Rule by Natural Reason: Late Medieval and

Early Renaissance Conceptions of Political

Corruption
Manuhuia Barcham

This paper argues that a new and distinctive model of corruption accompanied the
rediscovery and increased availability of a number of classical texts and ideals –
particularly those of Cicero and the Roman Jurists – from about the eleventh century
CE. This new model of corruption accompanied a renewed emphasis on classical
ideals in the theorising of the political, and a subsequent change in the way in which
political life was conceived within Europe. Combining the medieval Christian focus
on the importance of moral values with the classical emphasis on the value of reason,
this tradition merged political and moral reason such that they became conceptually
identical and indistinguishable from one another. The polity was thus seen as a
Christian community living under laws agreed on through reason, ruled on behalf of
the common good by a ruler who was bound and constrained by these same laws. In
this new conceptual model corruption was thus perceived largely in terms of the
adverse consequences of action occurring without regard to natural reason in contrast
to the previous Augustinian approach which had viewed our entire earthly life as
corrupt, without possibility of redemption.

The Augustinian Context

Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, an Augustinian approach to the
concept of the political as order provided the most influential framework within which
political life was discussed and studied within Christian Europe. 1 Augustine’s work
thus presented a political theory which placed earthly political institutions within the
context of Christian theology. In his writings Augustine altered older classical ideas
quite radically in his merging of classical political ideals with the concerns of
Christian theology. Probably his most radical departure from the classical tradition
concerned his rethinking of the role of politics and political institutions in human
affairs. Viewing earthly life in the wake of the fall as inherently corrupt, Augustine, in
contrast to earlier classical conceptions, viewed politics, and political life, as merely a
necessary evil requisite in order for a semblance of order to be achieved in our earthly
life. In the work of Augustine the idea of the “good” life achievable here on Earth, so
basic to any understanding of classical conceptions of the political or its corruption,
was thus dropped from the vocabulary of European political discourse.

Politics, for Augustine then, was concerned merely with preserving external peace
and order – not with shaping the moral character of citizens. With humanity seen as
inherently sinful and corrupt, laws could thus not make men good as Aristotle and

1
By Augustinian I refer to the Augustinian belief that politics, and political life, was merely a
necessary evil requisite in order for a semblance of order to be achieved in earthly life. However, it
should be pointed out that Augustine is not the main focus of this paper. Rather, Augustine is discussed
in order to both demonstrate how Christian conceptions of the political and its corruption differed from
classical antecedents and to indicate where the Medieval distinction between regnum and sacerdotium
emerged.
Cicero had claimed. At best, all laws could do was secure civic order.2 The polity was
thus merely a coercive institution designed to maintain a minimum of order in a sinful
world.

In making this move Augustine modified earlier classical conceptions of the res
publica. Arguing that human life was only intelligible through adherence to Christian
doctrine and belief in the redemption, Augustine’s City of God was thus comprised of
those who loved God to the contempt of the love of self.3 In arguing this, Augustine
effectively maintained that Cicero’s commonwealth never had true justice, as true
justice could only be found in a commonwealth whose founder and ruler was Christ.4
Rome had thus not been a true Republic as it had been a commonwealth based on
pride – not an association of individuals united by a common love of Christ. 5 This was
an important move as in claiming this Augustine can be seen as advocating a need for
political authority while at the same time allowing for the realisation of the existence
of a Christian commonwealth – united in love of God – that transcended earthly
political institutions. Augustine’s arguments could thus be seen as delegitimating
secular political institutions while simultaneously placing them in a subordinate
position to the Church.6 It is this Augustinian background then that provided the
framework for much political thought in medieval Europe.

Medieval Europe

Medieval Europe consisted of an assortment of secular realms existing in accord with

the Catholic Church within the wider rubric of the greater Christian commonwealth
(res publica christiana). Europe was thus seen as a single Christian society governed
by two powers with different, but complementary roles – the regnum (secular
government) dealt with temporal matters and the sacerdotium (ecclesiastical
government) dealt with spiritual matters. Within this Christian commonwealth both
secular and ecclesiastical rulers were seen as deriving their power from God. During
this period secular and ecclesiastical authority were intricately intertwined. However,
the church lacked a machinery of government and so the pope had little jurisdictional
or coercive power over its dominion. To implement ecclesiastical policies the pope
thus depended on the good will and piety of secular rulers. In order to facilitate this,
however, the church had become increasingly involved in secular government.
Discontent from various quarters within the church with this increased involvement
2
Augustine’s thought differed from the ancients on a number of important points. Probably the most
important of these differences for the purposes of this paper was Augustine’s belief that ancient ethics
was nothing but part of a “perverse” human fantasy of self-perfection and autonomy. The pursuit of
virtūs or eudaimonia, so central a concept to classical political and ethical thought, thus became, in the
writings of Augustine and those who followed in his wake, nothing but a form of sinful self-pride.
3
Augustine (1998). The City of God Against the Pagans. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
XIV.9. The City of Men, in contrast, was composed of those who loved self to the contempt of the love
of God.
4
Ibid, XIV.9.
5
Augustine (1972). The City of God. London, Penguin, pp. 71-75 and 884-890.
6
While Augustine argued that secular rulers required the Church for spiritual guidance and
ecclesiastical authorities required the help of secular rulers in dealing deal with secular affairs he never
defined the relationship between the two in terms of a hierarchy. Augustine thus never claimed that the
City of God was the Christian Church although later church leaders and thinkers of the Middle Ages
read him as arguing just that, identifying the Church as representative of the City of God and secular
institutions of government as representative of the City of Men. The result of this conflation was that
Augustine’s idea of the two cities was used during the Middle Ages to justify both the subordination of
the individual to the state and the church, and of secular authority to religious authority.
by the church in secular affairs led to the initiation by various popes from the tenth
century onwards of a number of programs of reform designed to re-focus the church
on matters of theology and away from the power-brokering role that the church had
increasingly begun to hold.7

One of the consequences of this broad movement of reform over the tenth to twelfth
centuries was the emergence of increased levels of tension and conflict between
regnum and sacerdotium. As will become clear later in the paper, religious
interference in the political came to be seen as a form of corruption because of the
belief that these two spheres of human interaction should be distinct. This conflict
between regnum and sacerdotium came to a head in the late eleventh and early twelfth
century in the form of the investiture controversy when conflict over lay investiture
and the accompanying charges of simony (the act of buying or selling ecclesiastical
benefices or emoluments) led Pope Gregory VII to declare sacerdotal and secular
supremacy over all princely sovereignties. Simony was seen as a form of corruption
not because it represented the transfer of funds and favours in exchange for a
particular outcome, but rather because it represented the encroachment of temporal
affairs into the concerns of ecclesiastical government. King Henry IV of Germany
considered Pope Gregory VII’s decree an abridgement of his authority over the
episcopacy and an impingement of his rights as King. The resulting controversy only
came to an official end in 1122 when Henry V and Pope Calixtus II agreed at the
Concordat of Worms that secular rulers would only invest bishops with the symbols
of their temporal possessions and so leave their investment with the symbols of
ecclesiastical authority to the ecclesiastical establishment.

