Ideas
Page 90
Men had been told, by the likes of Thomas Aquinas, that God had ordained the forms by which men should live together, and that any change was unthinkable. Under Aquinas, secular authority was allowed, but still as part of God’s plan. Yet men, though they might still be very religious, though unbelief might still be an impossibility for them, were not fools. Some of them at least could not accept that chaos and disintegration were part of any divine plan.
The first man to attempt to think his way through this problem was Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527). He was fortunate (if that is the word) in living in Florence under three different systems of government–the rule of the Medici, until 1494, then of Savonarola and, after his fall, in 1498, of a republic. Indeed, Machiavelli was given a job in the new republic, as secretary to the second chancery, concerned with home matters, war, and some foreign affairs.4 This did not give him much in the way of power but it did give him an inside view of politics. In his dealings with other city-states in Italy, he came in touch with the oligarchy of Venice and the monarchy of Naples in addition to the democracy in his own city. In Rome his travels also brought him up against the notorious Cesare Borgia, then in his mid-twenties. Machiavelli made Cesare Borgia the ‘hero’ of his book The Prince. This book, generally regarded as the first book of modern political theory, or realpolitik, as we would say, was in fact written only because the Florentine republic fell in 1512 and the Medici were restored to leadership. Machiavelli fell from favour, lost his position, was tortured and–all in quick succession–exiled from the city. In his enforced leisure, at his estate in San Casciano, he wrote The Prince very quickly, completing it in 1513, and dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici (grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent). In this way he hoped to return to favour. In fact, Lorenzo never even read the book, and it wasn’t printed in Machiavelli’s lifetime.5
Machiavelli was a humanist and this coloured The Prince. It meant for example that he had a rigidly secular attitude to politics. Like Leonardo da Vinci, he was a scientist, the very first social scientist according to some, and in following this course he noted to himself that he was, in fact, opening up a ‘new route’. What he meant was that he tried to look at politics objectively, in a disinterested way, so as to be able to generalise. He wanted to describe things as they were, not as they ‘should be’. The Prince made a total break with the past in that Machiavelli didn’t tell people what the good or honourable way to behave was, rather he was describing what he saw, how people actually do behave, ‘how a prince must act if he wishes to prevail’.6 In politics, Machiavelli was the first empiricist.
In some ways Machiavelli prefigured Galileo a century later. One of Galileo’s ideas was that matter was the same everywhere, in the heavens as on earth, and Machiavelli argued that human nature was the same everywhere and at all times. He carried this further, insisting that while man’s nature is both good and bad, for the purposes of politics we must assume it is bad. ‘Men are wicked,’ he writes, ‘and will not keep faith with you…Unless men are compelled to be good they will inevitably turn out bad.’ It may be that Machiavelli took his ‘new route’ because he himself had been so disillusioned by his own political experiences, or it may be that he took his theory from the religious temper of the times, with its emphasis on evil. But in doing what he did, Machiavelli emancipated politics from religion. In working out that men would always tend to act in their own selfish, short-term interests, Machiavelli turned politics into an arena of secular thought.7
Machiavelli’s other great innovation was his treatment of the state. In circumstances where men were selfish and evil and giving way constantly to evil inclinations, the only defence was lo stato–the state. ‘This is a term which in its application to the organisation of political power occurs for the first time in Machiavelli, and which in fact was long limited to the Italian language.’8 Hitherto, Hagen Schulze tells us, people had talked of ‘rule’ (dominium), ‘government’ (regimen), of ‘kingdoms’ or ‘land’ (regio or territorium), ‘but when Machiavelli and his Italian contemporaries, from Villani to Guicciardini, spoke of stato they had in mind a form of government that had not been thought of before: basically a situation in which a concentrated form of public political authority was exercised uniformly throughout a given territory, irrespective of the person who exercised it, or in whose name it was exercised; a self-justifying system without transcendental dimension or reference.’9 For Machiavelli the ends always justify the means and the maintenance of the state requires no justification beyond survival, because life without the state is unthinkable. ‘A prince need only be victorious and maintain his rule, and whatever means he employs will be looked upon as honourable and will please everyone.’10 This effectively marks the point of separation between theology and politics–in fact, at one point Machiavelli urges his readers to care more for their state than for their souls (though he thought the church should support the state and that success without such support would be difficult). His contemporary Francesco Guicciardini (1483–1540) went further, arguing that the medieval practice of subordinating politics to theology was now outmoded, that ‘no one can live truly according to God’s will unless he withdraws totally from the world; on the other hand, it is hard for man to live on tolerable terms with the world without offering offence to God’.11
