Ancient and Modern Virtue Compared: De Beaufort and Van Effen on Republican Citizenship

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In discussing the writings of Lieven de Beaufort and Justus van Effen, the broader purpose of this article is to reflect critically upon two extremely powerful but in many respects misguided notions concerning early modern Dutch history. The first of these is the characterization of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Seven United Provinces as essentially bourgeois. The early modern Netherlands, this well-known interpretation runs, was a society in which neither the clergy nor the aristocracy played a role comparable to that in surrounding European countries. This was a society, moreover, in which commerce rather than agriculture was the preponderant economic activity and that was therefore urban rather than rural in nature. This situation resulted, the story continues, in a culture dominated by the middle class and its unheroic bourgeois values of hard work, frugality, sobriety, and simplicity. ² By the first half of the eighteenth century—this brings us to the second notion to be disputed here—this bourgeois culture, so one is told, was well beyond its prime. The clear loss of international power the Seven United Provinces experienced after the death of the Stadtholder-King William III in 1702 was domestically reflected in an almost total cessation of cultural and political creativity. Indeed, the first half of the eighteenth century in Dutch history is generally regarded as an era that is hardly worth serious study. According to I. L. Leeb, the author of what is still the only attempt at a synthesis of Dutch eighteenth-century political thought, the first decades of the eighteenth century produced, with the single exception of Simon van Slingelandt (whose writings remained unpublished until the 1780s), no theorist worthy of discussion. ³ And in a recent article on the idea of freedom, Herbert Rowen describes Dutch public discourse between 1702 and the revolution of 1747–1748 as largely “a simple rehashing of old ideas without originality of either content or form.” ⁴

Both the characterization of early modern Dutch society as essentially bourgeois and the description of the first half of the eighteenth century as—to quote Herbert Rowen again—“an era of doldrums, political and intellectual” are, to put it mildly, unsatisfactory. ⁵ Both these misguided notions are, moreover, linked. For it is only when we cease to view the Seven United Provinces as a bourgeois society that the importance of Dutch public discourse in the first half of the eighteenth century becomes apparent. It is Simon Schama, whose work is generally disparaged by Dutch historians, who deserves credit for raising doubts about the applicability and relevance of the concept of a bourgeois society to the study of early modern Dutch history. In the introduction to The Embarrassment of Riches, his wide-ranging study of Dutch seventeenth-century culture published in 1987, Schama points out that, contrary to what is generally supposed, “at the center of the Dutch world was a burgher, not a bourgeois. There is a difference, and it is more than a nuance of translation. For the burgher was a citizen first and homo oeconomicus second.” Later on in the book he emphatically states that “the sensibility that joined Dutch men and women in a common feeling for family, nation, freedom and material comfort was civic in the classically republican sense.” ⁶ Although Schama does not do as much with this observation as one might have wished, it is nonetheless of fundamental importance. For it refers to the long tradition, starting with Aristotle, of defining the citizen as a member of a koinonia politike or societas civilis, terms that were translated in early modern Europe as civil society, société civile, bürgerliche Gesellschaft, or—in Dutch—burgerstaat. It was this definition of the burger not as a bourgeois but primarily as a member of a political community or res publica that dominated Dutch public discourse in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It would, in fact, have been quite surprising had this been otherwise, for the Dutch were highly aware of living in a republic, a form of government habitually associated with an active political...