Despite its apparent conclusion, however, this controversy had opened up a debate
over the relationship between regnum and sacerdotium that was to continue on and
off for the greater part of the next five hundred years. The major issue in this debate
concerned the extent of the jurisdictional authority of the church. One of the early
claims in this debate by supporters of the papacy was the Augustinian derived
assertion that the only way to redeem earthly government from being wholly sinful
would be the complete submission of earthly princes to the guidance of the papacy.8
In arguing this, the supporters of the papacy utilised the two-swords doctrine in order
to support their hierocratic claims that the church exercised ultimate authority over the
governance of temporal affairs.9 The continuing conflict between regnum and

7
This refocusing meant that by the eleventh century many practices which had by this time become
traditional royal prerogatives began to increasingly be seen as unlawful. In the medieval period, lay
authorities – in their capacity as protectors of their local churches – routinely installed newly elected
church leaders within their territorial domains. In practice, however, this capacity often meant that the
secular leader would subvert the canonical election or appointment process in order to appoint someone
favourable to them. Thus, at times church office would be sold to the highest bidder or exchanged for
various favours. The reformist popes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries considered this a form of
simony.
8
See Tierney, B. (1964). The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall,
pp. 33-95.
9
The two-swords doctrine concerned the division of Earthly power between temporal and religious
authorities. Articulated first by Pope Gelasius I, who claimed that whilst power was to be equally
divided amongst these two aspects of the Christian world, true primacy lay with the Church. Robinson,
I. S. (1991). Church and Papacy. The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought. J. H. Burns.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 288-289. This doctrine was to be the basis of dispute
between temporal and religious rulers until the collapse of the Christian Commonwealth in the wake of
the Reformation and the Wars of Religion.
sacerdotium over these issues was to have important consequences for the way in
which political life was approached and theorised. Underlying these developments
was a particular approach to the concept of politics and political life which had
emerged out of the confluence of the extant classical, particularly Ciceronian,
tradition and the strongly Augustinian influenced Christian tradition.

Political Life and Natural Reason

In the work of John of Salisbury we see a mixing of the Ciceronian republican

tradition with Christian doctrine. In his writings, the Christian ruler was limited in the
exercise of his power through the use of the Ciceronian notion of the utilitas publica
(public good) which John used to elaborate the Christian ministerial idea of rulership.
As a public power subject to the rule of law the ruler was thus the Minister of the
common good and the servant of equity.10 If the king ruled in accord with the law then
he was a just prince. If, however, he broke the law then the ruler ceased to be a
monarch, becoming instead merely a tyrant, with the rule of a tyrant being seen as a
corrupted form of monarchal rule.11 Thus, although unfamiliar with Aristotle’s
Politics, John of Salisbury developed a conception of rule easily identifiable with
earlier classical conceptions of rule. John of Salisbury differed, however, from the
classical texts when, following the received dogma of the time he argued along
hierocratic lines that temporal rulers received their authority through the Church as
Kingship was a gift conferred by divine grace.12 One of the key results of this claim
was that John of Salisbury made no mention of the possibility of any other form of
rule apart from monarchy, and his discussion of government focused almost entirely
on the moral character and fortitude of the prince - making explicit the notion that
only a good man could be a good ruler.13

This image of the political man – of the ideal ruler – and the virtues that he possessed
was a key focus of works of political analysis from the eleventh to the thirteenth
century. Writers during this period argued that governing should consist of restraining
and moderating men so as to protect them from their own excesses as only a man
capable of submitting his own passions to reason could succeed in keeping a kingdom
peaceful and united.14 The political and the moral were therefore intricately
connected, with the moral quality of rulers impacting directly on the quality of their
rule ‘because the lord is like the head of the citizens, and all men desire to have a
healthy head, because when the head is sick, men must above all things try to have a
governor who will lead to a good end according to law and justice.’15 Of the virtues
10
When talking about the nature of rule in the Policraticus John of Salisbury uses the Latin term
principes (leading statesman) rather than the term regis (king) when discussing the character and roles
of the ruler. This distinction is an important one for the purposes of this paper. In using this distinction
John of Salisbury signaled the continued existence of a distinction within European thought between
rule for oneself and rule for the sake of the community.
11
Salisbury, John of (1990). Policraticus. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, VIII.17.
12
Ibid, p. 14. For more on the hierocratic interpretation of the Pope as the source of both spiritual and
temporal power see Ullmann, W. (1972). A Short History of the Papacy in the Middle Ages. London,
Methuen, p. 223.
13
Salisbury, John of (1990). Policraticus. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, VI.29.
14
Rome, Giles of (2001). On the Rule of Princes (selected). The Cambridge Translations of Medieval
Philosophical Texts: Ethics and Political Philosophy. A. McGrade, John Kilcullen and Matthew
Kempshall. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, Bk 1, 1.2.
15
Latini, B. (1939). The Book of the Treasure (Li Livres dou Tresor). New York, Garland Publishing,
III.75.
that leaders should have, prudence – by which was meant rule according to the
dictates of natural reason – was the first, and most important, although the virtue of
justice was close behind prudence in terms of importance as the good prince must also
be the guardian of the laws.16 A man without the correct moral character would
corrupt a city by bringing about division and conflict through the promotion of his
own welfare rather than the common good. Such a leader would be a corrupted public
figure – a tyrant.

Up to the early thirteenth century political analyses thus focused on the virtues and
character of the ruler. However, the reintroduction of Aristotle’s political and ethical
works in the mid-thirteenth century shifted the focus of political inquiry away from
the qualities of the ruler and towards an increased focus on the comparative merits of
various regime types. Giles of Rome thus argued in his On the Rule of Princes that
monarchy was superior to republican forms of self-government as political rule led to
discord and war while monarchical rule resulted in concord and peace.17 The other
major consequence of the re-introduction of these Aristotelian works was the
recognition that contrary to the received Augustinian view, politics was actually a
natural form of human interaction, and in fact could be seen as a good in and of itself.
This re-introduction of the classical idea that politics was a good in and of itself
should not be seen, however, as a simple refutation of the Augustinian notion of
politics.

