Spinoza and Dutch Republicanism

Spinoza and Republicanism Raia Prokhovnik Spinoza and Republicanism By the same author RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN HO...

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Spinoza and Republicanism Raia Prokhovnik

Spinoza and Republicanism

By the same author RHETORIC AND PHILOSOPHY IN HOBBES’ ‘LEVIATHAN’ (1991) RATIONAL WOMAN: A Feminist Critique of Dichotomy (2nd Edition 2002)

Spinoza and Republicanism Raia Prokhovnik Senior Lecturer Department of Politics and Government Open University, UK

© Raia Prokhovnik 2004 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2004 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0–333–73390–8 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Prokhovnik, Raia. Spinoza and republicanism/Raia Prokhovnik. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–73390–8 (cloth) 1. Spinoza, Benedictus de, 1632–1677–Contributions in political science. 2. Republicanism–Netherlands–History–17th century. 3. Netherlands– Politics and government–17th century. I. Title. JC163.S8P76 2004 321.8⬘6⬘092–dc22 10 13

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

For Eleanor and Conal Browning

Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Maps

ix

Introduction

1

1 The Revolt The history of the Revolt of the Netherlands Political thought during the Revolt

21 21 46

2 The Dutch Republic The date of the Dutch Republic Political thought in 1648

65 65 74

3 De Witt’s Republicanism

88

4 English and Dutch Republicanism English republican writings

117 133

5 Dutch Republicanism The signiﬁcance of the Dutch mentality The Holland-centric factor

154 154 162

6 Spinoza’s Dutch Perspective The political works Spinoza’s Marrano status

168 169 191

7 Liberty and Sovereignty in the Political Works Liberty Sovereignty

200 201 220

8 Spinoza’s Republicanism The reception of Spinoza’s political works The character of Spinoza’s republicanism

237 237 246

Epilogue

257

Bibliography

262

Index

277

vii

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the Harold Hyam Wingate Foundation for its generous support through the award of a Wingate scholarship to pursue this research. In particular I would like to thank Jane Reid, the Administrator of the Foundation. I would also like to acknowledge the assistance of a British Academy grant in support of the further research for this book. I am deeply grateful for their positive and constructive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript to Conal Condren, Gary Browning, Simon Prokhovnik, Terrell Carver, Noel O’Sullivan, John Horton, Mark Philp, the late Liam O’Sullivan, and two anonymous readers. This book also owes an enormous debt to Quentin Skinner’s revolutionary insights into the distinctiveness of contexts, highlighted in the illocutionary force of writers, in studying the history of political thought. I could not have completed this project without the sustaining encouragement of Gary Browning, the stimulation of colleagues at the Open University, and the warm support of Alan and Hilary Browning, Angela Radcliffe, Lorraine Foreman-Peck, and Caroline Thompson.

viii

Hoorn

Th

ix

DRENTHE

t

Brussels s

LUXEMBOURG

Maa

Liège

Maastricht

BRABANT Cologne ine

Amsterdam

Nimegen

ER

The Dutch Republic

Maastricht

Breda AL I T Y

GENER Bergenop-Zoom

Bois-le Duc Tilburg LAN DS

LD

Arnhem

GE

ZUIDER Kampen ZEE

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Deventer

SS

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DRENTHE

Groningen

O VE R Zwolle I J

FRIESLAND

Harlingen

Leeuwarden

Enkhuizen

UTRECHT Utrecht Rijswijk Gouda Delft Rotterdam Waal Dordrecht

The Hague

Leiden

Hoorn Zaan

TEXEL

VLIELAND

Haarlem

NORTH SEA

ZEELAND Veere Middelburg Flushing

N

Adapted from K. Davids and J. Lucassen eds, A Miracle Mirrored. The Dutch Republic in European Perspective Cambridge University Press, 1995

The Habsburg Netherlands

Dutch border (post 1648)

NAMUR

eld

Sch

Ghent

Antwerp

Lingen

Rh

H A I N A U LT

Lys

FLANDERS

Ostend

LLA

HO

Em

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Emden GR Leeuwarden O N I N GE Groningen N Harlingen FRIESLAND

Enkhuizen

a eW

NDS

n

e dd

l Ijsse

Vecht ZUIDER Haarlem ZEE OVERIJSSEL Amsterdam Deventer GE LD The Hague Leiden Utrecht E R Zutphen Gouda L AN Rhine Arnhem Delft D RotterdamWaal ZEELAND Dordrecht Nimegen Zierikzee Maas Veere Breda Middelburg Flushing Venlo

NORTH SEA

TEXEL

ND

ISLA

O

IAN

H

Emden

s

IS

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FR

L

l Ijsse

Dunkirk

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M aa s

Introduction

Seventeenth-century Dutch political practice and thought, and in particular Dutch republicanism, set against the background of its history and political traditions, represents a crucially important context in which to discuss Spinoza’s political philosophy. Several modern commentators place Spinoza in a self-conﬁdent republican tradition dating from 1579 when, it is said, the United Provinces asserted its independence from Spain, embracing political change along with economic innovation and colonial expansion. Such change and innovation are seen as the foundation of the success of the northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century, when Dutch selfassurance resulted, so the story goes, in a Golden Age of wealth, prosperity, and the status of a major European power. In this Golden Age, a proud republicanism is depicted as given a deﬁnitive statement by Spinoza, and an unprecedented cultural ﬂowering, for instance in painting, is seen as giving rise to a tradition richly diverse enough to embrace the genius and technical skill of both Rembrandt and Vermeer. But in closer focus, a series of curious features emerge from this history. The Dutch republic is an interestingly difﬁcult term to deﬁne, and for almost a hundred years – almost a whole century after its ‘independence’ in 1579 – the politics of the United Provinces exhibits a profound mismatch between practice and theory. The disjunction is between (for the most part, a stubbornly unacknowledged) republican practice on the one hand, and, on the other, orthodox theory as taught in the universities, which continued to centre on an analysis of monarchy as the best form of government. Within the context of this unacknowledged lack of correspondence between theory and practice, political debate was elliptical at times and also demonstrated a 1

2 Spinoza and Republicanism

mismatch. However, neither dimension of this second anomalous situation conformed directly to either practice or theory, revolving instead around a substance-and-form dichotomy. The substance of political debate was often engrossed with the powers of the provincial regent oligarchies, the pre-eminent position held by Holland among the seven provinces, and with the strengths of shifting pro- and antiOrangist factions. But this substance was often framed in the language and ﬁercely held convictions of the confrontation between Remonstrant and counter-Remonstrant adherents. The lack of ﬁt between theory and practice helped to mask the fact that United Provinces politics took place in the context of an intense fragmentation of loyalties. Spinoza’s work can be analysed fruitfully in a rich variety of contexts, as the history of commentary on Spinoza attests. A range of scholars have placed him within a narrative about the rise of liberal political theory; Wolfson regarded him as the last of the great medieval philosophers; and Gebhardt considered Spinoza in the light of the Marrano experience. In recent years Spinoza’s political writings have been the subject of important scholarly investigation by three groups of writers. Philosophers interested in tracing the connections between the Ethics and the political works, such as Lloyd, Gatens, van Bunge and others, have seen these texts as contexts for each other. In particular they have related the key categories Spinoza developed in the Ethics to his idea of political community and the values that inform it. Much valuable work has been done in illuminating Spinoza’s politics through the connections between the Ethics and the political works, but that is not the focus of the present work. Moreover, Jonathan Israel’s recent Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 sees Spinoza and especially Spinozism as central to an integrated conception of the European Enlightenment encompassing the mainstream ‘French’ perspective, an English Enlightenment focusing on Locke and Newton and other ‘national’ examples, together with a radical and until now recessive Enlightenment in which Spinoza has latterly been seen as a key ﬁgure. Israel in Radical Enlightenment is dealing with Spinoza’s philosophy seen as inaugurating a distinctively modern view, for whom ‘nothing is based on God’s Word or commandment…the only legitimacy in politics is the self-interest of the individual’, according to a near-contemporary (Israel 2001, 5). Historians of political thought interested in classical republicanism, such as Skinner, Pocock, van Gelderen, Haitsma Mulier and others, have explored another important context in which to view Spinoza’s

