Renaissance eloquence: rhetoric and philosophy

Skirting the problematical subject of the reception of Renaissance humanism outside Italy (Skinner 1978, 1, ch. 7) this chapter addresses itself directly to humanism as an established phenomenon north of the Alps. Chronologically it spans what may be described as northern humanism's epic phase: the period from roughly the last decade of the fifteenth century when, with the writing of such scholars as Robert Gaguin in France, Conrad Celtis in Germany, and John Colet in England, humanist discourse in the north acquired a native voice, down to the late 1530s when, with the death of the generation of Erasmus and Budé, and the burgeoning of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, northern humanism lost its discrete character as a cultural force – succumbing to the role of handmaiden in the service of a variety of other cultural forces. The specific concern of the chapter is to explore the intellectual and ideological content of the political literature generated by northern humanism in this epic phase. Thus, having skirted a historigraphical Scylla, it will be necessary to engage with a Charybdis.

Charybdis looms in the form of a well-established orthodoxy which denies Renaissance humanism any specific philosophical content. It does so by defining humanism in exclusively literary and educational terms, as a movement devoted to the cultivation of bonae literae and the studia humanitatis. Accordingly, it is argued, the involvement of humanists with the larger questions of religion, morality, and politics must be distinguished from their proper role as humanists.

The middle of the fifteenth century was a turning point in the relations between the Italian states, and the relative stability which Italy enjoyed until the Neapolitan expedition of Charles VIII in 1494 forms part of the background to the history of its political thought during that period. The peace of Lodi had put an end, in 1454, to a succession of wars which had begun in the 1420s. It had been followed by the conclusion of an Italian league, aimed at safeguarding the integrity of the Italian states as well as peace among them; in fact, wars were chiefly prevented or contained by triple and dual alliances between the five greater powers which were its members, Milan, Venice, Florence, the papacy, and Naples.

To the relative stability and equilibrium in inter-state relations, threatened primarily by the expansionist policies of Venice and the papacy, there corresponded a similar stability in the internal conditions of the Italian states, although it too could be temporarily threatened. Domestic crises occurred in Milan in 1476 with the assassination of Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza; in Florence in 1478 with the Pazzi conspiracy, but these were of short duration; far more serious and lasting was the revolt of the Neapolitan barons against Ferrante of Aragon in 1485. The lesser princes, such as the Malatesta at Rimini and the Este at Ferrara, were more vulnerable; a judicious policy of placing themselves under the protection of one or more of the greater powers, as well as serving them as condottieri, could help them to achieve security and dynastic survival.

‘Civil science is the true philosophy’, declared the fifteenth-century jurist Claude de Seyssel in his commentary on the Digest, ‘and is to be preferred to all other fields because of its purpose’ (Seyssel 1508, fo.1). Down at least to the eighteenth century this conviction was maintained by professional lawyers of various political persuasions, and indeed expanded because of the increasing interaction between jurisprudence and modern political thought and institutions. The original Roman formula, enshrined in the first lines of that great anthology of classical jurisprudence, the Digest of Justinian, was joined to a deep reverence for judicial expertise and for the holy office of the ‘priests of the laws’; but in its Byzantine context legal science was subordinated to, and conscripted by, the absolutist and imperialist designs of the emperor; and this strategy was resumed by early modern European jurists, especially those serving monarchs – kings of France, Spain, and England – who claimed to be ‘emperors’ in their own kingdoms. Civil law continued to be concerned predominantly with private matters (personal status, family, succession, property, obligations, and the like), though increasingly it came to be subordinated to and shaped by legislation. ‘True philosophy’ was in many ways boud to modern ideas of rulership. This is why political thought in its widest sense cannot be understood apart from law and jurisprudence.

The old legal heritage

In the fifteenth century the European legal tradition was vastly complex but displays, from a modern perspective, three fairly distinctive aspects, corresponding to civil, canon, and customary law. By then each o f these had been formulated in modern written terms, rationalised and in various ways modernised, and subjected to several generations of adaptive 'interpretation'.

