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

Chapter 1. Introduction
advice. We do this in chapter 9 by analysing the Disquisitiones politicae (Political
Inquiries, 1650), one of Boxhorn’s most popular works. The most important
question of this chapter is what the central features of Boxhorn’s practical
political advice were. The chapter ends with connecting Boxhorn’s empirical
and historical approach to politics with his relativistic view on human reason
and metaphysical theories and, from there, with his positive view on scientific
innovations.
Finally, at the end of this introduction a short remark on methodology. The
method followed in this thesis can be best described as contextualism in a
broad sense. In this thesis attention is not only paid to the intellectual context
of Boxhorn’s historical and political thought, but also to their ‘non-intellectual’
context. The former deals with questions like: what were Boxhorn’s
sources, how did he use them, and how do his ideas relate to those of his
predecessors, contemporaries, and later authors? The latter concentrates on
questions like: when did Boxhorn write work A or B, how do the ideas that
Boxhorn expressed in work A or B relate to his personal situation at that specific
moment in time when he wrote work A or B, and how to that in the Dutch
Republic? By combining these two contextual approaches, this thesis will
hopefully provide the reader with a broad overview of Boxhorn’s historical
and political thought in which both the intellectual context and the ‘non-intellectual’
context of Boxhorn’s historical and political thought are sufficiently
taken into account. It is up to the reader if I have succeeded in this attempt.
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