Introduction 3

political works. This enterprise intersects with a large and lively literature on English republicanism by Worden, Scott, Sharpe and others. ‘Classical republicanism’ refers not to ancient republicanism but to early modern writings that draw upon ancient Greek and Roman republican authors. Over the past two or three decades historians of political thought have been involved in tracing the use of primarily Roman and Italian Renaissance reﬂections on republican theory and practice in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European contexts, and wider eighteenth-century transatlantic contexts. Recently Hankins has developed an argument that casts doubt on civic humanism and classical republicanism as constituting ‘a distinct tradition or language of political discourse’ (Hankins 2000, 3). His recommendation has been to ‘slice up Pocock’s long republican tradition into unrelated sections’ (Hankins 2000, 5), and he cautions against reifying both ‘classical republicanism’ and Pocock’s notion of tradition. Notwithstanding Hankins’ reservations, this school of thought continues to recover important insights into the meaning of early modern texts, to make valuable connections between writers, and to remind political theorists of the thriving republican tradition of thought and practice prior to the development of liberal political theory in Europe. In particular, Skinner’s series of interventions, documenting as Hankins says, the ‘long prehistory of the ideas in medieval scholastic and rhetorical traditions’ (Hankins 2000, 5), and his redeﬁnition of classical republicans as neo-Romans, are very important. Skinner’s most recent contribution is found in his co-edited two-volume and immensely illuminating work, Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage (2002). The study contains a wealth of important scholarship devoted to the project of reclaiming the classical intellectual inheritance enriching the meaning of early modern republicanism. However, this literature is not the primary one within which the current project seeks to locate itself. Together with these two contextual organising frameworks, centring on the philosophical text and on the ‘classical republican’ tradition, there is a third tradition. This third organising framework is indebted to the work of Kossmann, Price, Israel, van Deursen and others, and highlights the distinctiveness of theory and practice in politics in the Netherlands in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is to this third tradition that the present book on Spinoza’s political works seeks primarily to contribute. It is well known that Spinoza took an active interest in the public domain and politics, as part of the spirit of philosophical inquiry with which he viewed the world. This book draws out the extent of his interest in the conduct of political relations in the

4 Spinoza and Republicanism

United Provinces in particular. The current work highlights the extent to which Spinoza’s political works seek to defend and update the Dutch way of doing politics. These three forms of context are not mutually exclusive and are in places overlapping and mutually enriching. However, at times in what follows, it is necessary to distinguish the present endeavour from those other undertakings. The current work will attempt to show how this third context can throw further light on the meanings of Spinoza’s political works. These three domains of reﬂection on political theory, while overlapping, are irreducible and spring from different, equally legitimate, questions. One example of the difference in approach of the current perspective from the ‘classical republicanism’ perspective concerns, for want of less anachronistic terms, the national and international characters of seventeenth-century forms of republicanism. In the seventeenth century, before the pattern had been established of the self-determination of nations to gain statehood and before the consolidation of Europe as a group of nation-states, the terms ‘nations’, ‘states’, ‘Europe’, and ‘international’ did not have their current meanings. Pocock indicates that while ‘Europe’ was an ancient term, it was not used as a selfdescription by the Romans – theirs was a Mediterranean empire. ‘Europe’ as a continent needs to be clearly distinguished from ‘Europe’ as a civilisation (Pocock 2002, 59). The term ‘Christendom’ was the dominant political one to describe the area of modern Europe, delineating the realm of Latin Christians (Jordan 2002, 74–5), and it was only from the sixteenth century, with the construction of overseas empires, that ‘worlds beyond Europe’ were encountered in detail (Pagden 2002, 10), and a new distinction between Europe and the international was established. Pagden also notes (2002, 13) that it was only the treaties of 1648 that ‘put a ﬁnal end to the Church’s role as arbiter in international affairs’. Over the following century an international politics inﬂected by national churches, the multiplicity of other churches, and based on the idea of a balance of power settlement between states emerged. ‘Europe’ as a secular civilisation developed only with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century and the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht (Pocock 2002, 64). Writers like Scott, Velema and Armitage quite legitimately explore the trans-European connections between republican writers, though without always clarifying the different meanings of ‘international’ in seventeenth-, twentieth- and a possibly-transformed twenty-ﬁrstcentury usage. They examine the common and so in that sense

Introduction 5

‘international’ features of the intellectual inheritances or, as Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk put it (2001, 2), the ‘universalist and cosmopolitan ideals’ shared by such writers. Velema, for instance, contends that there were ‘few if any early modern European nations with totally and entirely exclusive traditions of political thought or language’, though his conclusion that the ‘dominant early modern political languages were, to a large extent, international’ may be an overstatement (Velema 2002, 10). This contemporary school of thought charts the rich vein of afﬁnities in the classical education and common language of Latin shared by educated elites across Europe, aware of each others’ writings, forming a much stronger ‘international respublica literatum’ (Boralevi 2002, 261) network than exists in knowledge and learning today. Classically educated writers in the seventeenth century used that classical inheritance, to a greater or lesser extent, to inform their reﬂections on contemporary events, and exploited its rhetorical potential to do so. For the current project, however, the phrase, ‘to a greater or lesser extent’ is crucial. While it is useful to draw links and recover similarities and resemblances as Velema and others do, a different but equally valid emphasis is concerned to specify the distinctiveness of speciﬁc writers and practices in a particular political society in order to understand their illocutionary force. In the Dutch case, more strongly than in some others, the ‘national’ character of political culture can be clearly identiﬁed. Within this context the illocutionary force of a writer like Spinoza can be (at least partly and illuminatingly) speciﬁed within the ‘deeply communicative’ (Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk 2001, 4) Dutch tradition of political thought and action, taken to have stable meanings. For instance, Curley notes that the reason Spinoza put the Ethics to one side to write the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus has ‘much to do with political and social conditions in the Netherlands at that time’ (Curley in Spinoza 1985, 350). Klever describes Spinoza as one ‘who so loved his country and its much-praised freedom’ (Klever 1996, 45), and observes that ‘Amsterdam…was a positive example in the eyes of Spinoza’ (Klever 1996, 38). Because of Spinoza’s attachment to the strong and particular identity of the Dutch case, it makes sense to explore the purpose of a line of argument developed by a writer like Spinoza in terms of his political society and culture, as well as in terms of his intellectual peers and predecessors. It is also pertinent to raise the national/international distinction in the light of the approach taken by some philosophers. Philosophers committed to a mono-contextual meaning for Spinoza in the Tractatus

