Search

Hobbes's work had been associated with many features of political and cultural life in the early 1670s; atheism, libertinism, authoritarian churchmen and seditious dissenters. But as the crown appeared to drift towards what critics like Marvell would characterise as popery and arbitrary government, Charles's policies began to look more like the Hobbism condemned by Harrington and Lawson. Although Hobbes's absolutism had always been condemned, this feature of Hobbes's argument had drawn less attention in the early Restoration period. Partly this was because Hobbes had been successfully recast by Royalist propaganda as a seditious contract theorist, but a connected reason was that most parties had good reasons to magnify royal authority in a manner sometimes not unlike that described in Leviathan. Parliamentarians, Anglican churchmen and dissenters, for example, all sought royal support for their causes; if Eachard found nothing exceptional in chapters 18–20 of Leviathan, Marvell, as we have seen, could also appeal to Charles's absolute authority in a Hobbesian fashion as a possible means of bringing about a more moderate approach to dissent. As the decade wore on, however, the king's absolute authority started to seem less benign. The increasing (and to a large extent justified) suspicion that the court favoured popery and absolutist France began to motivate political opposition. The court's attachment to foreign arbitrary absolutism took centre-stage as a danger to law, property and religion. In this context, Leviathan's earlier reputation as the textbook of despotic absolutism could be fitted into more general anxieties about the court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

HOBBES AND THE PROTECTORATE Thus far Leviathan had attracted suprisingly little public comment. The Royalists had attacked Hobbes after his defection, and the Presbyterians and Episcopalians had launched minor attacks on his theology and ecclesiology from the autumn of 1652 onwards, but this hardly amounted to a major campaign. The relative silence was such that in 1654 John Davies commented that ‘On this side of the sea, besides the dirt and slander cast on him in Sermons & private meetings, none hath put any thing in Print against him, but Mr Rosse.’ However all of this would soon change, and the reasons were political. One of the most decisive political changes to affect the reception of Leviathan during the 1650s was the establishment of the Protectorate after the Nominated Assembly dissolved itself in December 1653. John Lambert's Instrument of Government envisaged the restitution of a triadic constitutional structure, with a Lord Protector, Council of State and Parliament. Cromwell's installation as Head of State was soon followed in the spring by implementation of religious reforms which created a tolerant national church along the lines proposed by John Owen's Humble proposals. If Hobbes's political and ecclesiastical vision was a rather uncomfortable fit with the republican and tolerationist agendas of the Commonwealth, Leviathan's absolutism and Erastianism were now highly relevant to the new political situation where Cromwell's authority was now publicly recognised and identified with a new settlement in the established church. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If republicanism stood for any clear and coherent doctrine in late sixteenth-century England, it was the intellectual conviction that it was necessary to control the powers of the crown by establishing a means of ensuring that a coterie of virtuous advisers and servants would always have the constitutional right to counsel the monarch, and so influence and control his or her actions within the limits of the law. Patrick Collinson has controversially labelled this notion of politics a ‘monarchical republic’. Professor Collinson argues that although forms of official propaganda tried to define those living within Elizabeth's realms as ‘subjects’ of the crown, many cosmopolitan urban intellectuals from the early part of the sixteenth century onwards saw themselves as citizens, akin to the influential figures who dominated the histories of the Roman republic they had all read. Citizens were unfortunately ‘concealed within subjects’. For large stretches of time, such a notion was perhaps little more than a severe irritant for important men who felt themselves to be undervalued by the state. However, at many key moments throughout the century political identities and definitions assumed a crucial importance. The presence of Mary Stuart as second queen within the British Isles alongside Elizabeth, a monarch whose hereditary claim was perhaps as good as that of the English queen, and who was supported by all of Catholic Europe, triggered many of the most dangerous crises of Elizabeth's reign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dangerous conceits are in their natures poisons, Which at the first are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood, Burn like the mines of sulphur. Set at that crucial moment in history, when Rome began to break out of the confines of the polis and to emerge as an expansionist power in the pursuit of imperium, Shakespeare's Coriolanus offers one of the most penetrating and disturbing analyses of republican politics in the Western tradition. The play opens and ends with two triumphal processions, one fairly traditional and the other highly unconventional. Having almost singlehandedly fought and defeated the city of Corioles, the Roman patrician Caius Marcius returns to Rome in triumph, carrying with him the title Coriolanus that Cominius, his fellow commander, has given him. The conqueror's moment of glory is short-lived, however. In his disastrous campaign to be elected to the consulship, Coriolanus displays contempt for the people, makes himself hated by the majority, and is banished from Rome as a result. The exiled triumphator makes his way to Antium, where he takes hire with the Volsces, long-time enemies of Rome. Soon, the arrogant and self-complacent Romans will have reason to regret their rash decision, as Coriolanus leads the Volscian army in an assault on the city, spreading panic among his internally divided and defenseless compatriots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is another philosophy that is better suited for political action, that takes its cue, adapts itself to the drama in hand, and acts its part neatly and well. In Machiavelli's most famous comedy, La mandragola (1518), the desperately love-sick Callimaco asks his clever friend, Ligurio, for help in getting into bed with the beautiful Lucrezia, the childless and unhappy wife of Nicia, a wealthy merchant and “the simplest and most stupid man of Florence.” Ligurio, a former marriage-broker, who now is said