Western philosophy
History of Western philosophy from its development among the ancient
Greeks to the present.
Renaissance philosophy
The philosophy of a period arises as a response to social need, and the
development of philosophy in the history of Western civilization since
the Renaissance has, thus, reflected the process in which creative
philosophers have responded to the unique challenges of each stage in
the development of Western culture itself.
The career of philosophy—how it views its tasks and functions, how it
defines itself, the special methods it invents for the achievement of
philosophical knowledge, the literary forms it adopts and utilizes, its
conception of the scope of its subject matter, and its changing criteria
of meaning and truth—hinges on the mode of its successive responses to
the challenges of the social structure within which it arises. Thus,
Western philosophy in the Middle Ages was primarily a Christian
philosophy, complementing the divine revelation, reflecting the feudal
order in its cosmology, devoting itself in no small measure to the
institutional tasks of the Roman Catholic Church. It was no accident
that the major philosophical achievements of the 13th and 14th centuries
were the work of churchmen who also happened to be professors of
theology at the Universities of Oxford and Paris.
The Renaissance of the late 15th and 16th centuries presented a
different set of problems and therefore suggested different lines of
philosophical endeavour. What is called the European Renaissance
followed the introduction of three novel mechanical inventions from the
East: gunpowder, block printing from movable type, and the compass. The
first was used to explode the massive fortifications of the feudal order
and thus became an agent of the new spirit of nationalism that
threatened the rule of churchmen—and, indeed, the universalist emphasis
of the church itself—with a competing secular power. The second,
printing, propagated knowledge widely, secularized learning, reduced the
intellectual monopoly of an ecclesiastical elite, and restored the
literary and philosophical classics of Greece and Rome. The third, the
compass, increased the safety and scope of navigation, produced the
voyages of discovery that opened up the Western Hemisphere, and
symbolized a new spirit of physical adventure and a new scientific
interest in the structure of the natural world.
Each of these inventions, with its wider cultural consequences,
presented new intellectual problems and novel philosophical tasks within
a changing political and social environment. As the power of a single
religious authority was slowly eroded under the influence of the
Protestant Reformation and as the prestige of the universal Latin
language gave way to vernacular tongues, philosophers became less and
less identified with their positions in the ecclesiastical hierarchy and
more and more identified with their national origins. The works of
Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Bonaventure, and
John Duns
Scotus had been basically unrelated to the countries of their birth; but
the philosophy of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) was directly related
to Italian experience, and that of Francis Bacon (1561–1626) was English
to the core, as was that of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in the early
modern period. Likewise, the thought of René Descartes (1596–1650) set
the standard and tone of intellectual life in France for 200 years. (See Modern philosophy.)
Knowledge in the contemporary world is conventionally divided between
the natural sciences, the social sciences, and the humanities. In the
Renaissance, however, fields of learning had not yet become so sharply
departmentalized; in fact, each of these divisions arose in the
comprehensive and broadly inclusive area of philosophy. As the
Renaissance mounted its revolt against the reign of religion and
therefore reacted against the church, against authority, against
Scholasticism, and against Aristotle, there was a sudden blossoming of
interest in problems centring on civil society, humankind, and nature.
These three areas corresponded exactly to the three dominant strands of
Renaissance philosophy: political philosophy, humanism, and the
philosophy of nature.
Renaissance philosophy » Political philosophy
As secular authority replaced ecclesiastical authority and as the
dominant interest of the age shifted from religion to politics, it was
natural that the rivalries of the national states and their persistent
crises of internal order should raise with renewed urgency philosophical
problems, practically dormant since pre-Christian times, about the
nature and the moral status of political power. This new preoccupation
with national unity, internal security, state power, and international
justice stimulated the growth of political philosophy in Italy, France,
England, and Holland.
Machiavelli, sometime state secretary of the Florentine republic,
explored techniques for the seizure and retention of power in ways that
seemed to exalt “reasons of state” above morality. His The Prince and
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (both published posthumously)
codified the actual practices of Renaissance diplomacy for the next 100
years. In fact, Machiavelli was motivated by patriotic hopes for the
ultimate unification of Italy and by the conviction that the moral
standards of contemporary Italians needed to be elevated by restoring
the ancient Roman virtues. More than half a century later, the French
political philosopher Jean Bodin (1530–96) insisted that the state must
possess a single, unified, and absolute power; he thus developed in
detail the doctrine of national sovereignty as the source of all legal
legitimacy.
In England, Hobbes, who was to become tutor to the future king
Charles II (1630–85), developed the fiction that, in the “state of
nature” that preceded civilization, “every man’s hand [was] raised
against every other” and human life was accordingly “solitary, poor,
nasty, brutish, and short.” A social contract was thus agreed upon to
convey all private rights to a single sovereign in return for general
protection and the institution of a reign of law. Because law is simply
“the command of the sovereign,” Hobbes at once turned justice into a
by-product of power and denied any right of rebellion except when the
sovereign becomes too weak to protect the commonwealth or to hold it
together. (See The materialism of Thomas Hobbes.)
