The Historical Journal, 38, 1 (1995), pp. 161-173Copyright © 1995Cambridge University Press

STATECRAFT AND CULTURE IN EARLYMODERN EUROPE

From politics to reason of state: the acquisition and transformation of a language of politics,1250-1650. By Maurizio Viroli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp.« + 33>- £35<x>-The counter-reformation prince: anti-Machiavellism or catholic statecraft in early modern Europe.ByRobert Bireley. Chapel Hill, NC: University ofNorth Carolina, 1990. Pp. xii +309.84395.Philosophy and government, 1572-1651. By Richard Tuck. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1993. Pp. xviii+386. £35 (hb), £13.95 (Pbk)-The rise ofmerchant empires: long-distance trade in the early modern world 1350-1750. EditedbyJames D.Tracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xviii +442.£55-The political economy ofmerchant empires: state power and world trade 1350-1750. Edited byJames D.Tracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Pp. viii +504. £40.Empires and entrepots: the Dutch, the Spanish monarchy and the Jews, 1585-1713. By JonathanI. Israel. London and Ronceverte: Hambledon, 1990. Pp. xii+457. £40.

Heros et orateurs: rhilorique el dramaturgic corneliennes. By Marc Fumaroli. Geneva:Droz, 1990. Pp. 532.Pierre Comeille: poetics and political drama under Louis XIII. ByDavid Clarke. Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1992. Pp. xii+ 316. £42.50.Stoics and neostoics: Rubens and the circle of Lipsius. By Mark Morford. Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1991. Pp. xviii+ 246. 842.50.What can we learn about European history from the character of the literature on'reason of state*? This is the underlying question that arises from a flurry of recentpublications on early modern political thought, political economy and intellectualculture. The basic facts arewell-known: between roughly 1590 and 1650 there wasaprofusion of texts inall the Western European languages onthe problems ofstatecraft.They tended to ignore questions of the origin and legitimacy of government andinstead concentrated on the methods of preserving existing governments. For manycontemporaries this stress on the autonomous practice of politics challenged theproblematic union of the good and the useful, of the desire to create a more justsociety and the necessity of preserving society in whatever condition. They weretroubled by the ease with which some writers seemed guided solely by considerationsof expediency. Moreover, this often seemed to be reflected in the distressinglysubordinate role played by religion in the polities described by these writers. Thehostile reaction of some seventeenth-century writers to what they took to beunscrupulous politics, which has bequeathed to posterity the connotations of'Machtavellism', hasdominated the understanding, even in thiscentury,of a languageofpolitics shaped by the fundamental early modern problems of polity (state, empire,colony), society (aristocratic, commercial), and personal status (subject, citizen).

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The books underconsideration investigate different aspects of this change. MaurizioViroli argues that reason ofstatemarks acrucial shift inthehistory ofpolitical thought,away from theclassical andclassical republican notion of politics. Richard Tuck seeksto put this political literature into an intellectual context that he terms the 'newhumanism' while RobertBireley examines the attemptof theorthodox to contain theautonomy of politics in acatholic statecraft. The object of these arguments, the'state',occupies centre stage in the volumes edited by James D.Tracy and in the essays ofJonathan Israel. For thenew themes thathadsuch aneffect onthecontour of political-theoretical discussion reflected, aswell as challenged, the actions and policies of theempires and states of Europe. The literature of reason of state was a product of thatsame intellectual crisis of themixed constitution out ofwhich thenewstates of Europeeither emerged from, or descended into, during this period. The need to re-groundauthority led towards sophisticated discussions of emergency power, but also towardsan emphasis on the ideal comportment for subjects or regimes operating on thesepolitical principles. Mark Morford's book focuses on Justus Lipsius, one of the mostinfluential, and even representative, early seventeenth-century intellectual figures.Lipsius offers a particularly advantageous perspective from which to sketch therelationship between reason of state and notions of citizenship. His friendship withRubens introduces still another important point: the most famous cultural products,and personalities, of this period were not isolated from the currents of political orintellectual discussion. Whilewe might not put Rubens together with Lipsius or, forthatmatter,Grotius with Peiresc, thefact of these friendships provides moreauthenticcategories with which to approach seventeenth-century European history. In a lessbiographical but equally historical vein, the booksofDavid Clarkeand Marc Fumarolishow justhow enmeshed was Corneille's dramaturgy in theproblems ofFrench politicsand counter-reformation culture. Reason ofstate captures theexplicitly didactic aspectofanengagement with the problems of politics - construed broadly ashowindividualswithdifferent interests oughtbest toorganize theirnecessarily social co-existence - thatalso informed the imaginative domain we call culture. Taken together, then, thesebooks describe the ground of a possible enquiry that would acknowledge theconvergence of these approaches andso facilitate a more sophisticated investigation ofa period in which their very indissolubility is both explanans and explanandum.Maurizio Viroli's From politics to reason of state is an exposition of the ideology of