The Saxon philosopher Samuel Pufendorf has, for three reasons, an unusual place in the history of modern political thought. First, unlike Hobbes or Montesquieu, he has often been consigned to oblivion. He was famous in his own time and a central figure in eighteenth-century writing, through the texts translated, compiled and popularised by Jean Barbeyrac, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Gradually, however, his work became discredited, becoming overshadowed by Christian Thomasius, Christian Wolff, and Kant in Germany, and by Locke and Rousseau in the English and French traditions. His reputation was never secure, and even contemporaries passed contradictory judgements. Leibniz denigrated him as ‘no lawyer, and scarcely a philosopher at all’ (Leibniz 1768, p. 261). Thomasius lauded him as ‘the first in Germany to think of establishing a science of morality in accordance with mathematical methods’ (Thomasius 1719, p. 6). Secondly, unlike Bodin, Locke, or Rousseau, Pufendorf left a disparate body of work, seemingly lacking in unity and containing no major political text. He wrote voluminously on practical philosophy and public law, and monumental historical works. Yet he does not look like a classical political thinker. Thirdly, unlike, say, Machiavelli or More, Pufendorf's political thought is characterised not by the originality of his own ideas, but by his eclecticism. He borrowed the epistemological and methodological principles of the Jena Cartesian Erhard Weigel and sought to combine the opposing anthropological and political concepts of Hobbes and Grotius. Consequently, for a long time he was seen as ‘a thinker of secondary importance’, at worst ‘a dull and indigestible compiler’ (Derathé 1970, p. 78; Belime 1856, p. 11).

The account of sovereignty in the work of Jean Bodin was a major event in the development of European political thought. Bodin's precise definition of supreme authority, his determination of its scope, and his analysis of the functions that it logically entailed, helped turn public law into a scientific discipline. And the vast system of comparative public law and politics provided in his Les Six Livres de la République (1576) became the prototype for a whole new literary genre, which in the seventeenth century was cultivated most in Germany.

But Bodin's account of sovereignty was also the source of much confusion, since he was primarily responsible for introducing the seductive but erroneous notion that sovereignty is indivisible. It is true, of course, that every legal system, by its very definition as an authoritative method of resolving conflicts, must rest upon an ultimate legal norm or rule of recognition, which is the guarantee of unity. But when Bodin spoke about the unity of sovereignty, the power that he had in mind was not the constituent authority of the general community or the ultimate coordinating rule that the community had come to recognise, but the power, rather, of the ordinary agencies of government. He advanced, in other words, a theory of ruler sovereignty. His celebrated principle that sovereignty is indivisible thus meant that the high powers of government could not be shared by separate agents or distributed among them, but that all of them had to be entirely concentrated in a single individual or group.

The second generation of the Reformation was dominated by the followers of John Calvin. Calvin, to be sure, was but one of a number of theologians who provided intellectual leadership to the new type of Protestantism that emerged in these years. And he built upon a base that had already been constructed by Huldreich Zwingli in Zurich, Martin Bucer in Strasburg, and others. But he achieved such prominence within the movement, both among its advocates and its opponents, that it can fairly be called Calvinist. This new type of Protestantism was created in a number of free cities in what is now southern Germany and Switzerland, and continued to bear traces of its civic origins. It developed institutions that were able to penetrate into hostile parts of Europe outside of the Holy Roman Empire, and thus came to be the form of Protestantism most common in areas outside the German heartland of the movement. And it also tended to become particularly militant, not hesitating to mobilise political and military forces in order to win its way. This militant posture made it necessary for Calvinists to develop theories in justification of political resistance: they did develop such theories, some being both subtle and influential.

In the development of Calvinist resistance theory, Calvin himself played a role which was seminal but not major. For the greatest political challenges to his movement developed after his death. Calvin first won intellectual prominence in 1536, with the publication of the first edition of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, but he did not win institutional prominence until 1555, the year his supporters won control of the city of Geneva, and he did not gain an international role until the 1560s, when his followers took the leadership in promoting militant movements in his native France, in the Netherlands, in Britain, and in parts of Germany.