In Holland, a prosperous and tolerant commercial republic in the 17th
century, the issues of political philosophy took a different form. The
Dutch East India Company commissioned a great jurist, Hugo Grotius
(1583–1645), to write a defense of their trading rights and their free
access to the seas, and the resulting two treatises, The Freedom of the
Seas (1609) and On the Law of War and Peace (1625), were the first
significant codifications of international law. Their philosophical
originality lay, however, in the fact that, in defending the rights of a
small, militarily weak nation against the powerful states of England,
France, and Spain, Grotius was led to a preliminary investigation of the
sources and validity of the concept of natural law—the notion that
inherent in human reason and immutable even against the willfulness of
sovereign states are imperative considerations of natural justice and
moral responsibility, which must serve as a check against the arbitrary
exercise of vast political power.
In general, the political philosophy of the Renaissance and the early
modern period was dualistic: it was haunted, even confused, by the
conflict between political necessity and general moral responsibility.
Machiavelli, Bodin, and Hobbes asserted claims that justified the
actions of Italian despotism and the absolutism of the Bourbon and
Stuart dynasties. Yet Machiavelli was obsessed with the problem of human
virtue, Bodin insisted that even the sovereign ought to obey the law of
nature (that is, to govern in accordance with the dictates of natural
justice), and Hobbes himself found in natural law the rational
motivation that causes a person to seek security and peace. In the end,
Renaissance and early modern political philosophy advocated the
doctrines of Thrasymachus, who held that right is what is in the
interests of the strong, but it could never finally escape a twinge of
Socratic conscience.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
Italian statesman and writer
born May 3, 1469, Florence, Italy
died June 21, 1527, Florence
Main
Italian Renaissance political philosopher and statesman,
secretary of the Florentine republic, whose most famous
work, The Prince (Il Principe), brought him a reputation as
an atheist and an immoral cynic.
Early life and political career
From the 13th century onward, Machiavelli’s family was
wealthy and prominent, holding on occasion Florence’s most
important offices. His father, Bernardo, a doctor of laws,
was nevertheless among the family’s poorest members. Barred
from public office in Florence as an insolvent debtor,
Bernardo lived frugally, administering his small landed
property near the city and supplementing his meagre income
from it with earnings from the restricted and almost
clandestine exercise of his profession.
Bernardo kept a library in which Niccolò must have read,
but little is known of Niccolò’s education and early life in
Florence, at that time a thriving centre of philosophy and a
brilliant showcase of the arts. He attended lectures by
Marcello Virgilio Adriani, who chaired the Studio Fiorentino.
He learned Latin well and probably knew some Greek, and he
seems to have acquired the typical humanist education that
was expected of officials of the Florentine Chancery.
In a letter to a friend in 1498, Machiavelli writes of
listening to the sermons of Girolamo Savonarola (1452–98), a
Dominican friar who moved to Florence in 1482 and in the
1490s attracted a party of popular supporters with his
thinly veiled accusations against the government, the
clergy, and the pope. Although Savonarola, who effectively
ruled Florence for several years after 1494, was featured in
The Prince (1513) as an example of an “unarmed prophet” who
must fail, Machiavelli was impressed with his learning and
rhetorical skill. On May 24, 1498, Savonarola was hanged as
a heretic and his body burned in the public square. Several
days later, emerging from obscurity at the age of 29,
Machiavelli became head of the second chancery (cancelleria),
a post that placed him in charge of the republic’s foreign
affairs in subject territories. How so young a man could be
entrusted with so high an office remains a mystery,
particularly because Machiavelli apparently never served an
apprenticeship in the chancery. He held the post until 1512,
having gained the confidence of Piero Soderini (1452–1522),
the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) for life in Florence from
1502.
During his tenure at the second chancery, Machiavelli
persuaded Soderini to reduce the city’s reliance on
mercenary forces by establishing a militia (1505), which
Machiavelli subsequently organized. He also undertook
diplomatic and military missions to the court of France; to
Cesare Borgia (1475/76–1507), the son of Pope Alexander VI
(reigned 1492–1503); to Pope Julius II (reigned 1503–13),
Alexander’s successor; to the court of Holy Roman Emperor
Maximilian I (reigned 1493–1519); and to Pisa (1509 and
1511).
In 1503, one year after his missions to Cesare Borgia,
Machiavelli wrote a short work, Del modo di trattare i
sudditi della Val di Chiana ribellati (On the Way to Deal
with the Rebel Subjects of the Valdichiana). Anticipating
his later Discourses on Livy, a commentary on the ancient
Roman historian, in this work he contrasts the errors of
Florence with the wisdom of the Romans and declares that in
dealing with rebellious peoples one must either benefit them
or eliminate them. Machiavelli also was a witness to the
bloody vengeance taken by Cesare on his mutinous captains at
the town of Sinigaglia (December 31, 1502), of which he
wrote a famous account. In much of his early writings,
Machiavelli argues that “one should not offend a prince and
later put faith in him.”
In 1503 Machiavelli was sent to Rome for the duration of
the conclave that elected Pope Julius II, an enemy of the
Borgias, whose election Cesare had unwisely aided.
Machiavelli watched Cesare’s decline and, in a poem (First
Decennale), celebrated his imprisonment, a burden that “he
deserved as a rebel against Christ.” Altogether, Machiavelli
embarked on more than 40 diplomatic missions during his 14
years at the chancery.
