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Dante Politico: Toward a Mapping of Dante’s Political Thought

The studies collected in this volume show the impact that Dante’s political thought has had in historical and geographical circumstances far removed from his own. This essay, intended as a complement to the Introduction by Dennis Looney, turns to the Middle Ages and explores some of Dante’s political ideas as they took shape in light of his own historical and poetic experience, and in relation to the initial reception they elicited. Political concerns traverse Dante’s corpus from his early production to his works of maturity—notably, Convivio 4, De vulgari eloquentia, the Monarchia, the Commedia, and the political Epistole—and are inseparable from the philosophical, theological, and poetic modes of inquiry that pervade his intellectual career. It is an integrated approach that calls for an equally integrated reading. The phrase Dante politico must be understood in a twofold sense: Dante reflecting on the social nature of human beings— the Aristotelian concept of man as a political animal—and Dante heralding a specific theory of an ideal politia, or form of political organization. While in Aristotle the organized community identifies with the polis, or city-state, Dante’s political unit is the universal empire, an overarching structure that unifies smaller entities such as kingdoms, cities, and villages under a common rule of law. We find Dante’s first pronouncements on this matter in Convivio 4, the treatise revolving around the question of nobility in which Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen figures as Dante’s privileged interlocutor. Defined as “the last emperor of the Romans” (Conv. 4.3.6), Frederick II— lawgiver and himself a theorist of sovereignty in the Liber Augustalis—is not just an opponent in the debate on nobility but the implicit catalyzer of Dante’s discourse on the empire. “The root foundation underlying the Imperial Majesty” Dante declares “is, in truth, man’s need for human society, which is established for a single end: namely, a life of happiness” (Conv. 4.4.1).