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

Chapter 8. The science of politics. The Institutiones politicae
sociability is completely absent. 62 Instead, Boxhorn provides his readers with
a gloomy description of the origin of political society and of man’s nature
that strongly suggests that it was not ‘special to man’ to live with his fellow
men, but that he was forced to do so by the circumstances he found himself
in. 63 This was a line of thought that Arnisaeus, one of the founding fathers
of the politica genre, had associated with Plato, Machiavelli, and the Spanish
Jesuit Juan de Mariana (1536-1624), 64 and for which Hobbes, the brothers De
la Court, and Spinoza would become notorious, that is, a line of thought that
took man’s unsociability as its point of departure and that grounded the foundation
and workings of political society on a negative anthropology of fear,
ambition, and self-interest. 65
62 That is, in the sections attributed to Boxhorn. It can be found in the commentaries of George
Hornius. See Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, II.10, p. 359 [365].
63 I therefore disagree with Ernst Kossmann’s judgement that Boxhorn, whom Kossmann classified
as an erudite but superficial scholar, represented the merry side of the Baroque age, who followed
the latest popular trends, and who, unlike the brothers De la Court, could find amusement in men’s
wicked ways. On account of these arguments, Kossmann concluded that scholars like Boxhorn had felt
no need to develop methods by which better forms of social and political behaviour could be achieved.
As this chapter will show, in the case of Boxhorn the very opposite is true. Kossmann, “Enkele laatzeventiende-eeuwse
Nederlandse geschriften over Raison d’Etat”, pp. 103-6.
64 Henning Arnisaeus, Doctrina politica (Lowijs Elzevier; Amsterdam, 1651), I.2, p. 46. ‘Plato quidem,
3. de ll. & ferè Machiav. l. 1. disc. ad 1. Dec. Liv. c. I. Ioh. Marian. l. I. de reg. instit. c. I. homines putat
primum egestate & necessitate compulsos societatem iniisse. Sed Arist. 4. pol. 4. illam sententiam meritò
improbat, quoniam, ut in loci illius enarratione dicit Thomas, civitas non est propter ipsum vivere, sed
propter benè vivere.’ For a discussion of Arnisaeus’s own view on the beginning of society, see Brett,
Changes of State, p. 119.
65 This line of thought has a religious counterpart in Augustine’s negative picture of the unavoidable
persistence of human sinfulness due to the Fall, and his subsequent view of politics as ‘the means
to achieve minimum disorder’. Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought, Vol. 1: From Ancient Greece
to Early Christianity (Blackwell Publishers; Oxford/Malden, 2000), pp. 330-37, with quote on p. 333. Taking
his cue from the same Spanish Late-Scholastic tradition by which Boxhorn was influenced, Samuel
Rutherford (c.1600-1660), writing in the early 1640s, also pointed out to the artificial and unnatural
foundation of political society. Although he accepted that ‘God hath made man a social creature, and
one who inclineth to be governed by men’ (specific reference to Aristotle, Politics, 1252b1-1253a1 [I:2]),
he also argued that ‘if all men be born equally free … there is no reason in nature why one should be
king and lord over another; therefore … I conceive all jurisdiction of man over man to be as it were
artificial and positive, and that it inferreth some servitude whereof nature from the womb hath freed
us …’ (specific reference to Vázquez, Controversiarum illustrium, I.42.28-29). Samuel Rutherford, Lex,
Rex, or the Law and the Prince (Sprinkle Publications; Harrisonburg, 1982), pp. 1-2. For Rutherford and
his modification of the arguments put forward by the Spanish Late-Scholastics, see Robert von Friedeburg,
“Bausteine widerstandsrechtlicher Argumente in der frühen Neuzeit (1523-1668): Konfessionen,
klassische Verfassungsvorbilder, Naturrecht, direkter Befehl Gottes, historische Rechte der Gemeinwesen”,
in Christoph Strohm and Heinrich de Wall (eds.), Konfessionalität und Jurisprudenz in der frühen
Neuzeit (Duncker and Humblot; Berlin, 2009), pp. 130-31, 154-56. In his analysis of Rutherford’s ‘mind’
John Coffey, who classifies Lex, Rex as an in some ways ‘deeply Thomistic book’, tries to explain these
two seemingly opposed ideas of Rutherford by pointing out to the distinction that Rutherford draws
between political society being natural ‘in the root’ and voluntary ‘in the manner of coalescing’. John
Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge University
Press; Cambridge, 1997), pp. 152, 158-63.
257