An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought

6 Absolutist thought in Italy and France

6.1  The emergence of absolutist thought in Italy

6.2  Italian humanism: the republicans

6.3  Italian humanism: the monarchists

6.4  ‘Old Nick’: preacher of evil or first value-free political scientist?

6.5  The spread of humanism in Europe

6.6  Botero and the spread of Machiavellianism

6.7  Humanism and absolutism in France

6.8  The sceptic as absolutist: Michel de Montaigne

6.9  Jean Bodin: apex of absolutist thought in France

6.10 After Bodin

6.11 Notes

6.1 The emergence of absolutist thought in Italy

By the twelfth century, the Italian city-states had evolved a new form of government, new at least since ancient Greece. Instead of the usual hereditary monarch as feudal overlord, basing his rule on a network of feudal dominion over land areas, the Italian city-states became republics. The commercial oligarchs who constituted the ruling elite of the city-state would elect as ruler a salaried bureaucratic official or podesta, whose term of office was short, and who therefore ruled at the pleasure of the oligarchy. This city-republican form of government began at Pisa in 1085, and had swept northern Italy by the end of the twelfth century.

Since the age of Charlemagne in the ninth century, the German – or ‘Holy Roman’ – emperors were legally supposed to be rulers of northern Italy. For several centuries, however, this rule was merely pro forma, and the city-states were de facto independent. By the mid-twelfth century, the Italian city-states were the most prosperous countries in Europe. Prosperity meant the standing temptation of wealth to loot, and so the German emperors, beginning with Frederick Barbarossa in 1154, began a two-centuries-long series of attempts to conquer the northern Italian cities. The incursions came to an end with the resounding defeat of Emperor Henry VII’s expedition of 1310–13, followed by the abject withdrawal and dissolution of the imperial army of Louis of Bavaria in 1327.

In the course of this chronic struggle, legal and political theorists arose in Italy to give voice to an eventually successful Italian determination to resist the encroachment of the German monarchs. They evolved the idea of the right of nations to resist imperial attempts at conquest by other states – what would later be called the right of national independence, or ‘self-government’ or ‘national self-determination’.

During the two centuries of conflict, the major ally of the Italian city-states against the German empire was the pope, who in that era was able to put papal armies into the field. As the papal armies helped the cities roll back the emperor’s forces during the thirteenth century, the city-states found to their growing chagrin that the pope was beginning to assert temporal power over northern Italy. And those claims could be backed up by the papal armies occupying large sections of the Italian peninsula.

For a while, some theorists toyed with the idea of reversing Italian policy and submitting to the German emperor in order to rid themselves of the papal threat. Prominent among this group was the great Florentine poet Dante Alighieri, who advanced his pro-imperial and anti-papal views in his Monarchy, written at the height of the imperial hopes for the 1310 expedition of Henry VII. The end of the imperial threat soon afterwards, however, made this turn to the emperor impractical, as well as unpalatable to the majority of Italians. And so a new political theory was needed by the oligarchs of the Italian city-states. Such a theory would assert the claims of the secular state – whether republic or monarchy made little difference – to rule at will, unchecked by the age-old moral and often concrete authority of the Catholic Church to limit state invasions of natural law and human rights. In short, the Italian oligarchs needed a theory of state absolutism, of secular power untrammelled. The Church was to be impatiently relegated to the purely theological and ‘religious’ area while secular affairs would be in the entirely separate hands of the state and its temporal power. This amounted to the politique doctrine, as it would come to prevail in late sixteenth century France.

As we have seen above, the Italian oligarchs found their new theory in the writings of the political theorist and university professor, Marsiglio of Padua. Marsiglio can therefore be considered the first absolutist in the modern western world, and his Defensor Pacis (1324) the first main expression of absolutism.

While Marsiglio was the founding theorist of absolutism in the West, the specific form of his own cherished polity quickly became obsolete – at least in Padua. For Marsiglio was an adherent of oligarchical republicanism, but this form of government proved short-lived, and disappeared in Padua soon after the publication of his treatise. During the latter half of the thirteenth century, the Italian city-states became riven between the old oligarchs – the magnati – striving to retain their power, and the newly wealthy but disenfranchised popolani, who kept attempting to gain power. The upshot was that throughout northern Italy during the last half of the thirteenth century – beginning with Ferrara in 1264 – power was seized by one man, one signor, one despot who imposed the hereditary rule of himself and his family. In effect, hereditary monarchy had been established once again. They were not called ‘kings’, since that would have been an absurdly grandiose title for the territory of one city; and so they gave themselves other names: ‘permanent lord’; ‘captain general’; ‘duke’, etc. Florence was one of the few cities able to resist the new tide of one-man rule.

In 1328, four years after the publication of Defensor Pads, the della Scala family finally managed to impose their control over the city of Padua. The della Scalas had taken over Verona in the 1260s, and now, after many years of conflict, Cangrande della Scala was able to seize power in Padua as well. Quick to inaugurate a new tradition of fawning adulation of tyranny was the prominent Paduan literary figure Ferreto de Ferreti (c.1296–1337), who abandoned his previous republicanism to compose a long Latin poem on The Rise of the della Scala.

The hero Cangrande had come, according to Ferreti, and brought peace and stability at last to ‘turbulent’ and torn Padua. Ferreti concluded his panegyric by expressing the fervent hope that the descendants of Cangrande della Scala would ‘continue to hold their sceptres for long years to come’.

6.2 Italian humanism: the republicans

The defenders of the old oligarchic republics countered the rise of the signori with a pro-republican absolutism of their own. This development began in the teaching of rhetoric. By the early twelfth century, the University of Bologna, and other Italian centres for training lawyers, had developed courses in rhetoric, originally the art and style of writing letters, to which was later added the art of public speaking. By the first half of the thirteenth century, the professors of rhetoric were including direct political commentary in their lessons and handbooks. One popular form was a propagandistic history of their particular cities, glorifying the city and its rulers, and expressly devoted to inculcating the ideology of support for the ruling elite of the city. The most prominent early master of this genre was the Bolognese rhetorician Boncampagno da Signa (c. 1165–1240), whose most popular work was The Siege of Ancona (1201–2). Another prominent form, developed by Italian rhetoricians in the second half of the thirteenth century, was advice-books for rulers and city magistrates, in which political advice was directed to the rulers. The most important early advice-book was John of Viterbo’s The Government of Cities, which he wrote in the 1240s after serving as a judge under the elected ruler, or podesta of Florence. John of Viterbo, however, was not a full absolutist, since his determinedly moral approach counselled the ruler always to pursue virtue and justice and to avoid vice and crime.

Whereas the Italian teaching of rhetoric at Bologna and elsewhere was narrowly practical, the French professors of rhetoric in the thirteenth century upheld the classical Greek and Roman writers as models of style. The French method was taught at the University of Paris and particularly at Orleans. By the second half of the thirteenth century, Italian rhetoricians who had studied in France brought the new approach to Italy, and the broader, more humanistic approach quickly swept the field, dominating even the University of Bologna. Soon these early humanists began to study the ideas as well as the style of the classical poets, historians and orators, and began to enliven their political theory with classical references and models.

The most important of these early humanist rhetoricians was the Florentine Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–94). Exiled from his native Florence, Latini went to France at the age of 40 and imbibed the works of Cicero and the French rhetorical approach. During his exile, Latini composed his leading work, The Books of Treasure, which introduced Cicero and other classical writers into the traditional works of Italian rhetoric. On his return to Florence in 1266, Latini also translated and published some of Cicero’s major works.

Particularly important in the new learning was the University of Padua, beginning with the great judge Lovato Lovati (1241–1309), whom no less a poet than Petrarch (mid-fourteenth century) called the greatest Italian poet up to that time. The most important of Lovati’s disciples was the fascinating character Alberto Mussato (1261–1329). Lawyer, politician, historian, dramatist and poet, Mussato was the leader of the republican faction in Padua, the main opposition to the lengthy campaign by the della Scala family to seize power in that city. (Ironically enough, Ferreto de Ferreti, the panegyrist of the della Scala victory, had been a fellow disciple in the Lovati circle.) Mussato wrote two histories of Italy; his most prominent literary effort was the notable Latin verse play Ecerinis (1313–14), the first secular drama written since the classical era. Here Mussato employed the new rhetoric as politician and propagandist. He explains in the introduction to the play that his chief purpose was to ‘inveigh with lamentations against tyranny’, specifically of course the tyranny of the della Scalas. The political propaganda value of Ecerinis was quickly recognized by the Paduan oligarchy, which crowned Mussato with a laurel wreath in 1315, and issued a decree ordering the play to be read aloud each year before the assembled populace of the city.

The new study of the classics also gave rise to sophisticated city chronicles, such as the Chronicle of Florence written in the early fourteenth century by Dino Compagni (c. 1255–1324), a prominent lawyer and politician of the city. Indeed, Compagni was himself one of the rulers of the Florentine oligarchy. Another important example of republican rhetorical humanism was Bonvesin della Riva’s book, The Glories of the City of Milan (1288). Bonvesin was a leading professor of rhetoric in Milan.

All these writers – Latini, Mussato, Compagni, and others – were concerned to work out a political theory in defence of oligarchical republican rule. They concluded that there are two basic reasons for the rise of the hated signori: the emergence of factions within the city, and love of greed and luxury. Both sets of ills were of course an implicit attack on the rise of the nouveau riche popolani and the challenge of the popolani against the old republican magnates. Without the new wealth of the popolani or the rise of their factions, the old oligarchy would have gone on their way undisturbed in the quiet exercise of power. Compagni put it baldly: Florence was disrupted because ‘the minds of the false popolani’ had been ‘corrupted to do wrong for the sake of gain’. Latini sees the source of evil in ‘those who covet riches’, and Mussato attributes the death of the Paduan republic to ‘the lust for money’ which undermined civic responsibility. Note the emphasis on the ‘lust’ or ‘coveting’ of money, that is, by new wealth; old and therefore ‘good’ wealth – that of the magnates – does not require lust or coveting since it is already in the possession of the oligarchy.