This relationship between these two traditions of the political or conceptual schema
was in fact rather complicated. The re-introduction of ideas from an older conceptual
schema did not necessarily lead to their wholesale adoption but rather to a novel form
of synthesis where the older ideals were adapted to serve contemporary concerns and
interests. One important consequence of this re-introduced Aristotelian corpus was the
space it created for the belief in the existence of a form of earthly good – a form of
earthly beatitude – without removing the ideal of a final Christian beatitude. This was
something which had been explicitly denied to humanity in the Augustinian tradition.
This idea of the two-ends of man was to play a vital role in the shaping of political
thought within Europe for the next four hundred years, with its influence felt no
where more keenly than in the ongoing battle for dominance between regnum and
sacerdotium.18 Among the many who began to explore the various implications of
16
Ibid, II. 70-71.and Rome, Giles of (2001). On the Rule of Princes (selected). The Cambridge
Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts: Ethics and Political Philosophy. A. McGrade, John
Kilcullen and Matthew Kempshall. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, I, 2.12. These writers also
emphasised the importance of charity and of devotion to God in the list of virtues that a prince must
possess. This marked a change from earlier purely Ciceronian writing wherein the possession of the
political virtues alone was enough for the Prince to gain earthly happiness. The traditional Ciceronian
political virtues consisted of Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance, Magnanimity, Liberality,
Tameness, Truthfulness, Affability and Pleasantness.
17
Rome, Giles of (2001). On the Rule of Princes (selected). The Cambridge Translations of Medieval
Philosophical Texts: Ethics and Political Philosophy. A. McGrade, John Kilcullen and Matthew
Kempshall. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. III, 2.3.
18
The idea that there existed two-ends for man – a spiritual and a temporal – was eagerly taken up by
the apologists for secular rule. The belief that political life was natural and hence occurred
independently of the church thus provided a useful device for later writers attempting to undermine
arguments that the Church should be dominant over the secular rulers. Thomist thought thus provided
the basis for a theory of an autonomous political sphere functioning under its own laws and
independently of ecclesiastical authority. While Aquinas himself denied that secular power was derived
from the ecclesiastical he nonetheless argued that the church stood behind the function of the temporal
polity, acting as a guide for things spiritual. However, while temporal government was subject in
these ideas none was more famous, nor more influential, than St. Thomas of Aquinas.

Earthly Beatitude

Following Aristotle, Aquinas argued that it was humanity’s rational and social
capacity that led to political government, not human sin.19 Politics was thus not an
activity to be shunned but one that should be embraced as an important aspect of
individual and collective moral growth and well-being.20 Aquinas’ Aristotelian
influenced writings were central to the renewal in the late thirteenth century of the
classical belief that humanity was endowed with certain earthly potentialities that
could only be achieved within a human community. Civic life allowed humanity to
live together in justice and virtue, thereby providing the medium by which humanity
would be able to attain the moral excellence that was humanity’s earthly end.

In order to achieve this earthly end, Aquinas and the scholastics argued that men must
practice their political virtues.21 Natural law provided the framework within which the
good life could be achieved, as law was ‘an ordinance of reason for the common good
made by the authority which has care of the community and promulgated.’ 22 The ruler
was obliged to keep the common good in mind when he legislated, and corrupt
governments were those that were directed towards the private good of the ruler rather
than the common good of the community.23 A ruler concerned with his own well-
being and not for the common good was then, for the scholastics, as for those, such as
John of Salisbury, who had preceded them, nothing more than a tyrant. However,
unlike earlier medieval authors Aquinas did not place exclusive emphasis on the
necessary qualities required for a good ruler, although he did agree that the good ruler
was also necessarily a good man.

One of the major consequences of the Aristotelian turn in the writings of Aquinas and
the other scholastics was a renewed focus on constitutional form when considering the
ends of government. Following Aristotle, Aquinas argued that political regimes
dissolve and become corrupt when the citizenry is oppressed by a tyrant or when
factions disrupt civic concord and fight over control for the city. Since the political
community must above all else be peaceful and unified the best form of government
was that which most easily secures those ends. For Aquinas then this was monarchy,
as government by a multitude was prone to disunity, thus his claim that:

unity or peace is the aim intended by the ruler of any group. Now the per se
cause of oneness is itself one, as is clear from the fact that several people
cannot bring many matters into a unity and harmony unless they are
themselves unified. That which is one of itself, however, can be the cause of
unity more readily and effectively than the many conjoined in union. For this

matters spiritual to the church, each was supreme in its own respective sphere.
19
Aquinas, T. (1964). Summa Theologiæ. London, Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode, Ia.XCII:I ad
3 and Ia.XCVI:4 resp.
20
Aquinas, T. (1997). On the Government of Rulers. On the Government Of Rulers. P. o. Lucca.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1.15.6.
21
Aquinas, T. (1964). Summa Theologiæ. London, Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode, IaIIae.LI:2
resp.
22
Ibid, IaIIae.XC:4 resp.
23
Aquinas, T. (1964). Summa Theologiæ. London, Blackfriars with Eyre & Spottiswoode, IaIIaeXC:2.
 reason any group is better governed by one person than by many.24

For Aquinas the best order is achieved in a monarchy where the people actively
participate in the election of the ruler.25 Aquinas’ belief in the natural superiority of
monarchy should not give the impression that all scholastic authors thought along the
same lines (Ptolemy of Lucca instead argued for some form of popular rule).26 One
thing all the scholastics did agree on, however, was that peace was best maintained
within the community where all were involved in public affairs.27

Good rulers, however, still needed to carry out their duties for love of God and not for
personal glory. It is at this point then that the key difference between the classical
reading of the Aristotelian need for virtue and the medieval concern for Christian
morality becomes apparent. A number of classical virtues were still seen as vices in
the Christian tradition and so, despite the adoption of many classical ideals by
medieval authors, the pursuit of eudaimonia, so central a concept to classical political
and ethical thought, was still perceived as a form of sinful self-pride for medieval
scholastic authors. The need for the good ruler or person to cultivate the Christian
virtues thus always existed in a form of tension with the Christian perception of self-
love as a type of sin. Despite his adoption of many classical ideals, Aquinas’ writing
was therefore still conceived within the context of a living Christian tradition, as the
scholastic adoption of older classical ideals of the political was only ever at best
partial and incomplete.

