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T W O Four Hundred Years of Althusius Controversy and the Need for a New Interpretation ON 7 DECEMBER 1618, THECITY COUNCILLORS of the northern German seaport of Emden decided to put under arrest in his own residence the city's provincial lord, the count of Eastern Frisia. The count had come to Emden in order to negotiate a settlement in an ongoing dispute over taxation between city and province. He was released from his rather embarrassing predicament only after weeks of mediation, which even included the intervention of the English king. The main instigator of this bold action was the city's syndic, Johannes Althusius, who did not hesitate to justify it as a legitimate act of self-defence and resistance "warranted under every natural and secular law."1 Althusius had been hired as city syndic2 in 1603, the same year in which the first edition of his famous Politica was published.3 In this book, he vigorously defended the local autonomies of the old plural order of guilds, estates, and cities against the rise of territorial absolutism, and especially against Jean Bodin's epochal definition of sovereignty as 1 Quoted in Heinz Antholz, Die politische Wirksamkeit desJohannes Althusius in Emden (Cologne: Leer, 1954). Antholz' monograph has to date remained the only piece of historical research on Althusius' life and activities. 2 See below, chap. 3, n. 10. 3 Johannes Althusius, Politica Methodice Digesta Exemplis Sacris & Profanis Illustrata (1603, 1610, 1614 and 1617). A translation of this lengthy title would read like: Politics Methodically Set Forth and Illustrated by Ecclesiastical as well as Secular Examples. The most widely distributed edition was the third of 1614. It has been reproduced in facsimile (Aalen: Scientia, 1958). Commonly available in North America is the slightly abbreviated Politica Methodice Digesta of Johannes Althusius, ed. by Carl Joachim Friedrich (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1932, rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1979). A similarly abbreviated English translation of the Politica is available as The Politics of Johannes Althusius, ed. and trans, by Frederick S. Carney (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964). A reedited reprint of Carney's translation is now available as Johannes Althusius, Politica (Indianapolis:Liberty Fund, 1995). 15 16 EARLY MODERN CONCEPTS FOR A LATE MODERNWORLD puissance absolue. He also justified the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spain by declaring that a province could revoke its allegiance to a ruler and submit itself to another when the fundamental rights of its people appeared violated. It can hardly be surprising that Althusius' book became one of the most widely read at the time. A second and enlarged edition appeared in 1610 in the Dutch cities of Arnhem and Groningen and was, as were all subsequent editions, dedicated to the Estates of the Dutch province of Frisia. This was the time when many of the English Puritans who would sail on the Mayflower to the New World within a few years had taken refuge in the Netherlands. There is as yet no historical evidence that a copy of the Politica might have sailed along with the "pilgrim fathers," but there is a striking similarity between Althusius' book and some of the first political documents of that New World. Althusius had defined consociation as the subject matter of politics: the organization of a political community whose "symbiotic" members pledge themselves "to mutual communication of whatever is useful and necessary for the harmonious exercise of social life."4 In the first section of the New England Confederation of 1643, for example, one can find a similar pledge to "Cosociation" [sic] for the organization of mutual help when Providence did not allow communication under the roof of one government and jurisdiction. There is similarly circumstantial evidence that such seventeenthcentury defenders of the Reformed faith as Samuel Rutherford, the great Scottish Presbyterian, and John Milton, in his defence of religious toleration , freedom of expression, and popular sovereignty, relied on Althusius in their formulations of constitutional law and protection from religious persecution.5 A century later, Montesquieu's observations on the constitutional virtues of a "republique federative"6 very closely 4 Proposita igitur Politicae est consodatio...qua symbiotici...ad communicationem mutuam eorum, quae ad vitae sodalis...sunt utilia & necessaria, se obligant (I.I; all citations are given in Althusius' own enumeration). My translations of the Latin text mainly follow Carney, The Politics of Johannes Althusius. Note, however, that Carney translates consociatio with "association," which I find somewhat misleading because of its modern liberal connotations. Carney translated Althusius before the term "consociational democracy" became...

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