to “make his living out of deceiving people,” accepts the assignment. Acting as something of a playwright in the play, at one point likening himself to a military captain giving orders to his troops before going into battle, Ligurio selects his cast, invents his plot, and sets it in motion. Busy attending to things big and small, he provides the other characters with motivations, reasons, and pretexts for their actions, and coaches and supervises their performances. When he first introduces Callimaco to Nicia, presenting him as a famous physician at the court of the king of France, he carefully constructs his friend's fictitious character, his ethos, so that it will impose itself on the merchant, and win his trust. Knowing that unlettered men like Nicia are easily impressed by people who have a knowledge of Latin, he encourages Callimaco to embellish his speech with a store of Latin stock phrases and maxims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sidney's broad defense of republican principles culminated in the articulation of a distinctly modern form of radical Whig republicanism. In his synthesis of Machiavellian republicanism and the modern natural rights theories of Hobbes, and especially of Spinoza, Sidney presents a vision of a new English republic grounded on radical Enlightenment philosophy. This new radical Whig English republic would be ruled by broadly based popular representative institutions that would immediately and directly reflect the sovereign power of the people. Sidney's republican idea of sovereignty is in a sense as absolutist as the moderate Whig idea of parliamentary sovereignty of king-in-Parliament; however, with the republican Sidney, the sovereign power is emphatically popular, even democratic. As such, Sidney offers a stinging critique of executive prerogative, and of the mixed and limited monarchical models of constitutionalism prevalent in England in the seventeenth century. In this respect, Sidney's vision of a democratic English republic broke new and uncharted ground in the Anglo-American constitutional and political tradition. Republican Natural Rights The core of Sidney's radical Whig republicanism is the idea of natural rights. These are the rights and liberties of individuals, which are “innate, inherent, and enjoy'd time out of mind.” The character of these rights “subsists as arising from the nature and being of man.” They derive from a source independent of their particular civil or historical context. The ground for Sidney's version of rights is the natural equality existing “in a multitude that is not entered into any society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Algernon Sidney and his Discourses Concerning Government cut a striking figure even among the colorful cast of characters in English Whiggery. Whereas the Cavalier country squire Tyrrell was self-consciously moderate and measured in tone, Sidney's argument is bellicose, incendiary, and defiantly republican. He was born in 1622, the scion of two illustrious aristocratic families, the Sidneys and the Percys. His father was the second earl of Leicester and his mother was the daughter of the ninth earl of Northumberland. His ancestors included the famed Elizabethan courtier, warrior, and poet Sir Philip Sidney and the proud, warlike, aristocratic rebel Hotspur, immortalized in Shakespeare's history plays. His youth was spent divided between the family estate in Kentshire at Penshurst and living with his diplomat father on assignments in Denmark and France in the 1630s, where the second earl met and came to know Grotius and other leading continental thinkers. As was true of most Englishmen of his generation, the formative experience of Sidney's life was the civil war. Ironically, the man who would become so clearly identified with the “old cause” of the Commonwealth actually began the war in royal service in Ireland but took up the parliamentary cause upon his return to England in 1643. By all accounts, he served gallantly as an officer in the earl of Manchester's Horse Regiment and was seriously wounded in a charge at Marston Moor in 1644. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very few people are willing to speak up for hypocrisy. As a rule, to use the word at all is to position oneself against it. I am no more likely to identify myself as a hypocrite than I am to call myself a cannibal, although I may do either so long as I invoke a rhetoric of confession or conversion that separates my present identity from the past one I name and thereby disavow. When I call someone else a hypocrite, I point to a gap between what she says and what she does. I sometimes also attribute to the hypocrite a broader, more pervasive deceitfulness whose practice can include the insincerities associated with self-control and good manners. In the last case, if the mask of politeness is sufficiently flawless, I may find it difficult to distinguish the hypocrite from any other member of civil society. Indeed, if everyone suddenly stopped lubricating social interactions with politeness, the consequences for the institutions of daily life – families, schools, religious organizations, companies, governments – would likely be catastrophic. Insofar as the charge of hypocrisy assumes a discontinuity between motive and action, the sophisticated hypocrite poses problems for conventional arguments about character and behavior. The belief that close scrutiny will always expose the hypocrite's true self depends on the highly questionable assumption that any given individual can be considered simply as the sum of a set of words and deeds that represent an ‘authentic’ self inside. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

And yet when these insatiably greedy and evil men have divided among themselves goods which would have sufficed for the entire people, how far they remain from the happiness of the Utopian Republic, which has abolished not only money but with it greed! Thomas More's hostility to greed was characteristic of Renaissance humanism. The distinctive aspect of his discussion of greed in Utopia is that he invented a society free from this vice which he located, twenty-four years after Columbus' first voyage, in the New World. Was More alone in imagining the New World through humanism? Humanism was the dominant intellectual force of Renaissance Europe. In what way did it shape Europe's ‘discovery’ and conquest of the New World? My aim is to explore this question in relation to the English (or, more precisely, anglophone) understanding of America from More's generation, early in the sixteenth century, through to the demise of the Virginia Company in 1625. Humanists were active in New World projects throughout Europe, but it was in England, I shall argue, that the humanist imagination dominated