Descartes had a remarkable capacity for lively friendships with young women intellectuals. In 1640, when he was forty-seven, he met the charming twenty-four-year-old Elizabeth of Bohemia, Princess Palatine. She had a talent for languages, had read some of his work, and was receiving instruction from university professors in philosophy and the sciences. She brought friends to visit Descartes, then living in a remote village in the marshes. Thus began a correspondence of which there remain twenty-six letters from Elizabeth and thirty-three from Descartes, on all sorts of philosophic and scientific subjects. Although he was a confirmed Catholic and she had been raised a Protestant, in an age of religious wars they still shared theological concerns. She needed his solace, especially on receiving news of the beheading of her uncle Charles I in England on February 9, 1649. Up to a point she shared Cartesian doubt, but oddly wrote that “you . . . alone have kept me from being skeptical.” They also shared mathematical puzzles like the ancient problem of the three circles, which she delighted him by solving.
The young intellectual Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-1689), who had been receiving Descartes’s writings from his friend and admirer who was the French minister in Sweden, wished to add him to the circle of brilliant celebrities at her court. He was reluctant to leave his village retreat at Egmond, but she pressed him with an offer of a naval vessel to take him to Stockholm. When he finally gave in and arrived in October 1649, he was impressed by the twenty-three-year-old queen’s lively mind. In that “land of bears between rock and ice” he observed that “men’s thoughts freeze during the winter months.” She set the bitter-cold hour of five o’clock in the morning for their tutorial sessions, which gave him chills, brought on pneumonia, and led to his death in February 1650. He received the last rites and died as a Catholic. During the French Revolution his remains were removed to the Pantheon.
PART FIVE
THE LIBERAL WAY
Liberty is not a means to a higher political end.
It is itself the highest political end.
—LORD ACTON, HISTORY OF FREEDOM (1907)
23
Machiavelli’s Reach for a Nation
The Renaissance in Europe, a great age of poetry, the arts, and architecture, and epochal adventures of discovery, never produced a great work of theoretical philosophy, nor a work of history to live alongside Herodotus and Thucydides. The widening vistas of experience diverted man’s seeking spirit from the ways of the Creator to new areas of man’s own dominion. So the age did produce the pioneer work of modern political science. It grew out of the experience of a perceptive and eloquent Florentine Seeker, active in the life of the Italian city-state and its battles with the papacy. The name of this first modern political scientist would become an eponym for the evil and devious ways of politicians. The reputation of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527) has suffered in history. He has been treated as a shallow polemicist for political immorality when he was a subtle interpreter, a Seeker of the grand truths of European political experience. His thought judged solely by his hundred-page essay, The Prince, has been as little appreciated as Karl Marx’s ideas would have been if judged solely by The Communist Manifesto without referring to Das Kapital. To rediscover Machiavelli is to see the foundations of modern political science.
Born in Florence to an impoverished father of a noble family, who had been denied public office as an insolvent debtor, Niccolò did not receive the education customary for his prominent family. As a youth he was mostly self-educated by the books he read and by an occasional private tutor. He learned Latin, but not Greek. So, luckily for his later work, he was never overwhelmed by pedantry or erudition and retained the alertness and curiosity of the amateur. In the turnover in the government of Florence after Savonarola had been tortured, hanged, and burned, the young Machiavelli in 1498 was employed in the new government in the “second chancery,” which dealt with foreign affairs and defense.
Minor diplomatic missions to France opened his eyes to the working of strong government. Returning to Florence, he saw how the ruthless Cesare Borgia had created a new state for himself in central Italy. Determined to strengthen his home city of Florence, Machiavelli promoted his idea of displacing the usual foreign mercenaries by a militia drawn from the people themselves. Missions to Pope Julius II, and across the Alps to Germany, produced his perceptive reports on the strength of the enemies of Florence and the invaders of Italy. He commanded his militia successfully in the capture of Pisa and in defense of Florence against the invaders. In the volatile wars of the city-states his patron the gonfalonier (chief magistrate) Soderini was removed, and in 1512, when the Medici returned to power in Florence, Machiavelli lost his place in the government. The Medici imprisoned and tortured him on suspicion of conspiracy, but he gave no false confession.
Having tried unsuccessfully to win the favor of the Medici, Machiavelli retreated to his family property near Florence where he wrote his influential books. He had been well baptized in the currents of political power. To his friend Francesco Vettori at the papal court in Rome in a familiar letter, he recounted the new delights of his life with books in his study.
On the threshold I slip off my day’s clothes with their mud and dirt, put on my royal and curial robes, and enter, decently accoutred, the ancient courts of men of old, where I am welcomed kindly and fed on that fare which is mine alone, and for which I was born: where I am not ashamed to address them and ask them the reasons for their action, and they reply considerately; and for two hours I forget all my cares, I know no more trouble, death loses its terrors: I am utterly translated in their company.
We owe Machiavelli’s passionate and illuminating primers of political science to his retreat from active politics during his fourteen-year exile on that farm outside Florence. If he had been a more successful politician, the literature of modern Seekers in political science would be much poorer.