In 1512 the Florentine republic was overthrown and the
gonfalonier deposed by a Spanish army that Julius II had
enlisted into his Holy League. The Medici family returned to
rule Florence, and Machiavelli, suspected of conspiracy, was
imprisoned, tortured, and sent into exile in 1513 to his
father’s small property in San Casciano, just south of
Florence. There he wrote his two major works, The Prince and
Discourses on Livy, both of which were published after his
death. He dedicated The Prince to Lorenzo di Piero de’
Medici (1492–1519), ruler of Florence from 1513 and grandson
of Lorenzo de’ Medici (1449–92). When, on Lorenzo’s death,
Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici (1478–1534) came to govern
Florence, Machiavelli was presented to the cardinal by
Lorenzo Strozzi (1488–1538), scion of one of Florence’s
wealthiest families, to whom he dedicated the dialogue The
Art of War (1521; Dell’arte della guerra).
Machiavelli was first employed in 1520 by the cardinal to
resolve a case of bankruptcy in Lucca, where he took the
occasion to write a sketch of its government and to compose
his The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520; La
vita di Castruccio Castracani da Lucca). Later that year the
cardinal agreed to have Machiavelli elected official
historian of the republic, a post to which he was appointed
in November 1520 with a salary of 57 gold florins a year,
later increased to 100. In the meantime, he was commissioned
by the Medici pope Leo X (reigned 1513–21) to write a
discourse on the organization of the government of Florence.
Machiavelli criticized both the Medici regime and the
succeeding republic he had served and boldly advised the
pope to restore the republic, replacing the unstable mixture
of republic and principality then prevailing. Shortly
thereafter, in May 1521, he was sent for two weeks to the
Franciscan chapter at Carpi, where he improved his ability
to “reason about silence.” Machiavelli faced a dilemma about
how to tell the truth about the rise of the Medici in
Florence without offending his Medici patron.
After the death of Pope Leo X in 1521, Cardinal Giulio,
Florence’s sole master, was inclined to reform the city’s
government and sought out the advice of Machiavelli, who
replied with the proposal he had made to Leo X. In 1523,
following the death of Pope Adrian VI, the cardinal became
Pope Clement VII, and Machiavelli worked with renewed
enthusiasm on an official history of Florence. In June 1525
he presented his Florentine Histories (Istorie Fiorentine)
to the pope, receiving in return a gift of 120 ducats. In
April 1526 Machiavelli was made chancellor of the
Procuratori delle Mura to superintend Florence’s
fortifications. At this time the pope had formed a Holy
League at Cognac against Holy Roman Emperor Charles V
(reigned 1519–56), and Machiavelli went with the army to
join his friend Francesco Guicciardini (1482–1540), the
pope’s lieutenant, with whom he remained until the sack of
Rome by the emperor’s forces brought the war to an end in
May 1527. Now that Florence had cast off the Medici,
Machiavelli hoped to be restored to his old post at the
chancery. But the few favours that the Medici had doled out
to him caused the supporters of the free republic to look
upon him with suspicion. Denied the post, he fell ill and
died within a month.
Writings
In office Machiavelli wrote a number of short political
discourses and poems (the Decennali) on Florentine history.
It was while he was out of office and in exile, however,
that the “Florentine Secretary,” as Machiavelli came to be
called, wrote the works of political philosophy for which he
is remembered. In his most noted letter (December 10, 1513),
he described one of his days—in the morning walking in the
woods, in the afternoon drinking and gambling with friends
at the inn, and in the evening reading and reflecting in his
study, where, he says, “I feed on the food that alone is
mine and that I was born for.” In the same letter,
Machiavelli remarks that he has just composed a little work
on princes—a “whimsy”—and thus lightly introduces arguably
the most famous book on politics ever written, the work that
was to give the name Machiavellian to the teaching of
worldly success through scheming deceit.
About the same time that Machiavelli wrote The Prince
(1513), he was also writing a very different book,
Discourses on Livy (or, more precisely, Discourses on the
First Ten Books of Titus Livy [Discorsi sopra la prima deca
di Tito Livio]). Both books were first published only after
Machiavelli’s death, the Discourses on Livy in 1531 and The
Prince in 1532. They are distinguished from his other works
by the fact that in the dedicatory letter to each he says
that it contains everything he knows. The dedication of the
Discourses on Livy presents the work to two of Machiavelli’s
friends, who he says are not princes but deserve to be, and
criticizes the sort of begging letter he appears to have
written in dedicating The Prince. The two works differ also
in substance and manner. Whereas The Prince is mostly
concerned with princes—particularly new princes—and is
short, easy to read, and, according to many, dangerously
wicked, the Discourses on Livy is a “reasoning” that is
long, difficult, and full of advice on how to preserve
republics. Every thoughtful treatment of Machiavelli has had
to come to terms with the differences between his two most
important works.