colonising projects. Frequently, prominent English humanists – John Rastell, Thomas Smith, Philip Sidney, Humphrey Gilbert, Walter Ralegh – were at the forefront of colonisation. Many others who were prominent humanists (or patrons of humanists) – Richard Eden, John Florio, Dudley Digges, Henry Wriothesley – were also involved in the projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of mathematics or mechanics as a model for natural philosophy was something that took shape gradually during the seventeenth century. By contrast, during the Renaissance the models were taken from a variety of areas in which argument, persuasion, discovery, and the many other things that one expected of natural philosophy were pursued. Law and textual criticism figured predominantly here, for these were areas in which major reforms were being introduced and which were continuing to yield benefits. For Renaissance thinkers – even those who, like Bacon, can take a significant share of the responsibility for the transition to modernity – it is above all the legal-rhetorical tradition that shapes their theoretical sensibilities. In the first instance, Bacon set out not to reform natural philosophy but to reform law and, through this, politics. His shift from the reform of law to the reform of natural philosophy is possible and, in a way that is initially very difficult for us to understand, natural, because what Bacon sees as the problems in law and natural philosophy have a number of shared – or at least analogous – sources. These sources are something embedded in English Renaissance culture, and Bacon very largely uses the resources of that culture to unearth and transform them. Consequently, our first priority must be that culture. An education in rhetoric Bacon was born into one of the most illustrious families in England. His father, Sir Nicholas Bacon, although from humble origins, was Lord-Keeper of the Great Seal of England, and was both eloquent and cultured. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From arcane learning to public knowledge Bacon's project was to harness firmly to the yoke of the state a new attitude to knowledge, and in the course of attempting to do this, he was led to think through and transform this new attitude to knowledge. At the most elementary level, his aim was to reform natural philosophy, but what exactly he was reforming, and how he envisaged its reform, are not straightforward questions. The object of this reform was both the practice and the practitioners of natural philosophy. He was concerned to reform a tradition of natural philosophy in which the central ingredients were areas such as natural history and alchemy: empirical, labour-intensive disciplines. In a pioneering essay, Kuhn attempted to distinguish between what he referred to as the mathematical and the experimental or ‘Baconian’ traditions. This is a useful first approximation, and it indicates a divergence of research in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (although Newton, for example, was considered to have produced models in both traditions, in his Principia and his Opticks, respectively). It is only to be expected that this characterisation is of less help in understanding the way in which fields of research were structured at the time Bacon was writing – and of course it is this that we need to understand if we are to comprehend what Bacon's reforms were directed towards – but there is a similar divergence between two broad kinds of discipline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic humanism is not a new topic, but it is not a small one either. The term was coined by Hans Baron in 1925, writing in German, as Bürgerhumanismus, and it is elaborated in his chief work, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (1955, 1966). The “crisis” was the challenge to republican Florence in 1402 from absolutist Milan, which was resolved or at least met by “civic humanism,” a movement of humanist orators, poets, and philosophers, hitherto unpolitical, or if political not thoroughly republican, into “civic” affairs, that is, republican partisanship. Of course the challenge had to be met in politics and on the field of battle by civic Florentines, but a “civic humanist” is, in the usage of historians, always a thinker or a writer who is shaped by, or gives shape to, the civic spirit of the city. Even though Baron tries to draw the closest connections between political or military events and the writers, thus implying that events come first, his interest is in the writers as expressions or interpreters – in those who come second. Baron defines the advent of civic humanism, coming as it does after a crisis, as a “break” between Francesco Petrarch's uncivic humanism of the Trecento and Leonardo Bruni's civic humanism of the Quattrocento. Almost immediately after speaking of a break, Baron refers to a “gradual process of fusion” leading from Coluccio Salutati and Filippo Villani to Bruni, and then immediately recoils from that concession, doubting that there could be fusion between citizens of a republic and aloof scholars or courtiers of a tyrant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At first glance Karl Marx's reception seems to pose few real problems. Marxism, the doctrine he inspired, has, on any reckoning, been enormously influential. If today, in E. J. Hobsbawm's words, “the shadow of Karl Marx presides over a third of the human race” this is surely no mean accomplishment for a theorist who died in relative obscurity in 1883 (Hobsbawm, 1987: 336). Marx's legacy is, in any case, intellectual as well as political, rather as he himself might have expected. “Over the whole range of the social sciences” says David McLellan in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought, “Marx has proved probably the most influential figure of the twentieth century” (Miller et al., 1987: 322). There is no reason to regard this claim as exaggerated. Ever since its inception, Marxism has stimulated debate across the social sciences. But it did so in an unprecedented way, which was both advantageous and disadvantageous to its reception. We have only to contrast the scholars who have tackled Marxism but have not lent their names to political movements at the same time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lipsius' Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex appeared in Leiden in 1589. It followed more than fifteen years of conscious or unconscious preparation, during which Lipsius had occupied himself with Tacitus, the greatest of the Roman historians. His celebrated Tacitus edition of 1574 is not just a work of brilliant philology and textual criticism: it also exhibits the editor's concern with practical politics, the linking of politics and history. In his introduction