He wrote his short book, Il Principe (The Prince), in a few months in 1513. It was dedicated to Lorenzo de’ Medici (the Magnificent), presented to him, and circulated in manuscript. His long work, his Discourses on the first ten books of Livy, was written over those many years of retreat. He was well aware that he was on a new track, as he explains in his introduction:
Although the envious nature of men, so prompt to blame and so slow to praise, makes the discovery and introduction of any new principles and systems as dangerous almost as the exploration of unknown seas and continents, yet, animated by that desire which impels me to do what may prove for the common benefit of all, I have resolved to open a new route, which has not yet been followed by any one, and may prove difficult and troublesome.
In the last chapter of The Prince, “Exhortation to Liberate Italy from the Barbarians,” Machiavelli gives us a clue to the new purpose he sees taking shape in modern history. The strategy of power that he describes will not be for its own sake but to fulfill a nation. It was said that “it was necessary in order that the power of Moses should be displayed that the people of Israel should be slaves in Egypt.” Similarly, Machiavelli ventures, “in order that the might of an Italian genius might be recognized, it was necessary that Italy should be reduced to her present condition, and that she should be more enslaved than the Hebrews, more oppressed than the Persians, and more scattered than the Athenians; without a head, without order, beaten, despoiled, lacerated, and overrun, and that she should have suffered ruin of every kind.” He calls on Lorenzo de’ Medici and his “illustrious house” “to follow those great men who redeemed their countries” so “in order to be able with Italian prowess to defend the country from foreigners.” He saw the nation as a way of organized liberation from alien dominion. The modern state in Italy that Machiavelli glimpsed was not to become real until the nineteenth century. Three centuries earlier he had prescribed ways to create and preserve such a nation-state.
The Italian peninsula in his day, split into numerous small states, whose lives were complicated by the papal reach for power, was again and again overrun by
French, German, Spanish, and Swiss armies. The tiny states, trying to defend themselves with mercenaries, lacked the power to repel the invaders. It is no wonder, then, that Machiavelli saw the primary “aim or thought” of the Prince to be “war and its organization and discipline.” And that he should foresee the “redeeming” of Italy in a strong, centralized state, defended by militias of its own people. So Machiavelli’s classic guide to national power came out of the desperate confusion of the numerous warring states of Renaissance Italy. The Italians needed his insights. But even with them, his Italy would be among the last of the great modern nations of Europe. “This barbarous domination stinks in the nostrils of everyone.” What Machiavelli provided, and what his country wanted, was not a political theory but political science and technology. He offered not a theory of the state but a manual for creating and preserving a state. No other part of Europe more desperately needed his prescriptions for political community.
A passionate pursuer of experience, he greatly admired the ancient Roman republic. And in his sprawling Discourses on Livy’s Roman history he reveals the special strengths of the government of the Roman republic—the balance of forces of the tribunes, the consuls, the Senate, and the people. In his rambling, suggestive exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of ancient society, he always has an eye on the recent experience of Florence and of Italy. So he cannot underestimate the power of religion, “the most necessary and assured support of any civil society.” And he sees ancient Roman society held together by religion. “The people of Florence are far from considering themselves ignorant and benighted, and yet Brother Girolamo Savonarola succeeded in persuading them that he held converse with God. I will not pretend to judge whether it was true or not, for we must speak with all respect of so great a man; but I may well say that an immense number believed it, without having seen any extraordinary manifestations that should have made them believe it.”
So Machiavelli offers us an incisive chapter on “the importance of giving religion a prominent influence in a state, and how Italy was ruined because she failed in this respect through conduct of the Church of Rome. . . . We Italians then owe to the Church of Rome and to her priests our having become irreligious and bad; but we owe her a still greater debt, and one that will be the cause of our ruin, namely that the Church has kept and still keeps our country divided. And certainly a country can never be united and happy, except when it obeys wholly one government, whether a republic or a monarchy, as is the case in France and in Spain; and the sole cause why Italy is not in the same condition and is not governed by either one republic or one sovereign is the Church; for having acquired and holding a temporal dominion, yet she has never had sufficient power or courage to enable her to seize the rest of the country, and make herself sole sovereign of all Italy.”
Machiavelli laments that while jurists and physicians in his time drew on the experience of the ancients, “yet to found a republic, maintain states, to govern a kingdom, organize an army, conduct a war, dispense justice, and extend empires, you will find neither prince, nor republic, nor captain, nor citizen, who has recourse to the examples of antiquity!” The main reason for this, he said, was less the weakness of education than “the evils caused by the proud indolence which prevails in most of the Christian states, and to the lack of real knowledge of history. . . . Thus the majority of those who read it take pleasure only in the variety of the events which history relates, without ever thinking of imitating the noble actions, deeming that not only difficult, but impossible; as though heaven, the sun, the elements, and men had changed the order of their motions and power, and were different from what they were in ancient times.” So in exploring ancient Rome he draws from “the variety of events” lessons for those who would transform the chaos of Italy in his day into a unified expression of “the might of an Italian genius.” His Discourses offer simple prescriptions for princes, republics, captains, and citizens toward that grand end, but not until three centuries had passed, in the age of Mazzini (1805-1872), had his hopes for a unified republican Italy, liberated from foreign dominion, begun to be realized.