The way to end factions, according to the humanists, was for the people to put aside personal interests for unity on behalf of the ‘public’ or civic ‘interest’, of the ‘common good’. Latini set the tone by bringing in Plato and Aristotle, Plato for instructing us that ‘we ought to consider the common profit above everything else’, and Aristotle for stressing that ‘if each man follows his own individual will, the government of men’s lives is destroyed and totally dissolved’.

Blather about the ‘public interest’ and the ‘common good’ may be all very well, until the time comes to interpret in practice what these cloudy concepts are supposed to mean and in particular who is supposed to interpret their meaning. To the humanists the answer is clear: the virtuous ruler. Select virtuous rulers, trust in their virtue, and the problem is solved.

How are the people supposed to go about selecting virtuous rulers? That was not the sort of embarrassing question posed or considered by the Italian humanists. For that would have led ineluctably to considering institutional mechanisms which might promote the selection of virtuous rulers, or worse yet, prevent the selection of the vicious. Any such tampering with institutions would have led to checks on the absolute power of rulers, and that was not the mind-set of these humanist apologists for the sovereign power of oligarchy.

The humanists were clear, however, that virtue inheres in the individuals and not in noble families per se. While it was surely sensible of them to avoid centring virtue in hereditary noble families, it also meant that the virtuous ruler could personally reign unchecked by any traditional family ties or commitments.

The only check offered to ensure the virtue of rulers, the only real criterion for such virtue, was if the rulers followed the advice of these humanists, as elaborated in their advice-books. Happily, while Latini and his humanist followers established all the preconditions for absolute rule, they did not proceed to endorse absolutism itself. For, like John of Viterbo before them, they insisted that the ruler must be truly virtuous, including cleaving to honesty and the pursuit of justice. Like John of Viterbo and others in what has been called the ‘mirror-of-princes’ literature, Latini and his followers insisted that the ruler must avoid all temptations to fraud and dishonesty, and that he serve as a model of integrity. To Latini and the others, true virtue and the self-interest of the ruler were one and the same. Honesty was not only morally correct, it was also, in a later phrase, ‘the best policy’. Justice, probity, being loved by his subjects rather than being feared – all would also serve to maintain the ruler in power. Seeming to be just and honest, Latini made clear, was not enough; the ruler, both for the sake of virtue and for keeping his power, ‘must actually be as he wishes to seem’, for he will be ‘grossly deceived’ if ‘he tries to gain glory by false methods...’ There was, in short, no conflict between morality and utility for the ruler; the ethical turned out, harmoniously, to be the useful.

The next great burst of Italian humanism came in the city of Florence, nearly a century later. The independence of Florence, the stronghold of oligarchic republicanism, was threatened, for three-quarters of a century, from the 1380s to the 1450s, by the Visconti family of Milan. Giangeleazzo Visconti, signor and duke of Milan, set out in the 1380s to reduce all northern Italy to his subjection. By 1402, Visconti had conquered all northern Italy except Florence, and that city was saved by the sudden death of the duke. Soon, however, Giangeleazzo’s son, Duke Filippo Maria Visconti, launched the war of conquest again. All-out war between Florence and imperial Milan continued from 1423 until 1454, when Florence induced Milan to recognize the independence of the Florentine republic.

The embattled status of the Florentine republic led to a revival of republican humanism. While these early fifteenth century Florentine humanists were more philosophically oriented and more optimistic then their early fourteenth century Paduan and other Italian predecessors, their political theory was very much the same. All these leading Florentine humanists (much better known to later historians than the earlier Paduans) had similar biographies: they were trained as lawyers and rhetoricians, and they became either professors of rhetoric and/or top bureaucrats in Florence, in other cities, or at the papal court at the Vatican. Thus the doyen of the Florentine humanists was Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406), who studied rhetoric at Bologna and became chancellor at various Italian cities, in the last three decades of his life at Florence. Of Salutati’s main disciples, Leonardo Bruni (1369–1444) studied law and rhetoric in Florence, became secretary at the papal curia, and then became a top bureaucrat and finally chancellor of Florence from 1427 until his death. Pier Paolo Vergerio (1370–1444) began training in law in Florence and then rose to secretary at the papal curia; and similarly Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) studied civil law at Bologna and Florence and then became a professor of rhetoric at the papal curia.

The second generation of the Salutati circle also followed similar careers and had kindred views. Here should be mentioned the distinguished architect Leon Battista degli Alberti (1404–72) of the great banking family, who earned a doctorate in canon law at Bologna and then became a papal secretary; Giannozzo Manetti (1396–1459) was educated in law and humanistic studies in Florence, and then served for two decades in the Florentine bureaucracy, later becoming secretary at the papal curia and finally secretary to the king of Naples; and Matteo Palmieri (1406–75) became a top bureaucrat for five decades in Florence, including eight different ambassadorships.

6.3 Italian humanism: the monarchists

The political and economic decline of the Italian city-states after the turn to the Atlantic in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, was marked in foreign affairs by the repeated invasions of Italy by armies of the burgeoning nation-states of Europe. The French kings invaded and conquered Italy repeatedly from the 1490s on, and from the early 1520s to the 1550s the armies of France and the Holy Roman Empire fought over Italy as a battleground for conquest.

While Florence and the remainder of northern Italy were being invaded from without, republicanism throughout Italy finally gave way to despotic one-man rule of the various signori. Whereas republican forces, headed by the Colonna family, had managed to deprive the popes of their temporal power during the mid-fifteenth century, by the end of that century the popes, led by Alexander VI (1492–1503) and Julius II (1503–13) managed to reassert themselves as unchallenged temporal monarchs over Rome and the papal states. In Florence, the powerful de Medici family of bankers and politicians began slowly but surely to build up their political power until they could become hereditary monarchs, signori. The process began as early as the 1430s with the great Cosimo de Medici, and culminated in the seizure of power in 1480 by Cosimo’s grandson Lorenzo ‘the Magnificent’. Lorenzo ensured his one-man rule by setting up a ‘council of seventy’ with complete control over the republic, all comprising his own supporters.

The republican forces fought back, however, and the struggle lasted another half-century. In 1494, the republican oligarchs forced Lorenzo’s son Piero into exile after he had surrendered Florence to the French. Republican rule collapsed in 1512, when the Medici took command with the aid of Spanish troops. Medici power then reigned until 1527, when another republican revolution drove them out; but two years later the Medici pope, Clement VII, induced the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Charles V to invade and conquer Florence on the Medici’s behalf. Charles did so in 1530, and the Florentine republic was no more. Clement VII, left in charge of Florence by the emperor, appointed Alessandro de Medici ruler of the city for life, and Alessandro and all his heirs were also named lords of the city in perpetuity. The government of Florence dissolved into the Medici Grand Duchy of Tuscany, and the Medicis ran Tuscany as monarchs for two more centuries.

The final triumph of the signori put an end to the optimism of the early fifteenth century republican humanists, whose successors began to grow cynical about politics and to advocate lives of quiet contemplation.

Other humanists, however, seeing on which side their bread was buttered, executed a quick shift from praising republican oligarchy to lauding one-man monarchy. We have already seen Ferreto Ferreti’s swiftness in composing a panegyric to the della Scala tyranny in Padua. Similarly, around 1400, the peripatetic and usually republican P.P. Vergerio, during his stay in monarchical Padua, composed a work On Monarchy, in which he hailed that system as ‘the best form of government’. Monarchy, after all, ended tumult and the ceaseless conflict of factions and parties; it brought peace, ‘safety, security and the defence of innocence’. Also, with the victory of Visconti absolutism in Milan, the Milanese humanists quickly fell into line, composing panegyrics to the glory of princely, and especially of Visconti, rule. Thus Uberto Decembrio (c. 1350–1427) dedicated four books on local government to Filippo Maria Visconti in the 1420s, while his son Pier Candido Decembrio (1392–1477), keeping up the family tradition, wrote a Eulogy in Praise of the City of Milan in 1436.

With the triumph of the rule of the signori throughout Italy in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, pro-princely humanism reached a peak of enthusiasm. The humanists proved to be nothing if not flexible in adjusting their theories to adapt from republican to princely rule. The humanists started turning out two kinds of advice-books: to the prince, and to the courtier, on how he should conduct himself toward that prince.

By far the most celebrated advice-book for courtiers was The Book of the Courtier (Il libro del Cortegiano), by Baldassare Castiglione (1478–1529). Born in a village near Mantua, Castiglione was educated at Milan and entered the service of the duke of that city. In 1504, he became attached to the court of the duke of Urbino, which he served faithfully as diplomat and military commander for two decades. Then, in 1524, Castiglione was passed over to the Emperor Charles V in Spain, and for his services, Charles made him bishop of Avila. Castiglione composed the Book of the Courtier as a series of dialogues between 1513 and 1518, and the book was first published in 1528 in Venice. The work became one of the most widely read books in the sixteenth century (known to Italians as Il libro d’oro), clearly touching a nerve in the culture of that epoch in its description and celebration of the qualities of the perfect courtier and gentleman.