6 Spinoza and Republicanism

Theologico-Politicus (TTP), as only a member of an international ‘republic of letters’, seek to deny the signiﬁcance of his interest in local politics, as well as being led to make inﬂated claims. For such philosophers Letter 23 is taken as deﬁnitive proof that Spinoza saw himself not as a United Provinces resident or a Jew but as a philosopher without national context, and Letter 30 is taken as Spinoza’s own statement as a philosopher of why he felt compelled to write the TTP. However in Letter 23, Spinoza’s description of ‘a pure philosopher’ who ‘has no other touchstone of truth than the natural intellect and not theology’ (Spinoza 1985, 387), and his stricture that ‘while we are speaking philosophically we must not use theological ways of speaking’ (Spinoza 1985, 388), refer to the separation between philosophy and theology in the TTP, and do not rule out Spinoza’s interest in contributing to republican debate in the United Provinces. In Letter 30, as Curley notes (Spinoza 1985, 350), Spinoza sets out his reasons for writing the TTP – the ‘prejudices of the theologians, for I know of no greater obstacle to men’s applying their minds to philosophy’, and the ‘opinion ordinary men have of me. They never stop accusing me of atheism, and I am forced to rebut this accusation as much as I can’. Curley observes that Spinoza aimed, in the TTP, to free ‘people from their reliance on Scripture as a guide to the truth about speculative matters’, before publishing the Ethics (Spinoza 1985, 350). Again, these reasons do not rule out others, including a desire to model his vision of a ‘free state’ on the political practice of the country in which he was born and lived. Indeed, the annotation to Letter 30 shows that Spinoza was motivated by an engagement with Dutch politics as much as with philosophical differences with Calvinist divines. Elwes relates that when an excited crowd suspected Spinoza of being a spy, Spinoza cried out, ‘I am a good republican’, adding that he had ‘never had any aim but the welfare and good of the State’ (Elwes 1883, xii). Moreover even the chief collections (Spinoza 1883, 1982, 1985, 1966) from Spinoza’s 88 letters, where the criterion of selection has been to highlight his philosophical correspondence, show not only an appetite for philosophical debate and of spirited clariﬁcation of critics’ mistakes but also a keen interest in optical lenses and other scientiﬁc matters and current affairs. Nonphilosophical correspondence was destroyed after his death. In the light of the modern national/international dichotomy, which only in the eighteenth century became the dominant way of conceiving home–foreign relations, it is important to make clear how the seventeenth-century United Provinces differs from a modern territorial nation-state. The Netherlanders do not form a nation in terms of

Introduction 7

having a stable territory, or a homogeneous language, religion or ethnic background. The United Provinces is nevertheless clearly a nation in the sense of having a shared political society and culture, and shared and relatively stable terms of contestation in political debate. In Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk’s important work, The History of Political Thought in National Context (2001), a group of writers discuss a range of issues that arise from the different meanings of ‘national’ political thought. The early modern United Provinces is still a neglected area of the history of political thought. This book is concerned to add to our understanding of Spinoza’s political works by explicating an important dimension of Spinoza’s intended meaning, which was primarily local and particularistic, rather than to recover evidence of classical learning in his political works or links with the Ethics as a guide to meaning. Moreover this dimension of Spinoza’s intended meaning was a contribution to a political society preoccupied with a local and particularistic discourse for articulating political reactions and policies. Asserting the distinctiveness or even uniqueness of Dutch republicanism and so accenting the diversity between different republican forms does not lead, however, to a withdrawal to a ‘nominalist’ position (Dunn 1994, 207), the view that each example can only be studied on its own. Neither does it entail subscription to a view of ‘national’ republican traditions. Indeed the comparison with English republicanism in Chapter 4 is designed to illuminate both cases and provide insights through comparison not available when cases are studied in isolation. Moreover it can be argued that Velema is setting up something of a straw man in his repudiation of a ‘totally and entirely exclusive tradition’. Speciﬁcally Velema regards Kossmann as instrumental in proposing ‘a purely Dutch and entirely original form of anti-monarchism’ (Velema 2002, 10). However, Kossmann is not guilty of this accusation, and it would be difﬁcult to recall any historian of political thought suggesting a ‘totally and entirely exclusive tradition’. The current work is certainly not arguing for a ‘pure’ form of political theory in Spinoza or the United Provinces. But it is seeking to discover what is notable and characteristic about the meaning of republicanism in this context, on the grounds that terms like ‘republicanism’ and ‘anti-monarchism’ meant something different (as well as something similar) in their different conﬁgurations in different national (not nation-state) and other political communities. In short the term ‘republicanism’ in this context refers to much more than a simple anti-monarchism (and the identiﬁcation of the Princes

8 Spinoza and Republicanism

of Orange with the monarchical component is by no means a simple one), and only secondarily involves a moral ideal of self-government and only doubtfully a notion of civic participation. ‘Republicanism’ in the Dutch context has most to do with, it will be argued, things like regional complementarity and Holland-centricity, provincial insularity and independence, traditionalist practice and the claim about the defence of privileges, the political dominance of the regents, and De Witt’s ‘True Liberty’ policy expressed in the loosest of polycentric confederal alliances – none of which ﬁgure in the abstract deﬁnition of ‘classical republicanism’. The legitimacy of this approach is strengthened by Sharpe’s, Pocock’s and Worden’s evidence, discussed in Chapter 4, for the novelty of republican ideas in England after the regicide, and by Conti’s statement highlighting the insularity of the Italians. He notes that in ‘sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, the word “republic” was all but a synonym for Venice. When “republic” was mentioned, Venice was automatically evoked’ (Conti 2002, 73). Having identiﬁed some of the organising frameworks in the current literature in which Spinoza and republicanism can be studied, and having thereby established more fully the context in terms of which this book seeks to contribute, we return to the present endeavour. Spinoza’s contribution to the political culture of the United Provinces, while extensive and serious, appears as in important ways that of an outsider to the real issues of political life, as he wrote from a perspective that was outside both the university establishment and the ruling regent class. And while he was seen as lending support to De Witt’s republican government, in particular through his published interventions, the publication of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) in 1670 was regarded as untimely, and the Tractatus Politicus (TP) in 1677 was too late to prevent De Witt’s vision of ‘True Liberty’ being overpowered. But in other ways, and this becomes clear with historical focus, Spinoza’s is the clearest statement that was made, during the 1660s and 1670s, of the moral, political, and constitutional implications of the republic’s identity. It was, however, supported by an abstract theoretical system that the Dutch distrusted and found unpalatable. Spinoza’s formulation also incorporates two traditional Dutch elements of crucial importance – a Holland-centric view of political arrangements in the United Provinces, and an emphasis on the role of practice, as traditionally understood, as the primary means of sanctioning political action. This second point is particularly important, in several respects, in understanding the nature of the ‘Dutch Republic’. It is in terms of