It is worth mentioning here that, in calling his book The Prince, and using Cesare Borgia as a kind of anti-hero, as we would say today, Machiavelli wasn’t writing a manual for tyranny. This was just a device of Machiavelli’s, to make his book readable and accessible. The Prince, for him, is the personification of the state. He acts on behalf of the community and therefore must be willing ‘to let his own conscience sleep’.12 This is made clear when Machiavelli considers the rise and fall of states, which he says are governed by laws that differ from the laws of religion and from those of personal morality. ‘The state has its own rules, its own code of behaviour, and its reasons of state that must govern the actions of statesmen, if they wish to succeed.’13 The phrase ‘reasons of state’ was new too, but it entered the language firmly, never to leave. In essence it meant that a ruler was at liberty to break his word if the publica utilitas, the public interest, required him to do so. By the same token, the prince may lie to his own people–serve up propaganda–if, in his judgement, that serves the state. ‘Men in general judge by their eyes…the common people are always impressed by appearances and results.’ This was a decidedly un-Christian approach but it caught on, perhaps reflecting the fact that Machiavelli had it exactly right when he said that in man’s nature, when it came to politics, the bad outweighed the good.
A final factor in the emergence of the state was the Protestant revolt, which broke the unity of Christendom.14 In doing so it changed the position of the papacy. It was now, at least for Catholics, a state within the European community of states, rather than the supreme papacy it had been, or tried to be, in medieval Christendom. The significance of Luther and Calvin lay in the transfer of authority and political sovereignty from institutions to people.15
In his Defence of Liberty Against Tyrants, Hubert Languet (1518–1581), a famous Protestant divine, invoked ‘a theory of contract between God on the one hand, and the prince and the people jointly on the other’. Both king and people were supposed to ensure that each observed the correct forms of worship. It fell to the king to organise the church within his realm but if he defaulted, the people had a duty to coerce him, being guilty in the eyes of God if they lapsed and did not oppose a prince ‘who was in error’. ‘The common man is caught between two fires but he does have a role to play.’16 This, politically speaking, was the crucial point.
Even the Catholics, even the Jesuits, were affected by this thinking to some extent. Among the Jesuits their two most important political theorists, Juan Mariana and Francisco Suárez, both Spaniards, were by no means deaf to what was happening elsewhere. Mariana argued that the social order derived from nature and that government evolved to accommodate the needs
of civilised life and to protect property. From this, he said, it follows that the interests of the whole community come first and ought not to be subordinated to an absolute ruler. For him, the purpose of the state is the worship of God and the establishment of a Christian way of life, always of course in accordance with the doctrines of the church. Therefore, secular government cannot command spiritual loyalty unless sanctified by the church. But here too the people have a role, albeit limited. Suárez, in his De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore (1619) argued that ‘all power comes from the community; men are born free and society is ordained to ensure order’. For him, therefore, a community is not simply an aggregate of individuals but an authority in itself, based on common consent. From this it follows that only the community can sanction authority. This is a much stronger statement than Mariana’s.17 Finally, in defining the papal position, the Jesuit theorists abandoned the traditional claim for papal sovereignty over all princes, which had caused so much trouble in the past, and in the process redefined the role of the headship of the church. In this way the pope became a sovereign on a par with other sovereigns, negotiating with them on equal terms for the benefit of Catholics.18
We may say then that four ideas emerged from this mix of events and theories: the secular side of politics had been emphasised, in which the people had a clearly defined role; the idea of individual liberty, and the right of rebellion, had crossed a psychological watershed (this was Karl Mannheim’s point); the concept of the state had been introduced and clarified; and finally, the sheer, unending bitterness of religious strife had concluded in what John Bowle aptly calls ‘a toleration of exhaustion’.19 Politically speaking, this was the end of the medieval order and the birth of the modern world.20
