J. H. Burns

The Cambridge history of political thought, 1450-1700

Introduction J. H. BURNS PART I. RENAISSANCE AND COUNTER-RENAISSANCE: 1. Humanism and political theory ANTHONY GRAFTON 2. Italian political thought, 1450-1530 NICOLAI RUBINSTEIN 3. Law DONALD R. KELLEY 4. Transalpine humanism BRENDAN BRADSHAW 5. Scholasticism: survival and revival J. H. BURNS PART II. RELIGION, CIVIL GOVERNMENT, AND THE DEBATE ON CONSTITUTIONS: 6. Christian obedience and authority, 1520-50 FRANCIS OAKLEY 7. Calvinism and resistance theory, 1550-80 ROBERT KINGDON 8. Catholic resistance theory, ultramontanism, and the royalist response, 1580-1620 J. H. M. SALMON 9. Constitutionalism HOWELL A. LLOYD 10. Sovereignity and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics JULIAN H. FRANKLIN 11. Utopianism J. C. DAVIES PART III. ABSOLUTISM AND REVOLUTION IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY: 12. Absolutism and royalism J. P. SOMMERVILLE 13. England: ancient constitution and common law Corinne C. Weston 14. Leveller democracy and the puritan revolution DAVID WOOTTON 15. English republicanism BLAIR WORDEN PART IV. THE END OF ARISTOTELIANISM: 16. Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state Peter Burke 17. Grotius and Selden RICHARD TUCK 18. Hobbes and Spinoza NOEL MALCOLM PART V. NATURAL LAW AND UTILITY: 19. Pufendorf ALFRED DUFOUR 20. The reception of Hobbes MARK GOLDIE 21. Locke JAMES TULLY.

Tacitism, scepticism, and reason of state

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 Boteros 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.

Leveller democracy and the Puritan Revolution

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 peoples representatives betrayed their trust, the nation as a whole could assert its ultimate sovereignty.

Law, legislative authority, and theories of government, 1150–1300

The will of the prince and the law In the middle of the twelfth century, Gratian completed his Concordia discordantium canonum – a ‘Concord of Discordant Canons’, later called simply the Decretum – and, unlike most earlier compilers of canonical collections, he began with a series of texts and comments on the various sources and types of law. Gratian did more than gather texts together; he unified and explained them, and in some cases he rejected the authority of some as being out-of-date or superfluous. The Decretum was the first collection of the high Middle Ages in which the compiler commented on the texts he brought together. It was an important step in medieval jurisprudence. Gratian made a general statement about law at the beginning of the Decretum : ‘The human race is ruled by two things: natural law and custom.’ He followed this definition with discussion of the types of human law: unwritten custom, civil law, the law of a city or a people, and the different types of laws in classical Roman law. A few pages later, he ended his treatment of legislation by defining how a law was validated: ‘Laws are established through promulgation and validated when they are approved by the acceptance of the people.’ Gratians treatment of law was in the mainstream of legal thought in the twelfth century. But he presented only raw, unassimilated ideas. He thought that the source of law might be a prince or the time-honoured customs of people.

Lordship, kingship, and empire : the idea of monarchy, 1400-1525

1. A Crisis of Monarchy? 2. Lordship: The Problem of Dominium 3. Lordship and Kingship: France and England 4. The Shaping of Absolutism: Spain 5. Monarchy: Papacy and Empire 6. The Conciliarist Tradition and Beyond 7. The Triumph of Monarchy? Bibliography Index.

Sovereignty and the mixed constitution: Bodin and his critics

The account of sovereignty in the work of Jean Bodin was a major event in the development of European political thought. Bodins 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 Republique (1576) became the prototype for a whole new literary genre, which in the seventeenth century was cultivated most in Germany. But Bodins 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.

Kingship and empire

For ideas of kingship, the period c. 750 to c. 1150 was no longer one of beginnings but of consolidation. It saw the formation of a single culture in an expanded Latin Christendom. It began with the incorporation of significant Spanish and insular contributions into the mainstream of western political thought, and it ended with new contributions from as far afield as Bohemia and Denmark. The history of the period was dominated first by the Frankish Empire, then by states that succeeded to or were profoundly influenced by it. Its creation strengthened in the short run the traditional elements in barbarian kingship, successful leadership of the people ( gens ) in wars of conquest and plunder bringing Frankish domination of other gentes. Hence the hegemonial idea of empire, of the emperor ruling many peoples and realms, arose directly from the political experience of the eighth-century West. In the longer run power devolved to kingdoms that proved durable, without a gentile identity or an economic base in plunder and tribute. This brought new formulations of the realm as a territorial and sociological entity, the aristocracy sharing power and responsibility with the king. The idea of empire detached from its gentile anchorage acquired Roman-Christian universality. In the eighth century the Frankish kings Pippin and Charlemagne successfully mobilised two elites, the higher clergy of the Frankish Church and the Frankish aristocracy. Power-sharing was built into the fabric of the Carolingian Empire though it was masked at first by a community of interest that evoked a chorus of praise for rulers evidently possessed of divine approval.

England: ancient constitution and common law

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 Englishmens 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 Is 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.

Italian political thought, 1450–1530

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.

The barbarian kingdoms

For all the tribulations and transformations experienced by the Roman empire in the third and fourth centuries, the territorial configuration of its western half in 400 was not significantly different from that of 200 years before. Just a lifetime later imperial power was extinct in the west, which lay parcelled out among an assortment of kings and other warlords, predominantly Germans. Ex uno plura. The political map was to be redrawn time and again in the years ahead as new barbarian powers asserted themselves, as the empire strove to re-impose its control, as Islam expanded its dominion. Not one of the Germanic kingdoms of 750 had arisen at the direct expense of the fifth-century empire: the Anglo-Saxons had descended in force upon an already abandoned Britain; the origins of the huge regnum Francorum lay with Clovis (c. 481–511); the Lombards had entered Italy only in 568. But, as all this demonstrates, the west had continued to know political fragmentation. Indeed, it has known it ever since. If the unitary ideal, among the most potent of Romes legion legacies, has never been far from the forefront of the western European consciousness, it is the political plurality bequeathed by the fifth-century collapse which in practice has always prevailed. To multiplicity of polities corresponded diversity of ethos and inner form. That Germanism, Romanitas and Christianity worked as shaping influences upon all the barbarian kingdoms may be granted. But the generalisation conceals a host of variables. The Germans were no undifferentiated mass, and the nature of their contribution varied from kingdom to kingdom.