'classical* Renaissance republicanism. The drama is provided by 'the acquisition andtransformation of the language of polities'. The author of a study of Rousseau'srepublicanism {Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the'well-ordered society1) Viroli here exposes thedistinct strands of political thinking (pre-humanist Roman, Aristotelian andjurisprudential) whose confluence, he argues, constitutes the mature Renaissanceideology of the vivere civile. The second halfof hisstorynarrates theerosion andultimatesubversion of thiswayof thinking about political life. The key transitional figures are,of course, Machiavelli and Guicciardini. The first of the exponents of the full-blown'language' of reason of state is Giovanni Botero and the last, those barely knownItalian political writers of theearly seventeenth century whose studyhas long been theprovince of Rodolfo de Mattei. Viroli makes a valuable contribution by bringing thisgroup of writers and their views to the attentionof an English-reading audience.Most helpful is the long opening chapter which synthesizes the work of Quentin

Skinner, Nicolai Rubinstein andJoseph Canning and so offers a textured presentationof the distinct sources of Quattrocento notions ofpolitics. Equally valuable, the finalchapter focuses on the unjustly neglected figures of Traiano Boccalini and Ludovico

REVIEW ARTICLES 163Zuccolo though, given the arresting character of their respective formulations anddiscursive forms, still closer attention would have been welcome.Viewed from the perspective of 1600 there can be no denying the fact of a change

in the language of politics.Viroli's explanations of the cause of this transformation andof its specific nature do, however, raise a series of questions. First, while Viroli is a defthandlerof complex texts in the languages of both 'politics' and 'the art of the state',the account of why the latter displaced the former fails to receive any comparableanalysis. His suggestion that the language of state was ' more fitting to the politicalcontext of principalities and monarchies' (p. 252) would seem to develop theimplications of Morris Croll's argument about anti-Ciceronianism by linking itspolitical and stylistic components. But to presume that republican political ideologydisappeared simply because only three Italian republics- rather than four - survivedpast 1530makes unspoken and undefended assumptions about human nature and thenature of Italian history. Tucked into a footnote (p. 271, n. 103), Viroli defends hisassessment of the decline in the value of politics in the seventeenth century againstdeMattei. 'I find it difficult to believe that in a time in which almostall Italy was underdirect or indirect foreign domination, or was ruled by princes and tyrants, politicsbecamea widespread human concern and was regarded as a necessary completionofa truly human life.' In the absence of social and demographic information we cannotknow how 'widespread' were any of the arguments discussed in this book. But even ifwe could agreethat the rangeof reference isconstituted by a putative Italian 'politicalnation', the unthcorized and undefended assumption that liberty no longermatters topeople who have been deprived of it cannot bear the weight of argument that restsupon it.There may not be an easyexplanation for the fading imaginative force of republican

ideology in seventeenth-century Italy, but its obvious importance to the history ofEuropean political thought demands a more serious engagement. This 'blindspot' is,perhaps, related to Viroli's characterization of the change itself. For while heacknowledges that 'the languageof the art of the state' is used by fourteenth-centuryrepublicans and that a concern for justice is expressed by seventeenth-century statetheorists - an observation that would otherwise serve to blur any claim for a'revolution'- he contends that such 'overlapping' 'do not alter the fact, however,that the two ideologies competed in the Italian scenario as fundamental enemies'(p. 5). Viroli seems to be contrasting ideal types, the constructed self-images of whathe takes to be inexorably opposedways of seeing the world.Viroli's discussion in chapter three, 'The philosophy of the city and the political

man', suggests that the language of civil life was given its most thoroughgoingexposition by Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti, amongothers - all of whom happen to be Florentines. To what extent can an account of an'Italian' ideology of civic and personal autonomy be grounded on writers from onetown writing a century or two afternearly every other republic had been extinguished?That the Florentine Sonderweg has, nevertheless, traditionally been made to serve as abenchmark for historical discussions of fifteenth-century Italian politics and politicalthought surely raises the spectre ofwhig history with a Tuscan accent. One wonderswhy the Florentine construction of a political identity has been treated with so muchmore scholarly deference than the contemporary Myth of Venice. Viroli's authoritiesweremastersofclassical rhetoricand their textual productionsQuattrocento exemplarsof the teachings ofCicero and Quintilian. These texts must be read, first and foremost,as the best examples of what their authors, themselves often public officials, wanted

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othersto believewas true of them and their city. It might have beenwished that Virolihad tai.en the declarations of writers on the state as seriously. Their frequentlyprotested commitment to the commongood is treated less respectfully.RobertBireley's bookon catholic statecraft, The counter-reformationprince, isa valuable

reminder that Italian republicans did not have a monopoly on the politics of meaning.He shows how implicatedwasthe counter-reformation in the developmentof a similaridiom stressingjustice, virtue, godliness and the need foraccommodation to the realitiesof the world, without insisting that these could only be achieved with participatorygovernment. The figures Bireley examines, Juan de Mariana, Pedrode Rivadeneira,Justus Lipisus, Saavedra Fajardo, Adam Contzen and Carlo Scribani, attackedimpious politics- it was Machiavelli's view of religion as deception and merely civicthat struck them as outrageous, not his acknowledgement that the means sometimesjustify the ends - even as they argued that the common good could be defended withall necessary means ifnecessity left no alternative.Whereas some contemporaries may,indeed, have been driven purely by calculationof advantage, thesecatholics'grudgingaccommodation to Realpolitik certainlycannot be interpreted assympathy for tyrants.Where Viroli does get behind the wrought curtain of public eloquence,he uncovers