Hobbes

Such was Hobbes' own account, written twenty-one years later, of the origins of his first work of political theory, The Elements of Law. Hobbes had himself been an unsuccessful candidate for election to the Short Parliament (Beats 1978, pp. 74–6), so no doubt he followed its proceedings closely. The disputed ‘points of the regal power’ emerged most pointedly in John Pym's famous speech of 17 April, which asserted fundamental constitutional rights of parliament against the crown (‘Parliament is as the soule of the common wealth’, ‘the intellectual parte which Governes all the rest’) and attacked ‘the Doctrine that what property the subject hath in any thinge may be lawfully taken away when the King requires it’. The latter point was taken up by Sir John Strangways on the following day: ‘for if the Kinge be judge of the necessitye, we have nothing and are but Tennants at will’ (Cope and Coates 1977, pp. 149, 155, 159).

The polemic against Hobbes: the theological premises

The German philosopher Leibniz, the most persistent and percipient of Hobbes' continental critics, believed that the crux of the quarrel between them lay in Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma. Socrates wanted to know of Euthyphro whether a thing was ‘just’ (or ‘good’ or ‘true’) by virtue of God having willed it, or whether God willed it because it was of itself just. If the former, then justice is arbitrary, having no essential nature; it subsists contingently, by divine fiat, and can be humanly known only as empirical knowledge of the facts of God's utterances. This is called the voluntarist, or nominalist, doctrine. But if the latter answer is correct (and Socrates thought it was), then justice does have an essence distinct from its being willed, and it can be intuited by rational agents. This answer is known as the essentialist, or realist, doctrine. In the biblical terms of seventeenth-century debate this dilemma was expressed as the choice between the awesome, peremptory God of Abraham and Isaac, or of Job, and the philosophical, rational God of the Johannine Logos. Because God told Abraham to kill Isaac it seemed that killing one's son was not an immutable evil, but only evil until God said otherwise: justice is contingent upon God's command. Yet if, on the other hand, God is the supreme light of reason, then He will act only in accordance with self-consistent rules embodied in the natural order.

A new history centring on law and government, pervasive respect for common law, and an increasingly confident and aggressive House of Commons – this congruence of elements nourished in Stuart England the doctrine of an ancient constitution. The authors of the new history were usually common lawyers with scholarly interests, often referred to as legal antiquaries, who interpreted the historical past from the standpoint of their own day. Assuming the antiquity of Englishmen's rights and liberties and their constant assertion through the centuries, they ransacked historical records for the requisite evidence and interpreted their findings in light of common law. Their list of rights and liberties, composing in toto the ancient constitution, proved surprisingly protean, ranging from freedom of speech in parliament to its regular meetings and, after civil war directed political thought into new channels, even legal rights concerned with parliamentary representation and the role of the House of Commons in law making – subjects little scrutinised in the pre-1642 political world.

Whether the human source of these rights and liberties was the king or community became a leading question in Stuart political thought. According to the Jacobean House of Commons, reasoning from common law, the rights and liberties of the commons of England, enjoyed from time immemorial, were an inheritance from their ancestors, a statement making the community their human source. James I's rejoinder expressed impatience with ‘anti-monarchical’ words about ancient liberties unless it were added that he and his ancestors had granted them; but the king pledged, of his own will, to respect privileges enjoyed by long custom and lawful precedent.

Reason of state

The historian Friedrich Meinecke, a bold climber of what he liked to call the ‘mountain-peaks’ in the history of ideas, once wrote despairingly of the literature on reason of state that ‘There are real catacombs here of forgotten literature by mediocrities’ (Meinecke 1957, p. 67n). All the same, these catacombs are well worth the effort of exploration to any historian concerned with the history of arguments, attitudes, and mentalities as well as with the achievements of outstanding individuals. Shifts in political attitudes are generally marked, sooner or later, by the coinage of new terms, as the traditional vocabulary comes to appear increasingly inadequate to express the new insights. In the later sixteenth century, an important new ‘keyword’ was ‘reason of state’.