Writings » The Prince
The first and most persistent view of Machiavelli is that of
a teacher of evil. The German-born American philosopher Leo
Strauss (1899–1973) begins his interpretation from this
point. The Prince is in the tradition of the “Mirror for
Princes”—i.e., books of advice that enabled princes to see
themselves as though reflected in a mirror—which began with
the Cyropaedia by the Greek historian Xenophon (431–350 bc)
and continued into the Middle Ages. Prior to Machiavelli,
works in this genre advised princes to adopt the best prince
as their model, but Machiavelli’s version recommends that a
prince go to the “effectual truth” of things and forgo the
standard of “what should be done” lest he bring about his
ruin. To maintain himself a prince must learn how not to be
good and use or not use this knowledge “according to
necessity.” An observer would see such a prince as guided by
necessity, and from this standpoint Machiavelli can be
interpreted as the founder of modern political science, a
discipline based on the actual state of the world as opposed
to how the world might be in utopias such as the Republic of
Plato (428/27–348/47 bc) or the City of God of Saint
Augustine (354–430). This second, amoral interpretation can
be found in works by the German historian Friedrich Meinecke
(1862–1954) and the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer
(1874–1945). The amoral interpretation fastens on
Machiavelli’s frequent resort to “necessity” in order to
excuse actions that might otherwise be condemned as immoral.
But Machiavelli also advises the use of prudence in
particular circumstances, and, though he sometimes offers
rules or remedies for princes to adopt, he does not seek to
establish exact or universal laws of politics in the manner
of modern political science.
Machiavelli divides principalities into those that are
acquired and those that are inherited. In general, he argues
that the more difficult it is to acquire control over a
state, the easier it is to hold on to it. The reason for
this is that the fear of a new prince is stronger than the
love for a hereditary prince; hence, the new prince, who
relies on “a dread of punishment that never forsakes you,”
will succeed, but a prince who expects his subjects to keep
their promises of support will be disappointed. The prince
will find that “each wants to die for him when death is at a
distance,” but, when the prince needs his subjects, they
generally decline to serve as promised. Thus, every prince,
whether new or old, must look upon himself as a new prince
and learn to rely on “one’s own arms,” both literally in
raising one’s own army and metaphorically in not relying on
the goodwill of others.
The new prince relies on his own virtue, but, if virtue
is to enable him to acquire a state, it must have a new
meaning distinct from the New Testament virtue of seeking
peace. Machiavelli’s notion of virtù requires the prince to
be concerned foremost with the art of war and to seek not
merely security but also glory, for glory is included in
necessity. Virtù for Machiavelli is virtue not for its own
sake but rather for the sake of the reputation it enables
princes to acquire. Liberality, for example, does not aid a
prince, because the recipients may not be grateful, and
lavish displays necessitate taxing of the prince’s subjects,
who will despise him for it. Thus, a prince should not be
concerned if he is held to be stingy, as this vice enables
him to rule. Similarly, a prince should not care about being
held cruel as long as the cruelty is “well used.”
Machiavelli sometimes uses virtù in the traditional sense
too, as in a famous passage on Agathocles (361–289 bc), the
self-styled king of Sicily, whom Machiavelli describes as a
“most excellent captain” but one who came to power by
criminal means. Of Agathocles, Machiavelli writes that “one
cannot call it virtue to kill one’s citizens, betray one’s
friends, to be without faith, without mercy and without
religion.” Yet in the very next sentence he speaks of “the
virtue of Agathocles,” who did all these things. Virtue,
according to Machiavelli, aims to reduce the power of
fortune over human affairs because fortune keeps men from
relying on themselves. At first Machiavelli admits that
fortune rules half of men’s lives, but then, in an infamous
metaphor, he compares fortune to a woman who lets herself be
won more by the impetuous and the young, “who command her
with more audacity,” than by those who proceed cautiously.
Machiavelli cannot simply dismiss or replace the traditional
notion of moral virtue, which gets its strength from the
religious beliefs of ordinary people. His own virtue of
mastery coexists with traditional moral virtue yet also
makes use of it. A prince who possesses the virtue of
mastery can command fortune and manage people to a degree
never before thought possible.
In the last chapter of The Prince, Machiavelli writes a
passionate “exhortation to seize Italy and to free her from
the barbarians”—apparently France and Spain, which had been
overrunning the disunited peninsula. He calls for a
redeemer, mentioning the miracles that occurred as Moses led
the Israelites to the promised land, and closes with a
quotation from a patriotic poem by Petrarch (1304–74). The
final chapter has led many to a third interpretation of
Machiavelli as a patriot rather than as a disinterested
scientist.
Writings » The Discourses on Livy
Like The Prince, the Discourses on Livy admits of various
interpretations. One view, elaborated separately in works by
the political theorists J.G.A. Pocock and Quentin Skinner in
the 1970s, stresses the work’s republicanism and locates
Machiavelli in a republican tradition that starts with
Aristotle (384–322 bc) and continues through the
organization of the medieval city-states, the renewal of
classical political philosophy in Renaissance humanism, and
the establishment of the contemporary American republic.
