reason of state and sovereignty in early modern england - a question of ideology

8/13/2019 Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England - A Question of Ideology

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Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England: A

Question of Ideology?

Conal Condren

Parergon, Volume 28, Number 2, 2011, pp. 5-27 (Article)

Published by Australian and New Zealand Association of Medieval and Early Modern

Studies (Inc.)

DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2011.0105

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Reason of State and Sovereignty in

Early Modern England: A Question ofIdeology?

Conal Condren

Much of the intellectual history of early modern England has been written as astory of emergent ideologies, with constitutionalism, Ciceronianism, Tacitism

(new humanism), de factoism, divine right, ascending political legitimacy,mixed monarchy theory, liberalism, and republicanism all being treated asarising between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.1A generation or soago, energies were spent on unearthing the antecedents of socialism to showthat it was not a naughty French or Hunnish importation, but authenticallynative to England.2 Environmentalism is, no doubt, waiting in the wingswith, at least initially, the standard cast of lineal suspects being scrutinized

for where they stood on the exploitation of nature and the conservation of

its resources. It might even seem to the untutored, or cynical, that all thatis needed is to add the suffix ism to a noun and we can discover some sortof abstract agency at work to which there have been clear commitmentsand whose history can now be written.3As Nietzsche put it in a typicallyspirited half-truth: the name givers are the great originals, for they make us

see what is already before us.4With all these ideological names, the search

is for intimations of ourselves who have, after all, lived in an age markedby clearly articulated competing ideologies. The textbooks and university

courses devoted to these are legion. To construe those earlier turbulent timesalso in terms of ideological conflict no doubt makes them more accessible,

but that access may be to the non-existent. It should at least be asked how

1 My thanks are due to all the discussants at the Natural Law, Raison dtat,and the EarlyModern State Symposium, University of Queensland, 5 November 2009; to ProfessorsPeter Cryle and Ian Hunter of The Centre for the History of European Discourses,and to The Department of Government, University of Queensland. Particular thanksare due to the editors Cathy Curtis and David Martin Jones, to Anne Scott and theanonymous reader for astute and constructive critical comment.

2 A. L. Morton, Socialism in Britain(London: Lawence and Wishart, 1963), pp. 922, 39.3 Harro Hpfl, Isms, British Journal of Political Science, 13 (1983), 117; Isms and Ideology,

in The Structure of Modern Ideology, ed. N. K. OSullivan (Aldershot: Elgar, 1989), pp.126.

4 Friedrich Nietzsche,La Gaia Scienza(1882), in Werke 2, ed. Karl Schlechta (Munich: Hanser,1963), para 261, p. 158.


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close the whole enterprise of unearthing ideological formations in the earlymodern world is to institutionalized myth-making. And, as I shall brieflydiscuss below, the shift of focus among some historians from ideologies to

languages may be just as problematic.As the neologism idologie was not invented until the mid 1790s, tosee the phenomenon existing in early modernity appears to presupposea considerable metaphysical commitment: ideology must find a place in acoherent conceptual realm to be posited as independent of and pre-datingthe requisite conceptual vocabulary. The words people actually used canthen be seen as more or less adequate labels for something we now have,thus the clich that X or Y had the concept, but not the words, in which to

express it. This can easily look like a euphemism for avoiding or massagingthe evidence into versions of the familiar, especially as it makes little sense toask which words we lack for the concepts we have. Or, the trans-historicalnecessity of ideology might be insured more briskly: if ideology is essential topolitics, and earlier societies had politics, then whether they knew it or notthey had ideology. But the grounding for this essentialism begs the question

by presupposing the universality of the concept at issue. Thus what seemssyllogistic, smacks of circularity. Either way, we have the means of reading

ideology into the past and presenting it as having been there all the time.For the most part, however, it is probably fair to say that the term ideologyis so taken for granted as part of our tacit understanding of the world, thatit gets inadvertently projected into the distant past. Ideologys ubiquity may

be largely a matter of faltering historiographical reflexivity, a function ofthoughtlessness as much about the present as the past.

Idologie began as an advertising neologism for a universal science ofsociety (Comtean sociologiewould be the next neologistic claimant for such

a status).5

And it was only with the disputes between Napoleon and theAcadmie franaise after 1812 that the word began to take on its meaning asa distinct programmatic doctrine to which there was a group commitment. Itcame to signify a set of putative truths and global imperatives, pre-emptivelystructuring, or simplifying present and prospective situations, and which

because of Napoleons hostility to the idologuesof the Acadmie, began to beexplained as a matter of delusional self-interest.6With Marx came what has

been called its classic polemical formulation as class false-consciousness.7

5 George Lichtheim, The Concept of Ideology, in Studies in the Philosophy of History, ed.George H. Nadel (New York: Harper Row, 1965), pp. 14879 (pp. 14849, 16162),(first publ. in History and Theory, 2 (1965), 16466).

6 Lichtheim, pp. 14954.7 Mark Goldie, Ideology, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, eds Terence Ball, James

Farr, and Russell Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 26691.


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7Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England

Since the mid-nineteenth century, the term ideology has been made socapacious that it may be used for a number of sometimes slippery concepts.From being the new authoritative human science, speedily condemned as

illusion, it has become variously a system of ideas, a zeitgeistof an epoch,a cultural digest, the other sides philosophy, or a bad case of reductiverationalism. These shifts in fortune may illustrate what William Connolly haspointed to as a kind of dialectic of definition. The range of a given conceptmay be increased because of the need to embrace what is taken to be animplication, in a more or less strict sense; and/or its persuasive value andemotional resonance may also encourage an inflationary exploitation.