To be exact, the Italian phrase ragione degli stati had been employed, around the year 1547, by Giovanni della Casa – the archbishop best known for his courtesy book – in an oration to the emperor Charles V, but it was only in 1580s or thereabouts that the new coinage passed into general currency. By the time Giovanni Botero published his Ragione di Stato (1589), the first of a whole shelf of books bearing that sort of title, it was, as he noted in the dedication, a ‘constant subject of discussion’ in some courts. The claim is plausible enough, since Botero's book went through at least five more Italian editions by 1606, while the phrase ragion di stato appears in the titles of at least eight more Italian treatises on politics by the year 1635.

The context o f Grotius’ career

When the history of recent moral philosophy was written at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth century, a consistent account was given of the role of Hugo Grotius. In the eyes of men like Samuel Pufendorf, Christian Thomasius, Jean Barbeyrac, and their successors, he was the one who ‘broke the ice’ after the long winter of Aristotelianism; who provided a new theory of natural law which could supplant both the discredited theories of the scholastics and the anti-scientific and sceptical writings of Renaisance authors such as Montaigne and Pierre Charron. He was the inventor of a new ‘science of morality’, which was taken up in various ways by all the major figures of the seventeenth century, including Hobbes, Locke, and Pufendorf himself. His first important follower, they also all agreed, was John Selden, though the relationship between the two men was by no means a straightforward one (see Tuck 1979, pp. 174–5).

As we shall see, there is a sense in which these historians were absolutely correct; Grotius did see something for the first time which was to be crucially important in the succeeding century, namely that there could be a systematic moral and political philosophy which met the objections levelled against such an enterprise in the late sixteenth century. But this insight was hard-won, and embodied in a series of works which were to some extent pièces d'occasion; to understand the generation of his political philosophy, it is necessary to look first at his public career.

The Leveller movement

The Levellers were a political movement united around the programme of the first Agreement of the People (3 November 1647; Wolfe 1944, pp. 223–34). That Agreement is the first proposal in history for a written constitution based on inalienable natural rights. It embodied three essential principles. The first, though ambiguously expressed, was taken by contemporaries to be that any property qualification for the franchise should be abolished: even the poor should have the right to vote. The second was that the representative assembly should have supreme authority in making law, appointing magistrates, and conducting foreign policy: the king, if any, was to be accountable to his subjects. The third principle was that the powers of government be limited by the principles of natural justice. This meant, first, that all laws must apply equally to all subjects: there must be no privileged estate or corporation. This also implied the illegality of all monopolies. Second, all subjects had the right to freedom of conscience, entitling them to dissent from any established state religion. This also implied a right to freedom of expression. Third, conscription was banned: subjects could not be compelled to serve in an army if they disapproved of the cause for which it was to fight, although they could be compelled to pay taxes. Finally, all laws ‘must be good, and not evidently destructive to the safety and well-being of the people’. This implied both the right of juries to refuse to enforce bad law, and an ultimate right of revolution: if the people's representatives betrayed their trust, the nation as a whole could assert its ultimate sovereignty.

The meaning of absolutism

The purpose of this chapter is to describe the main tenets of absolutist and royalist thinking in the seventeenth century. That century, we are often told, saw the making of absolutism, especially in France. There, the Estates General fell into disuse after 1615, and its demise brought death to the principle that taxation requires the consent of the taxed. In the 1620s Louis XIII subdued the Huguenots in a crusade which harnessed militant Catholicism to the service of the monarchy. In the 1630s war with Spain led to a massive increase in the crown's military capacity – and troops could be used to suppress insurrection at home as well as to defeat enemies abroad. The introduction of intendants brought local government under central control, and this development was given added impetus when the intendants assumed military powers. After the temporary setback of the Fronde, royal power resumed its progress, and in the latter decades of the century French absolutism entered its golden age. Louis XIV completed the work of Richelieu and Mazarin. In 1673 the parlement of Paris was formally deprived of the right to remonstrate against royal edicts before registering them. In 1682 the Declaration of the clergy of France unambiguously asserted the independence of kings from papal control in temporal matters.

