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

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Chapter 9. The working of politics. The Disquisitiones politicae
Boxhorn could easily do without the notorious Florentine, who until then had
a bad reputation in the Dutch Republic, 19 for he had Tacitus at his disposal, his
favourite historian, whose writings revealed the secrets of princes and ‘made
politics seem like a complex and ruthless game in which all players are selfinterested
and power is the prize’. 20 In Tacitus’s works this had led to all kinds
of assumptions and advices that most of Boxhorn’s seventeenth-century contemporaries
would find distasteful. ‘Among the most controversial of those
was the assumption that religion must be regarded as an instrument of rule’, 21
an assumption to which Boxhorn indeed adhered. 22 But Boxhorn never went
as far as Clapmarius to define the ius dominationis, the right of rulers to violate
civil law, and that Clapmarius had associated with the concept of ratio status, as
a legitimate form of tyranny. 23 No tyranny could be legitimate, and in the Institutiones
politicae Boxhorn denounces many of Clapmarius’s examples of iura
dominationis as scandalous acts (flagitia ( ). 24 For Boxhorn the mysteries of command
did not so much concern themselves with how people who are in power
standing of rulers themselves’ (p. 369) or ‘the state or condition of a realm or commonwealth’ (p. 370). In
Renaissance Italy the term became used ‘to refer not merely to prevailing regimes, but also and more specifically,
to the institutions of government and the means of coercive control that serve to preserve order
within political communities’. (p. 377). Therefore, Istvan Hont concludes that ‘the expression “ragione di
stato” had little to do with the idea of the modern state. Rather, it articulated the stern requirements of the
preservation of “status”’, that is, the preservation of the political standing of rulers or of the condition of
the commonwealth. Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-State in Historical
Perspective (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; Cambridge, 2005), pp. 11-12.
19 For example, in his inaugural oration as professor of politics (November 1613), published at Leiden
in 1614 by Lowijs Elzevier under the title De politica sapientia oratio (Oration on Political Wisdom), Heinsius
had depicted Machiavelli as someone who had ‘plundered the work of Aristotle without scruple’ and who
had an ‘open contempt … for matters such as law and religion’. See Van Heck, “Cymbalum Politicorum,
Consultor Dolosus”, pp. 53-55, with quotes on p. 53. See also E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier, “A Controversial
Republican: Dutch Views on Machiavelli in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries”, pp. 248-61.
20 Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War, p. 96. See also Burke, “Tacitism”,
p. 161ff; Kenneth C. Schellhase, “Tacitus in the Political Thought of Machiavelli”, in Pensiero politico,
Vol. 4, No. 3 (1971), pp. 381-91; Salmon, “Stoicism and Roman Example”, pp. 199-225; Burke, “Tacitism,
Scepticism, and Reason of State”, pp. 479-95; Morford, “Tacitean Prudentia and the Doctrines of Justus
Lipsius”, pp. 132-51, esp. pp. 136-46; Tuck, Philosophy and Government, pp. 65-130.
21 Ibidem, p. 97. ‘Among the most controversial of those was the assumption that religion must be
regarded as an instrument of rule. Fear of unknown powers was a very powerful factor in human psychology
(here early modern Tacitism went hand in hand with the Epicurean psychology of religion found in
Lucretius).’
22 See chapter 8.
23 For Clapmarius’s conceptions and their mutual relationships, see Donaldson, Machiavelli and
Mystery of State, esp. pp. 130-35.
24 Boxhorn, Institutiones politicae, I.6.11, p. 70. ‘Non tamen idcirco, cum Clapmario. c. 2. legitimam
Tyrannidem appellandam censeo, neque enim Tyrannis legitima dici potest, neque idem sunt, Tyrannis,
& jus dominationis, cùm hoc ad conservandam, illa ad subvertendam sit comparata Rempublicam:
Neque interim abnuerim, in Tyrannidem facilè illud posse deflectere, si quis facile sequatur, à Clapmario,
& aliis, in medium introducta exempla, in quorum nonnullis, flagitium potiùs agnosco, quam
jus dominationis.’ See Arnoldus Clapmarius, De arcanis rervm pvblicarvm, Illustratus A. Ioan. Corvino IC.
Accessit Chr. Besoldi De eadem materia Discursus (Lowijs Elzevier; Amsterdam, 1641), IV.2, p. 181. ‘Quare
sic definio, esse supremum quoddam jus sive privilegium, bono publico introductum, contra jus commune,
sive ordinarium; sed tamen à lege divina non alienum, atque est jus veluti legitimae Tyrannidis.’