Connolly took as a case in point the expanded meaning of genocide. From

being the deliberate extermination of a wholegens, it came to refer to anypolicy likely to have a highly destructive impact on a people. From that pointgenocide easily becomes a colourful term to emphasize the more or less fatal

results of social neglect for some or all of a racial group, where the wordrace can be similarly used with remarkable looseness. But the processes ofconceptual inflation go well beyond politics.8It is, then, at least unfortunatethat those charting the rise of ideologies so often draw on implicit agreement

about the term that may be illusory. What they are actually talking about can

be problematic.To be sure, once armed with something like the concept we can, as Mark

Goldie has done, see a progenitor to ideology in Protestant notions of popery

dating from the sixteenth century, and in priestcraft (James Harringtonscoinage, c. 1656), both signifying the myth-making of clerics.9Undoubtedly,the seventeenth century saw a pronounced sensitivity to the question of whowas advantaged by beliefs in any particular doctrine. As Thomas Hobbesinsisted, citing Cicero with approval, we need always ask, cui bono, who

benefits. The immediate context of this suspicion was Hobbess attack onCatholic conceptions of clerical authority, dependent on the promotion of a

Kingdom of Darknesse.10But this did not mean any doctrine was then an

ideology, or that coincidental benefit bestowed ideological status. The pre-history of ideology discussed by Goldie with reference to the terms poperyand priestcraft is not only much narrower than the range of ideology,even in its classic derogatory form, but it is less of a doctrine or emergingconcept than a quasi ad hominemaccusation. This appears to have become

more extended in its range during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

8 William Connolly, The Terms of Political Discourse(Oxford: Robertson, 1983), pp. 2235.9 Goldie, pp. 26667.10 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan(1651), ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), p. 474.


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From designating the evil forces of Rome itself (the polemicist Simon Fishe inthe 1520s), the accusation of popery came to encompass priestly ordinationas such, to which end the broader priestcraft was an aid. For the brothers

Hickeringill in the 1680s the very notion of ordained priesthood was botha perceived implication of Catholicism, and a means of maintaining a lurid

accusatory rhetoric of popery the whore of Babylon was just too good togive up.11

Recognizing this pre-history of ideology in the evidence, we need to bemore cautious than we have been in using the term as a general organizingcategory for forms of discourse in early modern times. This is especiallyimportant as ideology is not just an isolated conceptual label. It developed

and has meaning in a context of conceptual relations, many of which were asalien to the political vocabularies of Europe before 1789 as ideology itself:conservatism, radicalism, industrialism, socialism, liberalism were all weakneologisms invented between 1790 and 1820. By weak neologisms, I referto terms whose root form is in existence, but which can have transformed

functions with the addition of a suffix or prefix. Thus liberal had meantgenerous, but liberalism (c. 1815) could designate a broader more abstractphenomenon and be appropriated by a group of people advocating a set

of principles, capitalizing on the associations of liberality, generosity, andfreedom for a particular end. That the word liberal substantially pre-datesthe derivative neologism is then, no reliable evidence to justify a history ofliberalism reaching back into the early modern world. So too with the coinageof radicalism. It drew on the connotations of radical (from radix), as gettingto, or coming from the root of matters. As such, it was an expression of, rather

than a contrast to, the putative virtues of conservation. But Jeremy Benthamsconsidered invention of radicalism was a means by which he could promote

a programme of principles in contra-distinction to Christianity; thereafter itcame to stand in opposition to a neologism of the same time, conservatism.To retroject such neologisms back into a fiercely Christian world, as group

labels or ideologies, is to make a remarkable mess of nineteenth-century, aswell as early modern argument.12Using ideology as an historical descriptorappropriate to the premodern is, as it were, to take a Trojan horse intoTroy. It carries with it a closely related family of political conceptions mostnotably liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism as largely spurious topics

11 Philip Hickeringill,A Vindication of the Naked Truth, The Second Part(London, 1681), p. 17.12J. C. D. Clark, Religion and the Origins of Radicalism in Nineteenth-century Britain, in

English Radicalism, 15501850, eds Glenn Burgess and Matthew Festenstein (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 24184.


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for historical investigation.13 Superficially, it might be thought that a littledefinitional tidiness is sufficient to make such chronological intrusions safefor historiographical purposes. For a number of reasons, however, this is

delusory. I shall touch on just one.To this end, I would draw two rough distinctions here. I emphasize rough

because were they more straightforward, dealing with the broad notion ofideology would be easier. The first distinction is between complementaryregisters of historical writing; the second concerns semantic order andpragmatics. Much historiography is in a descriptive register, through whichthe historian attempts to establish a narrative or state of affairs that describes

or paraphrases the evidence, without imposing upon or re-shaping it through

anachronistic terms and categories. Thus for the historian to use a stipulativedefinition of a chronologically alien category hardly renders the descriptiveprocess less anachronistic. It is likely to give only spurious reassurance

that dealing with anachronism is easy, a matter of isolated terminologicalcauterization. Even to see something as a pre-history of a later conceptis incipiently anachronistic, structuring and predicating the description ofthe past in terms of that which is yet to come, a process that may be bestrestricted to dealing with strictly teleological development.14As W. B. Gallie

argued, however, the historians narratives or descriptive pictures of a givenset of circumstances often break down and coherence is restored by shiftingto an explanatory or interpolative register. Such a voice change allows fargreater tolerance in the introduction of later categories, needed to re-

establish a sense of what was going on, and in this context, some definitionaltidiness may be of benefit.15 It is important, then, always to consider theregister in which a word like ideology is being deployed, whether as adescriptor, or as a term of supervening clarification. The need is to avoid

conflating any explanatory usefulness the concept may have with the evidenceitself. Not to do so is to fall foul of structural anachronism of narrative; it is

also to risk circularity of conclusion illustrating the presence of ideologyby pre-emptive redescription into its terms. Thus, to describe anybody in

13 This issue is taken up more in Conal Condren, The Language of Politics in Seventeenth-Century England(New York: St Martins Press, 1994), pp. 1124, 14044; and Condren,Afterword: Radicalism Revisited, in English Radicalism, eds Burgess and Festenstein,pp. 31137; for a spirited defence of radicalism as an appropriate descriptor in earlymodernity, Jonathan Scott, Englands Troubles: Seventeenth-Century English Political Instabilityin European Context(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23336.

