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  • Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes
  • Thomas Turley
Noel Malcolm . Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 2007. x + 228 pp. index. bibl. $65. ISBN: 978–0–19–921593–5.

In this fine book, Noel Malcolm presents a remarkable find, an unnoticed translation of a Habsburg polemical pamphlet made by Thomas Hobbes during the late 1620s. Malcolm's skillful explication of the translation's origin and nuanced analysis of the propaganda work it rendered offer fresh insight into the early development of Hobbes' political thought, particularly its links to contemporary reason of state theory.

The translation lies among the papers of William Cavendish, first Earl of Newcastle, whose son Hobbes served in the 1620s. The manuscript (British Library, MS Add. 70499, fols. 73–83) is a fair text intended for presentation that has lost its last few folios. Malcolm establishes Hobbes's authorship based on handwriting, vocabulary, style, and methods of editorial alteration; he proposes 1627 as a tentative date of composition because the polemical work translated, the anonymous Altera secretissima instructio, was most widely discussed in England during the first months of that year. Hobbes made the translation while secretary to the elder son of the Earl of Newcastle, probably commissioned by the young man's cousin, Viscount Mansfield.

The task drew Hobbes to a clever piece of propaganda. The Altera secretissima instructio was, despite its title, the third in a series of pamphlets issued during the first decade of the Thirty Years' War by Habsburg supporters intent on discrediting the Protestant leadership, particularly the Elector Palatine Frederick V. The authors of these pamphlets represented the contents as policy proposals offered to the Elector by his counselors —Machiavellian advice, which they hoped would scandalize readers.

Malcolm's analysis of the Altera secretissima instructio, a work that has not received much recent attention, identifies a polemic of particular ingenuity and sophistication composed by someone close to the center of Habsburg government. The pamphlet's list of often contradictory but always unscrupulous and compelling political advice depicted the Elector as unprincipled and irreligious, a practitioner of reason of state and a man who could be trusted by neither allies nor opponents. Its blending of truth and fiction was so subtle that even discerning readers who saw the pamphlet as a satire of contemporary political practice —itself a product of reason of state propaganda, the pamphlet condemned its target by linking him to the immorality popularly associated with reason of state practice —were drawn to accept at least some of its premises.

Malcolm finds the Altera secretissima instructio significant for understanding Hobbes's development because it illustrates both the pervasiveness of reason of state thinking in early seventeenth-century discourse and the considerable limitations of reason of state as a political theory. The pamphlet would hardly have been Hobbes's first exposure to ragion di stato; he had surely sampled the many works on the subject in the Cavendish library. Malcolm, like Richard Tuck, notes a strain [End Page 273] of Tacitism in Hobbes's writings prominent as early as the commentary on Thucydides (1628). At the same time, Hobbes grappled with the conceptual limits inherent in reason of state thought. Malcolm suggests that works like the Altera secretissima instructio made these limits particularly evident to him. The pamphlet parodied reason of state principles at one level, yet employed them in earnest at another. The same ambiguity that served the polemical purposes of the Habsburg author so well made it very clear to a perceptive reader that reason of state had no firm foundation, no objective mode of verification, but rested almost entirely on descriptive and subjective criteria. Hobbes tried to solve these problems as he constructed his own political theory. Rather than dismiss reason of state practice, he dug beneath it, establishing a set of values rooted in key juridical categories such as right, covenant, and authority. These he embedded in the objective laws of nature. In effect, Hobbes undergirded the practical prudence of the Tacitists with a "science that would demonstrate the necessity of government...

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