historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

Chapter 1
Introduction
The subject of this thesis is the historical and political thought of Marcus Zuerius
Boxhorn (1612-1653), professor at Leiden University from 1633 until 1653.
The primary goal of this thesis is to unearth Boxhorn’s historical and political
thought, or at least to discover and present their most central features. On the
basis of the results of this investigation into Boxhorn’s historical and political
thought, an attempt will be made to make some more general observations
about the nature and development of Dutch historical and political thought
in the seventeenth century. That is the secondary goal of this thesis. The outcome
of this thesis will show that Boxhorn was an important transitional figure
between the ‘traditional’ humanist approach to history and politics, on the
one hand, and the ‘new’ approach to history and politics of the later seventeenth
century and Enlightenment, on the other.
Thanks to the reception of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469-1527), which had
already begun in the sixteenth century, and the appearance of the works of
Hugo Grotius (1583-1645) and Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the seventeenth
century witnessed two important intellectual developments: the rise of modes
of secular political thought and the rise of new ideas of natural law. These two
developments were sometimes accompanied by a hostile attitude towards
the received academic tradition. Hobbes, for example, explicitly campaigned
against the ‘Vain Philosophy’ he believed was taught at the universities and
which he wanted to see replaced with his own teachings as expressed in Leviathan
(1651). 1 In the Dutch Republic Hobbes’s attack on academic learning
found an echo in the Politike discoursen (Political Discourses, 1662) of the Leiden
cloth merchant Johan de la Court (1622-1660). In the introduction to the
work Johan’s brother Pieter de la Court (1618-1685) explained that Johan had
started his own study of politics partly because of his dissatisfaction with the
quality of the political works, written in Latin, ‘by some German Professors,
Doctors, Preachers and Schoolmasters’. In Johan’s view these works, which
1 Hobbes’s attack on academic learning is most forcefully expressed in chapter 46 of his Leviathan,
of which the title reads: ‘Of Darknesse from Vain Philosophy, and Fabulous Traditions’. Hobbes thought
that his Leviathan ‘may be profitably printed, and more profitably taught in the Universities’. Thomas
Hobbes, Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1 st ed. 1996, 2002),
pp. 458, 491.