Lipsius stresses the modernity of the Roman and praises his account of history as a fund of experience for tackling present problems. This propensity for the practical exploitation of history comes out even more strongly in the Tacitus commentary of 1581. Rome and things Roman, in particular the period of the Principate, were again and again invoked by Lipsius as a model of the present. The seventeenth century has been called, not without reason, the ‘Neo-Roman period’. For Lipsius and his contemporaries, the Roman past prompted a wealth of observations which were now to be used in the service of state administration and the moulding of public life. In the dedication to his commentary on Tacitus, Lipsius advises the Dutch ruling class to draw upon history and experience as the basis of a science of politics. He himself, as a much-consulted teacher, a much-read author and an authoritative editor of classical writers, always directed his activity to practical ends – and these he achieved, for in both the Constantia and the Politics Lipsius correctly read the signs of the times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1584 there appeared a small volume entitled De constantia libri duo qui alloquium praecipue continent in publicis malis. Its author, Justus Lipsius, was one of the luminaries of Dutch humanism, a professor of Leiden University, and already renowned throughout Europe for his edition of Tacitus and his commentary on his works. His little book on constantia found a wide and surprisingly rapid response among contemporary readers and proved to be an international best-seller. It was printed forty-four times in the original Latin, fifteen times in French translation, and it was also translated into Dutch, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish. Altogether it went into over eighty editions between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It is a work of moral philosophy with a humanist foundation, a prescription for the behaviour of the individual in the state, society and politics, that public domain of which, from the earliest times, man has only too often felt himself to be a victim rather than a denizen. The starting point for Lipsius' book is the actual state of civil war and the almost unbearable conditions in his own country, the Netherlands. The author presents himself as being on his way to Vienna (as in fact he had been twelve years earlier, in 1572), having decided that he can no longer go on living in Louvain, his old university town. Breaking his journey at Liège, he stays with a friend, the humanist canon Langius (Lang), who rouses him from his despondency and directs his mind to the teachings of philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the political sphere, as in the military, the first Dutch work of political science soon gave rise to an immense flood of writings which directly or indirectly derived from it, and later it was complemented by the work of Grotius on international relations and natural law. First in the field were Lipsius' own pupils, members of his immediate circle, academic associates elsewhere, and admirers and imitators. His pupils soon divided into two groups, which we may call the Leiden school and the Lou vain school; the former was largely indifferent to religious divisions, the latter more bound by confessional allegiances. The arcana imperii written by the new professors of history and politics in Germany, the Christian-Stoic ‘mirrors of princes’ which now began to appear in all European languages – especially those with a Jesuit flavour – testify to the durability of Neostoicism. In the seventeenth century the writings of the political publicists played an important part in social life, arousing a great deal of interest and answering to a real need. In Germany such political writing finally led to the large number of tracts on prudentia civilis, the literature designed for use by tutors at court, and the teachings on worldly wisdom of Christian Thomasius. All this writing had a pedagogical slant: it was designed to train up the princes and their helpers – ministers, civil servants and army leaders. The members of this ruling class had for the most part had an academic education before going into government or the army. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No attention has hitherto been paid – either in the general history of ideas or in studies relating to the intellectual foundations of the modern state – to the significance and influence of Neostoicism. Interest has centred mainly upon the controversial figure of Machiavelli, his work, his disciples and his opponents. Meanwhile, one important voice has been ignored, yet it was a voice that was able to make itself heard – and heeded – in the period of incipient absolutism, and again in the age of enlightened despotism. True, the Stoic philosophy has been invoked here and there, but only recently has the principal political work of Neostoicism, the Politics of Justus Lipsius, been fully analysed. This is all the more astonishing in view of the rapid, wide and enduring popularity the book achieved. Just before it was published, Bodin's work appeared, in 1576; shortly after, in 1603, that of Althusius. Yet these two achieved only a fraction of the influence destined for Lipsius' work. Of the Latin original there were fifteen editions in the first ten years, from 1589 to 1599. In the same period it was rendered into Dutch, French, English, Polish and German. Spanish and Italian translations followed in 1604, a Hungarian in 1641. Up to the start of the Thirty Years War a new edition left the press almost every year. The seventeenth century saw thirty-one editions of the original, the eighteenth another seven, the last one appearing in Vienna in 1751. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Things goeing soe easy soe smooth and soe right in your house, I know you will excuse me that I went into the country to enjoy there an uninterrupted satisfaction and quiet in the contemplation of them. I hope they continue in the same course since my comeing away, and the zeale and forwardnesse of you your selves makes it needlesse for us without dores soe much as to thinke of the publique which is the happyest state a country can be in, when those whose businesse it is, take such care of affairs that all others quietly and with resignation acquisce and thinke it superfluous and impertinent to medle or beat their heads about them. Do all human beings (or any human beings) have rational political obligations? Are political commitments, commitments either to sustain holders of political authority or to further socially extended shared human purposes, a necessary component of any rationally conceived human life? Or is it more appropriate to think of the moral acceptance of existing political institutions or the disposition to attempt to create what are presumed to be superior political institutions simply as an ideological condition, a state of belief and sentiment which we might (for example) be sure to have been causally generated but in relation to which no question of truth or falsehood, intrinsic validity or contingent error can coherently arise? These alternatives are certainly not exhaustive; but we may conveniently take them as a crude initial index of the range of disagreement about this issue which obtains at present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpreting the meaning of political structures and processes is an enterprise distinct from the attempt to give causal explanations for political outcomes. It is not, however, irrelevant to the latter enterprise. Even if one supposed that the only thing worth knowing about politics was what was likely to happen in specific conditions, it is hard to know how one could begin to select promising materials for deriving such expectations except from a political world which was already fairly elaborately interpreted. This paper is an attempt to interpret differences between the politics of Ghana and those of Sri Lanka in terms of the social basis of political allegiance. It deliberately sacrifices the selection of a neat set of explananda in pursuit of what is intended, perhaps optimistically, to be a greater evaluative richness. It is helpful to begin by conceiving of both representation and obligation as ideological categories. Allegiance by contrast may be seen, at least for the moment, as a social fact, though one of indeterminate scope. States and citizenship, in the world as it now is, we have everywhere with us. State ideologies are almost everywhere ostensibly democratic (hence the near omnipresence of citizenship) and state pretensions to authority correspondingly overweening (if we are for the people, who among our citizens can possibly be against us?). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the more elusive questions in charting the history of the modern historical consciousness is to ask when and how history tried to separate itself from fiction. Perhaps the trouble arises because the distinction between the two is so fundamental and yet so problematical, so full of difficulty, that there are some in our own contemporary culture who would deny it altogether. Indeed, for the modern skeptic there are many arguments to collapse the discrepancy between knowing and inventing the past, between discovering what actually happened and making it up, and it has recently become harder to defend the traditional distinctions between objective and subjective description, fact and value, truth and poetry. Doubt has spread even among historians. The one thing that seems reasonably clear is that there was once a time during the Middle Ages when no one seemed much concerned about the problem, and that it was only later, beginning with the Renaissance, that it began to arise. I have written elsewhere about the peculiar role that humanism seems to have played in generating the early modern conceptions of history and fiction; here I should like to return to the subject by having another look at that most fascinating of all texts in the early English Renaissance: Thomas More's Utopia. Whatever else More may have meant to do in that controversial work, he was certainly preoccupied there with the relationship between the real and the ideal in human life, and thus, inescapably, with the distinction between history and fiction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout his Weimar writings, Schmitt often asserts the existence of a dissociation between what is natural-scientific and what is “personalistic,” “human,” “specifically real,” “alive” within the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. For example, It is striking that one of the most consequential representatives of the abstract scientific orientation of the seventeenth century [Thomas Hobbes] became so personalistic. This is because as a juristic thinker he wanted to grasp the reality of societal life just as much as he, as a philosopher and a natural scientist, wanted to grasp the reality of nature. … [J]uristic thought in those days had not yet become so overpowered by the natural sciences that he, in the intensity of his scientific approach, should unsuspectingly have overlooked the specific reality of legal life. In this chapter, I discuss why Schmitt felt the need to emphasize this supposed distinction or opposition in the work of the great seventeenth-century English political theorist, particularly in his famous Concept of the Political. As Hobbes remarked, “The Passion to be reckoned upon, is Fear” (I, 14), and Schmitt recognizes something vital, substantive, and fundamentally human in Hobbes's grounding of the state in the fear of death. On the eve of Weimar's collapse, Schmitt, with the intellectual aid of a young admirer named Leo Strauss, sought to retrieve this primal source of political order and free it from the elements that Hobbes himself had found necessary to employ to construct a state on this foundation: natural science and technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an interview with Oriana Fallaci in 1972, Henry Kissinger, asked about the influence of Machiavelli on his thought, denied that the Florentine adviser of princes had had any influence on him at all: 'There is really very little of Machiavelli's one can accept or use in the contemporary world. . . . If you want to know who has influenced me most, I'll answer with two philosophers' names: Spinoza and Kant. Which makes it all the more peculiar that you choose to associate me with Machiavelli.' [The New Republic, 16 December 1972, page 21) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Benedict (Baruch) Spinoza's life is usually summarized in a few lines, as follows. He was born in 1632 in Amsterdam as a son of Jewish Marrano immigrants from Portugal. After having been educated as a Jew, he was excommunicated in 1656. While earning his livelihood, first by commerce and later by grinding lenses, he learned Latin in the school of Franciscus van den Enden and conversed with a circle of Amsterdam Collegiants, who were dedicated to Cartesianism. He lived in Rijnsburg near Leiden (1660-3), in Voorburg near The Hague (1663-70), and in The Hague (1670 onward). He published in 1663 under his own name Descartes's “Principles of Philosophy” [Renati Des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, Pars I et II, More Geometrico demonstratae), and anonymously in 1670 the Theological-Political Treatise (Tractatus Theologico-Politicus). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent times many studies have been dedicated to the fortunes of Machiavelli and his works. They have examined the sometimes fierce reactions to his opinions and they have elucidated the slow process by which his realistic views on the exercise of power in the state were assimilated into the political thought of early modern Europe. Little by little nearly every country has received its due attention as for instance in Felix Raab's admirable book on England. Whereas more generally oriented interest in Machiavelli's theories for a long time concentrated on what might be called the literature of the raison d'état, we are now, thanks especially to the work of J.G.A. Pocock, able to discern too how important and profound Machiavelli's influence as a republican has been in Europe and America. It is remarkable, however, that, at least until recently, nowhere in the surveys of Machiavelli's reputation as old Nick or as a republican has the Dutch Republic been taken into account. We must ask ourselves why this has been the case. Did one of the most important republican states of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries abstain from the discussion about Machiavelli? Did the special features of the Dutch state, so often emphasised by Dutch scholars, or the rather orthodox character of Calvinism practised in the country, perhaps prevent an open reaction? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is a single point on which scholars have reached a wide consensus, it is that Machiavelli created a new theory or a new science of politics. Be it his sin or his greatest contribution to modern culture, what seems to be beyond dispute is that Machiavelli rejected the republican idea of politics and provided us with a new account of what politics is all about. Against the classical view that politics is the art of establishing and preserving a good community, Machiavelli, it has been argued, emphasised that the goal of politics is the pursuit of power and that the ‘political man’ cannot be the ‘good man of the ancients’. While several scholars have stressed that the originality of Machiavelli lies in the redefinition of the aim of politics, others have emphasised his contribution to a new methodology of political enquiry. This agreement among contemporary scholars, could easily be corroborated by the opinions of the political writers of the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries who called Machiavelli the corruptor of the true (Aristotelian) idea of politics and pointed to him as the thinker who transformed the most noble of humane arts into the art of tyrannical rule. For instance, Innocent Gentillet wrote that Machiavelli invented ‘des Maximes tous meschantes, et basty sur icelles non une science politique mais tyrannique’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rousseau portrayed the antique ideals of frugality, civic virtue and martial independence as the only morally sound and therefore politically defensible alternatives to the vision of modernity he found in The Fable of the Bees. The corruption of contemporary commercial societies, Rousseau argued, followed inexorably from their illegitimate political foundations, a passage Mandeville had sketched with a perverse glee, and one to which Rousseau compulsively returned. The Fable haunted Rousseau's moral imagination, rendering him oblivious to Mandeville's satiric purposes. Rousseau simply passed over in contemptuous silence Mandeville's frequent assertions that the forms of commercial sociability were at the same time foundations of politically enlightened polities which respected the rights of their citizens, and which more than any others in recorded history provided expanding opportunities for an individual's worldly happiness. Rousseau became one of Mandeville's most influential readers precisely because he could so creatively accept, isolate from their ironic context, and then magnify those features of The Fable's argument in which it was baldly asserted that “What we call Evil in this World … is the grand Principle that makes us sociable Creatures” (1, 369). In his attack on Mandeville, Rousseau chose to ignore one of The Fable's most sociologically astute insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the history of civilization the perennial dream of a sublime life has the value of a very important reality. And even political history itself, under penalty of neglecting actual facts, is bound to take illusions, vanities, follies, into account. There is not a more dangerous tendency in history than that of representing the past as if it were a rational whole and dictated by clearly defined interests. Vulgar traditions must have had public grounds of truth, by virtue of which they came into being and were preserved by entire peoples over long periods of time. In recent scholarship on the Enlightenment it has become a truism that this era must not be regarded as the ‘Age of Reason’, but rather as the ‘Age of Criticism’. Whereas the former label has acquired derogatory connotations, signifying, among other things, the Enlightenment's naïve and destructive faith in the omnipotence of reason, the latter label and the concept of criticism appear to depict more accurately the cultural ideology which motivated this movement. Above all, however, the label ‘Age of Criticism’ is more accurate because it is compatible with the way in which some of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment saw their age. Thus, in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant identifies his age as one of Kritik to which everything must submit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If natural philosophy, in all its parts, by pursuing this method, shall at length be perfected, the bounds of moral philosophy will also be enlarged. Indeed, were you to apply the geometric method to life, ‘you would succeed only in trying to be a rational lunatic’, steering in a straight line amid life's curves, as though caprice, rashness, chance and fortune held no sway in human affairs. In his well-known and influential essay, The Divorce between the Sciences and the Humanities, Isaiah Berlin argues that although there have always been disputes about method and distinctions with regard to these spheres of knowledge (Berlin effectively discards the common notion of ‘two cultures’), it was only in the eighteenth century that there emerged a ‘sense of contrast’ between the two. Berlin concludes that ‘the great cleavage between the provinces of natural science and the humanities was, for the first time, made, or revealed, for better or for worse, by Giambattista Vico. Thereby he started a great debate of which the end is not in sight.’ Similarly, in his Newtonian Studies, Alexander Koyré touches upon the same problem, and points to Newton as the culprit responsible for ‘the splitting of our world in two’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are those who would deny a distinction between England and the continent of Europe, alleging that the island is in every respect – politically, socially, culturally – a part of Europe. This is an opinion that could be held only by those whose knowledge of the continent is derived from books and from visits; anyone who has actually ever lived there knows how fundamental those differences are. Or perhaps one should say, how fundamental they were; possibly they have in the last thirty years been disappearing together with an England that was real, and apparently unchangeable, at any rate down to 1939. It may also be argued that those differences have not always existed, time out of memory: medieval England, part of one European Church, may have displayed more likeness to the rest of Christendom than difference. An island ruled for so many centuries by Danish, Norman and Angevin princes perhaps demands to be treated as part of those continental dominions. I am certainly familiar with arguments of this kind from historians concerned to understand the medieval English Church or the Norman Conquest and its consequences. Yet even then there were real differences, and if the novel (and very persuasive) thesis that England never knew a ‘true’ peasantry survives detailed scrutiny those differences may well come to matter more throughout English history than any superficial resemblances in religion, in language, or in the social habits of the upper classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In early sixteenth-century France Cicero seemed a perfect model to humanists who challenged scholasticism through a rhetoric embodying both philosophy and history. Admiration for Ciceronian style was accompanied by a moralising civic humanism and a respect for Cicero, the philosopher, as the purveyor of Greek wisdom. At the end of the century Tacitus had become a more important linguistic influence, while the ideal of the active citizen and virtuous orator had been replaced by one of Stoic fortitude and withdrawal. Tacitus, the historian of the corruption of liberty, emerged as the exemplar of private and public prudence, and a reinterpreted Cicero was relegated to the role of a minor precursor in prudential morality. This parallel shift in linguistic structures and moral ideologies did not simply result from the stresses of the religious wars in the last third of the century. It was also, in part, a long-term consequence of the earlier importation from Italy of a debate about the extent to which Cicero should be imitated – a debate that attained a new dimension in the context of the Reformation. Other elements that contributed to the demise of Ciceronian humanism were not only the relativist implications in the new historical approach to law but also the logic of Peter Ramus, who, while pleading for the union of eloquence and philosophy, effectively disjoined rhetoric from its component parts. As the neostoic movement developed in reaction to rival religious enthusiasms, the literary models of Tacitus and Seneca invaded Latinity and left their mark upon the vernacular.In the new climate of absolutism Cicero, pater eloquentiae, yielded place to Tacitus, pater prudentiae. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ASSOCIATIONS For a century after its first publication in 1576 Bodin's Six Livres de la République occurred in the marginalia of every notable political controversy. But it was not always cited to the same effect. During the turbulent events in mid-seventeenth century England, for example, Bodin's opinions were marshalled to support such a diverse collection of causes as the sovereignty of the Long Parliament, the prerogative of Stuart monarchy, the rights of the Cromwellian army against the parliament, the execution of Charles I, and the defence of Cromwell against the radical elements that had once supported him. In some instances Bodin's views were palpably distorted, and in many others they were set beside those of the Huguenot critics of absolute monarchy, the so-called monarchomachs, whom Bodin had ostensibly set out to refute. To find the République a bedfellow with Hotman's Francogallia, Beza's De Jure Magistratuum, and Mornay's Vindidae contra Tyrannos is less surprising than it might seem. Within a decade of Bodin's death in 1596 the great jurist Althusius had turned him upon his head, and assimilated his definition of sovereignty to the opposing doctrine of the sovereignty of the community. If sovereignty were to be supreme and indivisible, as Bodin had argued, then its only possible repository must be the whole community. Althusius quoted the monarchomachs in support of the proposition that the community had agreed upon certain fundamental laws as conditions under which the administration and exercise of the rights of sovereignty were entrusted to the ruler. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thin evidence leaves us more dependent than usual on supposition to reconstruct Starkey's movements for much of the decade of the 1520s. Most previous claims about his activities cannot be supported – from the reasonably likely one that he lived in Pole's household in Padua through the more remote possibility that he served as Pole's chaplain to the ludicrous suggestion that he was set to spy on Pole. We have even fewer chronological landmarks than for Starkey's earlier life, as George Parks well summed up when he admitted that Starkey was in Padua, ‘though we do not know when he came or how long he stayed’. Nevertheless, a few new data about Starkey have turned up since Parks and W. Gordon Zeeveld wrote, together with much new evidence about the intellectual environment of Padua. Placing Starkey into the proper context often remains difficult, but enough signposts exist to allow reasonable conjectures. Thus it seems likely enough that Starkey soon realized, like the boy in one of the vulgaria he may have translated as a youth, that he would have to go to Italy to complete his education and only a little less likely that he went there in company with Thomas Lupset in 1523. Again, it matters comparatively little where Starkey lived in Padua, but even if Starkey were not in Pole's employ, as old friends they would at least have known many of the same people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? The idea of a civil religion is not one which students of political theory pay much attention to today. In so far as it resonates at all, it suggests a dark and aberrant episode in the career of the modern state. In the 1940s and 1950s scholars were understandably concerned to discover the roots of totalitarian state worship. In constructing its intellectual ancestry, paternity seemed to lie with Hegel, Rousseau