This interpretation focuses on Machiavelli’s various
pro-republican remarks, such as his statement that the
multitude is wiser and more constant than a prince and his
emphasis in the Discourses on Livy on the republican virtue
of self-sacrifice as a way of combating corruption. Yet
Machiavelli’s republicanism does not rest on the usual
republican premise that power is safer in the hands of many
than it is in the hands of one. To the contrary, he asserts
that, to found or reform a republic, it is necessary to “be
alone.” Any ordering must depend on a single mind; thus,
Romulus “deserves excuse” for killing Remus, his brother and
partner in the founding of Rome, because it was for the
common good. This statement is as close as Machiavelli ever
came to saying “the end justifies the means,” a phrase
closely associated with interpretations of The Prince.
Republics need the kind of leaders that Machiavelli
describes in The Prince. These “princes in a republic”
cannot govern in accordance with justice, because those who
get what they deserve from them do not feel any obligation.
Nor do those who are left alone feel grateful. Thus, a
prince in a republic will have no “partisan friends” unless
he learns “to kill the sons of Brutus,” using violence to
make examples of enemies of the republic and, not
incidentally, of himself. To reform a corrupt state
presupposes a good man, but to become a prince presupposes a
bad man. Good men, Machiavelli claims, will almost never get
power, and bad men will almost never use power for a good
end. Yet, since republics become corrupt when the people
lose the fear that compels them to obey, the people must be
led back to their original virtue by sensational executions
reminding them of punishment and reviving their fear. The
apparent solution to the problem is to let bad men gain
glory through actions that have a good outcome, if not a
good motive.
In the Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli favours the deeds
of the ancients above their philosophy; he reproaches his
contemporaries for consulting ancient jurists for political
wisdom rather than looking to the actual history of Rome. He
argues that the factional tumults of the Roman republic,
which were condemned by many ancient writers, actually made
Rome free and great. Moreover, although Machiavelli was a
product of the Renaissance—and is often portrayed as its
leading exponent (e.g., by 19th-century Swiss historian
Jacob Burckhardt)—he also criticized it, particularly for
the humanism it derived from Plato, Aristotle, and the Roman
orator Cicero (106–43 bc). He called for “new modes and
orders” and compared himself to the explorers of unknown
lands in his time. His emphasis on the effectual truth led
him to seek the hidden springs of politics in fraud and
conspiracy, examples of which he discussed with apparent
relish. It is notable that, in both The Prince and the
Discourses on Livy, the longest chapters are on conspiracy.
Throughout his two chief works, Machiavelli sees politics
as defined by the difference between the ancients and the
moderns: the ancients are strong, the moderns weak. The
moderns are weak because they have been formed by
Christianity, and, in three places in the Discourses on
Livy, Machiavelli boldly and impudently criticizes the Roman
Catholic church and Christianity itself. For Machiavelli the
church is the cause of Italy’s disunity; the clergy is
dishonest and leads people to believe “that it is evil to
say evil of evil”; and Christianity glorifies suffering and
makes the world effeminate. But Machiavelli leaves it
unclear whether he prefers atheism, paganism, or a reformed
Christianity, writing later, in a letter dated April 16,
1527 (only two months before his death): “I love my
fatherland more than my soul.”
Writings » The Florentine Histories
Machiavelli’s longest work—commissioned by Pope Leo X in
1520, presented to Pope Clement VII in 1525, and first
published in 1532—is a history of Florence from its origin
to the death of Lorenzo di Piero de’ Medici in 1492.
Adopting the approach of humanist historians before him,
Machiavelli used the plural “histories,” dividing his
account into “books” with nonhistorical introductions and
invented speeches presented as if they were actual reports.
His history, moreover, takes place in a nonhistorical
context—a contest between virtue and fortune. The theme of
the Florentine Histories is the city’s remarkable party
division, which, unlike the divisions in ancient Rome, kept
the city weak and corrupt. Like the Discourses on Livy, the
Florentine Histories contains (less bold) criticism of the
church and popes and revealing portraits of leading
characters, especially of the Medici (the book is organized
around the return of Cosimo de’ Medici [1389–1464] to
Florence in 1434 after his exile). It also features an
exaggeratedly “Machiavellian” oration by a plebeian leader,
apparently Michele di Lando, who was head of the 1378 Revolt
of the Ciompi (“wool carders”), a rebellion of Florence’s
lower classes that resulted in the formation of the city’s
most democratic (albeit short-lived) government. Although
not a modern historian, Machiavelli, with his emphasis on
“diverse effects,” exhibits some of the modern historian’s
devotion to facts.
Writings » The Art of War and other writings
The Art of War (1521), one of only a few works of
Machiavelli to be published during his lifetime, is a
dialogue set in the Orti Oricellari, a garden in Florence
where humanists gathered to discuss philosophy and politics.
The principal speaker is Fabrizio Colonna, a professional
condottiere and Machiavelli’s authority on the art of war.
He urges, contrary to the literary humanists, that the
ancients be imitated in “strong and harsh things, not
delicate and soft”—i.e., in war. Fabrizio, though a
mercenary himself, inveighs against the use of mercenaries
in modern times and presents the Roman army as his model of
military excellence. The dialogue was later praised by the
Prussian war theorist Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) and
has achieved a prominent place in the history of writings on
war.