Introduction 9

the peculiarly Dutch understanding of traditional practice, as applied to politics, that we can make sense of the reluctance on the part of the Dutch to theorise the republican character of their state. It is also in terms of this understanding that we can account for their distrust of Spinoza for undertaking such theorisation, and their unwillingness to accept Italian, English or other forms of republicanism as models to follow or emulate. The Holland-centric perspective and the role of practice also help to account for the eclectic mixture of elements to be ultimately found in Dutch republican formulations at the end of the seventeenth century. The Dutch predisposition toward practice is not conﬁned to traditional practice. While, during this period, in politics and government the northern Netherlanders favoured recourse to traditional forms of practice, they also embraced and excelled at a range of new scientiﬁc and technological practices. Under the demands of trade and war, important new developments were made in the practices of fortiﬁcations, surveying, navigation, mathematics, cartography, printing, optics, astronomy, shipbuilding, commerce, trade, manufacture, and cultural practices like painting and architecture. Descartes, for instance, was known ﬁrst as a mathematician. Many of these new practices were important on a global scale and fostered world markets for the Dutch. Thus what can be understood by republicanism in theory and practice, in the seventeenth century in the United Provinces, and Spinoza’s role in it, turns out to be a fascinating and complex subject. For although 1579 marks the beginning of a process by which the seven northern provinces became in practice a republic, comprehensively republican ideas were not put forward, let alone accepted, until almost a hundred years later. For almost a century the United Provinces seemed at pains to deny a republican character. Spinoza published the TTP in 1670, and the Ethics and TP were published after his death in 1677. But to understand these works and the political climate of the 1660s and 1670s in the United Provinces in which they were written, we are constantly dragged back into the turmoil of the Dutch Revolt of the previous century. For this reason, it is important here to rehearse the character of the theory and practice of political life in the United Provinces from the time of the Dutch Revolt onwards, before Spinoza’s contribution can be adequately understood. The history of the Revolt and its aftermath provide the appropriate antecedent conditions, in this study, for evaluating Spinoza’s political contribution, but are not regarded as deterministically causal. The examination of the evidence

10 Spinoza and Republicanism

relating to the character of the theory and practice of politics during this period will not only disclose a more accurate picture of the background to Spinoza’s contribution. That examination will also undercut any assumption of a ‘natural’ reciprocal expression between theory and practice, in politics in the United Provinces at this time. Thus the long prelude to discussion of Spinoza is required in order to consider a whole range of crucially relevant questions. For instance, why were the United Provinces so reluctant to use their republican title? And why was Spinoza’s theoretical justiﬁcation of a century of more or less republican practice received so poorly? Why had a more centralised and uniﬁed political and administrative structure not developed in line with the United Provinces’ status as a major European power? Why had Holland, obviously the wealthiest and most powerful province, not come to express its dominance in constitutional terms of institutional change, given the centralising tendencies at work elsewhere in Europe? The United Provinces is a notable exception to ‘that general drift towards absolutism which has often been taken as the theme par excellence of the century’ (Stoye 1969, 19). And how is it that Holland was overruled by weaker provinces, and accepted being overruled, at strategic points? Why did the United Provinces, as a major European power, not seek to increase its territory in Europe? In this way the United Provinces was going against the grain of the practice of France, Spain, Sweden and the Habsburgs – that is, going against the grain of the aggressively territorial ambitions of other major powers in seventeenth-century Europe. All the puzzling questions about the reluctance of the United Provinces to accept their republican status positively, and to develop a uniﬁed constitutional structure, draw us back to the previous century when the Netherlands began its eighty years’ struggle against the Spanish. But here more and more puzzles arise. Even in the 1570s, while staunchly ﬁghting the Spanish, the northern Netherlanders still regarded Philip II as their overlord. Why did the Union of Utrecht in 1579 not announce the independence of the United Provinces, but instead emphasise the separateness and autonomy from Spain of the provinces that signed it, while protesting their allegiance to a true prince? Why did the Abjuration of Spanish rule in 1581 still not contain a statement of independence? Why, even after the Abjuration, did the United Provinces cast around among various European states (Anjou, France, England), inviting them to take on the overlordship of the United Provinces? Why wasn’t the States General regarded as a sovereign body, when it was able to behave with such power over affairs?

Introduction 11

Why didn’t Holland attempt to dominate and unify at this point? How is it that the Calvinists did not establish a national church in the northern Netherlands, and yet the Calvinist fervour of the Sea Beggars was a decisive factor in being able to defeat the Spanish in the years leading up to the Truce? Why were inﬂuential sections of the United Provinces so opposed to the Truce with Spain in 1609, when a truce would seem to have been in their interests? Furthermore, why did the United Provinces not exploit Spanish weaknesses and force a peace treaty before 1648? Again it would seem to have been in their interests. Why did the United Provinces reject the overtures of German princes to join them in 1648? And why did the United Provinces not seek to at least reunify the Netherlands by taking over the Spanish southern Netherlands in 1648? Why, in a republican state, was a monarchical form of government recommended and advocated in university political theory courses in the seventeenth century? And how can we account for the strength and power of the Calvinist feeling in the northern Netherlands, in the light of the provisions enshrined in the Union of Utrecht of 1579 for religious toleration, which allowed Calvinists to worship freely? In what follows I hope some light will be cast on these questions and so on the character of the political background against which Spinoza wrote. Kossmann’s excellent ‘Introduction’ provides a valuable general context for the discussion (Kossmann and Mellink 1974). Seventeenth-century Dutch political thought and practice, and in particular Dutch republicanism, represents an important historical context for understanding Spinoza’s political philosophy. Two factors support the argument put forward here for contributing to a ‘political’ reading of Spinoza’s political works. First, Spinoza’s metaphysical philosophy and the other-worldly aspect of his reputation have led some commentators to discount all contexts for his writings other than that in which to establish the precise nature of his place in a dehistoricised Descartes-to-Kant rationalist canon. The ‘political’ reading of Spinoza’s political theory is designed to enrich the view of him as a philosopher. In addition, Spinoza’s two political treatises are not widely known among an English-speaking audience, his name being most often associated with the modern history of metaphysics. However in recent years the narrowly metaphysical interest in the Ethics has been supplemented, by writers like Genevieve Lloyd (1994, 1996), Moira Gatens (1996a, 1996b), and Lloyd and Gatens (1999) with a growing interest in the rich ethical,

12 Spinoza and Republicanism

ontological and epistemological theories of the Ethics, and their political implications. In the second place, Spinoza’s Jewish upbringing, complicated by his Marrano status, also render complex his relation to Dutch seventeenth-century history and politics. The ‘political’ interpretation of Spinoza’s two political texts seeks to understand how these aspects of his background might impact on his thinking as well as on the public reception of his works. The case for studying Spinoza’s political works in the context of seventeenthcentury Dutch political thought and practice, and especially Dutch republicanism, is supported in this respect by the fact of Spinoza’s own great and enthusiastic interest in political affairs in Holland. The connections between Spinoza’s political philosophy and the times in which he lived are what are being explored here. Even this context is an ambitious one to undertake. The scope of all the aspects of theory and practice which it encompasses – all the ramiﬁcations and inﬂuences and further reaches of expression in contemporary texts and pamphlets – cannot hope to be comprehensively explored here. However the context has been examined in sufﬁcient detail to demonstrate the soundness of the central propositions about the character of political life in the United Provinces in the 1660s and 1670s and the role of Spinoza’s contribution to it. The central theme of this book concerns the character of republicanism in the United Provinces in its ‘golden age’, and the assessment of Spinoza’s contribution to that meaning of republican government. Liberty and sovereignty are key concepts for understanding the parameters and form of republican dominion that Spinoza developed. These conceptions are developed in Chapter 7. Another major theme is to explore and highlight the meaning, for understanding Spinoza’s political thought, of the way in which the Dutch characteristically demonstrated a reluctance to theorise. This affected both political practice and political theory in the United Provinces and is the subject of Chapters 3 and 5. In terms of political practice, the way in which political and constitutional reform was not undertaken to bring it into line with events during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries requires particular attention. In terms of political theory it is worth examining the way in which the closest one comes to political theory before Spinoza, and to the use by political leaders of political theory, is represented in the pragmatic approach of the works of the De la Court brothers. The signiﬁcance of the theoretical character of Spinoza’s reﬂections on politics, and their impact on political practice, is discussed in Chapter 6. In addition, the signiﬁcance of the strands