14 On categories and degrees of anachronism, Condren, A Reflection on the Problem ofAnachronism, Scientia Poetica, Band 8 (2004), 28893.

15 W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London: Chatto and Windus,1964), pp. 10513, 12425.


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varying degrees considered it acceptable. On both sides, theories weredeveloped which were used, as we might put it, ideologically, but much ofthe argument was about the logical entailments of what it was for any human

being to use something in the minimal and paradigmatic sense of eating it.

27

Gerald of Abbeyville in the Contra adversarium perfectionis Christianae(1269)argued that it was meaningless to distinguish use of food from ownershipin eating. Locke took the cases of picking and eating berries to illustrate,coincidentally, or not, much the same point; mixing labour with somethingwas a right of ownership in it; and this, irrespective of disputed relevanceto the Americas, was principally focused on establishing criteria by which

to judge the presence of tyranny. In short, theories and arguments may be

formulated for quite different purposes and once developed, used differentlyagain. This may seem an obvious point, but it is easily obscured by over-reliance on a notion of ideology, especially where that notion is smuggledinto a world to describe what people seemed to think they were doing with

the resources they actually had.These cautionary methodological remarks have far reaching implications

for the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thinkinghas been redescribed and mythologized as if it were part of a post-nineteenth-

century political landscape populated by ideologies, a necessary pre-conditionfor their putative exponents being commended for being like us, or arraignedinquisitorially to be censured. Only such ideological fixations can explain thehistoriographical oddity, if not the philosophical triviality, of a round table ofphilosophers sitting down to compile a bibliography of discussions of Lockesracism.28The shaping into ideological form is of particular relevance to reasonof state theory, a number of recent and valuable discussions of which wouldsuggest it should be taken as a distinctly political doctrine, or even as an

emerging ideology, to be listed among the others I have noted at the outset.29

27 Conal Condren, Rhetoric, Historiography and Political Theory: Some Aspects of thePoverty Controversy Reconsidered,Journal of Religious History,13 (1984), 1534; theargument was quite unreflectively couched in terms of ideology.

28 I am grateful to Paul Corcoran for this information. See his unpublished paper, John Lockeon Colonial Possession: Natural Right and the Principle of vacuum domicilium.

29 Arguably the seminal text for this whole tradition is Friedrich Meinecke, Die Idee der

Staatsrson in der neueren Geschichte(1924), in Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison Dtatand its Place in Modern History, trans. Douglas Scott (New Haven: Yale University Press,1957); William F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State(Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1972); Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 15721651 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993); Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Peter Burke treats it more as a genre,Tacitism, Scepticism and Reason of State, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought,


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II

The phrase la ragione e uso degli state seems to occur quite casually in thewritings of Francesco Guicciardini.30 The off-handedness of his usage

suggests that the locution probably predated him in verbal and manuscriptcommunication. Statowas already part of the argot of diplomacy in fifteenth-century Florence before it was aired in print in Machiavellis Prince, the first,

but much-used noun in the body of the book.31Ragione, reason was similarlya term with a special meaning in Tuscan politics, referring to a particularlyadept capacity to make practical judgements that gave the city republics a

superiority over stronger societies.32The collocation Ragione degli state[stati], then, may have been less Guicciardinis coinage than his disclosure

of a lost or hidden idiom. Be this as it may, and as one might expect fromsomething aired so informally, it was and remained an expression of a kind ofargument, ubiquitous in medieval and early modern reflection, and for which

there developed a number of more or less synonymous, or closely relatedterms, such as prudence and policy and, during the seventeenth century,interest.33

It is my purpose here not to provide a chronological narrative, but ratheran overview of the sort of reasoning involved in evocations of reason of state

principally in early modern England. This narrow scope will neverthelessrequire the occasional foray into more broadly European writings. As GainesPost pointed out about medieval canon law, it was the special status of theoffice of the ruler as responsible for the condition (status) of the regnumthatpermitted acts that might otherwise be deemed wicked, sinful, or fattening.34But as I have argued elsewhere, notions of office-holding were themselvesextraordinarily accommodating, or were made so by use.35Again something ofa dialectic of definition might be inferred; the personae occupying any office,

as a sanctioned realm of responsibility, might claim a reason for it in order

14501700, ed. J. H. Burns with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991), pp. 47998.

30 Harro Hpfl, Orthodoxy and Reason of State, History of Political Thought, 23 (2002),21137 (p. 214); Viroli, pp. 178200.

31 Viroli, pp. 13234.32 Felix Gilbert, Florentine Political Assumptions in the Period of Savonarola and Soderini,

Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 20 (1957), 87214.33 Burke, Tacitism, pp. 48185.34 Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public Law and the State, 11001322(Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1964), p. 308.35 Conal Condren,Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths

and Ofces(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 20918, 34149.


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to justify questioned conduct. That is, an office carried with it a justifiablelatitude for its own maintenance. That reason of state was seen fundamentallyin such casuistic terms is indicated by its being contrasted with what should

usually be done. Abnormality of circumstance, including emergency, was thestandard toposevoked to signal any casuistic move: normally we should do xbut in extraordinary circumstances, it is permissible, or necessary to do y.Thus Giovanni della Casa contrasts reason of state with normally operativecivil law; and then Scipio Ammirato does so with reference to guistiziaordinaria, diurnal justice or the usual application of the law.36Indeed, centralto casuistic reasoning was the axiom that there are occasions when any givenethical rule or prohibition loses its authority in the face of a higher or different

requirement. John Donne insisted that this applies even to a prohibition asapparently absolute as that against suicide: [n]o law is so primary and simple,but it fore-imagines a Reason upon which it was founded.37In such a Reasonor rationale lies a criterion for putting that law to one side.

