Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

MORAL AND POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY OF SPINOZA 295
Political theory of the bourgeois middle classes: Johan and
Pieter de la Court (1622–60/1618–85)
The brothers de la Court represent the rapidly increasing category of nonacademic,
bourgeois philosophers in the Republic. Both studied at Leiden
University in the 1640s and made a Grand Tour to France, Italy and England;
however, they eventually took over their father’s business as cloth manufacturers
and traders. So they practised philosophy as dilettanti, in more than one respect
along the lines of the ‘Rederijkers’, the literary circles of the beginning of the
century. Their intellectual interest was to understand their society; their practical
interest was related to the promotion of the new commercial interest against
monopolies of guilds and government alike. The brothers de la Court were
curious and investigative. Pieter, in particular, who outlived his brother by
twenty-five years, had a lively interest in the new philosophy of Descartes and
Hobbes, was well versed in the classical authors of the republican tradition, like
Tacitus, Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and practised the Protestant religion in a
personal and independent way.
Following the death of his brother, Pieter—possibly profiting by some
manuscripts of Johan—proved to be a prolific author. He published five editions
of his Considerations of State, or Political Balance between 1660 and 1662,
Interest of Holland, or Foundations of the Well-being of Holland (nine different
editions in 1662), History of the Regime of Counts in Holland (four editions
since 1662), Political Discourses (three editions, 1662–3), Demonstration of the
Beneficent Political Foundations and Maxims of the Republic of Holland and
West Frisia (two editions, 1669 and 1671), a collection of emblemata entitled
Meaningful Fables (1685) and a manuscript on the ‘Well-being of Leiden’. So de
la Court’s career as an amateur philosopher was a political fact of outstanding
importance. One may appreciate this even better if one considers the fact that the
anonymous book De jure ecclesiasticorum (1665) was (falsely) attributed until
far into the eighteenth century both to de la Court and Spinoza. De la Court was
perceived by the defenders of the House of Orange and orthodox Protestants as a
defender of republicanism without a stadholder, but by the governing circle of
regenten he must have been seen as a critic of their burgeoning practice of closed
shop and monopolistic tendencies.
As de la Court is, next to Machiavelli and Hobbes, one of the political writers
that Spinoza refers to explicitly, we briefly sketch the outlines of his ideas. The
power and charm of de la Court have to be found in his many figures of speech
and his florid way of expressing himself. Here he brings the bourgeois
understanding of himself and his group to the fore. We may distinguish two
patterns. On the one hand he wants to make clear that man is always striving for
independence and self-reliance: ‘home, sweet home’, ‘better a minor lord, than a
mayor servant’, or the Spanish expression ‘en mi hambre mando yo’ (for all my
hunger I command), and a host of other, similar ones. On the other hand, he
expresses the dominant (and praiseworthy) principle of self-interest: ‘nobody