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]

Fink argued that Polybius and Niccolò Machiavelli, the latter in his Discourses on Livy, had a great influence on seventeenth-century "classical republicans" such as James Harrington. The "classical republicans", in turn, influenced eighteenth-century proponents of the Commonwealth.^[4][5][6]

Fink influenced both the political theorist Hannah Arendt^[6] as well as J. G. A. Pocock, the historian and author of The Machiavellian Moment.^[7]