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

Chapter 9. The working of politics. The Disquisitiones politicae
can stay in power, 25 but more with how rulers and subjects should behave to
protect their mutual bond against internal and external foes26 and to keep it
in a healthy condition amid the dangers that threaten to overthrow the commonwealth.
27 In the early 1640s this was a subject of no little importance, with
the Thirty Years’ War still not concluded, with troubles on the British Isles, and
with worries in the Dutch Republic itself about the future of the Union.
Addressing political questions.
Content and method of the Disquisitiones politicae
In the Disquisitiones politicae Boxhorn explains the mysteries of command on the
basis of historical case studies. Of the sixty case studies that the Disquisitiones
politicae counts, forty-seven are drawn from the period after 1500; in twentysix
of these the Dutch Republic is the topic of conversation, 28 while France is
worth ten case studies. 29 Of the remaining thirteen case studies, five are taken
from medieval history. In only eight cases the historical case study is taken from
antiquity; in five of these eight cases the historical case study is taken from
Greek history, in three of them from Roman history. 30
25 This is an important aspect in the second book of the Institutiones politicae. However, the effectiveness
of the arcana imperii, or the interiora consilia (‘the rather private counsels’) as Boxhorn also called
them, depended of course on their staying a secret. To expose and explain the arcana imperii to students
of politics, and, in printed form, to the public at large, had the paradoxical effect of undermining the
very power basis on which the arcana of a specific regime rested, namely secrecy, and even entailed the
danger that the arcana could be used against the regime in question. Machiavelli’s Il principe and the
works of Tacitus could be and were read as a satire or critique on tyrants, exposing their wicked ways
to the public eye. See Dreitzel, “Reason of State and the Crisis of Political Aristotelianism”, pp. 166-67;
Jacob Soll, “Empirical History and the Transformation of Political Criticism in France from Bodin to
Bayle”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 64, No. 2 (2003), pp. 305-7; idem, Publishing the Prince: History,
Reading, and the Birth of Political Criticism (University of Michigan Press; Ann Arbor, 2005), p. 76.
26 Both Jan Hendrikszoon Glazemaker and James Knapton praise the use of the Disquisitiones politicae
for both rulers and subjects, who Glazemaker divides into magistrates, on the one hand, and private
men, on the other, while Knapton makes a tripartite division of princes, statesmen, and ‘the people’.
27 As we will see below, Boxhorn believed that violent ‘changes’, for example caused by natural
disasters, were inevitable and likely to overthrow a commonwealth or to put it into a process of
decline. In this sense, a study into the arcana is a study into the causes of change and decline. It is
no coincidence that in the Institutiones politicae the chapter that deals with the arcana is immediately
followed by the chapter that deals with the ‘changes of commonwealths, and their causes’. Boxhorn,
Institutiones politicae, I.15-16, pp. 233-57. In the introduction to his edition of Clapmarius’s De arcanis
rerumpublicarum (Lowijs Elzevier; Amsterdam, 1 st ed. 1641, 1644) Johannes Corvinus (c.1582-1650), a
pupil of Arminius and professor of law in Amsterdam, put forward the same argument. Hans W. Blom,
“The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe”, in Anthony Pagden (ed.), The Idea of Europe: From
Antiquity to the European Union (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Cambridge University Press; Cambridge,
2002), pp. 104-7.
28 Disquisitiones IV-VI, X, XI, XV, XIX, XX, XXII, XXVII, XXIX, XXX, XXXVI, XXXVII, XXXIX,
XXXXII-XXXXVI, XXXXVIII, L, LIV, LVII-LX.
29 Disquisitiones I, II, VII, XIII, XXIII, XXVI, XXXII, XXXV, XXXX, LV.
30 Respectively disquisitiones XIV, XVIII, XXI, LIII, LVI, and disquisitiones VIII, IX, XXXI. In total, the
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