Ada Palmer: belief

Transcript context

…But the culture is getting started where somebody like that could be respected. How does that happen? An important part of it is when you have a merchant capital, everybody works for somebody who works for somebody who works for the boss. If you are a major merchant in Florence, you’re importing and exporting wool to and from all across Europe. You have employees all across Europe. You’re buying mass bulk wool from England, importing it to Florence to use olive oil that you’ve bought from Naples to process into high-quality wool, which you’re then exporting to Germany and France. You are a very interconnected businessman. You have a lot of contacts, you have a lot of clout, and the employees who work for you look to you for their safety net as well as their political representation. We’re very accustomed in the modern period to thinking of the government as being our big safety net. If we wonder who is going to fund the hospitals, whose job is it to take care of orphans, we think of the government, or maybe the church. But in this period, if you’re killed and you leave orphans behind, it is your employer whose duty it is to take care of them. If you are injured and can no longer work, it is your employer who will support you for the rest of your life while you are disabled and find you work that you can do with that disability. A huge portion of the safety net is your employer. Are you in trouble with the law? Your employer will supply your defense attorney. Your employer will supply the persuasive note to the judge that they would very much appreciate if their person got off. This is the system known as the patronage system, and it existed in ancient Rome. It exists and saturates the medieval and the Renaissance worlds in which everyone is in a very interconnected hierarchy. So if you’re a brewer and your son gets in a barroom brawl and punches somebody out and the person’s nose breaks and they die in the brawl and your son is suddenly in trouble and you say, “Oh no, I don’t want my son to be executed,” you turn to your landlord. Your landlord turns to his landlord. They turn to one of these major families. These major families are massive landowners that own dozens of apartments within the city. Hundreds or thousands of people work for them. So it makes sense to everyone to be represented that way, like having a council of the CEOs of all of the organizations that employees work for, when your corporation also supplies your social safety net and you see your representation there. It’s also a world that’s used to thinking in terms of hierarchy and very unused to thinking about real democracy. It really doesn’t have any confidence in what we would recognize as democracy. We talk about these republics, and we’re very excited by the fact that they give more power to the people than a monarchy does, but they’re still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics. as democracy. We talk about these republics, and we’re very excited by the fact that they give more power to the people than a monarchy does, but they’re still incredibly narrow oligarchic republics. When we read Machiavelli, he talks a lot about the popolo, which we translate as “the people.” He talks about how important it is that the popolo are respected and have a voice, that the popolo are armed, and the government shows respect for the people by allowing them to be armed. We read this and we’re like, “This feels really familiar. This feels like documents of the founding of the US where we’re respecting and arming and trusting the people.” Popolo meant the top 4% economically of the population, the members of the merchant guilds. That’s the popolo. He’s talking about a narrow-slice oligarchy being heard, a narrow-slice oligarchy being respected. We didn’t realize that in the nineteenth century when we were excitedly translating The Prince and reading it as quasi-democratic. We now have read more documents of the period and realize how people use these words.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.