Introduction 13

established by the historical material adduced in the earlier chapters, strands about the character of Dutch political life, is utilised in Chapter 8 on Spinoza’s republicanism. This book explores Spinoza’s political theory, his conception of republicanism, and the story of the interaction between Spinoza’s and Dutch republicanism. This exploration provides an opportunity to address the concept and tradition of republicanism more widely. The evidence which this book studies adds weight to the conviction of the diversity and speciﬁcity of meanings of republican theory and practice. As described earlier, the revival of scholarly interest in republicanism in recent years has been led by Skinner’s retrieval of the meaning and utility of the concept of liberty in republican writings prior to its adoption and redeﬁnition in liberal political theory. Skinner’s important body of work on ‘liberty before liberalism’, in part building upon Pocock’s portrayal of a classical republican tradition stretching from Machiavelli to the American Founding Fathers, and Hans Baron’s recovery of a ‘civic humanist’ tradition, have stimulated an interest in republican political principles among political theorists like Pettit. ‘Classical republicanism’ is thereby contrasted both with ‘ancient republicanism’, and with ‘modern representative democracy’, ‘modern constitutional’ or democratic and liberal republican values ‘reinvented’ in eighteenthcentury America and France. In the course of his lively and programmatic work, intended to attract liberals, communitarians and others to the contemporary relevance of the ‘republican project’, Pettit (1997, 120) outlines a number of features of republicanism. These include the rejection of arbitrary government, the notion of freedom as non-domination, speciﬁc linkages with equality, community, civic virtue, constitutionalism and the checking of government, a radical set of social policies, and democracy. In order to support his modern republican project Pettit presents a story of a tradition, heavily indebted to Pocock’s work, incorporating origins in classical Rome, resurrection in the Renaissance, the English Civil War and Commonwealth, culminating in eighteenth-century English, French and American republican writings (Pettit 1997, 5–6) and its overshadowing by the development of liberal political theory and practice. Pettit describes a conﬁdently transhistorical republican primary ‘theme’ of a ‘belief in freedom from non-domination which binds together thinkers of very different periods and very different background philosophies’ (Pettit 1997, 10–11). If Pettit’s depiction is correct, then his work does a service in illuminating, albeit indirectly,

14 Spinoza and Republicanism

the very distinctive insularity of Spinoza and the Dutch in only seeking legitimation for their republicanism from their own local tradition. Spinoza and Republicanism centres on Spinoza’s engagement with the concept of republicanism, in terms of his chosen context of the United Provinces in the seventeenth century. The present work’s title alludes to the importance of recognising how and in what ways the notion of republicanism that Spinoza engaged with and contributed to, was distinct and particular. In Chapter 8 speciﬁc elements of Spinoza’s republicanism are distinguished from a key feature of Pettit’s model. These elements draw on the discussions of Chapters 6 and 7. One of the things that emerges clearly from those discussions is that Spinoza was a republican but not a democrat. Pettit’s work is most useful in bringing to life a republican alternative to modern liberal political theory, and also in highlighting for the purposes of this book the speciﬁcity of the historical inﬂection of republicanism in the Dutch case. Dutch and even English republicanism, when looked at closely, do not ﬁt neatly into Pettit’s schematisation. It may well be the case that other instances within ‘the republican tradition’ (Pettit 1997, 20) Pettit constructs were more selfconscious than were the Dutch about drawing upon external republican examples to reinforce their contemporaneous claims. It may also be that Pettit’s ideal model of republicanism rests on categories important in modern political debate – democracy and individualism ﬁgure large, and universal suffrage is taken as critical to grounding a society without divisions – which cannot accommodate either the speciﬁcity of the early modern Dutch case without anachronism or its peculiarity. Modelbuilding in the form of Pettit’s ‘ideal type’, as well as Pocock’s notion of a ‘tradition’ of political discourse, can be problematic if they lead to the suppression of differences and heterogeneity which are key to understanding a particular case or conception, and also if they reify their subject. In order to understand the Dutch case more fully it is important to start by looking backwards rather than forwards, because that is what the Dutch did. By tracing their practice, we ﬁnd that the perspective of their political culture and mentality was backwardlooking in a positive sense. It characterises their political practice throughout the spectacular success of the Dutch ‘golden age’. We will tend to misunderstand Dutch republicanism if we attempt only to assimilate it, either to models of things that came after (‘bourgeois liberal republicanism’) or to the past in a place that was not central

Introduction 15

for them (Italian Renaissance city-states). The method undertaken in the present work, supporting the location of Spinoza’s meaning in the context of his chosen and local political culture, employs the following transcendental argument. 1 The Dutch could not have engaged in politics in the form they did, through an engagement with traditional political arguments about the location of authority in the privileges, without the assumption that there was an ongoing political discourse based on tradition in this sense. The transcendental argument distances to one remove the question of whether or not this political culture ‘really’ depended so crucially on the defence of privileges through a traditionalist practice or not. That question cannot be answered conclusively one way or the other, but what remains quite clear are the Dutch perception of what they were doing, and Spinoza’s primary intention in contributing to political debate in the United Provinces. The commitment to taking Spinoza’s local and particularistic political culture seriously is addressed and developed in more detail in Chapter 5 when the Dutch mentality is discussed. In contributing to the third organising framework in which to understand Spinoza and republicanism in the Dutch context, the novel or innovative aspects of the current work include a fresh understanding of the role of traditional practice and Holland-centricity in Spinoza’s political theory, and especially a reappraisal of Spinoza’s estimation of democracy and of his understanding of sovereignty. These reinterpretations, through a ‘political’ reading of Spinoza, arise in part from redressing the neglect of Spinoza’s second political treatise. The meaning of the Dutch appeal to the privileges is developed, in the light of the changing claims made about them and the unacknowledged slippage of meaning involved. The ambiguous meaning of the Dutch Republic’s constitution is also explored. Claims about the privileges of the cities and provinces, together with the international treaty of the Union of Utrecht of 1579, are the central elements of the de facto constitutional status of the Dutch Republic. Ideas about the role of regional complementarity in the success of the polycentric republic (which could be of interest to those theorising European integration in the twenty-ﬁrst century), and about the mismatch between theory and practice, are developed further. The detailed examination of dates for 1 I am indebted to Gary Browning for pointing out the value of this transcendental argument and its ‘ﬁt’ with the signiﬁcance which their political culture and mentality held for the Dutch and for Spinoza.