Discord and Conflict in the Christian Commonwealth

The emergence of scholastic thought in the thirteenth century coincided with the
growth of the temporal power of the papacy. Polemical attacks still continued,
however, as papacy and empire struggled over the nature of relationship between
sacerdotium and regnum. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the key issue dividing
papacy and empire had been the emperor’s claim over Italy.28 To the papacy it seemed
that if an emperor claimed sovereignty over Rome then the inevitable next step would
be the resumption of temporal control of the papacy. This was something the papacy
was determined to prevent. This matter was complicated somewhat as from about the
tenth century onwards a number of urban communes in Northern Italy had begun to
resist the claims of the German kings through the establishment of their own
republican forms of governments. The establishment of these city-states from such an
early date was unprecedented as republican self-government was a form of political
life completely at odds with the generally held assumption at that time that all
properly constituted political societies must take the form of hereditary God-given
lordships, and conflict thus ensued between these states and the Holy Roman
Emperor.

24
Ibid, Ia.CIII:3 resp.
25
Aquinas calls this type of elected monarchy political rule as opposed to regal rule typical of
monarchal forms of government where the people do not participate in public life.
26
Lucca, Ptolemy of (1997). On the Government of Rulers. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2.8 nd 4.1.
27
Aquinas, T. (1997). On the Government of Rulers. On the Government Of Rulers. P. o. Lucca.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1.2 and 1.5.
28
For more on this see Tierney, B. (1964). The Crisis of Church and State 1050-1300. Englewood
Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, pp. 97.115.
During this ongoing struggle with the Empire the major ally of the city-states had
been the Papacy. The danger of this alliance for these republican cities, however, was
that the Popes might begin to aspire to rule the Northern Italian city-states themselves
– and this is precisely what happened. From the early thirteenth century onwards
successive Popes began increasingly to dabble in the internal politics of the city-
states. The result of this internal meddling was that by the end of the thirteenth
century not only was a large part of central Italy under the direct control of the Papacy
but the curia also exercised a large degree of influence over many of the major
Northern city-states.29 Rediscovered Aristotelian works provided the political
vocabulary and conceptual apparatus through which these oppositional ideologies and
legitimating claims were constructed. In constructing their arguments these authors
utilised a little-before used political concept – that of liberty.30

However, the situation was more complicated for apologists for republican rule than
just having to legitimate their independence and continued liberty. The continuing
struggle between papacy and empire, as well as the growth of the commercial classes
in twelfth and thirteenth century Europe, introduced a number of complicating factors
into the mix. Thus issues of faction and civic discord came to be identified by many
writers of this period as major threats to the continued existence of these republican
city-states. The problem of faction faced by these city-states was thus one of the key
issues addressed by the scholastic authors during this period. Faction was viewed as
being anathema to the realisation of the goal of liberty, as faction was a form of
domination by others – not too dissimilar from tyranny. Faction was, however,
especially corrupting on political life due to the problems of discord and divisiveness
that inevitably arose from its existence.

Often posed in terms of the ongoing struggle between regnum and sacerdotium a
number of these authors argued that the papacy was the root cause of much of the
internal discord and factionalism within the Italian city-states. And so, Marsilius of
Padua claimed that ‘the singular cause which has hitherto produced civil discord or
intranquility in certain states and communities…is the belief, desire and undertaking
whereby the Roman bishop and his clerical coterie, in particular, are aiming to seize
secular rulerships and to possess excessive temporal wealth.’31 The corruption of the
church of which Marsilius writes harks back to an older argument that had been
utilised by both sides of the debate over the correct relationship between the regnum
and sacerdotium. In their writings apologists for both sides had accused the other of
corrupting the proper relationship between the two aspects of Christian government.
Marsilius’ arguments about the corrupt nature of the church can be seen as just
another example of this form of boundary keeping that saw the intrusion of the
ecclesiastical into temporal affairs being perceived as a form of corruption.

Dante Alighieri too in his treatise On Monarchy argued for the independence of the
29
Skinner, Q. (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, pp. 9-22.
30
Discussion of liberty and the use of the concept as an ideological foil to the demands of the Emperor
are discussed more fully in Skinner and are not discussed here. Skinner, Q. (1978). The Foundations of
Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 6-12. During these ideological
debates liberty came to connote both political independence (from the holy Roman Empire); and
republican self-government in the city-states of Northern Italy in the fourteenth century.
31
Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace. New York, Harper & Row, 3.1 see also
2.7.45 and 2.23.
empire from ecclesiastical rule. In arguing this he drew on the same basic assumptions
in terms of the ongoing debate between regnum and sacerdotium that Marsilius of
Padua and the other opponents of the temporal tyranny of the papacy had utilised. In
doing so, Dante placed particular emphasis in his argument on the claim that the two-
swords doctrine had been wrongly interpreted, saying that the temporal realm does
not owe its existence to the spiritual realm, nor its power (which is its authority), and
not even its function in an absolute sense.32 However, while these theorists were
predominantly hostile to the papacy they were nonetheless still concerned with the
preservation of the Christian commonwealth and the idea of Christendom – though
the church should confine its concerns to the immortal souls of the community.33 To
do otherwise was to corrupt the correct relationship between temporal and
ecclesiastical government.

Popular Rule and the Rise of Podestà

As Quentin Skinner has argued, the most original aspect in the writings of these
apologists for the Italian city-states was their assertion that popular rule was itself the
best form of government.34 By this, these authors meant that the safest plan to ensure
the preservation of peace and so thereby maintain concord within the community
would be to vest the power of government in the hands of the people.35 If one hoped
to forestall the development of factions or divided jurisdictions then the people must
serve as the sole judicial as well as the sole executive authority within their polity.36
These authors argued that if peace and the means to live the good life were to be
preserved then the body of the people must thus remain sovereign at all times.37

However, while these various authors were writing to defend and legitimate the
particular constitutional forms of the Northern Italian city-states, a change was taking
place within many of these republics. Continued strife and factionalism within the
Northern Italian city-states in the late thirteenth century eventually led many of them
to elect individual leaders, known as podestà, in order to quell the discord and unrest
that the continued conflict between factions within the cities was causing. The result
of this continued conflict was that by the early fourteenth century almost all of the
Northern Italy city-states had moved away from their original popular forms of
government and towards princely rule. One consequence of this move was the
emergence of a new body of literature designed to legitimate the emergence of these
new princely governments.

