Mark Goldie

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.

John Locke and Anglican Royalism

Whom did Locke attack? We know that the Two Treatises replied to Filmer, not Hobbes, and was written during the Exclusion crisis, not after the Revolution. Yet there is more to the historical context. Locke assaulted a whole generation of Anglican ideologists, who endorsed Bodinian doctrines of sovereignty and embarrassed the Whigs with the claim that their politics derived from both revolutionary Calvinism and ‘popish’ scholasticism. The clericalist hegemony in Restoration polemics, and the persecution, by statute, of Nonconformity, are constant themes for Locke and the Whigs. One result was an ambiguity about the Crown: they did not always align against Crown-and-Church, but sometimes with the Crown against the Church. The defence of Dissent, and the attack on the priestcraft of a hierocratic episcopate, render Lockes politics as much a work of radical Protestant ecclesiology as of secular revolutionism.

The Unacknowledged Republic: Officeholding in Early Modern England

We live in regimes which are, or claim to be, democracies. The defining features of democracy are the universal franchise and the practice of voting. Those who are sceptical of democratic politics as presently conceived have noticed that this tends to reduce political life to the strikingly minimal act of periodically writing ‘X’ on a ballot paper. Critics argue that citizenship is thereby emptied of content, and citizens made to feel alienated from governance. We occasionally vote, but we do not rule. As John Dunn has remarked, ‘One day’s rule in four years has very much the air of a placebo — or at least an irregular modern Saturnalia’.1

The Scottish Catholic Enlightenment

In the eighteenth century, most Scottish Protestants took it for granted that Roman Catholicism was antithetical to the spirit of “this enlightened age.” Amid the several polarities that framed their social theory—barbarism and politeness, superstition and rational enquiry, feudal and commercial, Highland and Lowland—popery in every case stood with the first term and Protestantism with the second. Sir Walter Scotts Redgauntlet , set in the 1760s, is redolent of these contrarieties. He draws a stark contrast between the world of Darsie Latimer, the cosmopolitan, bourgeois, and Presbyterian world of an Edinburgh attorney, and the world of Hugh Redgauntlet, rugged and rude, clannish and popish. When the Stuart Pretender appears on the scene he is disguised as a prelate, his odor more of sinister hegemony than of pious sanctimony. Scotts tableau captured the Enlightenment commonplace that the purblind faith of popery was a spiritual halter by which the credulous were led into political despotism. Catholicism, by its treasonable Jacobitism and its mendacious superstition, seemed self-exiled from the royal road of Scottish civil and intellectual improvement. It is not too harsh to suggest that modern scholarship on the Scottish Enlightenment has implicitly endorsed this view, for next to nothing has been written about the intellectual history of Scottish Catholicism, let alone anything comparable with the two full-scale studies now available on the English Catholic Enlightenment. One historian has suggested an alternative view, by suggesting that, in the emergence of the Scottish Enlightenment, it was Catholics and Episcopalians who, as alienated outsiders, helped loosen the straitjacket of Calvinist orthodoxy.

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.

John Locke's circle and James II

James IIs grant of religious toleration and his invitation to the whigs to return to office dramatically changed the English political scene and created profound dilemmasfor the crowns former enemies. Although there is ambiguity in their responses, and although Locke himself remained an immovable exile, his circle offriends took advantage of these changes. This included nomination to Jamess proposed tolerationist parliament, an accommodation which damaged them in the actual elections to the Convention of 1689. Some took office, and in at least two cases Lockes associates published pamphlets in support of the king. By exploring the politics of the Lockean whigs a contradiction in earlier views is resolved. For whilst Richard Ashcraft has argued that Lockes circle remained unremittingly hostile to James and engaged in clandestine plotting, other sources identify the same people as among the kings ‘whig collaborators’. The chief actors in Lockes circle are Edward Clarke, Sir Walter Yonge, Richard Duke and Richard Burthogge.

Edmund Bohun and Jus Gentium in the Revolution Debate, 1689–1693

The events of the Revolution of 1688 were the subject of an explosive pamphlet debate in which conservatives and radicals sought to capture the ideological initiative by imposing their rival interpretations upon events. The tories, who in large part brought about the Revolution, attempted to account for the nations acceptance of the setdement in terms which could be accommodated within the traditional tory principles of non-resistance, hereditary right and monarchical prerogative. Recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which the settlement was a compromise between conflicting whig and tory attitudes to monarchy, and within die context of this revision of the ‘whig’ interpretation a number of the arguments deployed by tories in 1689 and in subsequent years have now been elucidated.

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.

The early Enlightenment debate on commerce and luxury

The spectre of luxury A spectre was haunting the modern world, wrote the Neapolitan Ferdinando Galiani in 1751, the spectre of ‘luxury’. It ‘wanders among us never seen in its true light, or recognised for its efficacy and it, perhaps, never occurs to the virtuous‘. It was akin to the idea of ‘terrestrial happiness’, but ‘no-one knows or dares to say’, Galiani grumbled, ‘what luxury might properly be’ (Galiani 1977, p. 214). Denis Diderot was in a similar quandary. Defining the term in the Encyclopedie , he called for a ‘discussion among those who show the most discrimination in their use of the term luxury: a discussion which has yet to take place, and which even they cannot bring to a satisfactory conclusion’ (Diderot 1755, v , p. 635). The article on ‘Luxury’, published in 1762, and written by the marquis de Saint Lambert, was asmuch a summary of the luxury debates of the first half of the eighteenth century as an attempt to resolve them. The purpose of this chapter is to present the work of eight important contributors to these debates in France and Britain before 1748, the year of publication of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , that supplied Saint Lambert with the resources he needed to try to say what luxury actually was. As Saint Lambert presented it, luxury was not merely an economic phenomenon, but the central moral and political issue of modernity. The standard definition of luxury’ was excessive individual consumption (Butel- Dumont 1771), but Saint Lambert followed the definition of V´eron de Forbonnais (the author of the articles Commerce’ and Agriculture’ and the original assignee for Luxury’): [Luxury] is the use men make of wealth and industry to assure themselves of a pleasant existence’ (Forbonnais 1754, p. 221; Saint Lambert 1965, p. 202).

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.