Erasmus Center For Early Modern Studies
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Conquest, Competition and Ideology: Inventing Governance in the Dutch Golden Age
Project Leader
Professor Dr. Robert v. Friedeburg and dr. Hans Blom (FSW)
Summary
The breakingaway of the United Provinces from the Spanish Empire implied the end of the holy trinity of Common Good, Monarchy and Divine Providence. It opened the path towards new practices and new ways of thinking about the nature and purposes of government and private public relations. The realist, even sceptical raison d'état that inspired the monarchies of Europe was gradually replaced by a bourgeois reason of state that considered trade not only the sinews of war, but its proper replacement. All three elements of the holy trinity became essentially contested and thereby changed the practice of governance as well as its ideology. This programme aims at considering exemplary episodes in this process in order to rewrite the general story of this development, in order to contribute to our understanding of the dynamics of this highly innovative period in the history of Western governance. The programme aims at demonstrating that the Dutch Republic is justifiably the first case in European history of a system of governance (nonhierarchical, conscious application of privatepublic partnership). Moreover, it will enumerate and analyze the difficulties and prospects involved in its introduction.
Contact details
Professor Dr. Robert v. Friedeburg, ESHCC
Themes and scholarly objective
This programme aims at improving our understanding of the shifts in governance that were at the heart of the extraordinary successes of the Dutch Republic of the Golden Age. In its internal functioning the United Provinces relied on an intricate and constantly renegotiated interplay of public, private and intermediate actors. E.H. Kossmann has famously argued that the Dutch have failed to provide a good theory of their own practice. Here, it will be shown that while the notions of private and public were conceptually rearticulated along empirical casuistic lines, a new art of governance was developed that embodied a pragmatic understanding of these new practices of producing the public good, against the growing trend of monarchical absolutism in the rest of Europe, with its reliance on hierarchy and a centralized definition of the public good. In its external functioning the Republic developed a highly efficient colonial globalism that exited the jealousy of the other European powers who also tried to profit from the demise of the Spanish empire: France and England. This socalled Jealousy of Tradethat in the 18th century would lead to the new orthodoxies of Montesquieu and Adam Smithwas an earlymodern case of benchmarking of governance, and contributed further to the articulation of this new art of government.
The major contribution of this research project to the Shifts in Governance Research Programme is to unearth the ingenuity of 17thcentury Dutch debate between Regenten and Orangists in understanding and finetuning their innovative practices of governance before the availability of the basic concepts that inform our presentday discussions of governance. It will trace the causes and consequences of the disappearance of both the hierarchical model of rule (Abdication of Philip II and its aftermath), and the accommodation of religious diversity (loss of moral unity, shifting private public distinction) before the later enlightenment introduced new certainties about market, freedom and progress certainties however that the 20th century and the failure of global wealth and democracy have falsified.
During the 17th century, the gradual establishment of a new system of governance, in particular the finetuning of commerce as an instrument in international politics and of market relations to steer society were its main manifestations. In the writings of Grotius and Boxhorn we trace the early attempts at conceptualization. In the writings of De la Court and in the pamphlets around the dramatic events in 1672, the mature Republic is seen searching its soul. The interplay between morality (religious diversity, moral perplexity), internal political organization (governance proper) and the global dimension (colonialism, jealousy of trade, international war) is the central perspective.
This project will provide a good casestudy of the negotiated interplay of private and public (and privatepublic in important cases) in producing the public good and the related mechanisms of critical reflection (legitimacy, accountability, efficiency). It will also liberate the study of an important episode in the development of modern governance from the ageworn canon of political philosophy, with its often simplistic teleology of "the rise of modern democracy."
Over the last twenty years, history and historical sociology politics have aimed to integrate the history of political thought and practice, recognizing the importance of context for the development of political ideas. Thus, social and political history had to be integrated into the study of political thought. The project aims at the developing field of Historical Sociology and the History of Political Thought. Along these lines, the project aims to show that between Lipsius and the 1672 pamphlets, the traditional approach to politics and reason of state, informed by Aristotle and Tacitus, was fundamentally transformed into a new political sociology, carrying the reflection on conquest and competition from being merely dysfunctional problems to order to possibly productive elements of social organization.
Description of the project
The programme is structured around two case studieson Boxhorn and De la Courtwith the additional input from two additional casestudieswar taxation and 1672 pamphlets. In combination, the programme aims at a overall analysis of the shifts in (the culture of) governance in the heart of the 17thcentury Netherlands: the period between 1618 and 1672.
Late medieval and early modern government relied heavily on private individuals making their resources available for public purposes. However, to make sure that government served public functions rather the private interests, only persons with sufficient ethics had to be chosen to govern. To this end, king and aristocracy were meant to be enlisted to serve the common good. Primarily, the defense of monarchy and aristocracy rested on functional arguments about the unsuitability of common people for lack of resources and appropriate ethics. In contrast, the heavy reliance of European political thought into the 17th century rested on psychological assumptions enshrining the superiority, moral and emotional, of monarchs and noblemen. As a result of the independence from the Spanish crown and the failure to find a new king, that changed fundamentally in the 17th century Netherlands. But the Dutch did then not simply hail their new freedom, they discussed in detail how a country was going to be run where still, as earlier, private persons had to pursue the public common good, but where earlier assumptions about the moral superiority of monarchy and aristocracy were no longer practical and the functional superiority of monarchy had been put into doubt anyway. The shift in government from centralizing monarchy to semiaristocratic decentralized republic did not go along with an assumption about the common usefulness of all men for government. Rather, new arguments were developed, which will be studied primarily with regard to Lipsius and Grotius, to Boxhorn, to De la Court and to the pamphlets of 1672. It is from this special situation that fundamental insights into the problems of governance and shifts from public to private responsibility were found. Among them is the insight into the role of competition and market relations as problematic, but possibly productive forces (De la Court) and the historically and culturally changing framework of societies, making different groups of persons and institutions fit to govern (Boxhorn).
