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

Chapter 8. The science of politics. The Institutiones politicae
In contrast to the silent freedom from obedience, the expressed freedom
from obedience is the freedom that is laid down in certain laws and agreements
that clearly state the rights subjects have and rulers should respect. 107
These agreements are the leges fundamentales or fundamental laws, and Boxhorn
explicitly describes them as contracts between private individuals who
have come to an agreement about their mutual rights and obligations. 108
These fundamentals laws could have come into force at the moment of the
foundation of the commonwealth, like those of Venice. But they could also
have come into being as time went by, growing or diminishing under the pressure
of ever-changing circumstances that force individuals and the factions
that make up society to constantly renegotiate their mutual relationships. 109
As we have seen in chapter 7, this had been the case in both ancient Rome and
the province of Holland. In the Institutiones politicae we see that this also holds
good for the Netherlands as a whole. In first instance Boxhorn follows Grotius’s
conclusion in the De antiquitate that the ancient Batavians had elected
their kings, just like the ancient Germans had done in Tacitus’s Germania (On
Germany). 110 On the other hand, Boxhorn also states that in the past the Dutch
had taken special care to augment their freedom by claiming, and receiving,
ever more fundamental laws from their counts. 111 Seen from this perspective,
Dutch freedom is as much a common good as it is a historical product. 112
Among the rights subjects should lay down in fundamental laws is the
protection of their property, particularly against arbitrary taxation. 113 Boxhorn
common good’ was ‘the core concept of the debate’ ‘about limiting royal power’. ‘This common good
referred to a twofold goal of politics, a beatitudo for the individual citizen, which laid in some sense
beyond the state, and the conservation of the state by means of a moderated reason of state.’ Boxhorn’s
use of the concept seems to point in the direction of the second goal. Wolfgang Weber, “‘What a Good
Ruler Should Not Do’: Theoretical Limits of Royal Power in European Theories of Absolutism, 1500-
1700”, in Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 26, No. 4 (1995), pp. 897-902, with quotes on p. 897.
107 Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, I.5.10, pp. 47-48. ‘Expressa est, quae versatur circa singulares & certas
quasdam leges, ac conditiones, disertim propositas, quas sanctè se, & perpetuò observaturos, Imperaturi,
ante Imperium, solenni juramento testantur; quibus, aut Imperantium libidine quaedam exem[p]
ta, arbitrio subditorum relinquuntur integra, aut Imperantibus ea singulatim mandantur, quae omnino
praestare tenentur, ac privilegia & immunitates à Majoribus accepta, rata habentur & confirmantur, aut
denique quae sub praecedentium Imperio gravis aut nimia autoritas fuit, quantum expedit, coercetur.’
108 Ibidem, I.5.22-25, pp. 50-51. Thus, one might say that while the ‘silent freedom from obedience’ is
grounded on natural law principles, the ‘expressed freedom from obedience’ finds its origin in positive law.
109 Thus, their being ‘fundamental’ has not so much to do with them being ‘immutable’, but by the
subjects that these ‘fundamental’ laws address: the most important matters in a political society.
110 Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, I.5, p. 58; Grotius, The Antiquity of the Batavian Republic, II.5, 11-14,
pp. 61-63; Tacitus, Germania, VII, XXIX-XXXI, especially XXX.2.
111 Ibidem, I.9, p. 131. ‘Et certè tantùm faciunt ad praesidium libertatis, ut augeri plerumque soleant,
novisque Principibus electis novae addantur, quod à Belgis, dum sub Comitibus agerent, accuratè
observatum est.’
112 In the previous chapters we have already seen that Boxhorn equited ‘Dutch freedom’ with the
rights and privileges that were expressed in the charters of Dutch towns.
113 Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, I.5.19, p. 49. ‘(II.) Ad opes subditorum. Ne scilicet iisdem liceat
267