The modern state, centred on a bureaucracy and organised for defence/aggression, first emerged in France. Louis XIV never actually said ‘L’état, c’est moi’, but one can certainly see why the words were put into his mouth.21 At that time the use of the word état, in the singular, in France, would have been particularly shocking. Les états, in the plural, were the ‘estates’, the different ‘natural’ groupings that made up French society–the nobles, the clergy, the commons, who ruled jointly with the monarch, who was himself an estate. (In both France and Holland the Parliaments were, and in Holland still are, known as the ‘Estates General’.) The novel–the revolutionary–idea that the monarch should be the sole power in the state had been born as a result of the vicious civil war that tore France apart in the sixteenth century. Faced with such widespread demoralisation and the collapse of all civilised standards, and with religious fanaticism on all sides, humanists everywhere came to the view that any system of government that put an end to civil war was preferable to continual fighting. In this way the equivalents of Machiavelli arose in France and England: Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes.
Surrounded by the bloodshed of the Huguenot wars in France, Jean Bodin (1529–1596), a lawyer and philosopher, realised that the salvation of his country lay in the strong rule of a central power, and as a direct consequence produced his doctrine of sovereignty. In the Six Books of the Republic, he sought to make the power of government so strong that it could always outweigh the special interests of regional autonomy and of religious persuasion. Like the Jesuits, he regarded the safeguarding of property as pre-eminent and, on this reading, his idea of the state was that it was there, above all, to preserve order.22 It should be confessionally neutral and embodied in one man, the monarch.23 This did not mean the sovereign could do as he pleased. He had to abide by natural law, fairness, and by God’slaw. ‘This sovereignty [of the state]is unassailable.“He is sovereign who recognises nothing greater than himself save only Immortal God…The prince or people who possess sovereign power cannot be called to account for their actions by anyone but Immortal God”.’ This sounds fanatical and Bodin’s arguments certainly arose out of the vicious fanaticism shown in the French wars of religion.24 But under his system, religious issues were deliberately excluded, and not permitted to govern the policies of the state. They were matters for the church and it was expressly forbidden that they be settled by force.25 Thus was born the theory of the modern sovereign state. ‘Both the classical Roman conception of a world order, and the ideal of a Christian society, formulated by St Thomas [Aquinas] and Dante, are abandoned.’26
As many people have commented, the eventual results of this change were to be disastrous, in the twentieth century. But, at the time, in the wake of vicious religious intolerance, and the changing fortunes of nobles and ordinary people, it was felt that the only immediate hope of efficient government was in the development of centralised power, for the sake of order.
In seventeenth-century France, it seemed to work. This was the time when she rose to a position of unchallenged supremacy in Europe, both politically and culturally. Her population was 20 million people, about twice that of the Holy Roman Empire, three times the combined population of England and Scotland, and four times that of Spain. The great feudal aristocracies had been tamed and domesticated by means of the court: this provided the setting for the glorification of the monarch, ‘a temple for the worship of the ruler’.27 No fewer than 10,000 people took part in the court’s complicated rituals and no greater honour could be imagined than to be part of it. The strength and unity of the state was maintained by a standing army ten times the size of the court–100,000 men. This standing army was the ultima ratio Regis, the ultimate instrument for the enforcement of royal authority (these Latin words were actually engraved on the cannon of the Prussian army). Such standing armies were expensive but were paid for, in part, by the state’s involvement in trade.28 The theory here was that the status and reputation of the sovereign were dependent on the economic prosperity of the state, which gave the state the right to intervene in commerce. This meant the introduction of taxes (and tax farming, to guarantee revenues) and the development of luxuries. The latter was based on the economic theory that the amount of money circulating in Europe was roughly constant, so that one country could only become wealthier by drawing money from somewhere else. The ideal form of trade, therefore, was to import raw materials, relatively cheaply, and work them up to finished products, to be sold back abroad for much higher prices. So far as France was concerned, the idea worked spectacularly: the level of skill in arts and crafts was far higher there than elsewhere–French textiles, porcelain, furniture and perfumes brought in huge revenues, much of which was siphoned off by the state. Many other states in Europe modelled themselves on the Sun King.29 A final element in absolutism was the new tactics of war. With huge standing armies in Europe, for the first time, the new tactics called for the manoeuvring of large bodies of men with great precision, and meant that much greater discipline was now needed. This led to a greater concentration of power of the absolute state at home, and indeed the idea of the state now overwhelmed men’s minds.30 This also had something to do with the ever-present European wars of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.