just such a hard-headed approach to politics. The consulle epratiche, the 'whispered'minutes of council meetings, are said to reveal the 'coexistence of the two languages'(p. 132).The demands ofjustice and ofnecessity, the honestum and the utile, are mingledin the same discussions. This uncivic approach is explained as a secret and technicallanguage whose publication, in fact, constitutes the novelty of Machiavelli's Prince.Republics, writesViroli, insofaras they maintain dominion over others, use the languageofstates (p. 5). But does not this concession only furtherdistance the languageoflibertyfrom the reality of politics? In fact, Viroli himself suggests an answer. 'The recordsofthe Pratiche,* he writes, 'report of citizens stressing that in foreign affairs there is nopoint in caring about honesty' (p. 134).Whereas civic life, strictly defined, had been the province of justice since antiquity,

the moral dimension of the extra-mural world was both under-theorized andconsidered extrinsic to classical philosophical reflection on social life. Viroli's'revolution in politics' was triggered by the trans-Alpine monarchies' invasion of Italyand this, in turn, helps us understand the far-reaching impact of this event on moraland political philosophy. The correspondingly increased dominance of foreign overdomestic affairs in the concerns of those in whom was placed the care of the publicshiftedthe concernof politics into a realm in which therewasno languagecomparableto that developed for thepolis and civitas. It is, thus, almost to be expected that the greathistorian of the Italian wars, Francesco Guicciardini, was the first to begin theconstructionofa politicallanguageappropriate to conditionsin which, to paraphraseLocke,'all theworldwasdominion*. The political philosophical problemposed by interstatewarfare did not 'map on' to the city-centredlanguage of politics. This is a specialcase of the more general effort to fit the 'modern' world to the last of classical termsof analysis - a phenomenonwhich may be constitutiveof the age- and which, in thecase of republicanism, was seen as unlikely to be of much help in managingcontemporary problems. Before there could be a 'quarrel' between ancients andmoderns, there had to be moderns. Guicciardini was one of the first.His Augustinian insight that all polities are founded in force is used by Viroli to

distinguishbetween the melioristlanguageof politicsand the darker insights preferredby public advocates ofthe uso deglistati. IfGuicciardini is to be understood asoccupyinga Hrfinincr olace in this traiectorv. and if the rnicial contribution is written down to an

REVIEW ARTICLES 165attitude or disposition to view the world in a new light, then this ought to provoke seriousexamination.Augustinianismplaysa significantrolein anotherofViroli's' transitional'figures, the Venetian politicianand writer PaoloParuta.He isdescribedas'one of thelast advocatesof the civil philosophy', though Paruta's famousDelia perfettione della vitapolitico was published in 1582, and must be investigated in the light of that year'sideological revolution in Venetian government. If this foray into the Veneto onlyunderlines the risksentailed in building a conceptual chronologyon Florentinehistory,Paruta'slateDiscorsipolilici, with its haunting and intimate concluding soliloquio, insistson the need for a more philosophically-informed account of political thought. Virolican explainwhat Paruta wrote, but not why he might have bothered.The failure topursue the inquiry to this depth actuallymakes it impossible to assess the claim of arevolutionary transformation.The most significantof the contributionsmade by Richard Tuck in hisPhilosophy and

government 1572-1651 lies precisely in the recognition that political and moral thoughtcannot be usefully studied in isolation and that, therefore, the story of thetransformation of late Renaissance political thought - the theme of hismonographaswell- must also be, in part, a history of philosophy. The arguments of writers likeGuicciardini and Paruta are made accessible in a context in which reason of state,scepticism and neo-stoicism are shown to be complementary. 'Interest' had becomedecisive in Guicciardini's discussion because in a world of obscure and indistinctcausation there was nothing else by which to be guided except a cold-headedassessment of one's fellow men. In a sceptical environment faith could seem at bestnaive and at worst hazardous. Tuck has sought to tie an account of the period'ssceptical politics to developments in moral philosophy. His 'major theme', he writes,is 'the attack on constitutionalism and its replacement by a modern, instrumental andoftenunscrupulous politics' (p. xii). Scepticism shaped the space of political thinkingprecisely by calling into question the traditional ideological constraints on a humannaturedrivenby self-interest: Christianity and naturallaw. Reason of state terrified totheextentthat itssceptical foundation liberated this'naturalman'. Furthermore, sinceit wasa commonplace that rulers remained in such a 'state of nature' towards eachother, reason of state seemed to remove the sanctionagainst uncheckedand unendingviolence.Viroli limited hisinquiry to Italywhile acknowledging that'a skilled historian could