While this emergent body of literature celebrated the rise of podestà at the expense of
the older forms of popular rule it nonetheless maintained a familial resemblance to the
32
Dante (1996). Monarchy. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 3.9.
33
Ibid, 3.16.
34
Skinner, Q. (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p. 61.
35
See Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace. New York, Harper & Row, 1.12.3,
Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Government of a City. Oxford, Oxford University
History Faculty, 420 and Lucca, Ptolemy of (1997). On the Government of Rulers. Philadelphia,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 4.23.
36
Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace. New York, Harper & Row, 1.12 and 1.17.
37
Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Government of a City. Oxford, Oxford University
History Faculty, pp. 16 and 34. See also Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Tyrant.
Oxford, Oxford University History Faculty and Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace.
New York, Harper & Row.
earlier political tracts. The common good, achieved through a pacific harmony within
the city, was still seen as the goal of government, and the writers in this new literature
also agreed on the necessarily destructive consequences of civic discord within the
body politic and the corruption that would ensue if the ruler placed their own interests
above those of the commonwealth.38 In fact, it was the continued discord and conflict
of factionalism that had convinced many within these city-states that only rule by one
could provide peace though the podestà were to rule for the common good and in the
interests of peace.39

Peace was thus associated by these authors with good government while discord was
equated with tyranny and the associated loss of liberty which that entailed.40 In
arguing this these authors followed Aristotle’s classification of temperate and
diseased forms of polity wherein a healthy or temperate polity was one in which the
common good was pursued by the polity’s leaders and a diseased polity was one in
which the regime’s rulers attended to their own interests even at the expense of the
common good.41 If the laws of the polity were just – and the rulers were subject to
them – then the community would not be afflicted by rebellion and the other diseases
of the body-politic such as sedition that arose from injustice. Marsilius of Padua thus
argued that the polity would be healthy when all its parts functioned together well and
was diseased when this form of harmony was not achieved.42

Political rule then, these theorists argued, was prevented from descending into
factionalism and conflict through the rule of virtuous rulers and the right ordering of
the various parts of the polity, as ‘just as a building is stable when its parts are well
laid down, so also a polity has firmness and perpetuity when all, whether rectors,
officials, or subjects, work properly in their own ranks, as the action of their condition
requires.’43 Politics then was primarily the art of making good laws that were
conducive to the achievement of the common good. Civic harmony and concord were
necessary in achieving this end and so the unity of the citizens had to be the final aim
of a ruler ‘for if there is a single, corrupt humour which predominates in the whole
body, that is bad; but if all the humours were corrupted, and were to struggle against
each other, that would be the worst. Woe, therefore, to the city with many tyrants who
did not aim at a single end.’44

Despite their differences, both sets of authors thus still recognised a clear division
between political and tyrannical rule. Political rule was thus rule according to right
reason for the common good and not according to the passion’s of the ruler, while a
tyrant in contrast was ‘someone who acts tyrannically, that is, his acts tend not
38
Petrarch, F. (1978). How a Ruler Ought to Rule His State. The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists
on Government and Society. B. G. Kohl, and Ronald G. Witt. Manchester, Manchester University
Press, 46 and 55.
39
Skinner, Q. (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, pp. 24-26.
40
Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace. New York, Harper & Row, 1.3 and 1.5. See
also points in Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Government of a City. Oxford, Oxford
University History Faculty.
41
Padua, Marsiglio of (1956). The Defender of the Peace. New York, Harper & Row, 1.8.
42
Ibid, 1.2.
43
Lucca, Ptolemy of (1997). On the Government of Rulers. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania
Press, 4.23.
44
Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Government of a City. Oxford, Oxford University
History Faculty, p. 36.
towards the common good but to the particular good of the tyrant. For this is ruling
unlawfully.’45 A tyrant was thus corrupt because he did not rule according to right
reason.

The Emergence of Humanism

In the fourteenth century the debates between the apologists for the rule of the
podestà and the supporters of popular rule took a new turn. Across Europe, but
particularly within the Italian territories, a renewed focus was being placed on the
study of the classical Roman authors – especially those from the late Republican
period.46 Two key questions lay at the base of this new humanist body of thought.
What was the relationship between the general moral nature of the population of the
city as a whole and good government; and how was the ruler of the city to be properly
trained so as to possess the correct moral virtues for rule?

Humanists extended the notion of the virtuous leader to include the population of the
polity as a whole. They began to argue that only when the population as a whole acted
in a virtuous manner could the true ends of earthly government be achieved. The
humanist authors therefore placed particular emphasis on the continued participation
and interest of the general citizenry in the process of government. To not act as a
citizen was to promote the corruption of the republic and so was itself a form of
corruption. In this nascent civic humanist tradition then, as for all the earlier authors
discussed in this paper, corruption or tyranny (as it was sometimes referred) arose
when a private interest displaced or distorted the public interest and so disrupted the
concordant nature of political life.

Despite this concern, the humanist literature of the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries argued that the general population nonetheless neglected to cultivate virtue
and so must look to those who were more noble – those who possessed virtue – to rule
them. In this view the ends of earthly government depended on men of ability to lead
the state.47 An interesting example of the humanists’ linkage between virtue and good
rule is their treatment of the issue of avarice or greed. Combining the teachings of
Roman Stoicism with Franciscan asceticism humanist authors such as Petrarch and
Salutati argued that external riches did not lead to virtue.48 Petrarch thus argued:

all those who love virtue and wish to have a good reputation should avoid and
despise the evil of greed. But most of all, princes should avoid greed because
they are the leaders of men and in their care has been placed vast sums and
much property as well as the state itself. And if they will administer their
governments properly, they are certain to consider wealth foul corruption and
obtain the treasures that are most prized, namely, an easy and clear conscience
and the love of God and their fellow men. Those who follow their own desires
45
Sassoferrato, Bartolus of (1997). Treatise on the Tyrant. Oxford, Oxford University History Faculty,
p. 59.
46
Pfeiffer, R. (1976). History of Classical Scholarship from 1300 to 1850. Oxford, Oxford University
Press, pp. 3-16.
47
Morosini, D. (1992). Radical Proposals by an Aged Patrician. Venice: A Documentary History 1450-
1630. D. Chambers, and Brian Pullan with Jennifer Fletcher. Oxford, Blackwell, p. 70.
48
Kohl, B. G. (1978). Poggio Bracciolini: Introduction. The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists on
Government and Society. B. G. Kohl, and Ronald G. Witt. Manchester, Manchester University Press,
p. 231.
 will only come to ruin, for they will never satisfy their insatiable desires and
they will surely earn the hatred of God and of men.49

With avarice seen as a sin in the Christian moral tradition the virtuous ruler thus ought
to avoid excessive greed as to do otherwise was to lead to political corruption.

