In the Preface to the first volume of his Tārīkh-i Jarā’ id va Majallāt-i Īrān (“History of the Press and Periodicals in Iran”) Muhammad Sadr Hāshimī considers the proliferation of newspapers and periodicals in Iran during the Constitutional period to be the principal cause of the dearth of book and monograph publication by scholars and creative writers in the four decades that followed. The lack of such publications, which has certainly not been noticeable since the 1960s so far as non-fiction is concerned, and is amply compensated for in post-revolution Iran, was, he says, unprecedented in times before the advent of the newspaper and periodical. In support of his argument he cites one literary scholar, Vahīd Dastgirdī, who, as any student of Persian literature knows, devoted his life to its study, but produced not a single book. He preferred to confine himself to articles in Armaghā (“The Keepsake”), the literary journal he edited for twenty-two years. Hence, according to Sadr Hāshimī, the need to turn to newspapers, weeklies and more infrequent periodicals, in order to read the speculations and conclusions of researchers, as well as writers' expression of their genius. How ephemeral many of these repositories of Iranian literary output in the first forty years of the 20th century were, was proved when their historian and cataloguer began his work. He discovered that of some no trace could be found. There were instances when, after a lapse of several years, not even former editors and publishers could remember anything about their defunct enterprises.

INTRODUCTION

The oil industry has played a notable rôle in the economy of modern Iran, especially as a source of foreign exchange and as a factor in industrial development. Its major production operations have, however, been confined to the province of Khūzistān in the south west of the country and offshore in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, its impact upon and contribution to the domestic economy should not be exaggerated and needs to be related to the context of the whole national economy. As Dr ‘Alī Amīnī, when prime minister in 1961, reminded his countrymen “the economy of our nation is based primarily on agriculture. The majority of our people are engaged in agricultural activities.” As late as 1956 the urban population constituted 30% of the total population whilst that of the rural area was 70%. Twenty years later over half of the population still lived in the countryside. In the mid 1960s the agricultural sector was still providing some 25% of total gross national income.

The most impressive contribution of the oil industry to the national economy has been since the late 1960s, especially 1967–74, when Iran was the leading producer in the Middle East. Production peaked in 1974 at 301.2 million tons, doubling that of 1968 in six years, but declining thereafter by half to 15 8.1 million tons in 1979, a vast rise and fall in a decade (see Appendix 1). Oil revenues helped to accelerate the pace of industrialization, but the fall in national income experienced when oil revenues began to decline in the late 1970s caused a slowdown in industrial activity and precipitated an economic crisis.

Christian social morality and the best state

In the fifty years after its first publication in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia appeared in ten further Latin editions and in French, Dutch, English, German, and Italian translations. Widespread and profound as its influence was, its ambivalance generated both utopian and anti-utopian imitators. In other words, the spread of More's fictional device – the ‘discovery’ of an ideal society – was not always utopian in its political thought and the utopian impulse proper was not necessarily derived in the profoundest sense from the imitation of a model.

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of Plato and Plutarch stimulated the early modern ‘best state’ exercise and encouraged a debate on constitutions which replicated the seed-bed out of which the classical utopia had sprung (Logan 1983; Ferguson 1975, p. 28; Manuel and Manuel 1979, pp. 95–100). But some aspects of civic humanism and of Reformation thought endorsed and broadened the idea of social redemption through individual moral performance, typified for the late middle ages by the Mirror of Princes tradition (Skinner 1978, 1, pp. 126–35). Still others gradually excited a vast outpouring of millennial expectation, especially on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide. These two traditions of discourse about social idealisation – by individual moral effort or by a millennial and literal coup de grace – were quantitatively much more important in early modern Europe than the reemergent utopian mode which existed in dialogue with them. It is helpful, therefore, to distingish utopianism as a form of social idealisation.