also consider France, England, Spain andGermany' (p. 2). Not only is trans-AlpineEurope the arena in which Tuck's story unfolds, hisargument is that, essentially, thetransformation of renaissance thought is a northern European story. If Guicciardinimarks the opening of classical political thoughtto the exigencies of themodern world,Tuck suggests that Erasmus' Cieeronianus (1525), normally notedasa salvo in the waroverthe imitation ofCiceronian style, ought,likeGuicciardini's political thought, alsoto be perceived as a defence of the legitimacy of the modern age. To be a goodCiceronian meantkeeping abreast of one's times, rather thanslavishly aping the past.Defending modernity andtheinterest ofmodern states brought together Erasmus andGuicciardini; in the later sixteenth century these concerns were given voice by theextraordinary revival of Tacitus. In Viroli's account Tacitus is a bit player whointrudes latein the story(p. 252); inTuck's, hisuseby writers in thesecond halfof thesixteenth century gives crucial shape to the reason of state literature. The account ofthe migration of Florentine exiles to the Paris of their compatriot, Catharine de'Medici, is fascinating andexplains both the ultramontane appearance ofGuicciardinithe thinker and the first Dolitical use of Tacitus, creatine 'Tacitism' (dp. 4°-2)-

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This second chapter ('Scepticism, stoicism andraison d'itat*), isthemostoriginal andtheoretically significant in thebook. Here Tuck charts theconceptual common groundbetween scepticism and stoicism, asrevived in the sixteenth century, andsuggests thatthis provides precisely that link between moral and political philosophy which alonecan support claims for a 'revolution' in political thought. The chapter is especiallygood at anchoring the intellectual turns in the concreteof history. Tuck's account ofMontaigne and Lipsius-men whose disparate trajectories belie the community ofviews each felt obtained between them - shows how the expansion ofcanonical figuresresults in a concomitant broadening of themes. The new view of 'self-government'put forth by Lipsius and Montaigne underpinned a new notion of 'politicalgovernment'. Another of the important arguments of this book is to show how thedevelopment of natural law by Grotiusand Seldenconstitutes an attempt to improveupon the late sixteenth-centuryengagement with psychological and epistemologicalscepticism and its political corollary, reasonof state.The historical development - and Tuck's book itself-culminates in the looming

eminence of Thomas Hobbes. In a way, the book can be read as an elaborateintellectual biography in which the experiences and precepts of anepoch of Europeanhistoryaresummed up in the argumentsof oneman. Foras the' Conclusion' indicatesby its very structure, the component arguments fit together as discrete intellectualelements of Hobbes' thought. Grotius sought to parry the sceptic's challenge and bydoing so linked the world of Montaigneand Lipsiusto that of Hobbes. Yet, accordingtoTuck, Hobbes realized 'that the Grotian "solution" to scepticism wasonly partial,for therewouldstillbe irreconcilable conflictover the practical circumstances in whichthe rightof self-preservation should be exercised' (p. 348).Under conditionsofextremeinter-subjective doubt-a topic that also pre-occupied Hobbes' French friends,Mersenneand Descartes - therecould be no agreementon what constituted' necessity'and, hence, justified acts of self-defence. The mortal God Leviathan resolved thisproblem since hisreason alone coulddecide in cases of publicdisagreement. By puttingthe problemof'necessity' at the heart of the Hobbesianaccount of sovereignty,Tuckopens up the possibility of evaluating the similar and dissimilar approach ofcontemporary humanist writers on statecraft, such as Gabriel Naude\ Modern naturallaw as an evolved form of humanist political thought well suits Hobbes, who, like theother natural law writers closely examined in this book, Grotius and Selden, was anacclaimed master of humanist arts such as poetry, translation and antiquarianism(though he railed against the tyranny of style and rhetoric). In earlier articles Tuck hasstressed the inseparability ofHobbes the philosopher and humanist and this has beenthe subjectof Quentin Skinner's recent work, though from a different perspective. Itcanonly be hoped that further effortswill be made to disinter the cultural practices ofthose too frequently studied only as political thinkers, understood narrowly.The very pervasiveness of the discourse of reason of state marks the attempt to

reconstructand analyse the nature oflegitimate authority after the familiar structureshadeitherbroken down,asin France, orsimplytransmuted overtime,asin theUnitedProvinces or Portugal, leaving policy at the mercy of competing claimsof the publicgood. In all the various sub-discourses called in the contemporary short-hand reasonof state- mixed prudence, necessity, emergency, prerogative, higherlaw- the centralproblem wasa constitutional one. Forno one, neither the most confirmedrepublicannor thomist, rejected the priority of solus pofndi supreme lex esto. Butwhat provoked fearand unease was the sincerity of the person or persons invoking thislanguage to justifythe useof those powers. Guicciardini's declaration that' the primemotivation of one

