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

Chapter 8. The science of politics. The Institutiones politicae
systems’ that to some extent reflected their own reality. At the same time he
characterised Dutch political thought before 1650 as Aristotelian and humanist
with an inherent tendency to favour monarchy as the oldest, best, and safest
form of government. Here Kossmann put Boxhorn forward as a leading example.
In Kossmann’s view during this pre-1650 period there was no ‘principal
Dutch republicanism’, while he classified authors who favoured a royal form
of command (regnum) or a mixed form of command (imperium mixtum) as monarchists.
174
Since then many comments and alternatives have been reviewed. While
some have pointed out that the Dutch did manage to construct a consistent
republican theory of resistance during the early and later phases of the
Revolt, 175 others have emphasised that a monarchical theory, in a full appreciation
of monarchy or expressed in a theory of a mixed regime, only developed
in a later stage of the Revolt, as a reaction to the problems a Bodinian
kind of absolute sovereignty posed for the realities of Dutch politics. 176 Thus,
we are told that ‘the astonishment modern historians of political thought have
expressed about the prevalence of monarchical theory in the early Republic
seems to be misplaced. The seventeenth-century admirers of Roman antiquity,
these critics of Bodinian absolutism did indeed prefer a balanced form of
government, but could in no way accept the theory underlying it [i.e. reason
of state arguments-JN]. They used the monarchical model to escape the perplexities
involved’. 177
We have already seen that Boxhorn’s view on man and political society, and
the means to make the later function properly and peacefully, does not quite fit
the Aristotelian mould some have tried to put him. I will now show that Box-
174 First expressed in 1960, Ernst Kossmann, in his many publications, more or less stuck to the
same view, claiming in 2000, when his classical study was republished in English, that he could repeat
his arguments almost unaltered, because no real new convincing alternative, Hans Blom’s study of 1995
exempted, had been offered. Kossmann, Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, pp. 22-23, 38-39, 41-43,
50-51. See also, amongst others, idem, “Dutch Republicanism”, pp. 179-82, 193, and idem, “Freedom in
Seventeenth-Century Dutch Thought and Practice”, in Jonathan I. Israel (ed.), The Anglo Dutch Moment:
Essays on the Glorious Revolution and Its World Impact (Cambridge University Press; Cambridge, 1991),
pp. 289-90. Simon Groenveld and Harm Wansink followed Kossmann in this view. Groenveld, De prins
voor Amsterdam, pp. 37-44, and Wansink, Politieke wetenschappen aan de Leidse universiteit, esp. p. 231ff.
175 Nicolette Mout, “Van arm vaderland tot een eendrachtige republiek: de rol van politieke theorieën
in de Nederlandse Opstand”, in Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, Vol. 101,
No. 3 (1986), p. 359; Martin van Gelderen, “The Machiavellian Moment and the Dutch Revolt: The Rise
of Neostoicism and Dutch Republicanism”, in Block, Skinner and Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism,
pp. 221-22; idem, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt, pp. 276-87; idem, “The Low Countries”,
pp. 378-79, 387-89.
176 Nicolette Mout sees the period around 1600 as a watershed, Hans Blom the years 1618-19. Mout,
“Van arm vaderland tot een eendrachtige republiek”, p. 362, and Hans W. Blom, “Politieke theorieën in
het eerste kwart van de zeventiende eeuw: vaderland van aristocratische republiek naar gemengde
staat”, in Nellen and Trapman (eds.), De Hollandse jaren van Hugo de Groot (1583-1621), pp. 145-53.
177 Blom, Causality and Morality in Politics, p. 98.
283