Among Machiavelli’s lesser writings, two deserve mention:
The Life of Castruccio Castracani of Lucca (1520) and The
Mandrake (1518; La Mandragola). The former is a sketch of
Castruccio Castracani (1281–1328), the Ghibelline ruler of
Lucca (a city near Florence), who is presented as the
greatest man of postclassical times. It concludes with a
list of witty remarks attributed to Castruccio but actually
taken from ancient philosophers, providing a rare glimpse of
Machiavelli’s view of them. The Mandrake, the best known of
Machiavelli’s three plays, was probably composed in 1518. In
it a foolish old jurist, Messer Nicia, allows himself to be
cuckolded by a young man, Callimaco, in order to produce a
son he cannot beget himself. His wife, Lucrezia, is
persuaded to comply—despite her virtue—by a crooked priest,
and the conspiracy is facilitated by a procurer. Since at
the end of the play everyone gets what he wants, the lesson
is that immoral actions such as adultery can bring
happiness—out of evil can come good.
Assessment
Machiavelli’s influence on later times must be divided into
what was transmitted under his own name and what was known
through the works of others but not acknowledged as
Machiavelli’s. Since his own name was infamous, there is
little of the former kind. “Machiavellian” has never been an
epithet of praise; indeed, one of the villains of the play
Henry VI, by William Shakespeare, claims to surpass
“murtherous Machevil.” For moral lessons like the one
described above and for attacks on the church, Machiavelli’s
works were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“Index of
Forbidden Books”) when it was first drawn up in 1564.
Nonetheless, his works were read by all the modern
philosophers, though only a few of them were brave enough to
defend him: the English lawyer and philosopher Francis Bacon
(1561–1626) discussed Machiavelli in his The Essayes or
Counsels, Civill and Morall (1625), noting his boldness; the
English political philosopher James Harrington (1611–77), in
his The Common-wealth of Oceana (1656), speaks admiringly of
Machiavelli as the “prince of politicians” and the disciple
of ancient prudence; the Dutch-Jewish philosopher Benedict
de Spinoza (1632–77) defended Machiavelli’s good intentions
in teaching tyrants how to gain power, claiming in his
Political Treatise (1677) that Machiavelli was a republican;
likewise, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau
(1712–78) asserted in his Social Contract (1762) that
Machiavelli was, despite appearances, “an honest man and a
good citizen” and The Prince “the book of republicans.” The
contemporary republican interpretation of Machiavelli, less
mindful of his evil reputation, presents him as a
communitarian alternative to self-interested liberalism.
More powerful, however, was Machiavelli’s underground
influence on thinkers who avoided using his name. One may
suspect that some used his doctrines even while joining in
attacks on him. One such scholar, for example, was the
Italian philosopher Giovanni Botero (1540–1617), who was
among the first to establish the idea of a moral exemption
for the state. Authors taking a similar approach developed,
for safety’s sake, the practice of quoting passages from the
Roman historian Tacitus (ad 56–120)—thus becoming known as
“Tacitists”—when they might just as well have cited
Machiavelli.
But the greater, more fundamental claim of Machiavelli’s
influence, made especially by Burckhardt and Strauss, is as
the founder of modernity. Machiavelli himself despised the
moderns of his day as weak, but he also held forth the
possibility of a “perpetual republic” that would remedy the
weakness of the moderns and correct the errors of the Romans
and so establish a political order no longer subject to the
vicissitudes of fortune. There is no modern science in
Machiavelli, but the Baconian idea of the conquest of nature
and fortune in the interest of humanity is fully present. So
too are modern notions of irreversible progress, of
secularism, and of obtaining public good through private
interest. Whether Machiavelli could have had so grand an
ambition remains controversial, but all agree on his
greatness—his novelty, the penetration of his mind, and the
grace of his style.
Harvey Mansfield
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Jean Bodin
French political philosopher
born 1530, Angers, France
died June 1596, Laon
Main
French political philosopher whose exposition of the
principles of stable government was widely influential in
Europe at a time when medieval systems were giving way to
centralized states. He is widely credited with introducing
the concept of sovereignty into legal and political thought.
In 1551 Bodin went to the University of Toulouse to study
civil law. He remained there as a student and later as a
teacher until 1561, when he abandoned the teaching of law
for its practice and returned to Paris as avocat du roi
(French: “king’s advocate”) just as the civil wars between
Roman Catholics and Huguenots were beginning. In 1571 he
entered the household of the king’s brother, François, duc
d’Alençon, as master of requests and councillor. He appeared
only once on the public scene, as deputy of the third estate
for Vermandois at the Estates-General of Blois in 1576. His
uninterested conduct on that occasion lost him royal favour.
He opposed the projected resumption of war on the Huguenots
in favour of negotiation, and he also opposed the suggested
alienation, or sale, of royal domains by Henry III as
damaging to the monarchy. When the duc d’Alençon died in
1583, Bodin retired to Laon as procurateur to the presidial
court. He remained there until his death from the plague 13
years later.