16 Spinoza and Republicanism

the establishment of the Dutch Republic, and the comparison of English and Dutch republicanism, both represent more systematic analyses of their kind than have been undertaken previously. The book seeks to bring together the insights into Spinoza’s understanding of republicanism in the light of the Dutch context. It draws upon political theory, the history of political thought, and history, and thereby introduces to an English-speaking audience a speciﬁc case-study of this combined approach. Several notes on terminology are appropriate at the beginning. First, when the term ‘Dutch Republic’ is used, it refers speciﬁcally and precisely to its use during the period from the Treaty of Münster in 1648 to the end of the eighteenth century. This identiﬁcation is in line with the usage of the inhabitants of the northern Netherlands themselves. Several modern commentators use the term ‘Dutch Republic’ to refer to the United Provinces from various dates going back to 1579. It is one of the major contentions of this book that such a usage creates a serious misunderstanding about the character of political life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Chapter 2 discusses in detail the issues involved in attempting to date the inauguration of the ‘Dutch Republic’, on the basis of the framework of evidence presented in the ﬁrst chapter that the term ‘Dutch Republic’ does not most accurately refer to the period 1579–1648. A related problem concerns the most accurate term to describe the country or state of the United Provinces after 1648. Thus ‘Dutch Republic’ and ‘United Provinces’ overlap to some extent. The ‘northern Netherlands’ and the ‘Seven Provinces’ can also be used. The term ‘Low Countries’ refers to both the southern and northern Netherlands or what is now comprised by Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and French Flanders. It is signiﬁcant that these titles are in the plural, for they reﬂect both the intended distinctiveness of the parts and the unintended fragmentation of the area. Moreover, Blockmans conﬁrms that only in the middle of the sixteenth century did ‘people attempt to give a name to these Seventeen Provinces’, and then it came in three languages – ‘Nederland’ or ‘Nederlanden’ in Dutch, ‘Pais Bas’ in French, and ‘Belgique(s)’ from the Latin (Blockmans 1999, 119). It is interesting that, roughly speaking, what is now commonly known as ‘Holland’ was in Spinoza’s time the United Provinces, one of the provinces of which was Holland. The term ‘country’ is also locally used interchangeably with province. A second note concerns the use of terms to refer to the inhabitants of this country, especially in the second half of the seventeenth

Introduction 17

century, where the attention of this book is focused. The problem is that there is no immediately accessible term by which to refer to the population of the United Provinces, or of the Dutch Republic. Consequently I have resorted to using the terms ‘northern Netherlanders’, ‘Netherlanders’ and ‘the Dutch’, though fully aware that strictly speaking, ‘the Dutch’ are the inhabitants only of Holland, just one of the seven provinces. In order to avoid confusion here, I have used the term ‘Hollanders’ when wishing to refer only to the inhabitants of Holland. In the same way a term like ‘Dutch political practice’ is taken to refer to the political practice of those in the United Provinces. Two further cases of terminological awareness concern some institutional terms used by the northern Netherlanders and shared by modern Dutch commentators. Prime among these terms are ‘States General’ (or ‘Estates General’) and ‘States’, which refer to the political assemblies of the United Provinces and of the separate provinces respectively. These councils combined some legislative and executive functions, but do not correspond fully to parliamentary and prime ministerial duties. The United Provinces was not a modern state but a loose confederation of provinces comprised of independent city-states. As Blom notes, it ‘seems inadequate to label the Republic a federal state…because it possessed no detailed regulation of the respective rights and duties of its different parts’ (Blom 2002, 97). It is in this light that the functions of the States and States General need to be read. Price accurately captures the character of the States General when he describes it as ‘a conference of ambassadors from separate countries rather than a parliament’ (Price 1994, 211). As I shall argue, the Union of Utrecht of 1579, together with claims about the defence of privileges, is the closest the United Provinces came to a constitution, and this was not very close. The Union of Utrecht remained an international legal and military treaty between the separate provinces, and the (changing) signiﬁcance of the privileges lay in the claims made about them. The States General had direct control over foreign relations, the armed forces and the administration of the Generality Lands, that is, parts of Flanders, Brabant and Limburg annexed by the north during the Revolt (Price 1994, 210). Price conﬁrms that the ‘precise constitutional position’ of the States General ‘was never absolutely clear’ (Price 1994, 4), and that its powers were greater in practice than in theory. The States General represented two ‘estates’ or social orders – representatives from the college of Nobles, and delegations from the Town

18 Spinoza and Republicanism

Councils and Colleges of Magistrates – which together were taken to represent ‘the whole state and entire body of the inhabitants’. The States General contained delegations of deputies from the States of Gelderland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel, Friesland, Groningen, and Holland, and each province had a single vote. The delegations from the provinces were chosen by different, locally determined, methods (Price 1994, 211). The States General met in permanent session, unlike the provincial States. Its administrative functions were undertaken by a Raadpensionaris, who was also the Pensionary of the States of Holland, the most powerful province. The towns (also known as cities), in Vranck’s authoritative description of 1587, were ‘independent self-governing political entities, governed by a college of town councillors’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxix). The Southern (Spanish and later Austrian) Netherlands contained its own set of States and its own States General. Likewise, and holding a position separate from but often in tension with the States and States General, was the ofﬁce of ‘Stadholder’. The Stadholder historically had a leadership role as the emperor’s provincial governor, physically ‘standing in for’ him and controlling some appointments on town councils and the provincial States. The Stadholdership was historically associated with the House of Orange from the time of William the Silent (1533–84) (Blom 1995, 41). Moreover the association was with the extended House of Orange, including uncles and other family members who might hold titles in different Dutch provinces, and not just with the current Count. Velema says that the Stadholder in the form of the princes of the House of Orange was the ‘hereditary head (not monarch though) who was supreme military commander’ (Velema 2002, 19). But the situation was somewhat more complicated. From 1579 the post ceased to be hereditary since the Stadholder’s appointment now depended upon the separate provincial States (rather than on the States General), and the Stadholder was an agent of the States, although he could be appointed captain-general of the army by the States General. There were also two important ‘Stadholderless’ periods, the ﬁrst of which between 1650 and 1672 largely coincided with De Witt’s republican government. Although the post of Stadholder had been abolished by most of the Northern Provinces after the death of William II in 1650, in fact Friesland and Groningen continued to have Stadholders throughout this period. Thus, strictly speaking, the ﬁrst Stadholderless period was nothing of the kind. But