The Florentine humanists of the early fifteenth century had been optimistic for man, for his quest for virtus (or virtú) or excellence, and for the ‘honour, praise, and glory’ which more traditional Christians had thought due only to God. It was therefore easy for the later, sixteenth century humanists to transfer that quest for excellence and glory from individual man to being the sole function of the prince. Thus Castiglione declares that the courtier’s chief goal, ‘the end to which he is directed’, must be to advise his prince so that the latter may attain ‘the pinnacle of glory’ and make himself ‘famous and illustrious in the world’.

The earlier republican humanists had nurtured the ideal of ‘liberty’, by which they meant, not the modern concept of individual rights, but republican, generally oligarchial, ‘self-government’. Castiglione expressly condemns such old notions, on behalf of the monarchical virtues of peace, absence of discord, and total obedience to the absolute prince. In The Book of the Courtier, one of the characters in the dialogue protests that princes ‘hold their subjects in the closest bondage’ so that liberty is gone. Castiglione shrewdly counters, in age-old terms used in numerous apologia for despotism, that such liberty is only a plea that we be allowed to ‘live as we like’ rather than ‘according to good laws’. Since liberty is only licence, then, a monarch is needed to ‘establish his people in such laws and ordinances that they may live in ease and peace’.

A leading writer of advice-books to both the prince and the courtier, and a man who bears the dubious distinction of being perhaps the first mercantilist, was the Neapolitan duke, Diomede Carafa (1407–87). Carafa wrote The Perfect Courtier while serving at the court of Ferdinand, king of Naples, in the 1480s, as well as The Office of a Good Prince during the same period. In The Perfect Courtier, Carafa set the tone for Castiglione’s enormously influential work a generation later. In his Office of a Good Prince, Carafa set the model for the form of economic advice presented by consultant administrators. As in many later works, the book begins with principles of general policy and defence, then goes on to administration of justice, to public finance, and finally economic policy proper.

In detailed policies, Carafa’s advice is relatively sensible, and not nearly as totally power-oriented or as statist as later mercantilists advising fully fledged nation-states. The budget should be balanced, since forced loans are comparable to robbery and theft, and taxes should be equitable and moderate in order not to oppress labour or drive capital from the country. Business should be left alone but, on the other hand, Carafa called for subsidies of industry, agriculture, and commerce by the state, as well as substantial welfare expenditures. In contrast to the later mercantilists, foreign merchants, declared Carafa, should be made welcome because their activities are highly useful to the country.

But there is no hint in Carafa, in contrast to the scholastics, of any desire to understand or analyse market processes. The only important question was how the ruler can manipulate them. As Schumpeter wrote of Carafa: ‘The normal processes of economic life harbored no problem for Carafa. The only problem was how to manage and improve them’.

Schumpeter also attributes to Carafa the first conception of a national economy, of the entire country as one large business unit managed by the prince. Carafa was,

so far as I know, the first to deal comprehensively with the economic problems of the nascent modern state.... the fundamental idea that Carafa clothed in his conception of the Good Prince... of a National Economy...[which] is not simply the sum total of the individual households and firms or of the groups and classes within the borders of a state. It is conceived as a sort of sublimated business unit, something that has a distinct existence and distinct interests of its own and needs to be managed like a big farm.1

Perhaps the leading work among the new genre of advice-books to princes was that of Francesco Patrizi (1412–94), in his The Kingdom and the Education of the King, written in the 1470s and dedicated to the first activist pope, Sixtus IV, engaged in restoring the temporal power of the papacy in Rome and the papal states. A Sienese humanist, Patrizi was made bishop of Gaeta.

As in the other humanist advice-books, Patrizi sees the locus of virtus in the prince. But it should be noted that, along with his fellow pro-prince humanists as well as the earlier republicans, Patrizi’s virtuous prince is very much the model of Christian virtue. The prince must be a staunch Christian, and must always seek and cleave to justice. In particular, the prince must always be scrupulously honest and honourable. He ‘is never to engage in deceit, never to tell a lie, and never to permit others to tell lies’. Alone with his fellow later humanists, however, Patrizi speaks of the prince as having a different set of virtues from his more passive subjects. As the maker of history and the seeker after glory, for example, the prince is not supposed to be humble. On the contrary, he is supposed to be generous, lavish in spending and altogether ‘magnificent’.

The triumph of the signori led to many advice-books entitled, simply The Prince (II Principe). One was written by Bartolomeo Sacchi (1421–81) in 1471 in honour of the duke of Mantua, and an important one by Giovanni Pontano (1426–1503) who introduced himself to King Ferdinand of Naples by writing The Prince in his honour in 1468. In return, King Ferdinand made Pontano his secretary for more than 20 years. Pontano continued to extol his patron, in two separate treatises praising the twin princely virtues in Ferdinand of generosity and lavish splendour. In On Liberality, Pontano declares that ‘nothing is more undignified in a prince’ than lack of generosity. And in On Magnificence, Pontano insists that creating ‘noble building, splendid Churches and theatres’ is a crucial attribute of princely glory, and lauds King Ferdinand for ‘the magnificence and majesty’ of the public building he had constructed.

6.4 ‘Old Nick’: preacher of evil or first value-free political scientist?

The Italian humanists had propounded the doctrine of absolute political rule, first by republican oligarchs and next by the glorified despot, the monarch or prince. But one crucial point remained to free the ruler of all moral shackles and to allow and even glorify the unchecked and untrammelled rule of royal whim. For while the humanists would hear of no institutional check on state rule, one critical stumbling block still remained: Christian virtue. The ruler, the humanists all admonished, must be Christian, must cleave always to justice, and must be honest and honourable.

What was needed, then, to complete the development of absolutist theory, was a theoretician to fearlessly break the ethical chains that still bound the ruler to the claims of moral principle. That man was the Florentine bureaucrat Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) in one of the most influential works of political philosophy ever written, The Prince.

Niccolò Machiavelli was born in Florence, to a moderately well-off Tuscan noble family. His personal preference was clearly for the old oligarchic republic rather than for the signori, and in 1494, when the republicans kicked the Medicis out of Florence, young Niccolò entered the city bureaucracy. Rising rapidly in the government, Machiavelli became secretary of the Council of Ten, which managed the foreign policy and the wars of Florence. He held this important post until the Medicis reconquered Florence in 1512, serving in a series of diplomatic and military missions.

Machiavelli was nothing if not ‘flexible’, and this philosopher extraordinaire of opportunism greeted the return of the hated Medicis by attempting to ingratiate himself in their eyes. During the year 1513 he wrote The Prince, superficially yet another in the traditional series of advice-books and panegyrics to princes. Hoping to induce the Medicis to read it so that he might be restored to a top bureaucratic post, Machiavelli had the lack of shame needed to dedicate the book ‘to the magnificent Lorenzo de Medici’. The Medicis, however, did not take the bait, and the only thing left for Machiavelli was to embark on a literary career, and to drift back into republican conspiracies. Machiavelli took part in conspiratorial republican meetings at the Oricellari Gardens on the outskirts of Florence, owned by the aristocrat Cosimo Rucellai. It was at the Oricellari Gardens that Machiavelli discussed the drafts of his second most important book, the Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy, written from 1514 to 1519.

Niccolò Machiavelli was reviled throughout Europe during the sixteenth century and on into the next two centuries. He was considered to be someone unique in the history of the West, a conscious preacher of evil, a diabolic figure who had unleashed the demons in the world of politics. The English used his given name as a synonym for the Devil, ‘Old Nick’. As Macaulay put it: ‘Out of his surname they have coined an epithet for a knave, and out of his Christian name a synonym for the Devil.’

In modern times, Machiavelli’s reputation as a preacher of evil has been replaced by the admiration of political scientists as the founder of their discipline. For Machiavelli had cast off outdated moralism to look at power coolly and hard-headedly. A tough-minded realist, he was the pioneer developer of modern, positive, value-free political science. As the mercantilist, power-oriented, founder of modern ‘scientific’ method, Sir Francis Bacon, was to write early in the seventeenth century: ‘We are much beholden to Machiavel and others, that write what men do, and not what they ought to do.’

Well, which was Machiavelli, a teacher of evil or a value-free political scientist? Let us see. At first glance, The Prince was very much like other mirror-of-princes advice-books of the late fifteenth century humanists. The prince was supposed to seek virtú, or excellence, and was supposed to pursue honour, glory and fame in the development of such excellence. But within this traditional form, Machiavelli wrought a radical and drastic transformation, creating in this way a new paradigm for political theory. For what Machiavelli did was to redefine the critical concept of virtú. For the humanists, as for Christians and classical theorists alike, virtú, excellence, was the fulfilment of the traditional classical and Christian virtues: honesty, justice, benevolence, etc. For Old Nick, on the contrary, virtú in the ruler or prince – and for the late humanists, after all, it was only the prince who counted – was, simply and terribly, as Professor Skinner puts it, ‘any quality that helps a prince ‘to keep his state’.2 In short, the overriding, if not the only goal for the prince was to maintain and extend his power, his rule over the state. Keeping and expanding his power is the prince’s goal, his virtue, and therefore any means necessary to achieve that goal becomes justified.

