to one altar.

American republicanism therefore inherits a secularized Carolingian function, not a Frankish church policy. Written constitutions, printed session laws, common schools, a postal and newspaper public, and the old demand that office be a trust are correctio without the missus of a bishop-king. Disestablishment is the explicit refusal of Charlemagne’s religious monopoly; classical architecture, Latin in the academy, and Masonic-Roman ritual are the explicit rehabilitation of what his missionaries called pagan. Other republicanisms show the same splice: Mazzinian moral education and association; Swiss and Dutch civic discipline; French revolutionary festivals that tried to restage public cult without medieval orthodoxy and often failed.

The durable piece is that a free people still needs a program of correction as Jefferson suggested — letters, law, and character, while the medieval attitude that heresy is a policing matter is not required for that program, in the American case, was constitutionally barred. In contrast from Charlemagne, Jefferson’s corrective program is about civic and moral cultivation, not coercive suppression of religious difference. The tension that remains is not whether correctio belongs to republicanism. It is who performs it when there is no emperor and no single church: school, press, association, and law, or a party that wants the old unity back under a new name.

CONCLUSION

The trouble is not that the Enlightenment added liberty. It is that a later secular-rationalist use of the Enlightenment taught Americans to keep the rights and drop the formation. Stoic discipline became self-help or was discarded as pagan. Carolingian and humanist scholarship became technical specialties. Religion was either privatized into taste or hardened into a party badge. What remained in public speech was a thin kit: consent, markets or administration, and “values” with no obligatory canon. Once the republic was described that way, it could be filled with almost anything. One dominant expression calls it a delivery state and reads the past as tainted prelude. The other calls it a nation-will and reads the past as a costume for the present leader or crowd. Neither has to know Adams’s survey of republics, Jefferson’s diffusion of knowledge, or the mixed inheritance that actually trained the founders. Hollowed philosophy is not neutrality. It is vacancy, and vacancy is what lets rival visions define the tradition as whatever they already wanted.

No new synthesis is really required, because the integrated tradition of Stoic resilience, Carolingian scholarship, Renaissance humanism, and Enlightenment liberty suffices as an expression of civilizational wisdom. What is needed is recovery, imagination and exemplification. By institutionalizing that inheritance through classical education, we can revive civics, education and religion as active and humanistic, foster attitudes of moderation and piety without dogmatism, and ensure American republicanism endures not as illusion but as lived virtue. That recovery will not come from present political leaders. They inherit offices designed by a philosophy they no longer study, and they speak the thin languages of delivery or of popular will. The design had a longer memory than they do. Technology can serve a school that already knows what it is for. It cannot replace the canon, the teacher, or the civic religion of letters. If leaders will not do that work, it remains with schools, associations, and readers who are not waiting for an administration to package it. Schools, associations, and readers will have to carry what the political class no longer can or refuse to do to the standard and degree required to turn the cyclic course of a republic’s decline.

For readers tracing the long arc of civic and republican traditions, this piece complements Comparative Civic Humanism and The Roots of American Republican Heritage, while offering a counterpoint to Fascist philosopher Mario Palmieri’s reflections on the Renaissance revival of classical learning.

REFERENCES

Mariken Teeuwen, “Carolingian Scholarship on Classical Authors: Practices of Reading and Writing,” in Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800-1200, edited by Erik Kwakkel, 23-50 (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015).
Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, Princeton University Press, 1966 [1955].
J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton University Press, 1975).
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967).
M.N.S. Sellers, “Classical Influences on the American Founding Fathers,” in The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
Desiderius Erasmus. 1997 [1516, The Education of a Christian Prince, Cambridge University Press.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Civic Humanism” (2019/2024) and “Republicanism” (2002/2016).
Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, University of North Carolina Press, 1969.
Alcuin’s educational reforms and founders’ curricula as provided (e.g., find the Cothran/Memoria Press summaries of classical influences).
L.D. Reynolds and N.G. Wilson, Scribes and Scholars: A Guide to the Transmission of Greek and Latin Literature, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Mark Silk, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (1984).
K. Healan Gaston, Imagining Judeo-Christian America: Religion, Secularism, and the Redefinition of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

FOOTNOTES

Mariken Teeuwen, “Carolingian Scholarship on Classical Authors: Practices of Reading and Writing,” in Manuscripts of the Latin Classics 800-1200, edited by Erik Kwakkel, 23-50 (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2015) ↩︎
The Carolingian Renaissance was an eighth to ninth-century revival of learning, culture, and ecclesiastical reform in the Carolingian Empire, especially under Charlemagne (r. 768-814) and Louis the Pious (r. 814-840). It strengthened education, standardized Latin texts and liturgy, and produced innovations like Carolingian minuscule, a clear and influential script. Most dictionaries define it as a movement that revived classical learning, improved clerical education, expanded monastic and cathedral schools, and promoted the copying and preservation of ancient texts. It was driven by Charlemagne’s reform agenda and supported by scholars such as Alcuin of York and Theodulf of Orléans. ↩︎
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975). Read the chapter “The Americanization of Virtue,” pp. 506-52. ↩︎
The brackets are Soll’s, not Pocock’s. Soll is citing the 2003 edition of Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment, page 506, the opening of the chapter “The Americanization of Virtue.” ↩︎
M.N.S. Sellers, “Classical Influences on the American Founding Fathers,” in The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W. Most, and Salvatore Settis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); also University of Baltimore Legal Studies Research Paper No. 2009-20. ↩︎
John Adams, Defence of the Constitutions: Vol. I, Letter XXXV. ↩︎
King Charlemagne ruled over the Frankish Kingdom of continental Europe, which was a continental European realm centered in what is now France, western and central Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and parts of Switzerland and northern Italy. The Frankish Kingdom was a trans‑regional, continental empire spanning Western and Central Europe, not fitting neatly into modern national categories. Its core regions were composed of Neustria (roughly northern & western France); Austrasia (eastern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, western Germany); Burgundy (east-central France); Aquitaine (southwestern France); Saxony (northern Germany, conquered by Charlemagne); and Lombardy (northern Italy, after 774). The Franks originated in the Lower Rhine region (modern western Germany and Netherlands). The Carolingian Empire later evolved into the Holy Roman Empire, which became strongly associated with German identity. Charlemagne crowned Emperor of the Romans by Pope Leo III 800 AD/CE. Otto I crowned emperor; this is the formal founding of the Holy Roman Empire as a political institution in 962 AD/CE. In 1806, Emperor Francis II abdicates under pressure from Napoleon, dissolving the empire. ↩︎
Alcuin’s own writings and the legislative decree of Admonitio Generalis issued by Charlemagne in 789 demonstrates this. Its purpose was to reform the church, education, and moral life across the Frankish kingdom, forming a cornerstone of the Carolingian Renaissance. ↩︎
Reynolds and Wilson 1991, 97-99. ↩︎
Paul Meany, First Principles: What America’s Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country, Cato Institute. ↩︎