and Machiavelli. Hegel, it was held, had sanctified the Prussian state by embodying God in the unfolding of national history. Rousseau, in his chapter on ‘Civil religion’ in The Social Contract, had apparently married a religion of patriotism to his theory of an invincible democratic sovereignty. And Machiavelli, in the Discourses, had found the Christian religion inadequate in comparison with ancient Rome's ability to harness piety for the glory of the patria. Unavoidably, therefore, ‘civil religion’ came to connote a Faustian and totalitarian device to secure blind obedience to the state by the exploitation of human aspirations to spiritual fulfilment. For some commentators its aberrance lay in its violation of Augustine's Christian scepticism about temporal rule and earthly perfectibility. For others it lay in its violation of what seemed the pre-eminent achievement of modern political sensibility, the secular separation of politics and religion. It was, either way, ‘a radical departure from Western tradition’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Dutch Republic came into existence less as the result of a pre-conceived plan, than as a consequence of an unexpected combination of political events. As the Revolt spread and Spain responded with increasing use of force, the leading figures of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland found themselves compelled to consider (in general terms) the possibility of an independent state. But even after the States General had renounced Philip II in 1581 and declared their independence, it took a long time for these unsystematic ideas on sovereignty and the nature of the new state to be given any clear delineation. Political theory in the United Provinces continued to focus on the advantages and disadvantages of monarchy. A republican theory began to be formulated only with the greatest reluctance and it took until the second half of the seventeenth century before it came to be seen as a real alternative. The development of republicanism in the Netherlands during this period has not yet been adequately studied and what few studies there are suffer extensively from an evil which has long plagued Dutch historiography: a nationalist insistence on the integrity of its own past, and an insufficient consideration of the influences at work in the rest of Europe. Before, and even after, World War II the Dutch Republic was viewed as unique and deviant, so that scarcely any attempt has been made to notice similarities with developments elsewhere. The same holds true for the treatment of political theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe begins in the thirteenth century; as in other instances, the origins of modern political language have to be sought in the late Middle Ages. John of Salisbury had already used the term in the Policraticus to denote the institutions of the State; in his Didascalicon, Hugh of St Victor divides the practical science alternatively into solitary, private, and public, and into ‘ethicam, oeconomicam et politicam’; but politicus and other words with the same root definitively entered medieval political language after the middle of that century as the result of the translation of Aristotle's Politics and, to a lesser extent, of his Nicomachean Ethics. Albert the Great criticises the civilian lawyers who wrongly call themselves politici, although they are ignorant of the ars politica; and Brunetto Latini draws on a translation of the Ethics when defining, in his Trésor, the ‘gouvernment des cités’ as ‘politique’; but it was William of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics, used first by St Thomas Aquinas and then by all Aristotelian political writers until the fifteenth century, which introduced politicus, and its Latin equivalent civilis, into the language of Western political thought. In the Politics, the adjective politikos shares with the other derivatives from polis a variety of meanings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What I shall attempt in this essay is an account of a practice and some of its entailments; and while one cannot verbalise a practice without offering a theory, it is my hope–seeing that we are all in some degree committed to a common practice – to stay as far as possible on this side of metatheory. I do not want to find myself affirming and defending a general theory of language and how it operates in politics or in history, still less to offer an account of my kind of historian as, himself, a historical actor or agent. These are all real questions and from time to time they demand consideration; I propose, however, to let them arise, if they arise at all, out of the implications of what I shall be saying we as historians do. The métier d'historien, as I use the term, is primarily his craft or practice; his vocation and its significance, his experience of or action in history, are to me matters of self-discovery, to be met with in a time still to some extent our own. I shall hope, by proceeding in this way, to discover something about our shared and common discourse. The word furnishes my starting point. The concept of a political language to me implies that what was formerly, and as a matter of convention still is, known as the history of political thought is now more accurately described as the history of political discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades historians have become increasingly concerned with the role played by language in our understanding of social and political life. The theoretical sources for this concern are several and not infrequently contradictory. But if the works of Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Austin, Ryle, Foucault, Derrida and Rorty (to take only a random sample) often have little else in common, they have all, in different ways and with different ends in view, insisted upon the interdependence of the propositional content of an argument and the language, the discourse, in which it is made. At the most fundamental level such languages will be composed of precise vocabularies, metaphors and topoi, even recognised authorities, all readily identifiable and easily transmitted from one author to another. But there are also other levels, less easy to identify, at which it makes sense to say that a particular author is speaking in the language of, say ‘humanism’ or ‘scholasticism’ or ‘political economy’. Such languages are, as J. G. A. Pocock says here, ‘distinguishable language-games of which each may have its own vocabulary, rules, preconditions and implications, tone and style’ which the historian has to learn to ‘read’. They are, to borrow a term from Hobbes, ‘registers’ in which specific kinds of propositions may intelligibly be cast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]