Zera Fink

Zera Silver Fink (1902-1979) was an American literary scholar and professor known for his studies on English Renaissance literature and humanism. ^[1] In the 1940s in his book The Classical Republicans he developed the concept of classical republicanism arguing that Puritan political thought drew inspiration from classical Greece ^[2] and Rome ^[3] transmitted through Italian renaissance theories of mixed government and the stability of the Venetian Republic. ^[2]

One particular influence he discerned was Machiavelli, particularly his Discourses on Livy, who had a great influence on James Harrington who was himself influential among the radical supporters of the Commonwealth. ^{[4] [5]}

Fink influenced both the political theorist Hannah Arendt ^[5] as well as J. G. A. Pocock, the historian and author of The Machiavellian Moment. ^[6]

Fink demonstrated that Polybian and Machiavellian ideas, the latter primarily in the Discourses on Livy , had been transmitted into what Fink described as "the classical republican" minds of seventeenth-century England, particularly James Harrington. ^[7]

References

1. "Fink, Zera Silver, 1902-1979".
2. Pocock 1965, p. 551.
3. Fink 1945, p. 1.
4. Fink 1942.
5. Arendt 1963, pp. 316 and 321.
6. Pocock 1965.
7. Fink 1945, pp. 10–16 and 53.

Bibliography

Works

• Fink, Zera Silver (September 1942). "The Theory of the Mixed State and the Development of Milton's Political Thought" . PMLA . 57 (3): 705–736.
• Fink, Zera Silver (1945). The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth Century England (1962 ed.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Sources

• Arendt, Hannah (1963). On Revolution . New York, NY: Viking Press.
• Pocock, J. G. A. (October 1965). "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century" . The William and Mary Quarterly . 22 (4). Institute of Early American History and Culture: 549–583. doi:10.2307/1922910. JSTOR   1922910.
• Robbins, Caroline (1959). The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development and Circumstances of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.