According to Justus Lipsius in Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex(1589)38 it is the duty of parents and physicians to exercise discretion infollowing normal requirements of honesty. It is this duty that provides

precedent for princes to do the same in the fulfilment of their responsibilities.

This Lipsius called light (excusable) deceit as opposed to the inexcusablydark. He also suggested that there was a way between these extremes, anarea of grey deceit. On this ill-lit path, a wrong action was certainly wrong

but was, nevertheless justifiable in reference to the ends or scope of the realmof responsibility itself.39Thus to govern well is to couer well, and those towhome the charge of a common wealth is committed, must needs be tied to this.40Governing well, then, provides the general criterion for assessing specificacts; it is, in Donnes terms, an example of a fore-imagined Reason that gives

a point to any moral imperative. Indeed, sometimes it might even have been

36 On Giovanni della Casas oration to the Emperor Charles V, see Burke, Tacitism, pp.47980; Scipione Ammirato, Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito (Florence, 1594), Book 12,Chapter 1.

37John Donne, Biathanatos(1608; London, 1700 edn), p. 22.38 English translation, Lipsuis, Sixe Books of Politickes or civil doctrine, trans. William Jones

(London, 1594).39

See David Martin Jones, Aphorism and the Counsel of Prudence in Early ModernStatecraft: The Curious Case of Justus Lipsius, this volume; Church (Richelieu and Reasonof State, pp. 6162) quite misreads Lipsius on this, attributing to him an exclusivelypolitical conception of prudence, and which the text he cites actually contradicts; butChurch is committed to the more Meinekean view that, irrespective of language reasonof state is a defining perennial issue of politics.

40 Lipsius, Book 4, Chapter 14, p. 117 (italics in original).


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the need to rely upon an extenuating reason say of parenthood that mightrequire the protective claim to official responsibility. Normally a child hadto be baptised by a priest, but in emergency, a midwife might baptise by

virtue of her office. Reason of state, then, whenever there was an attempt tojustify it, came from and was a part of the casuistry of practical ethics, and it

expressed all the ambivalence commonly associated with casuistic reasoning.For, to put aside a rule under exceptional circumstances could be seen as ashort step from abandoning all rules, or waiving them whenever one wished.A midwife who routinely baptised children would have been seen as behavingin such an ethically wayward fashion, even as tyrannically usurping the office

of the priest. Whether or not this ever happened, it was certainly a fear, given

that midwives exercised their office largely without immediate supervision.41

Once reason of was extended to apply to what was arguably a newsort of political association, a state, it could be given greater significance andipso facto, the dangers of casuistic mitigation were intensified. So reason ofstate received much attention after Guicciardini by writers such as GiovanniBotero, who elevated it to titular significance in his Della ragion di stato(1589),as would a number of others in the first few decades of the seventeenthcentury.42Perhaps this is a case of those Nietzsche called the name givers

making evident what was before us. Yet what these early modern authors didput before us is unhelpfully, even redundantly, styled a political ideology.

Rather, what we see are instances of the sort of attempt that anyonemight make to exonerate or forestall criticism by appealing to their accepted

and over-riding responsibilities. Importantly, however, the ethical statusof such claims should not be taken in a Kantian sense, for casuistry wasdeontologically subversive, privileging the obligations of a specific socialoffice over ungrounded a prioridicta of right action. Living in a post-Kantian

world, it might even seem tautological to state that if an action is morallywrong per se, it should be morally condemned. Living in this world it is alsoeasy to project as universal a simple distinction between politics and ethics, orpracticality and morality.43But as I have illustrated above from Justus Lipsius,on both counts, matters can be less straightforward. There may be a moralduty to do the wrong thing; and the binary distinction between politics andethics misrepresents a great deal earlier argument. Most specifically, if we take

back to the early modern world the universalism of Kantian ethics that has

41 The extent and detail of the oath administered to midwives is revealing, see Anonymous[R. Garnet?], The Book of Oathes(London, 1649), p. 228.

42 Burke, Tacitism, p. 47943 Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, pp. 3648 and throughout, provides a succinct

example of this established misconception.


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done so much to erase the ethical seriousness of such casuistic reasoning, it isgoing to be difficult to see reason of state for what it was. So repackaging it asideology accommodates it to modern ethical as well as political expectations.

Interestingly, to get a better idea of what was going on, we need toapproach the casuistries of reason of state principally through their negative

adumbration. Like casuistry itself, reason of state was most likely to benamed when under attack and called something else when being relied upon.Acceptable reason of state (or a narrow sense of prudence, policy, or ancientwisdom) exercised in the interests of the common good, sound rule, andso forth, has its place in the immediate linguistic context of the positive

register of the vocabulary of office-holding and is presented as occasional,

retrospective, or hypothetical, being largely hidden in the arcana imperii.44

Were this all we had to go on, the evidence for a belief in it would betenuous and highly fragmented; but what was held to be unacceptable reasonof state had a prominent place in a negative register of office abuse, beingused to formulate accusations of neglect or abuse of office and ultimatelytyranny. Reference to evil reason of state is predictably detailed, graphic,

and unreliable. We need think only of the stage image of Machiavel in thesixteenth century. Shakespeares Richard III readily discloses his villainy to

the audience, making clear his plots and ruthless deceit purely for his ownadvancement; he is bereft of any sense of responsibility to the offices he holds.

In his case, we have a projection of evil, reason of of self-interested ambitiondestructive of good order. Indeed, much negatively presented reason ofstate might have been a creation of satiric propaganda. As Noel Malcolmhas shown, it could be a matter of revealing hidden plots and wicked plans,nefarious letters and memoranda, the secret histories attributed to enemies

who might not have known much about them, we cannot always tell.45Even

beyond such literature, discussions during the seventeenth century seempredominantly to use reference to a reason of state to display by contrast

an authors high-minded integrity. Thus Thomas Campanella in his Aforismipolitici opposes ancient political reason dependent on justice (iustitia) andequity (aequitas) to the modern and degenerate reason of state. Ancientwisdom allowed violation of the letter of the law to protect its end (theappeal to equity); modern reason of state was violation of all principles of law

and was an invention of tyrants. On such evidence Viroli curiously concludes

44 Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State(Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1988), pp. 11141.