Continuities with the medieval past are no less evident in the political ideas to which the Protestant Reformation gave rise than in the religious and theological commitments that characterised it. In both respects, however, it constituted also a striking break with the centuries preceding, and scholars have devoted an enormous amount of attention to wrestling with the problem of continuities and discontinuities. By a long-established route, the characteristic approach to Martin Luther's startling departures in word and deed from the norms of medieval orthodoxy and the dominant patterns of late medieval political thinking sets out from the decline of the later medieval papacy into legalism, fiscalism, confusion, and corruption. Encompassing the onset of the Great Schism in 1378, the emergence in the conciliar movement of a constitutionalist opposition to the jurisdictional claims of Rome and in the policies of European rulers of a set of comparable claims that overlapped and rivalled them, that approach moves on to the more radical challenges posed to the whole hierarchical order of the church by such heretics as the Waldensians, Wycliffites, and Hussites. It takes special note of the rise of the nominalist theology and of the retreat from the externals of religion reflected in the mysticism of Germany, the Netherlands, and England, as well as in the later flowering of the devotio moderna and the humanist philosophia Christi. And it terminates on the eve of Luther's great challenge with an emphasis on the deepening tension between the intense piety – ‘churchliness’ even – of the populace and the increasing calcification of the ecclesiastical establishment, and a concomitant emphasis on the growth of anti-clericalism (Moeller 1965, pp. 3–31, 1966, pp. 32–44).

Scholarship and power: a problematic partnership

In 1599 the Habsburg archduke and his Infanta came to the university of Louvain to hear a humanist teach. The outstanding local scholar Justus Lipsius proved more than equal to this challenging task, as he explained to a friend in a characteristically immodest letter:

The political ideas examined in this volume were generated in a period that requires its historians, in an especially marked degree, to ‘look before and after’. A watershed between ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ European history has conventionally been located in the late fifteenth century and the beginning of the sixteenth – the period which saw the final eclipse of the Byzantine Empire, the flowering of the humanist Renaissance, and the first stages of the Protestant Reformation. Yet the society of the three centuries following that period has increasingly been represented as a ‘world we have lost’ – a world essentially pre-modern because pre-industrial (at least in terms of what Marx called ‘machinofacture’) and pre-capitalist (if by ‘capitalist’ we mean to refer to a society having an urban proletariat as a major characteristic). Demographically, the population explosion accompanying the social transformations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought into being mass societies of an unprecedented kind. In political terms, it is true, there may seem to be less reason to question the modernity of the period here under scrutiny. There is a genuine sense in which the ‘sovereign state’ – even if its lineaments are more clearly discernible in medieval Europe than has sometimes been supposed – took firmer shape in and after the sixteenth century. Yet even here the need to distinguish an ‘early modern’ from a later phase is evident. The European nation-state of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a very different entity from the typically dynastic states (or the surviving republics) of that Ancien Régime which was shaped in the period with which we are here concerned.

The political thought of John Locke is concerned with four problesms that every major political theorist faced in the seventeenth century. These are: a form of government that would not lead to oppression or civil war, an arrangement of religion wars, a set of applied arts of governing appropriate to the early modern mercantile states in a balance of power system, and the epistemic status of religious and political knowledge. This chapter is a survey of Locke’s response to the first two problems; sections i to vi consider the first and section vii the second (for an introduction to the latter two, see Tully 1988). Recent scholarship has shed indispendasble light on the political events and pamphlet literature in England which provided the immediate context of Locke’s writings on government and religion (Franklin 1978; Ashcraft 1980, 1986; Goldie 1980a, 1980b). In addition to this context, I will suggest, the political issues Locke confronted and the concepts he used were also part of a larger, European crisis in government and sustained theoretical reflection on it (Rabb 1975).

Government

The first problem is, what is government – its origin, extent, and end? It is classically posed in the subtitle of the Two Treatises of Government. Locke worked on this issue from the Two Tracts on Government (1660–1), to the Two Treatises (1681–9), moving from a solution of absolutism and unconditional obedience to one of popular sovereignty and the individual right of revolution. The question is not about the nature of the state as a form of power over and above rulers and ruled, although he was familiar with this reason of state way of conceptualising early modern politics and sought to undermine it (TT, I.ix.93, p. 248, II.xiv.163, p. 394).

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.