The avoidance of morally repugnant practices such as avarice was of key importance
in the development of the good prince, as the virtue of the city depended upon the
virtue of its ruler. Combining the medieval Christian focus on the importance of moral
values with the classical emphasis on the value of natural reason the issue of avarice
thus demonstrates the way in which political and moral reason were merged in
Renaissance conceptions of the political such that they became conceptually identical
and indistinguishable from one another. The challenge of politics, then, was not to
improve laws or institutions but to improve the moral quality of the ruler. The best
way to achieve this was to train them in ‘virtue and eloquence through the prolonged
study of the ancient authors.’50

Honour, Glory and Liberty

Like the earlier scholastic authors these humanist authors thus believed that security
and peace were among the main values of political life and so were the highest aims
of government. However they had different views about how this aim might be
achieved.51 The good prince, the scholastics argued, needed merely the possession of
the older political virtues combined with an inward devotion to God in order to
provide peace and security in his city. The quest for honour and glory would
inevitably lead to conflict and discord and so, they argued, should be avoided at all
costs. In contrast to this though, the humanists argued like the Romans before them,
that glory was achieved through the pursuit of virtue and since the achievement of
virtue was at the basis of living the good life the pursuit of glory was entirely
compatible with the achievement of good government. In reviving these older Roman
ideals these humanist authors also revived the older ideas of virtus and fortuna.52 And,
in reviving these twin ideals, the humanists opened the way for an increased sense
that human choice played a greater role in the events of the world than had previously
been thought. In doing this, the humanists weakened the Christian idea of divine
providence that had so firmly underpinned previous political thought and writing –
though the humanists still wrote firmly within the Christian context of the final
salvation and the goal of eternal beatitude.

In their writings the humanist authors also strengthened the linkage between liberty,
the leading of a virtuous life and good government developed by the supporters of
popular rule in the Northern Italian city-states during the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. According to the humanist authors a person living his life according to
reason was morally free and virtuous as the rule of the passions over reason was a
49
Petrarch, F. Ibid.How a Ruler Ought to Rule His State, p. 63.
50
Petrarch, F. (1978). How a Ruler Ought to Rule His State. The Earthly Republic: Italian Humanists
on Government and Society. B. G. Kohl, and Ronald G. Witt. Manchester, Manchester University
Press, p. 42.
51
Aquinas, T. (1997). On the Government of Rulers. On the Government Of Rulers. P. o. Lucca.
Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1.8.
52
Augustine had refuted the existence of the twin goddesses of Virtus and Fortuna through the claim
that there existed no conception of fate separate from God’s providence.
form of moral slavery. In a tyranny the ruler, who was himself a slave to his passions,
dominated free men like a master dominated bondsmen. In such a society morality
would degenerate and civic life would become corrupted. Of the various forms of
government available then, they argued, only that which produced maximum liberty
would guarantee virtuous activity. Liberty for the humanist authors, as for the earlier
apologists for the Italian city-states, was the potentiality to live in freedom within the
limits of both custom and law.53

The greatness of cities, and Florence was often used as the example of choice by the
early humanists, was thus held to be a direct result of the liberty found within it
walls.54 Florence was free from external conquest and free from faction and so was
able to speak as one voice – concordant and united. Bruni like other humanist authors
thus felt that unity within a city was of the utmost importance. Unity was best
promoted when the state alone was the font of honour as this would lead to the
creation of an ethic of public service, and hence love of the state, which would be
lacking if there were other sources of honour. This notion of the primacy of the state
reflected the collapse of feudalism and the disintegration of the conceptual union
between regnum and sacerdotium that was occurring in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries. This process led to the gradual transfer of political power away from these
other estates and towards the emergence of an apparatus of government which existed
independently from the person of the ruler – the first beginnings of what we in the
modern West would later know as the state.55

The Art of Politics and the Art of the State

Machiavelli and Guicciardini both agreed with the earlier humanist writers that the
pursuit of the common good and not the pursuit of private interests was the cause of
greatness in cities.56 Thus, for Machiavelli, to be a corrupt citizen was to place one’s
own ambitions, or the ends of faction, above the common good, as to act in this way
was invariably fatal to liberty and hence greatness.57 A corrupt city was, as for the

53
Rinuccini, A. (1978). Liberty. Humanism & Liberty: Writings on Freedom from Fifteenth-Century
Florence. R. N. Watkins. Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, pp. 193-222.
54
See for example Bruni, L. (1978). Panegyric to the City of Florence. The Earthly Republic: Italian
Humanists on Government and Society. B. G. Kohl, and Ronald G. Witt. Manchester, Manchester
University Press.
55
Skinner, Q. (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought., 1. and Skinner, Q. (2002). From
the State of Princes to the Person of the State. Visions of Politics: Renaissance Virtues. Q. Skinner.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 2. See also Hindess, B. (in press). The State. New Keywords:
A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society. T. Bennett, Larry Grossberg and Meaghan Morris.
Oxford, Blackwell.
56
See Machiavelli, N. (1989). Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Machiavelli: The Chief
Works and Others. A. Gilbert. Durham, Duke University Press. 1, 2.2 and Guicciardini, F. (1994).
Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 87.
57
By liberty of the body politic Machiavelli meant, following the usage of the early Northern Italian
city-state apologists, the capacity of the civic body to pursue its own ends. Machiavelli, N. (1989).
Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. A. Gilbert.
Durham, Duke University Press. 1, 1.2. In arguing this, Machiavelli thus endorsed the traditional belief
in the pursuit of the common good as a key aspect of good government, arguing that unless each citizen
behaves with virtù – which in practice means placing the good of his community above all private
ambitions and factional allegiances – then the goal of grandezza (glory) could never be achieved.
Skinner, Q. (1990). Machiavelli's Discorsi and the Pre-Humanist Origins of Republican Ideas.
Machiavelli and Republicanism. G. Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli. Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, p. 138.
earlier writers, one where laws were disobeyed and people lived only to further their
own self-interest. Machiavelli also made the argument, linking arms and liberty, that
keeping ‘men-at-arms is a method that is corrupt and not good. The reason is that they
are men who make war their profession, and every day they would cause a thousand
disorders in the states where they are…So as to this custom of retaining men-at-arms,
I do not approve of it, for it is corrupt and can cause serious trouble.’58