Introduction 19

because of the power and authority wielded by the province of Holland during this time, his absence there was decisive. Speck recounts that although William III revived the post in 1672, ‘and even got it to be made hereditary, he died childless in 1702’, which thereby inaugurated the second Stadholderless period of 1702 to 1747 (Speck 1995, 174). As Speck notes, a Stadholder ‘was not a monarch but the occupant of a post devised before the Dutch Revolt to represent the absentee Habsburg monarchs, being equivalent to viceroy or lieutenant’. It follows that the post was ‘therefore something of an anomaly after the successful movement to throw off the Habsburgs and establish a republic’ (Speck 1995, 174). But the post was not abolished at that point and the anomaly was at times exploited to decisive political advantage by the House of Orange. During the Dutch Revolt when resistance to the monarchical component of the regnum mixtum was focused upon the Spanish king, the Princes of Orange were often allied with and at times played a leading role in the defence of the Netherlands. But with the emergence of the Dutch Republic tensions in the relation between the regents, States General and States on the one side and the House of Orange on the other, always under strain, became more marked. For now the strategic signiﬁcance of the Stadholderate changed, being as Speck says, ‘the one agency which had the potential to focus authority at the centre rather than the peripheries’ (Speck 1995, 174). The House of Orange thus represented a further and at times very strong focus for anti-monarchical sentiment, particularly in the light of its centralising ambitions at home and appetite for war abroad. In this way the ambiguity about whether the Stadholder was the monarchical component of a mixed constitution, or whether he harboured monarchical ambitions and aspired to the role of the Habsburg kings in the Northern Netherlands, is a distinctive feature of Dutch politics throughout this period. References to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) and Tractatus Politicus (TP) are to the unabridged Elwes translation of 1951. A new translation of the TTP by Samuel Shirley was published in 1991. While the Shirley edition has much to recommend it there are three reasons for staying with the Elwes translation. Shirley has translated the TTP but not the TP and for the purposes of this book it is important to retain the consistency afforded by using the Elwes edition of both political treatises. Second, not all of Shirley’s notes

20 Spinoza and Republicanism

to contemporaneous events are reliable – see for instance the ﬁnal note on p. 218, which identiﬁes Spinoza’s reference to ‘the last count’ as Philip II of Spain, when the reference is more probably to William II’s attempted coup d’etat of 1650. Finally the beneﬁt of the Shirley translation’s modern updating of the language in a manner that makes it more accessible to students, comes at the cost of some of the nuances of the earlier translation.

1 The Revolt

The history of the Revolt of the Netherlands In order to demonstrate the legacy of political practices as an important framework for Spinoza’s political theory, it is valuable to highlight the key milestones of the Revolt, and to indicate how political negotiations were conducted at signiﬁcant points during the Revolt. This undertaking is crucial in establishing the character of political practice in the United Provinces in the 1650s and 1660s. Throughout the period covered by the Revolt and the Dutch Republic a movable feast of provinces and towns resisted and fought the Spanish, the French and the English. Relations between the States General and the House of Orange are also important. Scott argues that after 1648 ‘periodic cooperation’ gave way to ‘sustained rivalry’ (Scott 2000, 459), but the history of the relations of the States General with the House of Orange overall is perhaps best characterised in terms of periods of cooperation within an overall framework of rivalry. In the middle of the sixteenth century the overlordship of the seventeen provinces comprising the whole of the northern and southern Netherlands, passed in dynastic succession from the Habsburg Charles V to the Spanish Philip II (his son). It was more than symbolically important that Philip, unlike his father, did not speak Dutch (van Gelderen 1993, ix). It was discontent with Spanish rule that led to the Dutch Revolt. Kossmann’s noteworthy assessment demonstrates a typically Dutch reluctance to theorise, or perhaps overtheorise, the beginnings of the Revolt. ‘Historians’, he says, ‘have stopped debating about the main causes and the true nature of the Revolt. A series of disturbances stretching over various decades cannot, they think, be explained by means of such imperialistic conceptions’ (Kossmann 1991, 283). It is, 21

22 Spinoza and Republicanism

nevertheless, possible to outline the stages or phases of the Revolt and to examine the character of the ‘independence’ of the northern provinces, achieved through eighty years of war with Spain. What follows does not attempt to represent a comprehensive history of the Revolt. The account highlights features of the Revolt which have a bearing on Dutch political theorising and Spinoza’s political thought. The ‘Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands’ in 1566 were not easy to govern, with three million people living within the territory understood in terms of some three hundred cities, each with a local focus of interest, proud history, and loyalty. The Seventeen Provinces were organised into a group for the ﬁrst time, for the purposes of imperial politics, only in 1548, ‘by the Transaction of Augsburg in a separate Burgundian Circle of the Holy Roman Empire and, following the 1549 Pragmatic Sanction, were the patrimony of Philip II’ (van Gelderen 1992, 1). Several different languages were spoken in different parts of the Netherlands, and Habsburg attempts to standardise law had been patchy (Blockmans 1999, 120). The country was in effect a confederation of cities, so the personality and conduct of the overall ruler was of great signiﬁcance as the only real source of whatever administrative unity existed. In the eyes of the cities and their provincial States, Philip was not entitled to make decisions, as he boldly began to do, about important political matters such as foreign and ﬁnancial policies and legal issues nor to levy taxes without the ‘counsel and consent’ of the States. These claims were an important resource of power for the provincial assemblies. One sign of Philip’s intentions is found in his order to the mapmaker Jacob van Deventer in 1559 to ‘visit, measure and draw all the towns of the Habsburg Netherlands, with the rivers and villages adjoining, likewise the frontier crossings and passes’. Philip’s determination to gather information using new scientiﬁc cartographic techniques in order to produce an accurate record of the territory for administrative and military uses was frustrated by Deventer, who having made maps of three hundred towns, ﬂed to Cologne at the outbreak of war in 1572 (Parker 1992, 128). On the Netherlanders’ side, van Bunge notes that in the late sixteenth century Prince Maurice of Orange employed scientists to reformulate the principles of fortiﬁcation, to beneﬁt the Dutch army in the Eighty Years War, which in military terms was fought mainly as a series of sieges (van Bunge 1999b, 2). The decentralised tendencies of the Netherlands were also expressed in the structure and powers of the States General. The States General comprised representatives from the different States’ assemblies. As van

The Revolt 23

Gelderen notes, the States General was ‘created by the Burgundian Dukes in the course of the ﬁfteenth century to foster the idea of unity amongst the provinces’, but was in practice used by the separate States ‘primarily as a useful instrument for increasing their inﬂuence on central policy’ (van Gelderen 1993, x). Duke details how each province of the ‘Seventeen Netherlands’ stood in a ‘special relationship’ to the prince. He comments that Philip was ‘duly recognised in 1555 as duke of Brabant, Limburg, Luxemburg and Gelre, count of Flanders, Artois, Hainaul, Holland, Zeeland and Namur and as lord of Friesland, Mehelen, Utrecht, Overijssel and Groningen’. Thus, importantly, Philip’s authority was not as prince over an integrated whole, but over the separate parts. Moreover, Duke remarks, ‘the Habsburg princes had never intended to foster a speciﬁc and exclusively Netherlandish consciousness’ (Duke 1990, 182). These territories were administered separately and the princes were not in the business of state-building. Duke also comments that the ‘precise nature of the bond’ between prince and each province differed, and was ‘deﬁned by chartered privileges which the prince swore to observe when he made his entry’ (Duke 1990, 175). As a result of this disaggregated relationship between the prince and the different provinces, the ‘bonds of loyalty to the prince and the degree of participation in the wider community greatly varied’ (Duke 1990, 178). Duke also notes as a complicating factor the role of the nobles in the relationship between prince and province, further ensuring that chains of command were complex and mediated by differently framed local loyalties. Charles V, like his Burgundian predecessors had given, in Duke’s words, ‘a semblance of coherence to his fragmented territories by involving the score or so great noble houses in their government’ (Duke 1990, 176). But ‘the character and political power of the nobility differed widely between one part of the country and another’ (Duke 1990, 178). Only in the Walloon provinces ‘did conditions allow the nobility’ to function as the principal liaison ‘between the prince and his people’ (Duke 1990, 181). Moreover, as Duke relates, it was ‘precisely the Spanish character of the ruling dynasty after 1555 that the nobility of the Low Countries found hardest to stomach’. While in other circumstances the nobility might be natural allies of the prince, ‘the native nobility took a strong dislike to Philip because he preferred the Spanish ways of life and took counsel only from Spaniards’ (Duke 1990, 183). Among the nobility Philip was disliked not for state-building (which he didn’t attempt) but for his ‘Spanish ways’.