REVIEW ARTICLES 167who rules and governs is to conserve himself and his state' embraced all thatrepublicans feared about rule by a single individual. For them, a prince sought only hisown, necessarily private, interest, and not that of the public (Viroli, pp. 139,274). Theproblem turned on the issueof representation. Foronly this could legitimate the claimsof emergency that are an inevitable component of a world shorn of prophecy. In fact,reasonofstate ceases to be a problem and sovereignty ceasesto be someone else'snotionof tyranny only when a theory of representation is installed at the centre ofconstitutional practice.Tuck here makes still another crucial point: Hobbes' notion of sovereignty as the

power to decide in' all matters which aredebatable', foremost among which were casesofnecessity, followed from the fact of consent. He could put forward the Leviathan asa solution to the competing claims of public good and necessity that had convulsedEurope with civil warsonly becausehe could claim that the Leviathan's representativecharacter made its decisions on emergency legitimate and, hence, binding. Ifsovereignty is to be viewed asan 'answer' to precisely thoseclaimsthat constituted thevocabularyof reason of state politics - which is to say that the very scepticism thatfostered instrumental politics also undermined the superiorityof any claimcouchedinits language - then only by definitively transcending competing identifications ofparticular policies with a public, or national, interest could the source of ongoingpolitical division be eliminated.This 'modern', representative, republicwas the sovereignstate. It wasgrounded on

the minimal sceptic-resistant claim that individualspossessed a right toself-preservationand a duty not to harm others without causeand, hence, was fundamentally agnostictowards alternative visionsof the 'good life'. The liberal state, then, is the real hero ofTuck's book. In this particular trajectoryHobbes stands on the shoulders of Grotius.At a time when political legitimacywasderived by appeals to a 'common good' whichin turn rested on a notion of'community' that was, perhaps, the most significant andleastdiscussed fiction in the compositestate,Grotius had deployed the 'social contract'asa concretemeansby which individualscould signify their identificationasmembersof the samecommunity. Unlike its employment by French monarcomachs during thecivil wars to justify resistance or discredit the application of power, in Grotius the'contract' stoodsimply asa threshold for entering the discussion and asa prerequisiteto establishing government among people. In this senseit clearlysuggested that a politycould only be just if it were clearly defined.The importance of consent and representation points to a third response to the

intellectual crisis of the mixed constitution (the others being humanist statecraft andthe modernnatural law) in whichGrotius again occupies a fundamental place. In hisyouthful De republica emendanda (c. 1600) the central problem was who, or whichcollective body, within the mixed constitution ought to be entrusted with summumimperium. The tract marked a failed attempt to improve upon what was felt to be anunfortunate constitutional arrangement in which the Dutch towns and provincespossessed preponderant authority vitiating the mediation of conflicting claims ofinterest. Even the war against the Spanish which, Grotius claimed, ought to haveprovided the ineluctable motive for union, was being hampered because notadministered for the common benefit. The weakness of confederation - explicitlycontrasted with the strengthof a republic - was the absence of some figure 'who couldbe the living embodiment ofits unity' (§§54~6). The ancient Israelite polity, despite itstribal character, served as such a model because it avoided the ills ofconfederation byvirtueof itsstrong central authority. The council of seventy (Sanhedrin) was composed

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of the leader of the nation and of the tribes with the rest drawn from their leadingfamilies. Grotius adds, quite significantly for the time, that it had the power totemporarily suspend the law 'excausapermitlere'. Bothconceptuallyand in its historicalcontext, this admission effectively locates the sovereignty in the Sanhedrin. Thesubsequent claim, that this representative council could reprimand kings followednaturally, though Grotius was reluctant to give more than theoretical assent (§§28,38-9). He concludes the examination of the Hebrewpolityby affirming that all otherpowers were subordinate to and dependent on the council, which had the supremeadministrative power in the republic (§42). The historical importance of the Hebrewrepublic in the seventeenth century lies precisely in its combination of the autonomyprovided by confederation, and the sovereigntyoffered by federation and legitimatelysecuredby representation. In Selden's great posthumous,de Synedriis veterum Ebraeorum,government by Sanhedrin was projected as an ideal form of the erastian solutiondesired by so many contemporaries. The genealogy of the modern, which is to saysovereign and representative, republic can be traced, then, from Grotius throughSelden, Hobbes, Spinoza and Montesquieu to Madison.Tuck's book is rich with insights and provocative juxtapositions that ought to

stimulate serious investigations of the conceptual foundations of seventeenth-centuryEuropean political culture. His argument could, I think, be deepened in threedirections which arc, in fact, adumbrated in this volume, and are still moresubstantially addressed in the forthcoming published version of his iggt CarlyleLectures. First, one might wish to knowmore about the extent to which the expansionofoverseas empire affected notionsof sovereignty and state. Second, movingfrom thedidactic texts which form- necessarily it would seem- the basis of any conceptualanalysis, to the range of imaginative literature would offer the possibility of a morecomprehensive assessment of the nature of an epochal change in European social andpolitical life. Third, though perhaps mostdifficult of all to ascertain, is the relationshipbetweenphilosophical change and the livedlife. The more fully-developed investigationofsignificant figures (rather than representative), likeGrotius or Selden,might permita more precisedelineation of what activity these figures believed they were engaged in.This, in turn, would give us closer access to the contemporary character of the'political' and its variation in this period. Finally, inquiry into each of these areas-and others, too - could only benefit from being continued into the eighteenth centuryand, in most cases, up to, and including, the French revolution. Though this would,in part, have been addressed by James Tully's sequel (designed to take the storythrough the Treaty of Utrecht), the sundering of the bulk of the eighteenth centuryfrom the seventeenth tends to lend an artificial sense of closure and resolution toarguments which, in nearly every case, remained unsettled for another hundred years.Viroli observed that, unlike Machiavelli, Guicciardini had emphasized the