Bodin’s principal writing, The Six Bookes of a
Commonweale (1576), won him immediate fame and was
influential in western Europe into the 17th century. The
bitter experience of civil war and its attendant anarchy in
France had turned Bodin’s attention to the problem of how to
secure order and authority. Bodin thought that the secret
lay in recognition of the sovereignty of the state and
argued that the distinctive mark of the state is supreme
power. This power is unique; absolute, in that no limits of
time or competence can be placed upon it; and
self-subsisting, in that it does not depend for its validity
on the consent of the subject. Bodin assumed that
governments command by divine right because government is
instituted by providence for the well-being of humanity.
Government consists essentially of the power to command, as
expressed in the making of laws. In a well-ordered state,
this power is exercised subject to the principles of divine
and natural law; in other words, the Ten Commandments are
enforced, and certain fundamental rights, chiefly liberty
and property, are extended to those governed. But should
these conditions be violated, the sovereign still commands
and may not be resisted by his subjects, whose whole duty is
obedience to their ruler. Bodin distinguished only three
types of political systems—monarchy, aristocracy, and
democracy—according to whether sovereign power rests in one
person, in a minority, or in a majority. Bodin himself
preferred a monarchy that was kept informed of the peoples’
needs by a parliament or representative assembly.
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Hugo Grotius
Dutch statesman and scholar
Dutch Huigh de Groot
born April 10, 1583, Delft, Neth.
died Aug. 28, 1645, Rostock, Mecklenburg-Schwerin
Main
Dutch jurist and scholar whose masterpiece De Jure Belli ac
Pacis (1625; On the Law of War and Peace) is considered one
of the greatest contributions to the development of
international law. Also a statesman and diplomat, Grotius
has been called the “father of international law.”
Early life
Grotius’s father, a learned man, had been burgomaster of
Delft and curator of the recently founded Leiden University
(courses then would be similar to high-school classes
today). An extremely gifted child, Hugo Grotius wrote Latin
elegies at age 8 and became a student of the arts faculty at
Leiden University at age 11. He studied under the renowned
humanist Joseph Scaliger, who contributed greatly to
Grotius’s development as a philologist.
In 1598 he accompanied Johann van Oldenbarnevelt, the
leading Dutch statesman, to France, where he met Henry IV,
who called Grotius the “miracle of Holland.” This experience
is reflected in Pontifex Romanus (1598), which comprises six
monologues on the current political situation. In 1599 he
settled in The Hague as an advocate, lodging for a time with
the court preacher and theologian Johannes Uyttenbogaert.
In 1601 the States of Holland requested from Grotius an
account of the United Provinces’ revolt against Spain. The
resulting work, covering the period from 1559 to 1609, was
written in the manner of the Roman historian Tacitus.
Although it was largely finished by 1612, it was published
only posthumously in 1657 as Annales et Historiae de Rebus
Belgicis (“Annals and Histories of the Revolts of the Low
Countries”).
Throughout his life Grotius wrote in a variety of fields.
He edited, with commentary, an encyclopaedic work on the
seven liberal arts by the North African poet Martianus
Capella and the Phaenomena by the Greek astronomer Aratus of
Soli. He wrote a number of philological works and a drama,
Adamus Exul (1601; Adam in Exile), which was greatly admired
by the English poet John Milton. Grotius also published many
theological and politico-theological works, including De
Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627; The Truth of the
Christian Religion), the book that in his lifetime probably
enjoyed the highest popularity among his works.
Involvement in politics
Grotius was deeply involved in Dutch politics. In the early
17th century the united kingdom of Spain and Portugal
claimed a monopoly on trade with the East Indies. In 1604,
after a Dutch admiral had seized the Portuguese vessel Santa
Catarina, the Dutch East India Company asked Grotius to
produce a work legally defending the action on the ground
that, by claiming a monopoly on the right of trade,
Spain-Portugal had deprived the Dutch of their natural
trading rights. The work, De Jure Praedae (On the Law of
Prize and Booty), remained unpublished during his lifetime,
except for one chapter—in which Grotius defends free access
to the ocean for all nations—which appeared under the famous
title Mare Liberum (The Freedom of the Seas) in 1609. The
work buttressed the Dutch position in the negotiations
regarding the Twelve Years’ Truce concluded that year with
Spain and was widely circulated and often reprinted.
In 1607 Grotius was appointed advocaat-fiscaal (attorney
general) of the provinces of Holland, Zeeland, and West
Friesland. In the following year he married Maria van
Reigersberch, the daughter of the burgomaster of Veere, an
intelligent and courageous woman who stood by him
unwaveringly in the difficult years to come. A member of the
Remonstrants (primarily upper-class “regents” siding with
Jacobus Arminius’s tolerant Protestantism), Grotius was
engaged in the bitter political struggle under
Oldenbarnevelt against the Gomarists (orthodox Calvinists
led by Franciscus Gomarus who were dominant among the
ministers and the populace), who were under the leadership
of Prince Maurice, for control of the country.
In 1618 Maurice, using his military powers in a coup
d’état, ordered the arrest of Arminian leaders.
Oldenbarnevelt was executed for high treason, and Grotius
was sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress of
Loevestein. In 1621, with the aid of his wife, Grotius made
a dramatic escape from the castle by hiding in a chest of
books. He fled to Antwerp and finally to Paris, where he
stayed until 1631 under the patronage of Louis XIII.
