Publishing the Prince: History, Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (review)

In Publishing the Prince, Jacob Soll provides a lively account of the emergence of a secular political criticism in the early modern period. The thesis of the book is twofold: first, that the secular political criticism associated with Machiavelli and Tacitus, among others, was at its origins a "monarchist creation" (26); and, second, that this political criticism developed out of the new humanist techniques for editing and commenting on texts. In the effort to master the religious and political conflicts of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the French monarchy began to patronize the humanist philologists, editors, and historiographers who were developing a new secular language of political theory and new techniques of government. Chief among these were Bodin, Lipsius, and—the central focus of this book—Amelot de la Houssaye (1634–1706), editor and translator of Tacitus, Machiavelli, Sarpi, Contarini and others.

Soll draws on the thesis of Marcel Gauchet that "the rationalizing tendency in absolutist government during the religious wars in France was the key element in the shift towards secularism," and that this rationalizing tendency was evident in the turn towards prudence and reason of state. This emphasis on reason of state constituted a "cosmological revolution" in the history of political thought. Instead of defining sovereignty in terms of the ancient constitutional laws of the kingdom and the corporative conception of society, absolutist reason of state placed the sovereign above the law. Unlike Gauchet, however, Soll is particularly concerned to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between humanism and absolutism. He argues that, in furthering its absolutist program, the French monarchy turned to humanist editors and translators, who were eager to put their philological skills in the service of the crown. In particular, "the demand for editions of Tacitus came directly from the crown itself, which actively institutionalized the new critical, learned culture necessary for inductive political science" (39), while, on the humanist side, the "quest to create a truly accurate, critically assessed, source-based history was driven by ambitions to help strengthen the French monarchy" (2). The critical textual practices adopted by Amelot and others in turn formed the basis for the Enlightenment culture of "secular truth, criticism, and progress."

The centerpiece of the book is a close and compelling analysis of Amelot's editing practices. Soll is particularly good on what he calls the "material rhetoric" of political theory, that is, the contribution of the mise en page to the transmission of critical ways of thinking about politics and history. According to Soll, Amelot concealed a "libertine political philosophy" in the margins and layout of his editions, turning the royalist weapon of reason of state and inductive political theory against royal absolutism. In his preface to and commentary on The Prince (1683), Amelot explicitly presented Machiavelli as a Tacitean critic of princely power. Soll also has much to tell us about the afterlife of Amelot's textual practices in the works of admirers such as Pierre Bayle and critics such as Voltaire. In this way, according to Soll, the Enlightenment emerges as a chapter in the history of humanism: even those Enlightenment thinkers who rejected the immorality of reason of state adopted the humanist practices of criticism that were at the center of Amelot's achievement.

This book is a good place to begin if you want to know something about Amelot de la Houssaye, the reception of Machiavelli in seventeenth-century France, and the contribution of humanist philology and editing to secular political theory. However, some of the broader claims are unpersuasive and others are already well-established in the scholarly literature on humanist historiography and political theory. Soll's argument for the link between humanism and absolutism may work for seventeenth-century France but it is inaccurate when generalized to Europe as a whole, as he sometimes seems to do. Much of the book, including the footnotes, tells a more complicated story—but it is not fully acknowledged by Soll. So, side by side on a...