Elsewhere events often ran a similar course. In 1660 the Danish Estates met for the last time. In 1680 the Swedish Riksdag engineered a constitutional revolution which effectively introduced absolutism. In Prussia the Great Elector taxed without consent and used troops to enforce his will. By the end of the century, we might argue, absolutism was made or in the making in most European states. Even in England its triumph sometimes looked likely, and was averted only by the execution of one king and the deposition o f another. Even in republics — Holland, Venice — there were those who expressed absolutist ideas.

That excellent book Gerasimos Santas contributed to the “Arguments of the Philosophers” series in 1979 is entitled Socrates. But once inside it you discover that what it is really about is a “Socrates” in Plato. More than once since I first started working on this book I asked myself: “Why not follow that example? Why not bypass, as he did, that bugbear of Platonic studies, the so-called ‘Socratic Problem’? Why not let the historians have the Socrates of history all to themselves, keeping for myself that enchanting figure whose challenge to philosophers would be the same were he historic fact or Platonic fiction?” If my interests had been as purely philosophical as are those of Santas this, certainly, is the way I would have gone. But it so happens that my philosophical interests are impure. I cannot pass the buck to the historians without passing it to myself. All my life I have been one of their tribe and once in it no easy exit is allowed. The question “Who are you talking about – Socrates or a ‘Socrates’ in Plato?” will dog your steps, barking at you, forcing you to turn and face it in self-defense. If you do mean the former, you must argue for it.

That Socrates does not scruple to palm off on his interlocutors – for their own good, of course – premises he considers false or inferences he knows are crooked has been maintained repeatedly by scholars of high repute. E. R. Dodds: “It looks rather as if Plato was content at this stage to let Socrates repay the Sophists in their own coin, as no doubt Socrates often did.” Paul Friedländer: Socrates believes that to educate deluded persons “he must resort to dialectical tricks”; and he “knows how to deceive better than all the sophists.” W. K. C. Guthrie: “Plato lets Socrates make a wickedly sophistical use of ambiguity when he likes.” Charles Kahn: Socrates uses “dialectical trickery” to win his argument against Polus in G. 474c–475c.

I am not suggesting that such views are now shared by a majority of Platonic scholars. My distinct impression is that quite the contrary is the case. Thus two of the best of recent philosophical commentaries on Socratic dialogues, C. C. W. Taylor's on the Protagoras (1976) and T. H. Irwin's on the Gorgias (1979), give no quarter to the idea that Socrates resorts to sophistry when it suits his purpose. Neither does the systematic examination – the most comprehensive on record – of the arguments in Plato's earlier dialogues in Gerasimos Santas' Socrates (1979).

ARETĒ, EUDAIMONIA: THEIR TRANSLATION

The key terms in the title pose problems of translation. On “virtue” for aretē I need not linger at all, for whatever may be the general usage of this word, Socrates own use of it to designate precisely what we understand by moral virtue must have been apparent throughout this book. Any lingering doubt on this point in my readers' mind may be resolved by referring them to the fact that whenever he brings the general concept under scrutiny – as when he debates the teachability of aretē in the Protagoras and the Meno – he assumes without argument that its sole constituents or “parts” (μόριαμέρη) are five qualities which are, incontestably, the Greek terms of moral commendation par excellence: andreia (“manliness,” “courage”), sōphrosynē (“temperance,” “moderation”), dikaiosynē (“justice,” “righteousness”), hosiotēs (“piety,” “holiness”), sophia (“wisdom”).

“Happiness” for eudaimonia is a more contentious matter. Leading Aristotelians, Ross and Ackrill, have claimed that “well-being” would be a better translation. But in their own translations of the Nicomachean Ethics (hereafter abbreviated to “E.N.”) both stick to “happiness” all the same. It is not hard to see why they would and should. “Well-being” has no adjectival or adverbial forms. This may seem a small matter to armchair translators, philosophers dogmatizing on how others should do the job.