1 Peter Stamatov Human Diversity and Democracy in the Renaissance 1 7, 082 words For all its intellectual glories, the Renaissance lies in the extensive fallows of democratic dormancy—a stretch of time disconnected from the long-arched historical and intellectual bridge between Aristotelian antiquity and modern liberal democracy. Nevertheless, the period can usefully be seen as a democratic laboratory of sorts: a laboratory of cultural models, practices, and institutions aiming at the recognition and dignified treatment of the bearers of consolidating and proliferating identity designations that separated individuals into national, ethnic, racial, and religious categories. And, because of that, the Renaissance bestowed on modern democracy important historical legacies that configured its shape. An important driving force of the larger democratic project in history is, as John Dunn writes, the “determination and longing to be treated with respect and some degree of consideration” (2005:xxiii). This is an impulse, in other words, towards the recognition of the dignity of human beings regardless of their outward characteristics, whether these characteristics be considered innate and “biological” or imposed by convention and culture. This democratic impulse towards the recognition of human dignity is, however, in a tense dialectical relationship with human communities' inherent tendency to make distinctions among and within themselves—and to differentially allocate resources, material or symbolic, according to these distinctions. On the one hand, the egalitarian democratic impulse is at cross-purpose with the establishment and preservation of distinctions between humans—at least within the bounds of the political unit—because such distinctions