45 Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda and the Thirty Years War: An Unknown Translation by ThomasHobbes(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007), pp. 3060.


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belief in reason of state to have been an ideological watershed.46In fact, wesee the possibility of naughty reason of state being not so much a theoreticalcommitment, or a set of programmatic principles as would befit ideological

status than casuistry disliked, a projected fear of what the others might do.One simple way of expressing this was, as we see with Campanella, to plot

the distinction in terms of the highly accommodating topos of the ancients(good) versus moderns (bad). Whether this particular device was used, whatwe find in the attention given to bad reason of state is a means of mobilizationand encouragement in times of deep division. In contrast, acceptable casuisticmitigation, often needed what I have noted above, an ethicizing redescriptive

expression that avoids the phrase itself. It may be that in the cut and thrust

of argument, displacements for the odious expression were to some extentcontaminated by its associations; such was the fate of the term policy, oftencarrying a penumbra of ethical ambiguity. It may also be that gradually the

need to avoid an expression of derogation diminished.47But shifts of fortunethrough the intricacy and resourcefulness of casuistic debate were neverstraightforward or settled.

Given that so much of the vocabulary of office-holding was open tocontentious redescription, distinguishing Lipsiuss dark from light deceit,

and finding a suitably sanitizing expression, was easier said than done,especially if one admits a grey area between them. But this was precisely thepreoccupation of Botero, of Giovanni Frachetta in his Idea de governi(1592),of Scipione Ammirato in his Discorsi sopra Cornelio Tacito(1594), and ArnoldusClapmarius in De arcanis rerumpublicarum(1605).48Adam Contzen, Politicorumlibri decem(1621) and Mysteria politica(1624), was just as insistent on the needto distinguish a good from a bad reason of state, as was Claude Vaure; goodreason of state was Christianity in government.49As Hpfl has pointed out,

prior confessional allegiance was apt to be the determining factor.50With

46 Thomas Campanella,Aforismi politici, ed. L. Firpo (Turin, 1941), p. 163; cited Viroli, FromPolitics, p. 267; cf. Campanella and Girolamo Frachetta, Idea del libero de governi di statoet di guerra(Venice, 1592), fols 37r46r, on reason of state as prudence or tyrannicalself-interest and atheism.

47 The evidence gathered by Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, suggests this was the casein France.

48 Donaldson, Machiavelli, pp. 11141.49 Claude Vaure, LEstat chrestien, ou Maximes politiques, tires de lEscriture (Paris, 1626), as

discussed in Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, pp. 4344.50 On Jesuit employment of reason of state, see Harro Hpfl,Jesuit Political Thought: The Society

of Jesus and the State, c. 15401630(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp.21718, 223; also Church, Richelieu and Reason of State, e.g. pp. 49550, although thedoctrine emerges in a thoroughly ideological society, p. 506.


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these writers, the emphasis is largely on the criteria that might distinguishthe wicked from the justifiable more than on detailing specific examplesand case studies. Whatever good reason of state was and however labelled,

it was usually kept behind closed doors rather than becoming programmaticcommitment or free-standing political doctrine. For all of these writers, the

reason of state toposwas used to reaffirm the imperative of keeping to theends and scope of ruling and of avoiding tyrannical interests. In the evocationof the scope of ruling, office as a criterion for action, whatever it might havemeant in practice and however it might have been applied, is a continuitywith the status regniof medieval jurisprudence. We can hardly expect such alofty and abstract affirmation of the prudent flexibility needed for any official

responsibility to be self-contained. It is less likely that it constitutes a seculartheory of politics, always to be rejected or accepted as if it were an ideology.Here, however, we do see something of the means by which reason of

state was increasingly associated with interest. Self-interest was inimicalto responsible office-holding, a mark of the tyrannically inclined, thus thenegative associations of both interest and reason of state could come together.Yet, as interest lost something of its negative associations through the writingsof Henri Duc du Rohan, who saw it as analogous to, or in some respects

much like an official responsibility, so reason of state, with a diminution ofnegative connotation, might eventually even be called reason of interest.51

This variable usage, slipperiness, and ambivalence is not incidentalto the nature of reason of state. It remained throughout the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries a portable rhetoric, an adjunct to developed theoriesof human conduct and it was to remain part of the predominant form ofmoral reasoning until the eighteenth century.52To chart its rise as an ideology,is to mythologize a great deal of interesting argument. And understanding it

does not require a voice change to ideology for explanatory purposes. Weneed only pay adequate attention to the scope of casuistic reasoning endemic

to early modern society. Even Peter Burkes more cautious designation of itas a genre creates the impression of too solid and self-contained a politicalconcept.

51

Henri duc de Rohan, De linterest des Princes et Estats de la Chrestient (Paris, 1638), seeCondren, Argument and Authority, p. 344; Philippe de Bthune, Le Conseiller dEtat, ouRecueil des plus gnrale considrations servant au mainiment des affaires publiques(Paris, 1633),quoted in Burke, Tacitism, p. 482. On interest theory, see Walter, Interest Theory.

52 For its extension into eighteenth-century theories of relationships between the Europeanstates, see Richard Devetak, Law of Nations as Reason of State: Diplomacy and theBalance of Power in Vattels Law of Nations, this volume.


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for citing him in early modern Europe. Between 1500 and 1700 there wereover a hundred commentaries on Tacitus and over sixty editions during thefirst half of the seventeenth century. Playwrights like Ben Jonson turned to

him, as did the composer Monteverdi.

