History of political thought

November 12th

Ovidiu Olar – Revenge against tyrants (Razbunare impotriva tiranilor) (TO READ for next
time!)

The Renaissance – focus on the 16th century

The Renaissance was a period when mysticism was a permanent presence and there was
uncritical acclaim of the Greek and Roman Antiquity – a revival of the study of Greek and
Roman classics. The revival was not an invention of the Renaissance though – for
example, at the University of Paris the classic texts were being studied since the 12 th
century. An author who was re-discovered during the Renaissance was Plato, and the
other was Sextus Empiricus (known for transmitting the wisdom of the Greek Sceptics).

Scepticism, therefore, was a major element in the architecture of the 16th and 17th
century (EXTRA: Popkin – History of scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza). Scepticism had
a deep impact in theology and more generally on the arguments related to the nature of
religious doctrine. E.g.: the doctrines in the Bible are true because they are revealed. In
the beginning of the Scepticism, many people started to doubt this approach.

There appeared a new interest in the study of nature. Most of the time, the concept of
what science meant was sharply different from what we call today modern science. For
the Renaissance thinkers, science was mainly supposed to discover the exceptional,
what is curious and out of the ordinary. The grand edifice of science was mainly a
collection of curious observations and exceptional facts. A Renaissance Encyclopedia
would have brought together descriptions of monsters, accidents of nature, freaks etc.
Historians are also set on emphasizing exceptional, even miraculous characters and
deeds. A good image of the Renaissance is the famous Cabinet of curiosities. The
constant belief was that nature itself is a miraculous creation of the divinity.

Jean Bodin
1576 – Le Six Livres de la Republique (The Six Books of the Republic, originally The Six
Books of the Commonwealth) – referring to the modern term of state, not to that of
republic.
Bodin was a historian and a jurist. His sixth book is famous for putting together the
doctrine of sovereignty and providing a definition for sovereignty which remained mainly
unchallenged to this day. He is mainly concerned with absolute power, similar to God’s
power.
Sovereignty = absolute power.
Political power comes, so to speak, in two flavours: power limited and power unlimited.
Sovereignty is the universal power to make laws
The sovereign is the law giver, the legislator – ideally, the universal legislator, i.e. the will
of the sovereign is a law for everybody else.
Sovereignty is the power final (i.e. not simply absolute, but also final), which means that
the decision of the sovereign cannot be appealed, because there is no higher power.
Every sort of dispute or dilemma, not only the juridical ones, stays as it is decided by the
sovereign.
The sovereign is the one who declares war and peace (a legal aspect of sovereignty).
The sovereign has power of appointment towards lesser officials (officers, administrators
etc – every ounce of their authority derives from the sovereign) and the power to
distribute honours (orders, titles etc).
The sovereign also distributes punishments, and so his power is a power of life and death
– the sovereign holds “the power of the sword”. The capital punishment is practically
always applied in the name of the sovereign.
The sovereign has the power to mint coins.

Giovanni Botero
1589 – On the reason of state
The theory of the school of reason of state (end of 16th century – first part of the 17th
century)
The school was immensely influential in Italy (“in Italy even barbers discuss about the
theory of the reason of state” ).
The theory refers to the nature of sovereignty.
What Giovanni Botero brings to the table lies in the realm of justification. How are to
legitimize the acts of the sovereign? All sorts of reasons could be involved in justification
of the acts of the sovereign (utilitarian, peer pressure etc). However, Botero discovered
that there is yet another level of justification, which is specific to sovereigns (or states).
Unlike average individuals, the primary goal of the sovereigns is the preservation of the
state itself, i.e. there is a supreme goal of political action that has priority over all others:
the goal of preserving the state – the supreme interest of the state. This realisation
brings Botero to consider that the justifications of political actions that are connected
with the question of the survival of the state override all other considerations. One
consequence was that sometimes the sovereign could override normal political principles
(even morality or law) in the pursuit of this higher goal – the survival of the state. One
extreme position being that the sovereign could override even the law of nature.

In the Renaissance, there was a proliferation of works that could be summed up in a

category we call now “books of advice”, addressed directly to a sovereign and containing
directions. There were also manuals of advice for the advisors.
Erasmus of Rotterdam
1502 – The Education of a Christian Prince
Baldassare Castiglione
1528 - The Book of the Courtier
In both these books there is a very striking emphasis on what we call today “the
education of manners”. They are mainly an Italian speciality.
There is a deliberate attempt to legitimize the cultivation of an aristocratic attitude
towards politics.
Castiglione is more interested in providing a practical manual for the members of the
court.
There also exists a theory of the sprezzatura – a quality of an aristocrat, i.e. an ability to
make things happen very easily, as if by accident, as if unintended – projecting the right
aristocratic image, incompatible with the idea of effort. A true sovereign would
understand how a system works, will use it to his own advantage, will put things and men
into motion, but his action would be quite discreet, often invisible, and for the untrained
eye, it would be as if things were happening around the aristocrat by chance.
Another feature of Renaissance was the cultivation of secrecy: politics was not a public
science, but rather a secret art and this is why it was called arcana imperii (the secrets of
government).
EXTRA: Balthazar Gracian – a Spanish Jesuit.