In his illuminating discussion of Machiavelli, Professor Skinner tries to defend him against the charge of being a ‘preacher of evil’. Machiavelli did not praise evil per se, Skinner tells us; indeed, other things being equal, he probably preferred the orthodox Christian virtues. It is simply that when those virtues became inconvenient, that is, when they ran up against the overriding goal of keeping state power, the Christian virtues had to be set aside. The more naive humanists also favoured the prince’s keeping his state and achieving greatness and glory. They believed, however, that this could only be done by always maintaining and cleaving to the Christian virtues. In contrast, Machiavelli realized that cleaving to justice, honesty and other Christian virtues might sometimes, or even most of the time, conflict with the goal of maintaining and expanding state power. For Machiavelli, orthodox virtues would then have to go by the board. Skinner sums up Machiavelli as follows:

Machiavelli’s final sense of what it is to be a man of virtú and his final words of advice to the prince, can thus be summarised by saying that he tells the prince to ensure above all that he becomes a man of ‘flexible disposition’: he must be capable of varying his conduct from good to evil and back again ‘as fortune and circumstances dictate’.3

Professor Skinner, however, has a curious view of what ‘preaching evil’ might really be. Who in the history of the world, after all, and outside a Dr Fu Manchu novel, has actually lauded evil per se and counselled evil and vice at every step of life’s way? Preaching evil is to counsel precisely as Machiavelli has done: be good so long as goodness doesn’t get in the way of something you want, in the case of the ruler that something being the maintenance and expansion of power. What else but such ‘flexibility’ can the preaching of evil be all about?

Following straightaway from power as the overriding goal, and from his realism about power and standard morality being often in conflict, is Machiavelli’s famous defence of deception and mendacity on the part of the prince. For then the prince is advised always to appear to be moral and virtuous in the Christian manner, since that enhances his popularity; but to practise the opposite if necessary to maintain power. Thus Machiavelli stressed the value of appearances, of what Christians and other moralists call ‘hypocrisy’. The prince, he writes, must be willing to become ‘a great liar and deceiver’, taking advantage of all the credulous: for ‘men are so simple’ that ‘the deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived’. Or, in the immortal words of P.T. Barnum centuries later, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute’. And again, in praising fraud and deceit, Machiavelli writes that ‘contemporary experience shows that princes who have achieved great things have been those who have given their word lightly, who have known how to trick men with their cunning, and who, in the end, have overcome those abiding by honest principles’. Or, in the words of another astute American social critic: ‘nice guys finish last’.

There is, of course, an inner contradiction in a preacher of deceit candidly(!) broadcasting such views to one and all. For, as rulers begin to adopt a ‘pragmatic’ philosophy which is their natural inclination in any case, the deluded public may begin to awaken to the true state of affairs (‘the suckers may wise up’), and then continuing deceit by the ruling class might well prove counterproductive. The ‘great liars and deceivers’ might no longer find so many subjects so ‘ready to be deceived’.

Niccolò Machiavelli, therefore, was unquestionably a new phenomenon in the western world: a conscious preacher of evil to the ruling class. What of his alleged contributions in founding a hard-nosed, realistic, value-free political science?

First, one of his main contributions has been claimed to be the overwhelming use of power, of force and violence, by the rulers of state. Machiavelli was scarcely the first political philosopher who understood that force and violence are at the heart of state power. Previous theorists, however, were anxious to have that power curbed by ancient or Christian virtues. But there is a certain refreshing realism in Machiavelli’s total casting off the cloak of virtue in politics and in his seeing the state plainly as unadorned brutal force in the service of sheer power.

There is a profound sense, too, in which Machiavelli was the founder of modern political science. For the modern ‘policy scientist’ – political scientist, economist, sociologist, or whatever – is a person who has put himself quite comfortably in the role of adviser to the prince or, more broadly, to the ruling class. As a pure technician, then, this counsellor realistically advises the ruling class on how to achieve their goals, which, as Machiavelli sees, boils down to achieving greatness and glory by maintaining and expanding their power. The modern policy scientists eschew moral principles as being ‘unscientific’ and therefore outside their sphere of interest.

In all this, modern social science is a faithful follower of the wily Florentine opportunist. But in one important sense the two differ. For Niccolò Machiavelli never had the presumption – or the cunning – to claim to be a true scientist because he is ‘value-free’. There is no pretend value-freedom in Old Nick. He has simply replaced the goals of Christian virtue by another contrasting set of moral principles: that of maintaining and expanding the power of the prince. As Skinner writes:

it is often claimed that the originality of Machiavelli’s argument... lies in the fact that he divorces politics from morality, and in consequence emphasises the ‘autonomy of politics’...[but] the difference between Machiavelli and his contemporaries cannot adequately be characterized as a difference between a moral view of politics and a view of politics as divorced from morality. The essential contrast is rather between two different moralities – two rival and incompatible accounts of what ought ultimately to be done.4

Modern social scientists, in contrast, pride themselves on being realistic and value-free. But in this, ironically, they are far less realistic or perhaps less candid than their Florentine mentor. For, as Machiavelli knew full well, in taking on their role of adviser to the rulers of state, the ‘value-free scientist’ is willy-nilly, committing himself to the end, and therefore to the overriding morality, of strengthening the power of those rulers. In advocating public policy, if nowhere else, value-freedom is a snare and a delusion; Old Nick was either too honest or too much of a realist even to consider thinking otherwise.

Niccolò Machiavelli, therefore, was both the founder of modern political science and a notable preacher of evil. In casting out Christian or natural law morality, however, he did not presume to claim to be ‘value-free’ as do his modern followers; he knew full well that he was advocating the new morality of subordinating all other considerations to power and to the reasons of state. Machiavelli was the philosopher and apologist par excellence for the untrammelled, unchecked power of the absolute state.

Some historians like to contrast the ‘bad’ Machiavelli of The Prince with the ‘good’ Machiavelli of his later though less influential Discourses. Failing to convince the Medicis of his change of heart, Machiavelli reverted, in the Discourses, to his republican leanings. But the Old Nick of the Discourses is in no sense transformed by goodness; he is simply adapting his doctrine to a republican as against a monarchical polity.

Obviously, as a republican Machiavelli can no longer stress the virtú and the greatness of the prince, and so he shifts ground to a kind of collective virtú by the community as a whole. Except that in the case of the community, of course, virtú can no longer be doing great deeds and maintaining one man’s power. It now becomes acting always in the ‘public good’ or the ‘common good’, and always subordinating an individual’s or a group’s private, ‘selfish’ interests to an alleged greater good.

In contrast, Machiavelli condemns the pursuit of private interest as ‘corruption’. In short, Machiavelli is still holding the maintenance and expansion of state power to be the highest good, except that now the state is oligarchic and republican. What he is really preaching is similar to the creed of earlier republican humanists: each individual and group subordinates itself and obeys without question the decrees of the oligarchic ruling class of the republican city-state.

Niccolò Machiavelli is the same preacher of evil in the Discourses as he had been in The Prince. One of the first atheist writers, Machiavelli’s attitude toward religion in the Discourses is typically cynical and manipulative. Religion is helpful, he opined, in keeping subjects united and obedient to the state, and thus ‘those princes and those Republics which desire to remain free from corruption should above all else maintain incorrupt the ceremonies of their religion’. Religion could also make a positive contribution if it glorified strength and other warlike qualities, but unfortunately Christianity has sapped men’s strength by preaching humility and contemplation. In a tirade anticipating Nietzsche, Machiavelli charged that Christian morality has ‘glorified humble and contemplative men’ and that this peaceful spirit has led to existing corruption.

Machiavelli thundered that citizens can only achieve virtú if their highest goal is maintaining and expanding the state, and that therefore they must subordinate Christian ethics to that end. Specifically, they must be prepared to abandon the restraints of Christian ethics and be willing ‘to enter on the path of wrongdoing’ in order to maintain the state. The state must always take precedence. Therefore, any attempt to judge politics or government on a scale of Christian ethics must be abandoned. As Machievelli puts it with crystal clarity and great solemnity at the end of his final Discourse, ‘when the safety of one’s country depends upon the decision to be taken, no considerations of justice or injustice, humanity or cruelty, nor of glory or shame, should be allowed to prevail’.

Machiavelli’s views, and the essential unity with his outlook in The Prince, are shown in his discussion in The Discourses of Romulus, the legendary founder of the city of Rome. The fact that Romulus murdered his brother and others is justified by Machiavelli’s view that only one man should impose the founding constitution of a republic. Machiavelli’s wily conflation of the ‘public good’ with the private interests of the ruler is shown in the following mendacious passage: ‘A sagacious legislator of a republic, therefore, whose object is to promote the public good, and not his private interests [sic]... should concentrate all authority in himself. In such concentration, the end of establishing the state excuses any necessary means: ‘a wise mind will never censure any one for taking any action, however extraordinary, which may be of service in the organizing of a kingdom or the constituting of a republic’. Machiavelli concludes with what he calls the ‘sound maxim’ that ‘reprehensible actions may be excused by their effects, and that when the effect is good, as it was in the case of Romulus, it always excuses the action’.

Throughout the Discourses, Machiavelli preaches the virtue of deceit for the ruler. He insists, also, in contrast to previous humanists, that it is better for a ruler to be feared than to be loved, and that punishment is far better than clemency in dealing with his subjects. Furthermore, when a ruler finds that a whole city is rebelling against his rule, by far the best course of action is to ‘wipe them out’ altogether.

Thus, Professor Skinner is perceptive and correct when he concludes, in re The Prince and the Discourses, that

the underlying political morality of the two books is thus the same. The only change in Machiavelli’s basic stance arises out of the changing focus of his political advice. Whereas he was mainly concerned in The Prince with shaping the conduct of individual princes, he is more concerned in the Discourses with offering his counsel to the whole body of the citizens. The assumptions underlying his advice, however, remain the same as before.

Machiavelli is still at one and the same time a preacher of evil and a founder of modern political and policy science.