Boxhorn's empirical art of governance
Boxhorn was one of the most prolific political scientists of the 1630s to 1650s. Several works merit particular attention. These are his Apologia pro navigationibus Hollandorum (1633), later referred to by Selden; his Emblemata Politica (1635); his Oratio de vera nobilitate (1635); Disputationum politicarum de regio Romanorum imperio prima, de Romuli principatu (1643); Oratio inauguralis dicta cum historiarum professionem aggrederetur (1649); his Commentarius de statu confoederatarum provinciarum Belgii (1649); his Nederlantsche Historie (1649); his Disquisitiones Politicae (1650); and his Institutionum politicarum libri duo (1657). The study will trace the gradual development of an empirical casuistry on path dependent relations of institutional power, popular mentality, markets and money, passions and interest and a resulting notion of the "reason of state" of a given society at a given point. While Boxhorn did use in particular Roman history as frame of reference, his attention increasingly shifted to modern, not least modern French and Dutch history. Due to his own concise observation of the rapid changes in political constellations in France, Boxhorn was able to advise on a ruthless suppression of noble revolt in France, and at the same time advising cautious acknowledgement of the demands of different factions in the Netherlands. His empirical casuistry increasingly allowed for recognizing the demands on governance by the social dynamics of specific societies.
De la Court's comparative analysis of governance
Characteristic of programme's approach of shifts in seventeenthcentury Dutch governance is its emphasis on shifting relationships and ideologies of private and public. From the establishment of the public church ("publieke kerk") at the end of the 16th century, and the emergence of so many private churches in its wake, to the articulation of an appropriate ideology of toleration and churchstate relations, to the contributions of De la Court on the role of private interests in the establishment of the public good and in governance at large, a new bourgeois conception of governance takes hold. In De la Court we see the reflection of this development, as well as the necessarily contested nature of the very concepts on which it is based. It is the irony of the seventeenthcentury ideology of governance that it applied essentially contested concepts to bridge societal cleavages and ideological differences and bring about a concerted structure of governance. Part of De la Court's art of governance is dressed in the classical form of a comparative analysis of political systems. This comparative analysis is very useful for connecting the Dutch system of governance to developments elsewhere in Europe. To all appearance, notions of (self)interest were rampant all over Europe (in particular in connection to reason of state). Supposedly, however, important differences will be shown by a careful analysis of this style of comparative analysis in Europe. This project involves the closereading of De la Court's writings from this perspective, connecting it to contemporary political debate.
Jealousy of trade in the seventeenthcentury Republic: governance and globalization
The contentious debates about war versus commerce as the best strategy in international politics has been studied until now from the perspective of the history of the Dutch Revolt/Guerra de Flandres mainly. These debates that took place in the Republic as well as at the Courts of Europearose in very different political settings. The aim of this project is to bring together these different debates within a general framework of basic analytical dimensions: shifts in reason of state, shifts in privatepublic, shifts in globalization, shifts in techniques of governance and mechanisms of legitimization. This project will be realized by a recent Ph.D. (History of Political Thought, King's College, Cambridge), who majored in both economics and philosophy. He will bring to bear the growing international literature on 18thcentury jealousy of trade on what is now called the early Enlightenment of the Dutch Republic (Jonathan Israel). Its importance lies in the linkage of local and global, in its development during the 17th century: from the Dutch Revolt to the AngloDutch wars and the French attack of 1672. This project will involve a close and analytical study of a wide array of source material: pamphlets, scholarly treatises, policy documents, with a clear view to the debates on linkage politics in the history of international politics, and the nature of the commercial republic.
Governance and status in the pamphlets of 1672
The "Pandeamonium" (Jonathan Israel) of public unrest that swept the regents away in 1672 was accompanied and informed by an unprecedented wave of pamphlets arguing in favor of the possibility of common citizens to intervene in governance should the current government fail to safe the country. In these pamphlets, the danger of the common rabble in undermining order was explicitly discussed, and then the possibilities for an active intervention of citizens and patriots, as different from the rabble, discussed. The pamphlets thus developed a tableau of options to preserve order under the circumstances of a failing government, and thus argued the case for the problems and possibilities of societal governance intervening into government, pending on the moral and economic status of the citizens intervening. While the pamphlets have long been underestimated as part of an Orange Conspiracy for a Coup d'État, recent research by Jonathan Israel has unearthed the republican and participatory strains in Orange thought. This project will trace the connections between learned arguments on the relation of passions, interests, class, and institutions on the pamphlets and the way these arguments passed into popular debate.
Taxation and legitimacy
The connection between commerce and effective politics is partly provided by taxation. In order for public offices to play their role in the Dutch system of governance, sources of wealth had to be tapped, especially for defense and commercial warfare. It has been established that the actual system of taxation in the Netherlands was effectively decentralized, except for the Union's war effort. In this project the legitimacy and accountability of the taxation by the Union will be investigated, in order to establish the shifts in governance during the 17th century. Serial data on tax conflicts (from complaints to riots) will be collected with particular attention to their ideological manifestations. The series will be selected to allow for the discussion of changes in context (pre and postWestphalian) and in the culture of governance (first and second half of the century). A detailed study of city archives, collecting citizens' complaints, pamphlets and political decisionmaking connected to war taxation, will be undertaken in two series, to allow for eventual biases in datacollection. This project is a valuable empirical contribution to the programme, as much as it will profit for its analytical aspect from the collective effort.
Institutional Context
This project is a part of the research effort of the Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies. See the Center's Web Site for its research plan for the next years.
