Reason of State, Natural Law, and Early Modern Statecraft

This Special Issue of Parergon examines the manner in which understandings of reason of state and natural law informed the conception and practice of governance of the early modern state. A series of related essays considers aspects of these evolving understandings from the perspective of the political, economic, moral, and external conduct of the state, and of those who theorized, counselled, and advised it.

These discrete studies deal with distinctive features of the protean and flexible notion of the early modern state. Broadly speaking, they examine the state and its right, how its rulers ought to conduct themselves and their complex network of relationships, as well as the proper conduct of citizens towards the state. As a number of the essays suggest, this emerging understanding should be understood in terms of prudence and casuistry rather than viewed through a post-Enlightenment lens of ideology.

Conal Condren begins with an examination of the conception of ‘reason of state’, which he argues was not a coherent vision, let alone an ‘ideology’, but rather a series of casuistic moves and adjustments that drew on wider contemporary conceptions and practices of ethical conduct. He questions the usefulness of a concept of ideology as a descriptor for reason of state theory and sovereignty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, drawing attention to the often unspecified meanings the word might have, to its differing roles in descriptive and analytical idioms of historiography, and to its being – to borrow from Donald Davidson on metaphor – more a matter of pragmatics (various use) than semantics (definable meanings). While the expression ‘reason of state’ (ragion de stato or raison d’état) might have been new in the sixteenth century, it drew upon, and encapsulated, wider principles of ethical conduct. Sovereignty was a loose configuration of rather different theories, certainly important in Europe because of Roman law traditions of argument – these often look, as we might say, ideological – but in England it was at times not necessarily central to political argument. Therefore, Condren maintains, conceiving arguments about the English polity as focusing on competing claims to sovereign power is itself a distorting consequence of assuming the centrality of ideology, and perhaps of sovereignty itself.

This introductory essay casts doubt on the rigid categories and ideological presumptions that prevailing scholarship tends to read back into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century statecraft. It is followed by a series of linked essays that examine the early modern theory and practice of self-government and governance from this perspective. Essays by Cathy Curtis and David Martin Jones examine the contribution of the neglected sixteenth-century humanist scholars and counsellors, Juan Luis Vives and Justus Lipsius, to the understanding of moderation and constancy in self-government, and of virtue and prudence in the conduct of rule.

Curtis explores the humanist use of classical, Stoic, Christian, and contemporary humanist sources by the Valencian humanist Vives, who was the most widely read humanist of the sixteenth century after Erasmus. Part of the network of humanists, including Erasmus, associated with the Henrician court, he contributed to early modern conceptions of monarchy and tyranny, and war and peace, in the context of the complex diplomatic, religious, and intellectual changes of the 1520s. Vives considered that well-ordered human emotions, especially as exhibited by leaders, were vitally connected to the achievement of concord in civil and international European Christian society. His volume of 1526 containing humanist epistles addressed to ecclesiastical and secular European leaders and the satiric De Europae dissidiis et bello Turcico aimed to persuade and admonish in the context of war within Europe, the rise of Lutheran reform, and the increasing threat of Islamic advances in the West. The recipients of Vives’s counsel included Pope Adrian VI, Henry VIII, Emperor Charles V, and the Grand Inquisitor Alfonso Manrique. Curtis argues that Vives deserves a more central position in present scholarly discussions given the wide dissemination and frequent translations of his writings.

David Martin Jones considers the thought of Lipsius in its historical context, while discussing the importance of the aphoristic style Lipsius promoted as integral to his strategy of...