The first man to make the most of the scientific revolution in politics was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), the son of a vicar in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, in the west of England.31 Hobbes was never a Fellow of the Royal Society, as John Locke was (see below), but he did send in scientific papers to the society and he carried out his own experiments in physiology and mathematics. (His friend John Aubrey, in his famous book, Brief Lives, described Hobbes as being ‘in love with geometry’.) Hobbes acted as assistant to Boyle and amanuensis to Francis Bacon and met both Galileo and Descartes. He had an entirely materialistic view of the world, and developed the important doctrine of causality, the idea that the world is ‘an endless chain of cause and effect’.32
Though Hobbes went further than Bodin, he shared some of the same views, and for much the same reasons. Just as Bodin produced Six Books against the background of the Huguenot wars in France, so Hobbes produced his works in the immediate aftermath of the English Civil War. Like Bodin, he thought religious atrocities were based on fantas
ies and illusions brought about by fanaticism; therefore, what he was after, above all, was security for people and property–order. Like Machiavelli, he assumed that men are reasonable and yet predatory, and like Bodin he built an argument for the absolute authority of the sovereign. Hobbes, however, considered that a sovereign could be either a monarch or an assembly (though he preferred the former), and he put the ecclesiastical power firmly under the secular power. The Leviathan (the biblical monster, ‘which alone retained the wolf-like potential of man’s primeval condition’) is one of the great books of political theory and contains the most comprehensive description of Hobbes’ ideas, though he wrote several other books, notably the De Cive, the Tripos and the Philosophical Rudiments.33 In these, he reveals just what a heavy price he is willing to pay for order.
The Leviathan, ‘my discourse of Civill and Religious Government occasioned by the disorders of the Present Time’, was published in 1651.34 The book is divided into four. ‘Of Man’, Part One, is an investigation of the state of human knowledge and of psychology. There are chapters on the ‘Lawes of Nature’ and the origins of the social contract. Part Two, ‘Of Commonwealth’, contains the main thrust of the book. In the third part Hobbes airs his religious views and in the last part, ‘Of the Kingdom of Darkness’, he culminates with an attack on the church of Rome.35
Hobbes was dogmatic, didactic, dogged. His attempt to be ‘scientific’ is everywhere apparent. Underneath it all, he believed that sociological truth is just as discoverable in politics as it is in physics, biology or astronomy. ‘The skill of making and maintaining Common Wealths consists in Certain Rules, as doth Arithmetique and Geometry; not (as Tennis play) in practice only…’36 Hobbes argues openly that the state is a mere artificial contrivance for furthering the interests of the individuals who comprise it. He denied the Aristotelian belief that man is a social animal and argued that no society exists before the ‘covenant of submission’.37 Instead, he begins with the axiom that the natural condition of man is war. This is Machiavellian, only more so, and Hobbes’ pessimistic outlook conditions all of the book. In the first part, on human knowledge and psychology, his survey of what was known at the time leads him to conclude (controversially enough, then) that nature has made man ‘so equal in faculties of body and mind’ that, ‘when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as to prevent competition between them…So that in the nature of man we find three principall causes of quarrel. First, Competition; secondly, Diffidence [by which Hobbes meant fear]; thirdly, Glory.’ The consequences of this are not good. Life, he famously remarked, was ‘solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short’.38