24
John Locke Defines the Limits of Knowledge and of Government
The creators of dogma and champions of absolutes have a clear advantage before the bar of history. They offer attractive banners and clear targets. It is not as easy to give historic stature to the apostle of experience and of the modern liberal spirit John Locke. His life, buffeted by the winds of everyday politics, is lacking in drama or romance. His ideas were not strikingly original or subtle. His style was prosaic. So his career and his writings would illustrate the paradox of liberal thought. Openness to grand new ideas, the tradition of tolerant institutions, would be a by-product of the compromises of society’s daily problems, rather than of the sharp-edged visions of systems of philosophy. This man who provided a modern epistemology and leading ideas for democratic revolutions is one of the least systematic of the great social thinkers of modern times. Paradoxically, this prophet of revolutions would be a philosopher of limits. Yet if any modern thinker merits the title of a latter-day Aristotle, it is probably John Locke. He, too, offered ways of thinking equally applicable to science and society, ever ready to be arbitrated by common sense.
Born in 1632, son of a country attorney who had fought in the English Civil War on the side of Parliament, John Locke received the most conventional formal education. After Westminster School he took his B.A. at Christ Church College, Oxford (1656), which was still dominated by scholastic methods. Though his college offered advantages to those in orders, after reflection he decided not to become a clergyman.
His informal education awakened him to the new experiences of his age and encouraged him to seek a this-worldly solace. His growing interest in science was casually sparked by his providential contact with two of the most lively scientists of the day—the physicist Robert Boyle (1627-1691) and the physician Thomas Sydenham (1624-1689). Both provided antidotes to the scholastic methods still dominating the university. Not attached to any college, Boyle made his house on High Street in Oxford a laboratory and meeting place for experimental scientists whom he stimulated and encouraged. His air pumps (devised with the aid of Robert Hooke) made possible Boyle’s Law, and he showed how to make the barometer into a weather indicator. Passionately empirical and independent, Boyle had “purposely refrained” until he was thirty from reading Descartes’s works or Bacon’s Novum organum “that I might not be prepossessed with any theory or principles till I had spent some time in trying what things themselves would incline me to think.” Locke’s warm friendship with Boyle lasted till Boyle’s death.
After a brief tour as secretary to the British diplomatic mission in Brandenburg, Locke returned to Oxford to his experimental interests, and the influence of the eminent physician Thomas Sydenham, “the English Hippocrates,” a pioneer in clinical medicine and the treatment of smallpox and malaria. He became Sydenham’s intimate, and the doctor praised Locke’s intelligence as having “few equals and no superiors” in his time. Sydenham so bitterly opposed the professional dogmas that he was excluded from the College of Physicians. He believed the function of a physician to be “industrious investigation of the history of diseases, and of the effect of remedies, as shown by the only true teacher, experience.” Sharing this view, Locke—still without a medical degree—became a practicing physician.
It was as a physician that Locke began his momentous association with Anthony Ashley Cooper, first earl of Shaftesbury (1621-1683). A leading Parliamentary figure in the Civil War, Cooper was one of the commissioners sent by the House of Commons to invite Charles II to resume the throne. And he sponsored legislation to grant toleration to Protestant Dissenters. Cooper brought Locke into his large household as staff physician, but Locke soon became counselor in politics as well. The affinity of their thinking strengthened Locke in his liberal attitudes. Both favored a constitutional monarchy, the Protestant succession, civil liberty, and religious tolerati
on. Locke also enjoyed the spectacle of rising commerce and flourishing trade with the colonies, which he identified with toleration and a more open society. The example of Holland showed how toleration could nourish commerce, and how both could nourish culture. Locke was made secretary of Cooper’s group to promote trade with America, and he served as secretary of the newly founded Council of Trade and Plantations. Just as Boyle and Sydenham put Locke in the vanguard of new experience in the world of nature, so Anthony Ashley Cooper kept him in close touch with new currents in government and commerce.
Remarkably, none of these practical concerns distracted Locke from wider speculations that would place him in the vanguard of Seekers. Somehow these experiences stimulated him to pursue the large questions of philosophy and political theory, which made him a prophet of the English empirical spirit. Locke’s checkered active life as he shared the volatile political career of Anthony Ashley Cooper delayed the leisure needed for his works of philosophy and political theory, but enriched his understanding. In his early years at Oxford, Locke had been stimulated to do his most important work when he explored problems of philosophy and science in regular meetings in his chamber with five or six friends. These meetings, he explained in the Introductory Epistle to his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, while “discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves at a stand by the difficulties that arose on every side.” Locke decisively led them “to examine our own abilities and see what objects our understandings were or were not fitted to deal with.” The group agreed that Locke had hit on the basic question—the limits of human knowledge.
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