Erasmus Center for Early Modern Studies
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Private Wealth and Public Office
Good Governance and Accountable Government in Medieval and Early Modern Europe and America
Project Leader
Professor Dr. Robert v. Friedeburg and Hans Blom (FSW)
Summary
The modern predicament of (inter)national politics invites a co-ordinated investigation of the structures of political development and government in early-modern Europe and America (16th-18th centuries). Under the pressure of international competition, war, and internal religious strife, late medieval and early modern regimes became increasingly dependant on raising resources. At the same time, the recruitment of these resources brought into question the legitimacy of regimes, as the illegitimate influence of private wealth on public office became a key problem. Pondering the phenomenon of 'factions', 'friends', and 'favorites', late medieval and early modern thought developed a sociology of the relation of private wealth and public office that changed considerably from the later 15th ot the early 18th century. The project will organize three conferences, bringing together scholars from Europe and America, to address this problem.
Contact details
Professor Dr. Robert v. Friedeburg, ESHCC
Themes and scholarly objective
The late medieval and early modern period was characterised at once by the outbreak of severe religious warfare within and between European communities, an enormous pressure on making available resources to waging war, and accompanying shifts in the relation of citizens and government and in the nature of government.
Until about the 1920s, these shifts were addressed under the rubric of monarchical state building, leaving out republics as odd exceptions, and taking nineteenth century national identities for granted has having been existed since the Middle Ages. Under these auspices, historians judged the history of governance according to certain benchmarks. IN particular, government needed to be strong, centralised, and defending a nation's independence and power.
Since the 1920s, but in particular since the 1970s, perspectives have changed. Medieval nation building has been put into doubt. Research on the development of national identity has shifted into the Early Modern period. Likewise, the quest for participation has come to the fore as a main issue of research. As a consequence, the 'state-building' of the early modern period has been described as being essential of a dichotomic nature, being characterised by absolutist monarchies and constitutional republics, including England and the Netherlands.
This dichotomy has now itself been put into question. Leading researchers have begun to look at the similarities of problems that contemporaries identified in organising government. While monarchy and aristocracy were often understood to be functional, and not ideological, alternatives of government, and most citizens were meant to participate in minor administrative offices, but to obey to rather then to participate in actual Government, even in Republics, two main problems remained to be solved for most European communities: How to keep government accountable, how to punish failing magistrates, without undermining the offices that government was meant to serve? And how to provide bearers of office who carried out their functions for the public good despite the fact that these bearers were part of a society of differences of wealth and influence, of factions and corruption? In particular, political thought began to attempt to account how the body politic itself worked as a whole, rather then only on the way it was represented. In writers from Machiavelly via Althusius to Boxhorn, accounts of how society works serve the function to address these dilemmata. For us, a third question will be whether during the early modern period different national solutions to these problems developed, shaping in turn national identity.
The project will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines who have, within their own work begun to develop this new perspective, but will have to be brought together to make this new approach more fruitful. The project will develop in three conferences, structured chronologically and thematically, that will elaborate how the problems of the tension of private wealth and public office and of how keeping government accountable without undermining its function were played out.
Description of the project
The project will develop in three conferences that will in turn address key themes of the problem:
1. Monarchies and cities: In late medieval and sixteenth century Europe, government rested mainly on monarchical and urban concentrations of governance. Both shared a number of general assumptions, based on which they addressed the problems formulated above. Among those were abhorrance to social conflict or conflict of interest (the discourse on factions) and a resort to moral rectitude to solve problems of governance (enshrined in distinctions such as between liberty and licence; dominium and libido dominationis).
However, these basic similarities were plaid out against different backgrounds. While in England, monarchy itself had to fulfill most important tasks, in the area later mainly administered within the Holy Roman Empire and the later Netherlands cities remained responsible for a large variety of tasks. These different backgrounds let to different conclusions about the problems of faction, corruption and accountable government, played out in England in confrontations between crown and nobility during the fourteenth and fifteenth century and a new arrangement of their relation during early Tudor Rule, in the Netherlands and the Empire in conflicts between citizens and urban government.
2. Accountability and punishment: Controlling government while securing order. By the later sixteenth century, the agendas had changed. The enormous impact of the reformation and religious civil war had made an issue less problematic during the earlier period, the accountability of government, much more problematic. By the middle of the century, revolts against the crown in London (1640s), Naples, and Paris had persuaded many contemporaries that attempts at holding government accountable could have catastrophic consequences for the maintenance of order in general. This problem has been hidden behind an untimely emphasis on the rise of absolutism.
However, accounts of 'absolute monarchy' are primarily a variant of how to protect government to allow it to deliver its services from undue ways of accountability, in particular by making the king unaccountable to human agencies. Seen in perspective, all European regimes faced similar challenges (1600-1700). Over a broad range of phenomena, new objectives and methods of maintaining order arise, in churches, governing bodies, political entities and economic exchange. The new connections between the private (conscience, wealth, control) and the public (providence, property, power) are attempted and bring about new societal formations (New Army, 'objective' rule by specialists, the impartial monarch, the stakeholder-republic and its citizens' militia, churches, and a host of new training institutions). The conceptual articulation of these developments apparently follows the lines of the old opposition of liberty and oppression, but essentially is taken to be a new phase in the articulation of Private Wealth versus Public Office.
3. Civilisation and Progress: Educating the citizenry and improving governance 1700-1800). The more center stage Christian enlightenment - as distinguished from the Radical Enlightenment which influence has been probably long underrated - did not primarily put an emphasis on participation of citizens, but on the ability of governments to execute governance, that is to steer economy and society to benevolent ends. Intervention in society by a varied number of means, including schools and universities, but also the pulpit in order to address enlightened topics, followed up the seventeenth century discussion about the most profitable way to deal with the differences existing within society. Enlightened writers did cling to the need for strong government and keeping subjects at bay, but it is difficult to ignore that by the eighteenth century very different 'national' traditions of doing so had emerged. The legitimacy of commercial wealth and the willingness to keep up order without a sufficiently strong army did characterise England, notwithstanding age-old historiographical cliches' in that direction. To put it more succinctly - the eighteenth century began to conceptualise differences in historical experience and to link the possibilities of governance not only to characteristics of society as such, but to specific characteristics of specific societies - what worked in England, need not work in France, and so on.
Against this background, notions of civilisation and progress (Enlightened Christianity, moral improvement, scientific progress, citizenship and sociability) did however inform conceptions of governance. It makes sense to study the eighteenth century rather as a next step in the sorting out of the issue of governance (how to manage a body politic of self-interested citizens, without either becomes sceptical about social man, and falling for the attractions of pure power politics, or entertaining the optimistic hope for a new citizen and transparent political order). What is the mean between a mere collection of self-interested citizens and dominant political order dogmatically imposing itself upon its members?