continuity between the art of state and the art of commerce. Both involved managingpeople and, therefore, demanded a study of the passions that could not be neatlysummarized in a scries of rulesset forth in textbooks (p. 179).At the end of the century,both Giovanni Botero in his Discorso deWeccellenza delle monarchic (1607) and JustusLipsius in DeMagnitudine Romana (1599) stressed population, finances, public worksprojects and disciplined citizenryas sources ofpower.What, then, was the nature of therelationship between thinking about politics as developed in its post-Guicciardiniankey and thinking about commerce? Morespecifically, can the impactofreason ofstateon political economy be assessed? While Istvan Hont has studied this question in lateseventeenth and eighteenth-century Britain (in The economic limits to modem politics, ed.

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John Dunn (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 41-120), understanding of the earlier period is fullof significant gaps. The collections of essays edited by James Tracy and authored byJonathan Israel address this problem.The merchant empires that flourished in the early modern period (1500-1800) were

the very polities which the writers on statecraft like Botero and Lipsius had in mind.If war-fighting capacity required material resources, the acquisition of those resources,largely through trade, itselfmade certain demands on the existing political structures.Essays in the first or the Merchant empire volumes examine economic and social aspectsof the expanding European empires (Spanish, Dutch, English, French) and the regionsthey expanded into, as well as the more general themes of re-export trade and bullionflows. In the second of the volumes, subtitled, State power and world trade 1350-1750,several of the essays raise broader conceptual issues that link histories of politicalthought and political economy, in particular, those of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. andSanjay Subrahmanyam and Lufs Filipe F. R. Thotnaz. Brady ('The rise of merchantempires 1400-1700: a European counterpoint') suggests that the implications ofspecific imperial vocations facilitated the development of the older western Europeanmixed states into centralized ones. These nations, the product of two of the three greatsixteenth-century intellectual revolutions (exploration and reformation) are, accordingto Brady ' post-ecclesiastical Europe's solutionto the problemofmobilizing populationsfor imperial and other purposes. The first nations were the first imperial peoples-England, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and France - and other peoples inventednations either to imitate the imperial states or to get free of them' (pp. 134, 148).The article of Subrahmanyam and Thomaz in this collection ('Evolution of empire:

the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean during the sixteenth century') and the former'ssubsequent book, The Portuguese empire in Asia, raise the important question of therelationship betweenstate and empire in the early modern period. He argues that thehistorical development of the Portuguese empire must be told as a history of thedevelopment of the 'state' and that crucial sixteenth-century debates about thecharacter of the empire can best be understood in the light of the Iberian dimensionof the story ('Evolution of empire', pp. 300-4; Portuguese empire, pp. 74, 97-8). That the'mixed' states which launched merchant empires were also 'composite' ones, raisesobvious parallels between theories of'domestic' and 'overseas' management. How far,for instance, did sophisticated thinking about the management of the Spanishmonarchy reflect or influence thinking about the Spanish empire? To what extent didcontemporaries believestate and empire to be comparable? These are questions whichhave yet to be approached from within the history of early modern Iberia. As for theother great European empire, study of thinking about different forms of polity withinthe 'House of Austria' in the centuries on cither side of the peace of Westphalia wouldilluminate a context whose significance is only partially suggested by its crucial role inthe formation of Pufcndorfs thought.The essays in the volumes on Merchant empires link the quest for state power to

overseasexpansion, while those inJonathan Israel's collection, Empires and entrepots: theDutch, the Spanish monarchy and the Jews, 1585-1713, illustrate the importance of strategicpolitical economy in the context of a European imperial policy. The Dutch revolt tookon great significance because 'the basic thrust' of Spanish strategy in the century from1550was 'to shift the focus of struggle with France from Italy to the Low Countries'(p. 163). It was an awareness of their economic power that led Spanish ministers 'togive serious attention to schemes for mobilizing Spain's enormous economic poweragainst her European rivals and enemies'. For them, embargo was 'an instrument of

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state' (pp. r8o-go). Though the concepts that guided imperial political economicpractice are not Israel's main concern, these essays make a strong argument for theirimportance since they demonstrate the continuity between politics, empire andeconomics in the seventeenth century.Several ofthe essays in this collection also call attention to the importance ofreligious