Life in exile: De Jure Belli ac Pacis
While in Paris, Grotius published his legal masterpiece, De
Jure Belli ac Pacis, in 1625. In writing this work, which
made full use of De Jure Praedae, he was strongly influenced
by the bitter, violent political struggles both in his own
country and in Europe more broadly, particularly the Thirty
Years’ War, which had broken out in 1618. In one famous
passage of De Jure Belli ac Pacis, Grotius wrote that,
[f]ully convinced…that there is a common law among
nations, which is valid alike for war and in war, I have had
many and weighty reasons for undertaking to write upon this
subject. Throughout the Christian world I observed a lack of
restraint in relation to war, such as even barbarous nations
should be ashamed of. (Prolegomena, 28.)
Grotius sought to achieve his practical objective to
minimize bloodshed in wars by constructing a general theory
of law (jurisprudentia) that would restrain and regulate war
between various independent powers, including states.
Following Roman law and the work of the Stoics, Grotius
placed natural law at the centre of his jurisprudentia. He
argued that a law deduced from man’s inherent nature would
have a degree of validity
even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded
without the utmost wickedness, that there is no God, or that
the affairs of men are of no concern to Him. (Prolegomena,
11.)
He made this daring argument because he believed that
natural law—the most important tool to restrain and regulate
wars in Europe—must be independent of religion, applying to
all people regardless of their religious beliefs. He
realized, however, that the goal of restraining and
regulating war could not be achieved by secular law alone.
He thus reintroduced various elements of Christianity into
his jurisprudentia. Grotius has often been quoted to
“secularize” law or natural law, but the so-called
secularization of law was hypothetical rather than
categorical. In order to understand this critical character
of law in De Jure Belli ac Pacis, one must understand the
entire structure of his argumentation.
Grotius adopts a multilayered structure of norms,
including various religious ones, to restrain and regulate
both the resort to war and violence in warfare. When Grotius
found it difficult to persuade various kinds of rulers to
refrain from resorting to war or committing cruel acts
during the war by means of secular norms either by natural
law or law of nations, he did not hesitate to resort to “law
of God,” mainly taken from the Old Testament, or “law of
love” and other similar norms taken from the New Testament.
He even relied on the argument based on utility as a last
resort when he found it difficult to discourage political
leaders to refrain from violence by means of normative
argument alone, though he wrote that consideration of
utility was not his concern. This multilayered character of
the argumentation was the vital means to achieve his
practical goal: minimizing bloodshed.
Grotius believed that only wars with just causes should
be allowed. Because there is no judge for judicial
settlement between nations, war as a means to solve
conflicts must be tolerated. However, causes of war should
be limited to causes for litigation. For example, the
defense and restitution of things are just causes of war
(see also just war). He also developed a theory of crime and
punishment, which he used to characterize certain wars as
just punishment for crimes committed by independent powers,
including states.
Later life
Prince Maurice died in 1625, and in 1631 Grotius returned to
Holland. After intense debate in the States of Holland,
Grotius was again threatened with arrest. In 1632 he went to
Hamburg, then the centre of Franco-Swedish diplomatic
relations. In 1634 the Swedish chancellor, Axel, Count
Oxenstierna, offered him the position of Swedish ambassador
in Paris. Grotius accepted the appointment and Swedish
citizenship. He settled again in Paris, but his life as a
diplomat was not as successful as his life as a scholar.
In 1636–37 he worked on the Historia Gotthorum,
Vandalorum et Langobardorum (“History of the Goths, Vandals,
and Lombards”). He showed great interest in the
reunification of the Christian church and published a number
of works dealing with this subject. He also revised, again
and again, De Jure Belli ac Pacis; the last edition
including his own revision was published in 1646, shortly
after his death. On the other hand, Grotius was not
appointed to be a negotiator at the important peace
conferences of Münster and Osnabrück that finally resulted
in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years’ War.
In 1644 Grotius was relieved of his post of ambassador in
Paris. After consultations with Queen Christina, he left
Stockholm for Lübeck on Aug. 12, 1645, but was shipwrecked
on the coast of eastern Pomerania. The great man, great not
only in the history of international law but also in natural
law, civil law, criminal law, and modern humanities, soon
died of exhaustion at Rostock.
Assessment
Grotius designed his theory to apply not only to states but
also to rulers and subjects of law in general. De Jure Belli
ac Pacis thus proved useful in the later development of
theories of both private and criminal law. It is in the area
of international law, however, that Grotius’s masterpiece
has been most influential. Its general normative framework
provided a foundation to constitute and regulate relations
between emerging sovereign states, which became the basic
units of modern international society.
Non-European civilizations also had developed norms and
institutions for regulating the behaviour of independent
powers in their own regions (e.g., the siyar in Islamic
civilization and the Sino-centric tributary system in East
Asia). However, many of these civilizations had been
subjugated by the European colonial powers by the end of the
19th century. Thus, European international law became global
international law, and Grotius’s influence accordingly was
magnified on a global scale. Although long regarded as the
“father of international law”—and his importance has been
undeniable and lasting—this title is misleading; instead,
Grotius was one of many “fathers” of European international
law, and European international law is just one of many
historically coexisting regional normative systems.
Yasuaki Onuma
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