ABSTRACT
In ‘Communes and Despots’, Philip Jones drew attention to two alternative political theories corresponding to the contrast in practice between communes and despots:
For Italian political theorists monarchy remained the common ideal of government, not only for civilian and canon lawyers or academic philosophers, but also for humanist writers, of whom a number in the fifteenth century composed conventional tracts on the rule of princes. Princely rule, however, was not the exclusive ideal. On the contrary, it was precisely in the later Middle Ages, when monarchy was everywhere gaining ground and political indifference increasing, that Italy was swept … by a ‘current of republicanism’ in sentiment and doctrine.1