55

This quantitative evidence, thoughsignificant, needs to be treated with caution. The publications came within

the context of a burgeoning print industry, and Cicero hardly disappeared.Editions and translations of his work remained readily available, citation ofhis name was persistent. Any simple hypothesis of Tacitean ascendency, as ifwe are confronted by a distinct pattern of ideological allegiances replacingCiceronian humanism, is crude.

Caution is needed also in lumping together writers like Montaigne,

Sextus, and Tacitus as if together they form a coherent doctrinal edifice. Theycould, of course, like any group of writers be used together, but Taciteanskepticism about political virtue was a good deal less thorough-going thanthat of Sextus Empiricus, or Montaigne, for it presupposed firm albeit distant

standards against which modern corruption could be measured. This wasprecisely the sort of faith that Sextus had set out to destabilize. Nevertheless,

by the end of the sixteenth century, Tacituss popularity was evident enoughto have suggested that around his name and Montaignes was gathering an

ideology. According to Martin Dzelzainis, largely drawing on Peter Burkeand Richard Tuck, this new humanism was the emergent ideology to whichShakespeare was committed.56The court was the central political institutionin the sixteenth century, and Tacitus was held to be an authoritative guide to

its contaminating psychology.Justus Lipsius in particular was a major editor and a principal promoter

of Tacitus, but his new humanism was not in opposition to any earlier orolder humanism, as both the notion of an emergent ideology and the

epithet new might lead us to expect. At the beginning of the century, theErasmus circle had hardly needed telling about the corruptions of courtpolitics, or how Tacitus might cast light on them.57Book I of Mores Utopiaisa commentary precisely on such matters, while his Historia Richardus Tertius/The History of Richard IIIwas a detailed examination in full Tacitean style of theconsequences of tyranny for all in its ambit. It is largely Tacitus via More that

55 Burke, Tacitism, pp. 48485.56 Martin Dzelzainis, Shakespeare and Political thought, in A Companion to Shakespeare,

ed. David Scott Kastan (Maldon, MA: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 10016; Fitzmaurice,Humanism and America, pp. 17077.

57 See Curtis, Advising Monarchs and their Counsellors.


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we see in Shakespeares Richard III.58It is this to which Cornwallis criticallyresponded, emulating Montaigne and drawing on the redescriptive resourcesassociated with him and Sextus Empiricus. We need then, to recast what

Lipsius was attempting when promoting Tacitus in his elegant Politicorum,atabout the same time that Shakespeare was starting to write.Although he citesTacitus relentlessly, more than twice as much as he does Cicero, Lipsius, infact, sets out to demonstrate how Tacitus agrees with Cicero, Plato, Aristotle,and some 130 others rather than showing that he departs from or offersknowledge that supersedes them. That emergent ideologies can be erected onthe foundation of a name cited as being in agreement with everyone else lacks

solidity. This is not least as it also seems to require ignoring the alleged voice

of old humanism, Cicero, his attention to corruption, and his potential forgiving moral sanction to the casuistry of reason of state. Richard Beacon citesCicero, not Tacitus to make the standard casuistic point, that in necessity and

in the face of corruption, the requirements of legality may be put to oneside. I have already cited Lipsius to the effect that dubious behaviour can

be justified if the ends of office are kept paramount. On that occasion hisauthority is Cicero, while on others it is Tacitus. The use of a name, Tacitus,is not necessarily the overt sign of an ideology, we do have to see how it was

used. Shakespeare did not use it at all, so mnemonics in his plays, even whendealing with courts and tyrants are insufficient evidence for any ideologicalcommitment, should we find it necessary to find one for him. Reason of stagemight be sufficient to explain his giving any idea, phrase, or historical figurea walk-on part.59

The second discursive preoccupation in which reason of state playsa part is sovereignty theory, the concerted attempt to define an ethico-

jurisprudential conception of political society, of specifying the right and

necessary conditions in the context of which prudential reasoning aboutpolitics made sense.

The broadly complementary nature of Tacitism and sovereignty theorycan briefly be indicated by reference to the ambivalence of Hobbessreactions to the vogue for citing Tacitus in the days of his youth. There isno doubt that Hobbes wanted to present a theory of sovereignty that went

beyond disquisitions of political prudence with its reliance on history, butthere is nothing in Hobbess mature arguments to foreclose on the sovereigns

58 See especially, on the works imitation of Tacitus and Sullust, George M. Logan,Introduction to Thomas More, The History of King Richard III, ed. Logan (Bloomington:Indiana University Press, 2005), pp. xxxixl.

59 Cicero is, of course a character, but this tells us little but what Shakespeare kept fromNorths Plutarchs Lives on whichJulius Caesar is based.


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continuing to use prudential judgement.60Hobbess history of the Civil Wars,Behemoth, was an indirect aid to this end. Indeed, in Hobbess view, therecould be no social limits placed on the sovereign in dealing with the arcana

imperii, while there is nothing in what has been brought together as newhumanism to contradict theories of sovereignty. Insofar as there was a newhumanism it was doing something different from the rigid causative analysisHobbes and some other sovereignty theorists, such as Henning Arnisaeus,aspired to provide.