toleration as a strategic practice. Dutch Sephardim, translated from Iberia and theSpanish Netherlands and with family connections embedded within the Spanish andPortuguese empires - the CristSos Novos - constituted a trading network whose gainsthe Dutch were happy to harvest. Because oftheir leading position in precisely thattrade which the Spanish hoped to asphyxiate by blockade, the protection ofSephardim, according to Israel, came to be seen as 'a Dutch national interest'. In theseventeenth century toleration ofdissent and, paradigmatically religious dissent, could,as much as uniformity, be upheld for reasons ofstate. The crisis orobligation out ofwhich sovereignty emerged as a 'solution' made religious heterodoxy a politicalproblem, even more than a theological one. Nevertheless, it could be argued - and wasincreasingly so - that the free expression ofideas ultimately strengthened rather thandebilitated the state. The continuity of the debate between theorists of state andindividual conscience from the end ofthe sixteenth century (Justus Lipsius and DirckCoornhert in 1592) to the end of the eighteenth (William Blackstone and JosephPriestley in 1769) lets us characterize anepoch in terms ofits own questions. From thispoint ofview, Jefferson's 'Virginia statutefor religious freedom' and Madison's ' 10thFederalist' can be seen as attempts to address and accommodate these opposed positionsand sooffer the possibility ofsovereignty with wide toleration.Study of the political economy ofempire offers the possibility ofbridging, to a

greater extent, the distance between the theorization ofpolitical life and its practice.At the same time, it expands thefield in which to find registered thekind ofrevolutionin political thinking that occurred between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Thedomain ofimaginative, rather than didactic, literature is also appropriate for such aninvestigation. Few, nowadays, would dispute the incluctably political character ofthecultural. But few have also taken culture seriously enough. It is one thing toacknowledge that fresco cycles, theatre and architecture serve to emphasize authority,quite another to demonstrate, as has Quentin Skinner ('Ambrogio Lorenzetti: theartist as political philosopher', Proceedings ofthe British Academy (1986), just how deeplyart could be embedded in a sophisticated philosophically-grounded conceptuallanguage. One of the consistent pleasures provided by Marc Fumaroli's essays onCorneille collected in He'ros et orateurs comes from his effort to keep illuminated bothintellectual and dramatic texts. Rhetoric, Jesuit dramaturgy and the virtues of astoic-sceptic society - the very characteristics of Tuck's 'new humanism'-areintertwined with discussions of the plays. Corneille's position as a mediator betweencounter-reformation and French culture is made clear, as is the mediating content ofhis drama, situated between the late flowering of parliamentary and Jesuit eloquencethat closed Fumaroli's Vage de feloquence (1980) and the interest in more privateconversation that has informed his recent work on the republic ofletters. He has arguedhere and elsewhere that S. Francois de Sales' Introduction ala vie devote (1604) is the keytext for attaching this particular array of virtues to women and to the personalrelationship constituted by marriage. In this context, (informed by classical texts likePlutarch's Eroticus as well), one might argue that marriage stood for the idealcommunion ofboth soul and body between friends and, hence, as a model ofspiritualequality.

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The relevance of this type of idealized personal relationship for people living in aworld riven by faction, secrecy and tyranny - in short, the world represented inGuicciardini's History and on the Corncllian stage - seems obvious. David Clarke'sexamination of Corneille's history plays, Pierre Corneille: poetics and political drama underLouis XIII, focuses on the extent to which the on-stage conflict between legitimateauthority, tyranny and civil life reflected Corneille's engagement with the problemsengendered by Richelieu's raison d'etat. Clarke takes as a crucial context Corneille'sposition as a counsellor in the parlcmcnt of Rouen at a time when its privileges werebeing systematically quashed by that same Richelieu who was becoming his patron.The tension,according to Clarke, issued in the drama. His analysis moves between theplays themselves and the important contemporary tracts on statecraft produced byRichelieu's other clients.This argument puts staged power into its historical context. Indeed, the problem of

the tyrant, whoalsodominates baroque drama in Spain and Germany, iscentral to theintellectual crisis of the mixed constitution because the breakdown of order threatenedto unshackle self-interest and he was its archetypal representation. The tyrant'stypically perverted and self-serving abuse of the 'public good' was often characterizedbya warping ofthe topology oftheclassical virtues. In this one-sided rendering of the'statesman', cruelty replaced clemency, flattery friendship and bribery liberality. Thearduousand perhaps hopeless but nevertheless inescapable task of thesubject or citizenwas to navigate this altered moral landscape.Mark Morford's study ofJustus Lipsius addresses one of the central figures in any

investigation of the impact of reason of state politics on just this notion of individualcomportment. Morford stresses not only Lipsius' self-fashioning, an increasinglypopular academic subject, but also the way he fashioned a community around him.The contubernium in which the students learned from daily contact with their masterwasthe concrete vehicle with which Lipsius sought to evoke, if not recreate, the stoic andepicurean conceptualization of friendship. Not only was stoicism an ideology for theindividual living in a turbulent world, it also provided the basis for the construction ofa semi-public, or civil, society. Here loo, the virtues were designed to conduce to avision ofotium cum dignitate but the aspects of fortitude, prudence and temperance thatwere applied to friendship and conversationweredifferent from those used to upholda public-political life. Lipsius' significance as a theorist of letter writing (InstitutoEpistolica, 1577) reflects the rising tide of interest in the letters of ancients like Cicero andSeneca. As a vehicle forintimateconversation among absent friends thisidea, too, goesback to Erasmus. But the constitution of a community of friends independent ofgeography or confession and defined by its own virtueswasa product of hisstoic-scepticphilosophyof livingwhose clearest statement is in the famous De constantia (1584).Embedded in the mixedconstitutionwasa social reality.The breakdownof relations