The maintenance of a virtuous and free population was thus, for Machiavelli as for the
earlier humanist authors, the key to good government as it was believed that it was
both impossible for a tyranny to be established when the city was virtuous and
impossible for a corrupted people to establish a virtuous government. Thus
Machiavelli’s claim ‘that where the matter [the population] is not corrupt, uprisings
and other disturbances do no harm. Where it is corrupt well-planned laws are of no
use, unless indeed they are prepared by one who with the utmost power can force their
observation, so that the matter will become good.’59 Nonetheless, Machiavelli
believed that this good government did not always come merely through the existence
of good laws or just rule, but was sometimes something that required the employment
of force responding to necessity. Machiavelli saw more clearly than other writers of
his time the implications of Cicero’s belief that the survival and advancement of a
republic should take precedence over all things, even at the expense of conventional
virtuous and moral behaviour.60 The problem then, as Machiavelli puts it, is that a
good man must become bad in order to achieve the goal that the good man ought to
pursue.61 In a corrupt city despotic power is the only way out of the corruption and so
government becomes a quest for security.62

Machiavelli’s contemporary Guicciardini was even more pessimistic in his

assessment of the hopes for reform of a corrupt city. While like Machiavelli he argued
that persuasion on its own would not work, as people within a corrupt city are too
accustomed to the type of corrupted life they lead, he nonetheless also thought that
trying to find a good man to rescue the constitution by force was also a risky
proposition. For Guicciardini, to ensure that the city did not sink again into corruption
the “good” man would need to stay in power for a considerable period of time – and
would in probability become accustomed to that power and so not want to step aside –
thus becoming merely a tyrant – itself a corruption of good government.63

In light of this Guicciardini argued that ruling or reforming a city required the same
competence that citizens acquired through the practice of commerce and the
administration of their estates. Guicciardini also went further than his contemporary
Machiavelli in addressing the way in which rulers in the sixteenth century could
maintain their position through bribery and manipulation, and in doing so weakened
58
Machiavelli, N. (1989). The Art of War. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. A. Gilbert.
Durham, Duke University Press. 2, p. 579.
59
Machiavelli, N. (1989). Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Machiavelli: The Chief
Works and Others. A. Gilbert. Durham, Duke University Press. 1, 1.17.
60
Tuck, R. (1993). Philosophy and Government 1572-1651. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
p. 20.
61
Viroli, M. (1992). From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the
Language of Politics 1250-1600. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, p. 175.
62
Machiavelli, N. (1989). The Prince. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. A. Gilbert. Durham,
Duke University Press. 1, p. 66.
63
Guicciardini, F. (1994). Dialogue on the Government of Florence. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, p. 139.
the previously necessary connection between the private morality of the prince and
the quality of his rule.64 Guicciardini thus argued in far more explicit terms than
Machiavelli, that politics – by which he meant the restraining of private loyalties and
the reinforcing of impersonal attachments such as love for liberty, justice and one’s
country – was sometimes not enough to ensure the survival of the city and so the ruler
of a republic must sometimes, in extreme circumstances, resort to the ‘art of the state’
– the art of consolidating and creating private loyalties – in order to ensure the
survival of the city.65

In saying that there was a reason of states that transcended moral reason Guicciardini
should thus be understood as arguing that the language of politics was only
appropriate within certain bounds – this being a republic understood as a community
of citizens. Guicciardini makes the innovative and truly revolutionary leap that in
extreme circumstances governmental reason may actually justify cruelties and
injustices. This intellectual leap can be understood better through reference to Mark
Phillips’ argument that whereas Machiavelli was motivated in his writings by a
concern for liberty, Guicciardini in contrast was more concerned with the
achievement of order.66

In the writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini, then, we see a number of important

changes occurring in the way in which the conduct and process of government was
theorised in relation to conceptions of corruption. In their writings, the traditional
necessary connection between the individual morality of the ruler and the quality of
his rule was uncoupled for the first time. This uncoupling in turn led to the emergence
of a novel notion of political morality, wherein political morality began to be seen as
separate and not necessarily connected to individual morality. Political prudence and
virtue were thus no longer seen as necessarily connected aspects of civic life. This
was for both these authors, however, something that happened only in an extreme
state of affairs. Political or civil life, for Machiavelli and Guicciardini, was thus still
seen as the opposite of tyranny and corruption.67

The Northern Renaissance and the Reformation

Yet, while Machiavelli and Guicciardini pushed the traditional notion of government
to its limit, the majority of thinkers across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries continued to write their treatises and works within the broad context of the
humanist tradition. The private morality of the ruler and the quality of his rule were
thus still seen by the majority of writers on government in the fifteenth and sixteenth
64
Machiavelli too argues along this line of thinking in his claim that it is safer at times for a ruler to be
feared than be loved. Machiavelli, N. (1989). The Prince. Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others. A.
Gilbert. Durham, Duke University Press. 1, p. 62.
65
This new art of government was thus born from the introduction of oeconomics (household
management) into the discourse of government. The ‘art of the state’ was thus related to commerce, by
which sixteenth century writers meant – harking back to the older meaning of economics – as the
enlarging of someone’s status and possessions, in contrast to politics which was more closely related to
the study of ethics and law based as it was on protecting the common good. Rather than being seen as
being contained within scripture the principles of state were seen to lie within the knowledge of the
state itself, a knowledge with its own particular rationality.
66
Phillips, M. (1977). Francesco Guicciardini: The Historian's Craft. Manchester, Manchester
University Press, p. 85.
67
Machiavelli, N. (1989). Discourses on the First Decade of Titus Livius. Machiavelli: The Chief
Works and Others. A. Gilbert. Durham, Duke University Press. 1, 1.25, 1.55 and 3.8.
centuries as still being necessarily connected – as demonstrated in texts such as
Desiderius Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince.68 However, as such humanist
writers of the Northern Renaissance were composing these last, and greatest,
humanistic treatises on good government another intellectual revolution, in addition to
that begun by Machiavelli and Guicciardini, was gathering force. This intellectual
revolution was set to reshape the political makeup of Europe and irrevocably alter the
way in which the political itself in Europe was theorised.