6.5 The spread of humanism in Europe

The newly fashionable Italian humanism, marked by its philological and literary devotion to the classical texts, its absolutist political thought, and its contempt for the systematic thinking and natural law doctrines of the scholastics, spread like wildfire to the north – to France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands – during the fifteenth century. This conquest of northern scholarship and northern universities by the sixteenth century was nearly as influential as the upsurge of the Protestant Reformation in putting an end to scholastic thought, and in paving the way for the dominance of the absolute state. There was one important difference, however, in the political thought taken over by the northern humanists: in countries such as France, Germany and England, where the king was acquiring ever more centralized and dominant power, all discussion of the virtues of oligarchic republicanism seemed like bizarre and irrelevant blather. For the northern humanists, in contrast, were solidly committed to the ‘prince’ – although of course, to the virtuous pre-Machiavellian prince – and to themselves as sage counsellors to power.

The first Italian humanist to teach in France, and to cause a sensation in so doing, was the Neapolitan Gregorio da Tiferna (c. 1415–66), who arrived at the University of Paris in 1458 to become its first professor of Greek. Other Italian humanists soon came to storm successfully that venerable redoubt of medieval and early renaissance scholasticism. Filippo Beroaldo (c.1440–1504) came in 1476 to lecture on poetry, philosophy and humanist studies. Particularly influential at the University of Paris was Fausto Andrelini (c.1460–1518), who taught at the University of Paris for 30 years, beginning in 1489, winning great fame for his classical scholarship on the Latin poets and essayists.

Humanism penetrated England beginning with Pietro del Monte (d.1457) who, from 1435 to 1440, was a collector of papal revenues in England, and more importantly, was a literary adviser to Duke Humphrey of Gloucester, brother to King Henry V, who became the first English patron of humanism. Gloucester brought an Italian rhetorician into his household, and he collected a remarkable library, including all the major humanist texts, many of which he later presented to Oxford University. Oxford and Cambridge also served as the home for Italian humanist scholars in the later fifteenth century. The Milanese scholar Stefano Surigone (fl. 1430–80), taught grammar and rhetoric at Oxford between 1454 and 1471, and Cornelio Vitelli (c. 1450–1500) became the first professor of Greek at an English university, coming to teach at New College, Oxford in the 1470s. The Italian humanist Lorenzo da Savona taught at Cambridge in the 1470s, and published a handbook on rhetoric in 1478, which went into two printings by the end of the century. And Caio Auberino (fl. 1450–1500) became official professor of rhetoric at Cambridge, and taught Latin literature there in the 1480s.

Humanism also came to northern Europe because many young scholars, often inspired by Italian professors in their country, travelled to Italy to learn the new humanism at its source. Thus, Robert Gaguin (1435–1501), after being converted to humanism by the lectures of Gregorio da Tiferna, paid two extended visits to Italy in the late 1460s, and returned to become a distinguished French humanist at the Sorbonne in 1473, where he lectured on rhetoric and Latin literature, translated Livy, and published a treatise on Latin verse and the first history of France to be written in full rhetorical style. From England came William Grocyn (c.1449–1519), a student of Vitelli at Oxford, who studied humanism in Florence in the late 1480s. Grocyn returned to Oxford to become its first professor of Greek in 1491. William Latimer (c. 1460–1545), another young Oxford student, accompanied his friend Grocyn on his trip to Italy, and then went to the University of Padua to perfect his Greek studies. Soon after Grocyn’s initial Oxford post, Latimer was appointed teacher at Magdalen College, Oxford, inaugurating Magdalen as a centre of humanist studies.

The most eminent of the Oxford travellers to Italy was John Colet (c.1467–1519), a student of Grocyn at Oxford, who spent the years 1493 to 1496 in Italy. On his return from Italy, Colet, too, was appointed a professor at Oxford, and he delivered before the entire university a famous series of lectures on the Epistles of St Paul from 1498 to 1499.

6.6 Botero and the spread of Machiavellianism

The northern humanists, along with the Italians, were staunch believers in the necessity for the prince to practise the Christian virtues of honesty and justice. At about the same time that Machiavelli was writing his defence of the new pragmatic morality in The Prince, the greatest humanist of the age was penning a famous advice-book to princes, sternly reiterating the Christian virtues. Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536), a Dutch Augustinian canon persuaded to study theology by John Colet, dedicated his account of The Education of a Christian Prince to the future Emperor Charles V in 1516. While Old Nick was proclaiming that no consideration must stand in the way of maintaining the ruler in state power, Erasmus warned the prince that he must never do anything, regardless of his motives, which may harm the cause of justice.

Machiavelli’s Prince was not printed until 1532, and after that, as we have noted, a storm of attack on ‘Machiavel’ proceeded throughout Europe. In England the favourite term for Machiavelli was ‘the politic atheist’. Thus, one James Hull wrote a book on Machiavelli in 1602, entitled The Unmasking of the Politic Atheist. The northern humanists generally took the same position, defending the focus of traditional political philosophy on justice and honesty and attacking the overriding concern of the new theorists with what one Machiavellian aptly termed the ‘reason of state’ (ragione di stato). Thus, Cardinal Reginald Pole (1500–58), one of the champions of English Catholicism as against the Henrician Reformation, and a distinguished humanist, attacked Machiavelli’s political theory in 1539, in his Apology to Charles V, as destroying all the virtues. Roger Ascham (1515–68), another leading humanist and a long-time tutor to Queen Elizabeth in Greek and Latin, commented in horror in his Report and Discourse of the Affairs and State of Germany that Machiavelli taught that one may ‘think, say and do whatever may serve best for profit and pleasure’.

Machiavelli also proved to be grist for the Huguenots’ mill during the French religious war of the 1570s. The Huguenots attributed the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 to the wicked designs of the Queen Mother, Catherine de Medici, daughter of the selfsame Lorenzo the Magnificent to whom Machiavelli had dedicated The Prince. The Huguenots attributed the massacre to the philosophical outlook of Machiavelli. Thus The Awakener continually denounced the ‘pernicious heresy’ of Machiavelli, and asserted that the king ‘was actually persuaded by the doctrines of Machiavelli’ to try to eradicate the Huguenots. Another tract, The Alarm Bell (1577), maintained that Catherine had deliberately trained her son in the doctrines of ‘the atheist Machiavelli’, thereby instructing the young king ‘in the precepts most suitable for a tyrant’. To other Huguenots Machiavelli was a preceptor in the ‘science of cheating’, a ‘science’ imported by Italians such as Catherine into France.

The outstanding example of the genre of anti-Machiavellian tracts was the Anti-Machiavel of Innocent Gentillet (c. 1535–1595), published in 1576. Gentillet was a French Huguenot who fled to Geneva after the massacre of St Bartholomew. Machiavelli, he pointed out, was essentially a satanic writer of handbooks on ‘how to become a complete tyrant’.

But still the seductive nature of the new morality, of the justifying of evil means by the allegedly overriding end of maintaining and advancing state power, began to take hold among various writers. In Italy, a group of Machiavellians appeared during the sixteenth century, headed by Giovanni Botero (1540–1617), and his treatise of 1589, The Reason of State.

Botero was a leading humanist from Piedmont who joined the Jesuit Order. It is indicative of the decay of scholasticism in Italy in this period that this proponent of ‘reason of state’ and hence opponent of natural law ethics in political life should have been a member of the great Jesuit Order. Since Machiavelli was scarcely popular in Europe, especially in Catholic circles, Botero took care to attack Machiavelli explicitly and pro-forma. But that was merely a ritualistic cover for Botero’s adoption of the essence of Machiavellian thought. While beginning by paying lip service to the importance of the prince’s cleaving to justice, Botero quickly goes on to justify political prudence as crucial to all government, then defines the essence of prudence that ‘in the decisions made by princes, interest will always override every other argument’; all other considerations, such as friendship, treaties or other commitments must go by the board. The overall view of Botero is that a prince must be guided primarily by ‘reason of state’, and that actions so guided ‘cannot be considered in the light of ordinary reason’. The morality and justification for actions of the prince is diametrically opposed to the principles that must guide the ordinary citizen.

Botero’s work touched off a raft of similar works in Italy over the next 40 years, all of which had the same title, The Reason of State.

In addition to being a leading theorist of political pragmatism and reason of state, Giovanni Botero has the notable but dubious distinction of being the first ‘Malthusian’, the first bitter complainer about the alleged evils of population growth. In his On the Cause of the Greatness of Cities (1588), translated into English in 1606, Botero laid out almost the entire thesis of Malthus’s famous essay on population two centuries later. The analysis was, therefore, highly mechanistic: human population tends to increase without limit, or rather the only limit is the maximum possible degree of human fertility. The means of subsistence, on the contrary, can only be increased slowly. Therefore, the growth of population always – to use Malthus’s famous words – tends to ‘press on the means of subsistence’, with the result being ever-present poverty and starvation. Population growth, then, can only be checked in two ways. One is the dying of large numbers of people through starvation, plague, or wars over scarce resources (Malthus’s ‘positive’ check). Second is the only element of free will or active human response permitted by Botero’s theory: that starvation and poverty may induce some people to abstain from marriage and procreation (Malthus’s ‘preventive’ or ‘negative’ check).

In an epoch marked by rising population and rising living standards and economic growth, Botero’s gloom-and-doom about population growth was hardly likely to fall on friendly ears. Indeed, as we shall see further below, those seventeenth and eighteenth century theorists who foresaw unlimited population growth favoured the idea as a spur to prosperity and economic growth.5

In any case, whether one draws pessimistic, neutral or optimistic conclusions from the thesis of unlimited population growth, its basic flaw is assuming that people will not react if they see their living standards declining from bearing large families. Botero (and Malthus after him) indeed gave the case away by even mentioning ‘preventive’ checks. For if people will lower the number of children when faced with absolute destitution, why may they not lower it long before that? And if so, no such mechanistic tendency can be postulated.