More significantly, because reason of state exemplified a necessaryprudential latitude, restricted, or confined only by the ends of whatever

activity prudence served, it was as easily appropriated to the prerogative

of the office of the sovereign as it was associated with the name Tacitus. Assubsumed by prerogative power, reason of state became the most controversialfeature of sovereignty theory. This might account for the misconception that

reason of state was a consequence of sovereignty theory.61 Controversiesaround reason of state may also have helped coalesce two distinguishable butnot always separable understandings of sovereignty.62There was monarchicaldivine right, often in a strict sense patriarchal, and there was what may be

called global absolutism. The former, in Philip Huntons terms, might only

tend towards some absoluteness in rule.63

The latter was absolute but neverin the modern sense of asserting an untrammelled power (a word not oftenused in a modern fashionable fashion). Divine right absolutism was alsoimportant in its evocation of explicitly divine law, even in its use of the Bible

as a political text; this was most explicitly the case for Robert Filmer. Theassertions of a more global absolutism made variable play with the natural,uncertainly related to a conception of the divine.64

In some of its uses at least, divine right sovereignty does come close

to being what we would see as ideological: it offered an idealized image ofunitary authority in society, a virtual template of legitimacy by which other

forms of government were rendered unacceptable. It was remarkably close,

60 Noel Malcolm, Behemoth latinusAdam Egbert, Tacitism and Hobbes, Filozofski vestnik, 24(2003), pp. 85120 (p. 119).

61 Church,Richelieu and Reason of State, pp. 2940, and Preface asserting the causal relationship.It sits ill with the claim that reason of state is a fixture of politics, as opposed to morals

(see above note 38).62 Pocock (Virtue,pp. 9596) suggests why a distinction should be kept in mind; James VI &

I merges both in adapting Bodin to his own situation in The Trew Law of Free Monarchies(Edinburgh, 1598).

63 Philip Hunton,A Treatise of Monarchie(London, 1643), p. 7.64 On the variable uses of reference to natural law, see Hunter, Law, War, and Casuistry.


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as others have noted, to medieval hierocratic papal theory.65Its main Britishexpositors are Robert Filmer (Patriarcha, a work written before the Civil Wars

but published only in 1680), John Hall (Of Government and Obedience(1654)),

and Sir George MacKenzie (Ius regium (1684)). But precisely because themonarch, usually a male, had an ethical office, an onerous responsibility fromGod, then it was necessary for the ends of that office to exercise prerogative,for example, in showing mercy to criminals and granting privileges. Thislatitude embraced reason of state, not to exercise it in emergency wasdereliction of duty. In his study of the parliamentarian apologist Henry Parker,Michael Mendle associates reason of state decisively with an undifferentiated

absolutism but, as one would expect, reason of state was relied upon well

beyond divine right sovereignty.66

Justice Littleton (royalist lawyer but noabsolutist) sounding strikingly like Richard Beacon or Thomas Campanellaon the equity of ancient political reason, urged that ordinary law must yieldwhen keeping it might destroy the commonwealth. And Parker himself, forexample, in The Contra-Replicant concurred: reason of state, sublime andabove law must remain the guiding principle in emergency.67Here there wasno negative connotation to the phrase reason of state, acceptance of it was

required by those holding ruling office because of that responsibility alone, it

was not tied to any prior commitment to absolutism. The principle of equity,or casuistry that no fixed rule could override the end it served, that every rule(to recall Donne) fore-imagines a Reason on which it is based, remained in

place across political divisions and in the Court of Equity itself.68Indeed, strict adherence to the law regardless of circumstances

could actually be deemed tyrannous, just as disregard for it was routinelycondemned in such terms; for rigid adherence could be taken as contradictingthe flexibility needed to make any law workable. There was nothing new in

this, as those who cited Cicero and Tacitus or Aristotle knew full well. Again,we find this prudential imperative also right across what we might see as theideological spectrum. In Measure for Measure, if Shakespeare can be placedanywhere on such a spectrum, Angelo is deemed tyrannical because he will

65 Glenn Burgess,Absolute Monarchy and the Stuart Constitution(New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1996), pp. 15124, for a measured dismantling of the hitherto established viewthat early Stuart England was dominated by the opposing ideologies of ascending anddescending (absolutist) power; on papal hierocratic theory, M. J. Wilks, The Problem of

Sovereignty in the Later Middle Ages(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).66 Michael Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War: The Political Thought of the Publics

Privado(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 38, 40.67 Mendle, p. 118; Anonymous [Parker], Contra-Replicant(London, 1642/3), pp. 1819.68 Donne, Biathanatos, for a classic statement; Meg Lota Brown, Donne and the Politics of

Conscience in Early Modern England(Leiden: Brill, 1995), for a fine succinct study.


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not use his prerogative as an absolute ruler.69Milton evokes the same senseof tyranny in the first of the Divorce tracts, as does his unlikely bed-fellowCharles I in the Eikon Basilike.70Reason of state as casuistry was one way of

defending the prerogative essential to keep ruling office on its feet.All of this holds for what I am calling global absolutism, but that was

a more general and jurisprudentially attuned notion stemming from andarticulated most in those societies with a Roman, not common law, system.At its heart was the proposition associated with Jean Bodin, HenningArnisaeus, and many others that any political society is defined by theeffective exercise of law in a territory for a people. There must somewhere

be a core locus of authority to determine that law or sooner or later things

will fly apart. Bodin and those who followed, wrote with such destructivefears in mind, but the societies, consider Venice, could as easily be republicsas monarchies. And again regardless of form, reason of state and prerogativeare necessary lubricants.

Of course, the corollary was that the exercise of that prerogativecould be judged misguided, and so it could be redescribed as incipienttyranny, lawlessness, oppression, and abuse of office; or as I have noted,the prudence of ancient civic wisdom could be redescribed as tyrannous

reason of state. Natural law provided an idiom for housing such disquiet,and for this reason, one implication of global absolutism, as it would bedeveloped by Hobbes and Pufendorf, was to forestall any such appeal tonatural or divine law against the latitudes allowed sovereign office.71 ForHobbes, it was integral to the sovereigns office to mediate, legislate, and

declare all forms of law, for the subjects sense of security and well-beingdepended on it. Pufendorfs critical adaptation of Hobbes was not dissimilarin its thrust;72but natural law was a flexible topos, and as a projection from

notions of positive law, a place could be found in it for the casuistic notionof equity, the formal recognition that no ordinary law is adequate for all

circumstances. This recognition could in turn facilitate an appeal to naturallaw in order to justify a sovereigns departure from strict legality. It is a

69 For discussion of this see Conal Condren, Unfolding the Properties of Government:Measure for Measure and the History of Political Thought, in Shakespeare and EarlyModern Political Thought, eds David Armitage, Conal Condren, and Andrew Fitzmaurice(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 15775 (pp. 16771).

