Sharp chronological lines can seldom be confidently drawn across the page of any historical record – and never in the history of ideas. Yet a book must end somewhere, and it is desirable that the point at which it ends should be supported by some kind of rationale. In the present case, that rationale cannot well be derived from the general history of the period. The turn of the century in 1700 was not, even if we allow for some years' margin on either side, distinguished by any significant turning point in European development. Yet in intellectual history there is at least a certain sense, at that point or soon afterwards, of a stage being cleared by the demise of leading characters. Of the major thinkers discussed above perhaps only Leibniz (d. 1716) survived much beyond the earliest years of the new century. And by coincidence the year 1704 was marked by the deaths of two figures whose ideas encapsulate some of the main contrasting and indeed conflicting tendencies in the political thought of early-modern Europe.

John Locke and Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet did not, it is true, meet in controversy as Filmer did, posthumously, with Locke. Yet there is, it can be said, an implicit dialectic in which the thesis advanced by Bossuet, particularly in his Politique tireé des propres paroles de l'Ecriture sainte, is met and challenged in Locke's Two Treatises of Government. Where Locke sees an all but indissoluble link between power that is absolute and power that is arbitrary, and an almost inevitable degeneration from that conjuncture into the tyranny of the ruler and the slavery of his subjects, Bossuet rejects both the equation and the deduction: for him the king's absolute power, neither despotic nor tyrannical, is ‘sacred, paternal, and subject to reason’.

The idea o f constitutionalism

The term ‘constitutionalism’ had no currency in the political thought of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A nineteenth-century augmentative of ‘constitution’, itself derived from the Latin (constitutio), the term signifies advocacy of a system of checks upon the exercise of political power. Such a system is commonly taken to involve the rule of law, a separation of legislative from executive and from judicial power, and representative institutions to safeguard the individual and collective rights of a people who, while governed, are nonetheless sovereign. As we shall see, ideas which would contribute to later conceptions of that kind were present in the thought of the period. But for those thinkers the term ‘constitution’, which certainly formed part of their technical vocabulary, conveyed a very different meaning. They used it first and foremost in a sense consistent with the definition to be found in Justinian's lawbooks, a definition which drew no distinction between the legislative and judicial spheres: ‘whatever the emperor has determined (constituit) by rescript or decided as a judge or directed by edict is established to be law: it is these that are called constitutions’ (Institutes, 1.2.6). A constitution was an explicit declaration of law by the prime political authority. Hence, in England, Chief Justice Fortescue's view that ‘when customs and the rules of the law of nature have been reduced to writing and published by the sufficient authority of the prince and ordered to be kept, they are changed into a constitution or something of the nature of statutes’.

Patterns of controversy

The preceding chapter has outlined the development of Huguenot doctrines of resistance during the first half of the French religious wars. It was one of the ironies of the time that, in the second half, some French Protestant writers turned to support royal authority while their most bitter enemies among Catholic enthusiasts occupied the vacant ground with Catholic theories of resistance. The Holy League, in which these doctrines were evolved, relied not only upon secular justification of armed opposition but also upon the power of the papacy to depose temporal sovereigns and authorise armed opposition for religious reasons. In response, royalist theory was associated with the tradition of independence within the Gallican church. In England at the same time the Anglican settlement was defended against Puritan pressure for further reform and a Catholic campaign for reconversion that in one aspect was peaceful and non-political and in another welcomed papal deposition and foreign invasion. Not surprisingly, English and French royalism had much in common, however different the institutions and traditions of the two countries. In the early seventeenth century a European debate took place over the respective powers of kings and popes which invoked and redefined ideas generated by the French Holy League.

The three principal strands in secular Huguenot resistance theory were also contained in the ideas of the League. There were: loyal resistance to malevolent and Machiavellian advisers who had usurped royal authority; constitutional opposition to a king who had overstepped limitations defined by law and history; and communal defiance of a tyrant in the name of the ultimate power, or ‘popular sovereignty’, of the commonwealth over the ruler.

Sources and resources

The contribution of seventeenth-century republicanism to the development of western political thought was made principally in England. In Italy the vitality of Renaissance republicanism had been largely extinguished by 1600; in Holland the emergence of the independent United Provinces produced little systematic exploration of republican principles; in France, Spain, and the empire the domestic opposition to the advances of absolutism was particularist rather than republican. In England, the breakdown of political institutions between 1640 and 1660 stimulated a more profound reexamination of political belief and practice. The ideas of the English republicans are not easy to classify. Writing in order to shape events, they adapted their arguments and their emphases to immediate circumstances. Usually writing in opposition to the prevailing power, they drew heavily on ideas of contract and resistance and of natural rights which were not peculiarly republican. Their constitutional proposals were flexible, and the form of government often mattered less to them than its spirit. The term republican was not, on the whole, one which they sought, and was more commonly one of abuse. Nevertheless, a republican tradition can be identified which was to enter the mainstream of eighteenth-century political ideas in Britain, on the continent, and in America.

In the emergence of that tradition there were three main stages. The first, and most fruitful, belongs to the Interregnum of 1649–60. It was a response to the execution of Charles I in 1649, to the abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords in the same year, and to the ensuing failure of a series of improvised Puritan regimes to provide a durable alternative to kingship – an alternative which the republican writers of the Interregnum sought to provide.

Endings, in the history of ideas, are no easier to identify with certainty than beginnings. Scholasticism, that product of the mature intellectual culture of medieval Europe, was to experience, even within the period surveyed in this volume, more than one revival. Revitalisation might indeed be a better term; for that which has not died need not in the strict sense be revived, and there is ample evidence to indicate that the scholastic tradition, however exhausted it might seem at times to be, clung stubbornly to life. The advent of the printing press ensured the preservation, the transmission, and the wider dissemination of many scholastic texts. Nor was this characteristic only of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries – when it was only to be expected that what were still the standard works in theology and philosophy would be committed to print. Well into the seventeenth century we find, most notably, the twelve-volume edition of the work of Duns Scotus published in 1639. A year later – an instance of particular relevance here – Jean Buridan's commentary on Aristotle's Politics was printed at Oxford. The place is as significant as the date – as a reminder that academic conservatism played its part in keeping the scholastic mode alive. Hobbes' attack on the schoolmen – from whose works, nonetheless, he no doubt took more of his ideas than he cared to acknowledge – indicates, again, that the doctrine he had received at the turn of the century was still to the fore some fifty years later.

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.