between the different constitutive orders precipitated its intellectual crisis. Theseriousness with which Lipsius treated his role as an educator who presided over acommunity of friends was, in this context, as much a part of the reconstruction ofpolitical community as was his analysis of power. Neither Lipsius' discussion offriendship, nor those of like-minded contemporaries, can be relegated to the realm ofthe ideal or hypothetical.Living in a world governed by interest applied newstress to the theoreticalstatus of

the subject or citizen. Prior to Mandcvillc and Smith, thisstatus was mediated by theclassical language of virtue, creating a deep tension at the heart of a political societywhose rulers manifestly seemed to follow a different code. The uncertainty of theworld

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and scepticism about the truth of appearances that isso pervasive in yaripurforms of,seventeenth-century literature, whether didactic or imaginative, is ah expressionofthisdeep ideological strain. More specific idioms, such as thepolemic against courts andthsuasions of public life, were mediated by the stoic-sceptic language of preserving theself. Lipsius* 'teaching' isdifficult to categorize because itsemphasis ison theaspect ofthe classical virtues that shades into social practice. Friendship, conversation, constancyj|ormental fortitude, fidelity andmagnanimity sketch a way oflife first and a theoretical^system only indirectly. The virtues Lipsius sought to inculcate, both in his publishedJworks and his equally self-conscious private communications, were those which bestvserved subjects forced to live in a world in which the compassof classical politics wasno longer to be trusted implicitly. Morford's book is particularly valuable in focusingon the practice of the 'new humanism', the self-preservingmoral posture, that actuallymade it possible to survive in public life precisely because it had separated the sourcesof self-worth from service. Glory was gained by the truly self-governing individual, notby participation in governing others. The articulation of this new outlook on politicallife by its very nature is best ascertained through less public forms like thecorrespondence networks that offered these figures an alternative to the existing andoften denaturing political world.With its focus on Lipsiusand Rubens as seen through their livesand letters, Stoics and

neosloics often a bridge between intellectual history and its social context. One mightobserve that this is, precisely, the value of biography. For the lived life of individualsis the most powerful counter-argument to the scholarly narrowness and specializationthat have followed the hardening of disciplines in the later eighteenth century. WhilePhilosophy andgovernment could be read as an intellectual biography ofHobbes, since themost persuasive images are often explicitly biographical, whether of Corbinclli inParis or Hobbes' service as Bacon's amanuensis, a forthrightly biographical formatmight have been still more powerful. With figures like Grotius and Selden thisapproach seems equally justified. The former was a poet, historian and theologianwhose fame, even subsequent to the De iure belli ac pads (1625), rested on theseattainments. Selden, too, is far more than the common lawyer or antiquarian resourceof the recent (and too scant) literature. The account that can make sense of the intereststhat lay behind the Diis syris and Marmora arundeliana (the works that gained himcontemporary European fame) as well as De synedriis veterum Ebraeorum remains to bewritten.An age characterized by cncyclopedism and polymathy makes biography demand

ing, but also necessary. There are, of course, the obvious questions about whatconstitutes a valid interpretation of the thought of someone likeSelden or Grotius (orLipsius or Rubens or any number of significant figures) whose life embraces so manyspheres we now see as distinct. But there is a still more crucial reason for turningscholarly attention to the ground in which discourses merge, whether in a particularlifeor cultural form. For one of the most salient features of that period bounded by thecouncil of Trent and the French revolution is the decreasing importance of politicalparticipation as a source of self-worth. The slow and fitful story of the separation ofmoral from political perfection that would reach clearest expression in Kant's notionof enlightenment and civil society parallels that separation of political from moralexcellenceexamined by Viroli and Tuck. Civil society remains, of course, ineluctablypolitical. But because it is manifested in the intellectual and affective relations betweenmembers of the same, and related, communities, as a focus of study 'civil society'transforms the practice of the history of political thought into a cultural history whose

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successcan be measured by its ability to address cultural and political concerns in thisone idiom. The field suggested by these books offers that possibility.Reason of state, as a way of analysing political life, infiltrated nearly all the various

sub-discourses of politics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Yet, as long as theearly modern state justified its authority by appeals to necessity, without, at the sametime, reforming its representative system, it rested on an unstable foundation. TheEuropean crisis of state authority in the last decades of the eighteenth century soincisively charted by Franco Venturi in the third volume of Settecento riformatore standsas proof. Representation not only lent legitimacy to government; it acknowledged andaccepted the obvious fact that the sources of self-worth and self-satisfaction were beingboth sought and investigated outside of politics as construed in classical terms. Whereasthe teologo-consultore of the exemplary Venetian republic, Paolo Sarpi, was a hero toEuropeans of the seventeenth century (and in some southern parts, well into theeighteenth), and had, for example, been depicted as the wise man searched for byDiogenes, in a re-engraving of 1780 his visage was replaced by that of BenjaminFranklin. In Franklin, an exemplary modern republican, civil society had found a herofor its time.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PETER N. MILLER

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