Historically, indeed, the facts totally contradict the gloomy Malthusian forecasts. Population only tends to rise in response to greater economic growth and prosperity and the consequent rise in living standards, so that population and standards of living tend to move together, rather than in diametric opposition. This rise in population generally comes in response to falling death rates caused by the better nutrition, sanitation, and medical care attendant on higher living standards. The dramatic declines in death rates lead to accelerated population growth (roughly measured by birth rate minus death rate). After a few generations, the birth rate usually falls, as people act to preserve their higher living standards, so that population growth then levels off.

The main defect of the Botero-Malthus doctrine of population is that it assumes that two entities – population and the means of subsistence (or production, or living standards) – operate under laws that are totally independent of each other. And yet, as we have seen, population growth may be highly responsive to changes in production. Similarly, the reverse can be true. Increases in population may well encourage the growth of investment and production, by providing a greater market for more products as well as more labour to work on these processes.6 Schumpeter puts the overall point well in his critique of Malthus: ‘... there is of course no point whatever in trying to formulate independent “laws” for the behavior of two interdependent quantities.’7

In England, a leading humanist and colleague of Cardinal Pole in defending the Catholic Church as against the Anglican reform was Stephen Gardiner (c. 1483–1555), bishop of Winchester. Gardiner, in contrast to Pole, was the first northern humanist to take a pro-Machiavellian line. Written appropriately enough when he was Lord Chancellor under the despotic Queen Mary Tudor in the early 1550s, Gardiner’s Discourse on the Coming of the English and Normans to Britain was dedicated to King Philip II of Spain. Written as an advice-book to King Philip on the eve of his marriage to Queen Mary, the book counselled the king on how to govern England. Gardiner openly endorsed Machiavelli’s view that it was far more important for a prince to appear virtuous than actually to be so. It is useful, opines Gardiner, for the prince to appear ‘merciful, generous and observant of faith’, but any ruler who really feels bound to actually observe such qualities would come to more harm than good.

An ardent if implicit disciple of Machiavellism was the prominent late sixteenth century Belgian classical scholar and humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Lipsius had moved from Antwerp to Leyden, in Holland, to avoid the rigours of the war against Spanish rule. In 1589, in Leyden, Lipsius published his Six Books of Politics. The prince, wrote Lipsius, must learn how to engage in ‘profitable deceit’, and judiciously be able to ‘intermingle that which is profitable with that which is honest’. Reason of state was again triumphant.

6.7 Humanism and absolutism in France

Before humanism made its mark in France, political thought was medieval rather than absolutist. Thus, near the end of his life, the prominent royal bureaucrat, jurist, and churchman, Claude de Seyssel (c. 1450–1520), published a treatise on monarchy summing up the post-medievalist perspective in politics. He wrote The Monarchy of France on the death of King Louis XII in 1515, and presented it to the new king, Francis I. The book was published four years later under the more presumptuous title, The Grand Monarchy of France, and was reissued often thereafter.

De Seyssel was born in Savoy, trained as a jurist, and served King Charles VIII and King Louis XII, the latter as member of the Grand Council and on numerous occasions as ambassador. But despite his long service in the bureaucracy and his great admiration for Louis XII, de Seyssel was a constitutionalist rather than an absolutist. The king, he averred, is indeed absolute within his own sphere, but that sphere is severely delimited by a network of rights held by others in accordance with customary, natural, and divine law.

In contrast, the lengthy reign of Francis I (1515–47) saw the beginning of the triumph of absolutism in French political thought. This new trend was launched by the leading humanist in France, Guillaume Budé (1467–1540). A highly erudite classical and legal scholar, Budé travelled in Italy in the early 1500s, imbibed humanism there, and returned to write a bitter attack on scholastic jurisprudence in his Annotations on the Pandects in 1508. The advent of Francis I in 1515 had characteristically contrasting effects on the veteran de Seyssel and on the younger Budé. De Seyssel wrote his magnum opus to instruct the young king on the greatness of what he believed to be the old king’s constitutionalist regime. Budé was inspired by the advent of the new prince to write The Institution of a Prince in 1519, celebrating the king’s potentially absolute greatness and power.

In this French form of advice-book to the king, Budé developed the idea, then new in France, of the prince as totally and absolutely sovereign, whose power and every whim must never be limited or questioned. The prince, intoned Budé, was a quasi-divine person, a man necessarily superior to all others. Laws that bind the prince’s subjects do not bind or apply to him; for laws apply only to the average and the equal, not to the prince who closely approaches the perfect ideal of mankind. The prince, in short, was a god among men and a law unto himself. The monarch, therefore, was superhuman, himself the source and the criterion of all justice.

For Budé, the king’s actions are always right because ‘the heart of the king moves by instinct and by impulsion of God, who controls and attracts it according to his pleasure, to undertake enterprises that are praiseworthy and honest and useful to his people and himself...’. Ruling by divine right and inspired directly by God, the king needs only the advice of philosophers – and it did not take much imagination to see who the great Budé had in mind as philosophic counsellor to Francis I.

Budé‘s work was carried on and developed by succeeding decades of humanists and particularly legists. The French kings were delighted at these dominant theories of their age, and proceeded happily to put them into practice. In this they were greatly aided by the absolutist jurists being themselves top bureaucrats in the service of the king. Two of the leading jurists wrote in the reign of Francis I: Barthélemy de Chasseneux (1480–1541), whose Catalogue of the Glory of the World was published in 1529, and Charles de Grassaille, whose Regale of France was written in 1538. Grassaille declared that the king of France was God in the flesh, that all his actions were inspired and brought about by God operating through the person of the king. The king was therefore God’s vicar on earth and a living law. In a sense, then, Charles de Grassaille said it all: the king is God on earth.

The sixteenth century French legalists also systematically tore down the legal rights of all corporations or organizations which, in the Middle Ages, had stood between the individual and the state. There were no longer any intermediary or feudal authorities. The king is absolute over these intermediaries, and makes or breaks them at will. Thus, as one historian sums up Chasseneux’s view:

All jurisdiction, said Chasseneux, pertains to the supreme authority of the prince; no man may have jurisdiction except through the ruler’s concession and permission. The authority to create magistrates thus belongs to the prince alone; all offices and dignities flow and are derived from him as from a fountain.8

The most important contribution to the tearing down of the intermediary structures hampering the monarch’s absolute rule over his subjects was that of the greatest jurist of his age, Charles du Moulin. We have already seen du Moulin’s (Molinaeus’) critique of the prohibition of usury, in his Treatise on Contracts and Usury (1546). Far more important was his magnum opus, Commentaries on the Customs of Paris (1539), a compilation and commentary on customary law in France. This book dealt a lethal blow to the medieval rights and privileges of intermediary orders, and placed virtually all authority into the hands of the monarch and his state.

6.8 The sceptic as absolutist: Michel de Montaigne

It is a favourite conceit of modern, twentieth century liberals that scepticism, the attitude that nothing can really be known as the truth, is the best groundwork for individual liberty. The fanatic, convinced of the certainty of his views, will trample on the rights of others; the sceptic, convinced of nothing, will not. But the truth is precisely the opposite: the sceptic has no ground on which to stand to defend his or others’ liberty against assault. Since there will always be men willing to aggress against others for the sake of power or pelf, the triumph of scepticism means that the victims of aggression will be rendered defenceless against assault. Furthermore, the sceptic being unable to find any principle for rights or for any social organization, will probably cave in, albeit with a resigned sigh, to any existing regime of tyranny. Faute de mieux, he has little else to say or do.

An excellent case in point is one of the great sceptics of the modern world, the widely read and celebrated sixteenth century French essayist, Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533–92).9 Montaigne was born to a noble family in the Périgord region of south-western France, near the city of Bordeaux. He became a judge in the Bordeaux parlement in 1557, at the age of 24, as his father had been before him. He also joined at the parlement an uncle (his father’s brother), a first cousin of his mother, and a brother-in-law. Remaining in the parlement for 13 years, and then denied promotion to the upper chamber of that body, Montaigne retired to his rural chateau in 1570 to write his famous Essays. There he remained, except for a four-year stint as mayor of Bordeaux in the early 1580s. A leading humanist, Montaigne virtually created the essay form in France. He started writing these brief essays in the early 1570s, and published the first two volumes in 1580. The third book of essays was published in 1588, and all three volumes were posthumously published seven years later.

Though a practising Catholic, Montaigne was a thoroughgoing sceptic. Man can know nothing, his reason being insufficient to arrive either at a natural law ethics or a firm theology. As Montaigne put it: ‘reason does nothing but go astray in everything, and especially when it meddles with divine things’. And for a while, Montaigne adopted as his official motto the query, ‘What do I know?’

If Montaigne knew nothing, he could scarcely know enough to advocate setting one’s face against the burgeoning abolutist tyranny of his day. On the contrary, stoic resignation, a submission to the prevailing winds, became the required way of confronting the public world. Skinner sums up Montaigne’s political counsel, as holding ‘that everyone has a duty to submit himself to the existing order of things, never resisting the prevailing government and where necessary enduring it with fortitude’.10

In particular, Montaigne, though sceptical about religion itself, cynically stressed the social importance of everyone outwardly observing the same religious forms. Above all, France must ‘submit completely to the authority of our [Catholic] ecclesiastical government’.