70John Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643), in The Complete Prose Works, ed.Don M. Wolff and others, 8 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 195582), ii:16431648, ed. Ernest Sirluck (1959), pp. 23738, 24547; Charles I (?), Eikon Basilike(London, 1649), p. 239.

71 On Pufendorf in particular, see Hunter, Law, War, and Casuistry.72 See Hunter, Law, War, and Casuistry.


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point important to Pufendorf and is succinctly emphasized in AndrewTooks adaptive translation of Pufendorfs De ofcio hominis et civis.73On that

basis there is nothing to stop an absolute sovereign claiming that reason of

state was, to echo Campanella, an antique equity.Global absolutism, derived from Roman law with a locus of legislation at

its centre, became particularly fraught when canvassed in England (through

Bodin and James VI & I). For it came into a society highly suspicious of

Roman law, and in which government was diffused, with the law claiming

a quasi-independence of the (divinely sanctioned) sovereign, because of the

special expertise needed to understand its full complexities and its weird

French. Hence as Alan Cromartie has shown, crucial in the late sixteenth

and early seventeenth century was the question of who had the authority tomove beyond the strict application of the law in the name of equity the

judges expert in, or the King who was outside, the system.74A good case

could be made on either hand, and ironically (given their hostility to high

monarchy) nonconformists in England would later depend on monarchical

prerogative rather than the law for their survival. James VI & I was initially

regarded by some as a beacon of hope in this regard. His grandson Charles II,

as head of the Church of England, would try to exercise a reason of church to

protect nonconformists, with some of his supporters, in quasi-Pufendorfianstyle, invoking equity to over-ride positive laws that were contrary to natural

and divine law. Parliaments laws against nonconformity are against the

command of God: the king permits what God bids.75The nonconformists

problem, however, was that there was nothing to stop the King exercising

the same reason of church for Catholics. Some fearing what they saw as the

wayward exercise of discretionary reason, preferred to swim in the waters

of persecution rather than share a raft of indulgence with the adherents of

Rome. By definition there is no rule to control prerogative and in suspicioustimes it must always look like the thin end of a tyrannical wedge: the

ambivalences of reason of office in a nutshell.

In the meantime, it is important to note that the earlier disputes between

James VI & I and common lawyers marked by this same suspicion, were not

construed as a dispute between potential sovereignties. For the lawyers, a

theory of sovereignty was the problem: England did not need it. But on the

73 Andrew Took, The Whole Duty of Man, According to the Law of Nature(1691), eds. Ian Hunterand David Saunders (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003), pp. 16364.

74 Alan Cromartie, The Constitutionalist Revolution(Cambridge: University Press, 2006).75 Mark Goldie, Toleration and the Godly Prince in Restoration England, in Liberty, Authority,

Formality: Political Ideas and Culture, 16001900, eds Jonathan Scott and John Morrow(Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2008), pp. 4756, (quoting John Humphrey).


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eve of the Civil Wars, the debate over Parliaments Nineteen Propositions(June1642) and The Kings Answer to the Nineteen Propositions, provides the moststriking illustration of the uncertain status of the rhetorics of reason of state

and prerogative, when considered as ideologies. For Weston and Greenbergthis was an ideological clash over the location of sovereignty, in monarch or

parliament. Out of this emerged mixed monarchy ideology, dominant by theend of the century (ideologies are nothing if not emerging or dominant).76This neat narrative development at once distorts and loses sight of the issues.Curiously, it was only The Kings Answer that construed the matter in termsof sovereignty and proposed a theory appropriate to England that mightindeed be called ideological, though certainly not absolutist. The polemical

reason for insisting on the centrality of sovereignty was, I think, clear: ifthrough its Nineteen PropositionsParliament is claiming sovereignty, then itis an unprecedented tyrannous intrusion on the sovereigns prerogative. Topresent the issue in these terms allowed the accusation of tyranny, the worstin the political lexicon to be let loose on Parliament. For this very reason,

understanding their language better than we have done, Parliament had beenmost careful not to make a claim on sovereignty. It offered counsel, and apetition as a body of obedient subjects. On the one hand, Parliament was

traditionally seen as a council, not a ruling office, though the distinction couldbe a porous one; and on the other, subject was a word usually connotingand often formally entailing strict obedience to its correlative, sovereign.The issues and the position might rapidly have transformed in the tumbleinto war, but to see Parliament proleptically as making an argument it tooksome care not to make before the outbreak of war, is historically obscuring.

We might not believe the parliamentary case, but if we simply recast it to fitroyalist fears and accusations, something important about what was at issue

will be lost and replaced by a battle fought last Friday. If Parliament wasbeing disingenuous and actually making a claim on sovereignty, the deceitcould have been justified in terms of reason of state, though to make that

public might still have been counterproductive. To admit the necessity ofdeceit, even deceit justifiable for the public good might have been construedas implying the very claim on sovereignty the authors of the NineteenPropositionshad avoided. If the case was indeed meant, as Parliament claimed,as urgent advice by still loyal subjects, we may have in Bodinian terms a sense

76 C. C. Weston and Janelle Greenberg, Subjects and Sovereigns: The Grand Controversy over LegalSovereignty in Stuart England(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Chapter3, pp. 3586; for more detailed discussion, Condren,Argument and Authority, pp. 16671.


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of confusion heralding the civil wars about to break out.77In this arguablyasymmetrical dispute, we also get a sense of the contingency of what, likeideology, we take for granted, that sovereignty helps define any state and so

must be a central issue. But that is another matter.

77 It is, of course, also possible that the apparent displacement of any claim on sovereigntywas needed in the extremely tricky business of sustaining a reasonably united front.

reason of state and sovereignty in early modern england - a question of ideology

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