With the publication of his 95 theses in 1517 the young Martin Luther set into action a
course of events that was to rock Europe to its very core. Dissatisfied with what he
saw as the irredeemable corruption of the Catholic church brought about by its
involvement in temporal affairs, Martin Luther and others, such as Jean Calvin, who
followed in his wake used their writings to repudiate the temporal jurisdiction of the
church. Arguing that the church was nothing more than the community of the faithful
and not the institutional structure which had claimed this role, Luther liberated
Christians from the claims of the Church to mediate the relationship between God and
the individual. In doing this, Luther effectively denied the church any jurisdictional
power over temporal affairs. This is not to say that Luther and his intellectual
supporters and followers celebrated secular politics. On the contrary the thinkers of
the reformation possessed an almost Augustinian distaste for secular politics.
Temporal government was for both Luther and Calvin, as for Augustine, merely a
remedy for sin – a divinely instituted method of achieving a modicum of peace of
earth ‘which holds the Unchristian and the wicked in check and forces them to keep
the peace outwardly and be still.’69 Following this neo-Augustinian approach both
authors argued that there was no possibility for beatitude in this life – only the hope of
eternal redemption. The return to the idea that the polity was merely a coercive
institution designed to maintain a minimum of order in a sinful world that the writings
of the early Reformation entailed signaled a decisive move away from the neo-
classical conception of politics as the means to achieving earthly beatitude that had
formed the basis of governmental writings for the last three hundred years.70

These early Reformation writings had three major consequences for the model of
political life discussed in this paper. First, the return to a conception of politics as
order – and thereby divorced of all ethical and moral content – helped provide
theoretical support for the separation of politics and morality that writers such as
Machiavelli and Guicciardini had begun to explore. Second, the repudiation of any
need for a specific institutional structure for the Church that these writers espoused
meant that the traditional separation of the Christian commonwealth into regnum and
68
Erasmus, D. (1997). The Education of a Christian Prince. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
p. 21.
69
Luther, M. (1991). On Secular Authority. On Secular Authority. H. Höpfl. Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, I.IV.
70
In line with this neo-Augustinian approach, Luther placed a renewed emphasis on humanity’s fallen
nature in his writings – and the division of humanity into two separate communities, The Kingdom of
God and the Kingdom of Satan. For more on this see Luther, M. (1961). The Bondage of the Will.
Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings. J. Dillenberger. New York, Anchor Books. In arguing
that our fallen nature means that all our actions necessarily express this fallen nature Luther thus
provided the grounds for a neo-Augustinian rejection of the humanistic impulses towards the
celebration of free will that had emerged within the last centuries. In doing so Luther posed the
doctrine of original sin against the humanist focus on humanity in the image of God. Arguing that
reason was inadequate these early writers of the Reformation returned to the Augustinian argument that
eternal salvation was achievable only through the operation of faith alone.
sacerdotium was collapsed – thereby leading in effect to the collapse of the very
concept of a Christian commonwealth. And finally, the wars of religion that were a
direct consequence of the questioning of the Catholic church that the Luther’s
writings entailed introduced a period of violence, conflict and instability to Europe
unlike anything ever seen before. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
these three factors combined, led many across Europe to the study of the art of the
state.

Raison d’État Triumphant

Writing within this context of sectarian conflict and religious war, the writings of
Justus Lipsius, Michel de Montaigne, Jean Bodin and others in the late sixteenth
century augured in an entirely new conception of politics. In this new conceptual
framework the Thomistic unity of public and private morality first put to test in the
writings of Machiavelli and Guicciardini was finally severed. In this new discourse of
politics conflict between moral reason and the interests of the state was no longer
described as a divergence between reason and the practice of statecraft. Instead it was
a conflict between moral reason and reason of state. For these authors, the
maintenance of justice was no longer seen as always taking precedence over the
preservation of the polity itself. In arguing this, Michel de Montaigne, in his essay Of
the Useful and the Honest, even went so far as to argue that

in every government there are necessary offices which are not only base but
wicked. Wickedness finds a place there, and is employed in sewing and
binding us together; as poison is used for the preservation of our health…we
must allow that part to be played by the stoutest and least timorous citizens,
who will sacrifice their honour and their conscience; as those others, in ancient
times, sacrificed their lives for the good of the country…The public weal
requires men to betray, to lie, and to massacre.71

In this new conception of politics, and political life, governmental prudence was no
longer seen as right reason acting in accord with justice, instead being seen merely as
the capacity to decide what was most appropriate for the preservation of the state. In
light of this change, people began to speak of the political prudence of tyrants –
something previously unthinkable. This uncoupling of moral reason and political
reason was the final death knell for the model of politics discussed in this paper. With
its uncoupling the distinction between tyrant and monarch, of key importance to this
model of political life, was collapsed, and without this distinction the model of
corruption that had flowed from this model collapsed as well.

Conclusion

A distinctive model of political corruption and so too politics emerged in Europe from
the early eleventh century CE. In this model the medieval Christian focus on the
importance of moral values was combined with the classical emphasis on the value of
reason. The outcome of this synthesis was the emergence of the belief that natural
reason provided the principles by which human life ought to proceed. By extension, a
life not led in accord with these principles was seen as being necessarily corrupt. The
clearest example of this was the use of the notion of prudence. For the authors who
71
Montaigne, M. (1946). The Essays of Montaigne. New York, Random House, p. 388.
wrote within this tradition, prudence thus meant rule according to the dictates of
natural reason. Appeal to natural reason led these authors to intuit that only a good
man could be a good king as the necessarily all-encompassing nature of natural reason
meant that political and moral reason were necessarily identical. A ruler who lacked
the requisite moral fortitude was for these authors a corrupt form of ruler – a tyrant –
who could not necessarily be trusted to rule in terms of the common good. Political
corruption in this model of politics was, therefore, intricately connected to the notion
of natural reason. Actions which went against the principles of natural reason –
principles that every right-regarding person would be able to intuit – were necessarily
corrupt. This model of political life was initially relatively stable as the Christian and
classical traditions were initially seen as relatively complementary. The increasing
influence, however, of a number of late Roman Republican authors and their focus on
issues of honour and glory towards the end of the renaissance, however, began to
place this model under a degree of strain. The subsequent separation of church and
state in the wake of the Reformation and the concomitant separation of moral reason
from political reason in the writings of the raison d’état authors eventually led to the
complete collapse of this model of political life and its associated notion of political
corruption. The separation of these aspects of human life into distinct categories, each
possessing their own intrinsic rationality, necessarily led to the breakdown of this
model. The belief that these aspects of human life possessed their own intrinsic
rationality effectively denied the possibility for any appeal to the dictates of a natural
reason, and so the model of corruption which flowed from this also necessarily
collapsed.