Submission to constituted authority was, indeed, the key to Montaigne’s political thought. Everyone must remain obedient to the king at all times no matter how he discharges his obligation to rule. Unable to use reason as a guide, Montaigne had to fall back on the status quo, on custom and on tradition. He warned gravely and repeatedly that everyone must ‘wholly follow the accepted fashion and forms’, for ‘it is the rule of rules, and the universal law of laws, that each man should observe those of the place he is in’. Montaigne hailed Plato for wanting to prohibit any citizen from looking ‘even into the reason of the civil laws’, for those laws must ‘be respected as divine ordinances’. Although we may wish for different rulers, we ‘must nevertheless obey those that are here’. The finest achievement of the Christian religion, according to Montaigne, was its insistence on ‘obedience to the magistrates and maintenance of the government’.

Considering Montaigne’s fundamental outlook, it is no wonder that he warmly embraced the Machiavellian concept of ‘reason of state’. (May we say that he held the reason of man to be worthless, but the reason of state to be overriding?) Characteristically, while Montaigne writes that he personally likes to keep out of politics and diplomacy because he prefers to avoid lying and deceit, he also asserts the necessity of ‘lawful vice’ in the operations of government. Deceit in a ruler may be necessary, and furthermore, such vices are positively needed ‘for sewing our society together, as [are] poisons for the preservation of our health’. Montaigne then goes on to integrate his defence of deceit in a prince with his seemingly paradoxical defence of reason of state while having no use for human reason at all. For in following reason of state, the prince has simply ‘abandoned his own reason for a more universal and powerful reason’, and this mystical super-reason has shown him that an ordinarily evil action needed to be done.

Michel de Montaigne made a notable and highly influential contribution to mercantilism – the strictly economic aspect of state absolutism – as well. Although he claimed that he knew nothing, on one thing he certainly asserted truth, his much vaunted scepticism suddenly vanishing: in what Ludwig von Mises was later to call the ‘Montaigne fallacy’, he insisted, as in the title of his famous Essay Number 22, that ‘The Plight of One Man is the Benefit of Another’. There is the essence of mercantilist theory, in so far as mercantilism has a theory at all; in contrast to the fundamental truth well known to the scholastics that both parties benefit from an exchange, Montaigne opined that in a trade, one man can only benefit at the expense of another. By analogy, in international trade, one nation must benefit at the expense of another. The implication is that the market is a ravening jungle, so why should not a Frenchman urge the French state to grab as much from others as it can?

Montaigne developed his theme in Essay 22 in a characteristically worldly-wise and cynical manner. He notes that an Athenian once condemned a funeral director

on the charge that he demanded unreasonable profit, and this profit could not accrue to him but by the death of a great number of people. This judgment appears to be ill-grounded, inasmuch as no profit can possibly be made but at the expense of another, and because by the same rule every kind of gain would have to be condemned.

All work is done at the expense of others, and Montaigne correctly notes that the physician could be condemned in the same way. The same charge could be levied at the farmer or retailer for ‘gaining because of people’s hunger’, the tailor for ‘profiting because of someone’s need for clothing’, and so forth. He concluded broadly that the benefit of any one entity is necessarily ‘the dissolution and corruption of some other thing’. Unfortunately, of course, he could not see also that these producers did not create such needs, but instead were fulfilling them and thereby removing the want and pain of their customers and adding to their happiness and standard of living. If he had gone that far, he would have realized the nonsense of his dog-eat-dog, or what would now be called his ‘zero-sum game’, view of the marketplace.

6.9 Jean Bodin: apex of absolutist thought in France

While Montaigne paved the way for the dominance of absolutist thought in France, surely the founder, or at least the locus classicus of sixteenth century French absolutism was Jean Bodin (1530–96). Born in Angers, Bodin studied law at the University of Toulouse, where he taught for 12 years. Bodin later went to Paris to become a jurist, and soon became one of the leading servitors of King Henry III, and one of the leaders of the statist politique party, which upheld the power of the king as against the principled militants among the Huguenots on one side, and the Catholic League on the other.

Bodin’s most important work was The Six Books of a Commonwealth (Les Six livres de la republique) (1576). Perhaps the most massive work on political philosophy ever written, the Six Books was certainly the most influential book on political philosophy in the sixteenth century. In addition to this work, Bodin published books on money, law, the historical method, natural science, religion and the occult. Central to Bodin’s theory of absolutism, written in the face of the challenge of Huguenot rebellion, was the notion of sovereignty: the unchallengeable power of command in the monarch ruling over the rest of society. Characteristically, Bodin defined sovereignty as ‘the most high, absolute, and perpetual power over the citizens and subjects in a commonwealth’. Central to sovereignty in Bodin was the sovereign’s function as law-giver to society, and ‘the essence of lawmaking was command – in exercise of will with binding force’.11

Since the sovereign is the maker or creator of the law, he must therefore be above that law, which applies only to his subjects and not to himself. The sovereign, then, is a person whose will creates order out of formlessness and chaos.

The sovereign, furthermore, must be unitary and indivisible, the locus of command in society. Bodin explains that ‘we see the principal point of sovereign majesty and absolute power to consist in giving laws to subjects in general, without their consent’. The sovereign must be above the law that he creates as well as any customary law or institutions. Bodin urged the sovereign prince to follow God’s law in framing his edicts, but the important point was that no human action or institution could be employed to see that the prince follows the divine path or to call him to account.

Bodin, however, called upon the prince to rely for advice or counsel on a small number of wise advisers, men who, allegedly lacking motives of self-interest, would be able to aid the king in legislating for the public good of the entire nation. In short, a shall élite of wise men would share in the sovereign power behind the scenes, while publicly, the sovereign would hand down decrees as if solely the product of his own will. As Keohane writes, in Bodin’s system ‘the monarch’s dependence on his counsellors is hidden by the impressive and satisfying fiction that the law is handed down by one benevolent, absolute, superhuman will...’.12

It is hardly far-fetched to conclude that Bodin, court politician and jurist, saw himself as one of the sages running government from behind the scenes. Plato’s ideal of combined philosopher–king had now been transformed into the more realistic and, for Bodin, more self-serving goal of philosopher guiding the king. And all this cloaked in the illusory assumption that such a court philosopher has no self-interest in money or power in his own right.

Bodin also envisaged a broad role for various groups to participate in the government of the commonwealth, as well as a wide scope for bureaucrats and administrators. The crucial point is that all be subordinated to the power of the king.

It is often true that political analysts are at their most acute in revealing the flaws in systems with which they disagree. Accordingly, one of Bodin’s keenest insights was his examination of the popular democracies of the past. Bodin points out that ‘if we rip up all the popular states that ever were’, and closely examine their real condition, then we shall find that the alleged rule of the people was always rule by a small oligarchy. Anticipating such perceptive late nineteenth century theorists of the power elite or ruling class as Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, Bodin pointed out that in reality rule is always exercised by an oligarchy, for whom ‘the people serves but for a mask’.

There is a curious lacuna, however, in the agenda of absolutist power proclaimed by Jean Bodin. That lacuna lies in an area always crucial to the practical exercise of state power: taxation. We have seen that before the fourteenth century, French monarchs were expected to live off their own seigneurial rents and tolls, and that tax levies were only granted begrudgingly and in emergencies. And while a regular and oppressive system of taxation was in place in France by the early sixteenth century, even the royal and absolutist theorists hesitated to grant the monarch the unlimited right to tax. In the late sixteenth century, both the Huguenots and the Catholic Leaguers bitterly condemned the arbitrary power of the king to tax as a crime against society. As a result Bodin and his fellow establishment politiques were reluctant to play into the hands of the king’s enemies. Like the French writers before him, then, Bodin inconsistently upheld the rights of private property, as well as the invalidity of the king’s taxing his subjects without their consent: ‘It is not in the power of any prince in the world, at his pleasure to raise taxes upon the people, no more than to take another man’s goods upon him...’ Bodin’s notion of ‘consent’, however, was scarcely a thoroughgoing or radical one; instead, he was content with the existing formal agreement to taxation by the states-general.

Bodin’s own actions as a deputy from the Vermandois at the states-general meeting at Blois (1576–77) emphatically stressed the limited taxes aspect of his consistent attitude toward sovereignty. The king had proposed to substitute a graduated income tax on all commoners with no exemptions (what might now be called ‘a flat tax with bumps’) for the myriad of different taxes they then were forced to pay. Curiously enough, this scheme was almost precisely the one which Bodin himself had publicly advocated a short while before. But Bodin’s opposition to the king’s proposal displayed his shrewdly realistic attitude toward government. He noted ‘that the king could not be trusted when he said this tax would be substituted for the tailles, aides, and gabelles. Rather, it was much more likely that the king was plotting to make this an additional tax’.13 Bodin also engaged in a perceptive interest-analysis of the reason that the Parisian deputies had taken the lead in support of the new, higher tax. For he showed that the Parisians had not been paid any interest on their government bonds for a long while, and were hoping that the higher taxes would allow the king to resume his payments.

Jean Bodin, anxious to prevent the king from launching an all-out war against the Huguenots, led the estates in blocking not only the single-tax plan, but also other emergency grants to the king. Bodin pointed out that ‘temporary’ grants often became permanent. He also warned the king and his countrymen that ‘one cannot find more frequent upsets, seditions, and ruins of commonwealths than because of excessive tax burdens and imposts’.

Among the absolutist writers following Bodin, the seventeenth century servitors of the absolute state, all hesitance or piety to the medieval legacy of strictly limited taxation was destined to disappear. State power, unlimited, was to be glorified.

In the more narrowly economic sphere of the theory of money, Bodin, as we have seen above, has long been credited by historians with pioneering the quantity theory of money (more strictly, the direct influence of the supply of money on prices) in his Response to the Paradoxes of M. de Malestroit (1568). Malestroit had attributed the unusual and chronic price increases in France to debasement, but Bodin pinpointed the cause as the increased supply of specie from the New World. We have seen, however, that the quantity theory had been known since the time of the fourteenth century scholastic Jean Buridan and of Nicolas Copernicus in the early sixteenth century. The increased specie from the New World was spotted as the cause of price rises a dozen years earlier than Bodin by the eminent Spanish scholastic Martin de Azpilcueta Navarrus. As a highly learned scholar, Bodin would certainly have read Navarrus’s treatise, especially since Navarrus had taught at the University of Toulouse a generation before Bodin came there to study. Bodin’s claim of originality in this analysis should therefore be taken with many grains of salt.14

Jean Bodin was also one of the first theorists to point out the influence of social leaders on demand for goods, and therefore on their price. People, he points out, ‘esteem and raise in price everything that the great lords like, though the things in themselves are nor worth that valuation’. Then, a snob effect takes over, after ‘the great lords see that their subjects have an abundance of things that they themselves like’. The lords then ‘begin to despise’ these products, and their prices then fall.

Despite his numerous keen economic and political insights, however, Bodin was ultra-orthodox in his view of usury, ignoring the work of his near-contemporary Du Moulin as well as the Spanish scholastics. Interest-taking was prohibited by God, according to Bodin, and that was that.

6.10 After Bodin

Jean Bodin’s exaltation of sovereignty struck French political thought like a thunderclap; here at last was a way to justify and expand the ever-increasing powers of the Crown. In particular, the new view was adopted and subtly transformed by writers who were far more absolutist, in practice, than was Bodin himself. The one element that Bodin’s veneration of sovereignty lacked was the Protestant notion of divine sanction; for to Bodin absolute sovereignty was simply a fact of nature. Other politiques, however, soon added the missing ingredient, since they had long been accustomed to think of rule as by divine right. The idea of the king’s rule being commanded by God was a familiar one in the sixteenth century; none, however, had extended kingly rule to the notion of absolute sovereignty created by Bodin.

The most important immediate follower of Bodin was Pierre Grégoire, in his De republica (1578). The king, for Grégoire, was God’s appointed vicar in the temporal sphere, and his rule was under the constant influence of God’s will. The king’s command was therefore equivalent to God’s, and was equally owed absolute obedience by his subjects. ‘The prince is the image of God, in power and in authority’, wrote Grégoire.

Bodin and others had still retained the idea that true justice was a concept separate and apart from the king’s edicts, so that the king’s actions could well be unjust; no one, however, was allowed to obstruct or disobey such actions. But in the doctrine of the gallicized Scot Adam Blackwood, the two concepts become almost totally conflated (Adversus Georgii Buchanani, 1581). The will of the prince, for Blackwood, becomes just virtually by definition. The king was necessarily just and virtually superhuman, a living law unto himself. Indeed, Blackwood carried the glorification of divinely constituted monarchy to its apogee, asserting that the very person of the king, and not simply the authority of his office, was divine, and that he was in a literal sense a god on earth.

As its title indicates, Blackwood’s work was written as an attack on his fellow gallicized Scot, the radical Calvinist George Buchanan. Buchanan’s libertarian and pro-tyrannicide doctrine had rested, unsurprisingly, on the concept of natural law. And so Blackwood denounced natural law as a source of anarchistic liberty, prompting in its believers an aversion to law and to political authority. Against natural law, Blackwood upheld the jus gentium, the positive law of nations, as the explanation and justification of political authority.

It is not surprising that the consensual limit on taxation, still active in Bodin’s thought, should drop out immediately upon the fusion of absolute sovereignty and divine right. The leader of that fusion, Pierre Grégoire, introduced erasing the tax limit as well. Whereas even Bodin had conceded that natural law established a right to private property, with Grégoire natural law only ratifies the unchecked power of the king. For Grégoire, the king had the unlimited prerogative to levy taxes, since the good of the state is higher than the property rights of the individual. Indeed, the king possessed by divine grant an absolute authority over all the persons and properties of his subjects. To avoid confusion, therefore, or any implication of consent to taxation, the states-general should be abolished altogether.

It was, indeed, Adam Blackwood who uniquely and radically reached the clarity of consistency on the ruler’s right to tax. For if property rights are important, and the king has the absolute right to tax or otherwise seize private property at will, then this must mean that ‘All lands were originally held by the king and were granted by him to others... And the granting of fiefs by the king was but a partial transfer; all lands owed tribute to him and remained subject to his authority’.15 In short, in an odd version of the state of nature, only the king had original or continuing property rights; all other seeming property rights are simply allowances by the king, temporary possessions that are regulatable by the king and revocable by him at any time.

Whereas Adam Blackwood had been a lone extremist in absolutism in the early 1580s, a host of royalist pamphleteers were soon adopting his views. From approximately 1585 to Henry IV’s conversion to Catholicism eight years later, the royal power was beleaguered and subordinate to the strength of the militant Catholic League. The royalist writers therefore felt obliged to push the divine sanction of the sovereign to the maximum, in order to eliminate any power of the pope in France, and to counsel absolute obedience to any legitimate sovereign, regardless of his religion. The king had absolute authority over the Catholic Church in France as well as all other institutions. Thus, François Le Jay (On the Dignity of Kings, 1589) asserted that kings were established for the honour and service of God, and that subjects should obey their rulers as they would a god on earth. Louis Servin, in his Vindiciae (1590), trumpeted of Henry IV, then still a Huguenot, that ‘God is our king; by Him he lives and flourishes, and by His spirit is he animated’. Probably the most extreme version of this doctrine was expressed in a speech of Jacques de La Guesle, procurator general of France, asking the parlement to condemn a priest who had upheld the supreme temporal authority of the pope:

Sirs, the authority of the king is sacrosanct, ordained by God, the principal work of His Providence, the masterpeice of His hands, the image of His sublime Majesty and proportionate to His immense grandeur, so as to bear comparison of the creature with the Creator... For, just as God is by nature the first King and Prince, so is the King, by creation and imitation, God of all on earth...16

The subjects, according to these Henrician absolutists, owed this quasidivine figure absolute obedience. These writers developed the Blackwoodian theme that the king’s decrees were ipso facto and necessarily just. Jacques Hurault, in his On the Offices of State (1588), developed this doctrine most clearly. Hurault explained that the prince was guided by the hand of God and therefore could do no wrong. The ruler was not simply a man but justice itself, which he dispensed according to the will of God. The constitution of the state was subordinated, in Hurault, to two simple points: the prince’s necessarily just commands, and the obedience of his subjects. The ruler commands and the subjects obey. Period. Furthermore, in reaction to the Leaguer emphasis on the people, the royalists counselled the king not to allow naturally restless subjects much liberty.

Since the politiques and Henry IV triumphed shortly thereafter, these ultra-absolutist views of the embattled Henrician pamphleteers inspired and were followed fairly completely by the dominant theoreticians of the great age of absolutism: seventeenth century France.

6.11 Notes

• 1  Joseph A. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 163–4.
• 2  Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: Vol. I, The Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 138n.
• 3  Ibid., p. 138.
• 4  Ibid., pp. 134–5.
• 5  We shall see in a later volume that the renowned left Keynesian Alvin Henry Hansen, in his famous ‘stagnation’ thesis of the late 1930s, forecast permanent stagnation for the American economy partially because of the recent decline in population growth. We shall see further that Hansen developed this doctrine as the logical outcome of a rigid Walrasian framework. This of course is in stark contrast to the pro-‘zero population growth’ hysteria of the left liberals of the 1970s.
• 6  Thus, for the world of the twentieth century, P.T. Bauer notes: ‘Indeed, over large parts of the Third World the extreme sparseness of the population presents obstacles to the economic advance of enterprising people, obstacles which are more effective than those supposedly presented by population pressure. A sparse population precludes the construction of transport facilities and communications, and thus retards the spread of new ideas and methods. In this way, it circumscribes the scope for enterprise.’ P.T. Bauer, Equality, the Third World and Economic Delusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 45.
• 7  Schumpeter, op. cit., note 1. p. 579.
• 8  William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth-Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (1941, New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 53.
• 9  Pronounced Mon-TAN-ye rather than the usual Mon-TAYN, for he came from an area of south-western France where langue d’oc (Occitan) was spoken rather than the northern (essentially the area around Paris) langue d’oeil or d’oui (French). The southern regions had only been conquered by France in the course of a savage extirpation of their religion (Albigensian) and culture during the thirteenth century. The area around Bordeaux, furthermore, had been acquired by England and governed by the English for three centuries, from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fifteenth. When the French captured Bordeaux and the surrounding region in the 1450s, they proceeded to extirpate the Gascon (which includes Périgord) wing of Occitan as a written language, a language that the English had left alone. Thus, in 1539, a few years after Montaigne’s birth, the French outlawed the use of Occitan as an administrative, written language, in the Edict of Villers-Cotterêts. People like Montaigne were thus induced to write in the official French language, and while he was always loyal to the French Crown, Montaigne still considered himself far more of a Gascon than a Frenchman.
• 10  Skinner, op. cit., note 2, p. 279.
• 11  Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), p. 70.
• 12  Ibid., p. 75.
• 13  Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972), p. 162.
• 14  In 1907, a descendant of Bodin asserted that the first writer to explain the influence of specie from the New World on prices in Europe was the Frenchman Noel du Fail, in 1548.
• 15  William Farr Church, Constitutional Thought in Sixteenth Century France: A Study in the Evolution of Ideas (1941, New York: Octagon Books, 1969), p. 259.
• 16  My translation from the French. See ibid., pp. 266n-67n.