24 Spinoza and Republicanism

During the course of the Revolt and afterwards there is a strong trend in the decline in the political power of the old nobility and a corresponding trend in the growth in the power of the urban regent patriciates in the major towns. Van Nierop describes how the two trends are closely connected. In Holland, for example, the number of cities invited to join the States of Holland, initially just for the duration of the war but by default on a permanent basis, rose from six to eighteen. In consequence the nobles witnessed ‘the increasing importance of the cities and their regents in the states of Holland’ (van Nierop 1984, 203). There was a college of nobles and not all were enrolled in the college or Ridderschap. While the nobility had never held a monopoly of power, from the sixteenth century they shared it with the cities and the regents. But although the nobles and the cities then together, as van Nierop says, ‘constituted the administrative elite’, in social life a strict segregation applied (van Nierop 1984, 217–19). Furthermore the seventeenth century sees the ‘aristocratisation’ of the regent class in the Republic, as urban regents gave up ‘the activities in trade and industry in order to adopt an aristocratic style of life’ (van Nierop 1984, 212). Philip’s early, bold, policy statement of a centrally imposed tax was bound to antagonise the disaggregated sensibilities of the different provinces and towns. He ‘virtually started his reign by proposing a series of taxes’ (van Gelderen 1993, x) that radically disrupted the settled relation between centre and peripheries. Philip’s initiative was further confounded, however, when he discovered (not having realised beforehand) that the deputies of the different States assemblies were only delegates (only with powers to follow the mandate of their principals) rather than full representatives (entitled to act on behalf of their constituents). Moreover different provinces gave their delegates different kinds of instructions, and the more recently conquered provinces behaved differently from those long-established in the Burgundian empire. Thus, as Duke notes, while in the States General, ‘the Low Countries ostensibly possessed an institution capable of articulating a political identity of the country’, the ‘States General was by virtue of its composition and traditions quite unﬁtted to transcend provincial particularism’ (Duke 1990, 177). Duke conﬁrms that outside ‘the ranks of the nobility, patrie continued to denote, as it had during the middle ages, one’s native town or province’ (Duke 1990, 185). Van Gelderen comments that this situation ‘not only made it almost impossible for the sovereign to exert the charismatic powers of his ofﬁce’. It also ‘turned the negotiations into a time-consuming affair

The Revolt 25

with great possibilities for creative obstructionism’. Van Gelderen makes the further important point that although ‘eventually the States agreed to levy taxes, Philip interpreted’, or rather signiﬁcantly misinterpreted ‘their behaviour as an attempt to tilt the balance of power in favour of a sort of parliamentary government’ (van Gelderen 1993, x). Philip’s subsequent repressive measures were in part due to a basic misunderstanding about the political intentions of the Netherlanders. Far from desiring a form of parliamentary government, the Netherlanders were uniting in the desire to reafﬁrm their ﬁercely held separateness. Within thirty years of Luther’s initiation of the Reformation in 1517, the establishment of a Calvinist Geneva and the emergence of the Catholic Counter-Reformation shortly afterwards, the United Provinces were substantially affected by the religious and political repercussions of these events. By the 1540s and 1550s the spread from the east and south of Protestant beliefs including Calvinism had become widespread. Antwerp in the southern Netherlands became the centre for the Protestant faith (Blockmans 1999, 129). Blockmans recounts that ‘during the Spanish siege of Antwerp from 1584 and 1585 – when the Protestant tide was already ebbing – one third of the population identiﬁed themselves as Protestants, and most of them as Calvinists’. A further third were Catholics and the remainder did not specify their religious conviction. Blockmans considers that this pattern was repeated in many other cities (Blockmans 1999, 129). Van Gelderen conﬁrms that as well as ‘the rising number of Protestants there was a large “centre group” of people who, though themselves not Protestant, despised harsh persecution for legal, political and humanitarian reasons’ (van Gelderen 1999, xi). Van Bunge argues that from the ‘1560s onwards, after the ﬁrst Lutheran and Mennonite waves that had swept the religious landscape of the Low Countries’ in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century, Calvinist reformers ‘more or less hijacked the revolt, aspiring to establish a National Reformed Orthodoxy’. He notes that this attempt was resisted, for ‘in 1572 both William of Orange and the States of Holland had already declared that freedom of religion was to be guaranteed’ (van Bunge 1999b, 7). But theological and religious differences also need to be understood as a destabilising factor within a wider social and political context. Strong evidence supports the view that changes in religious allegiances could also have political motives. Blockmans argues that ‘sympathy for the Reformation meant a rejection of the status quo, which was embodied by the close relationship between the absolutist state and the Catholic church’ (Blockmans 1999, 120). Schöffer (1964, 76–7) also

26 Spinoza and Republicanism

reminds us not to underestimate the importance of homegrown inﬂuences on events. The Netherlands had been prepared to accept the burden of taxation imposed by Charles V in return for his protection of their interests and his abstention from interfering too closely in their internal affairs. But the high taxation imposed by his son Philip was less tolerable when accompanied by religious persecution, that is, when both the level of taxation and persecution amounted to insufferable interference in internal affairs. Philip’s return to Spain in 1559 further symbolised to the Netherlanders his view that the Netherlands were simply a territory to be exploited by Spanish interests and brought directly under the control of the Spanish crown. The ﬁrst phase of the Revolt, in 1566, started in fact in western Flanders, in the southern, not the northern part of the Netherlands. It was prompted by the introduction of the Spanish Inquisition as a measure to stamp out opposition to the Spanish championing of the Counter-Reformation. As Blockmans comments, the ‘stakes were high: the Spanish global empire was confronted with a revolt from the most important economic region of the world’ (Blockmans 1999, 127). The announcement of a scheme to create three new archbishoprics and fourteen new bishoprics, in an attempt ‘to root out religious dissent’ (Blockmans 1999, 127), had already triggered the antagonism of the Burgundian nobles, the urban patriciate and the common people. The intimate relationship between the church and the imperial state was, he notes, ‘predicated on the notion that the monarchy had been established by God, and that the king was obliged to safeguard true worship’. This ‘realignment of bishoprics to reﬂect political boundaries and the advent of the Inquisition in the Low Countries were other striking examples of this cooperation between church and state’, Blockmans argues. The logic was that ‘the emperor forbade heresy, the ecclesiastical courts prosecuted and convicted, and the state punished’. Blockmans makes an important point about the nature of heresy under these conditions. The synchronism between the Catholic church and the imperial state led to the situation in which ‘it was easy for people with economic grievances, either because authorities wronged them or because they faced a decline in their standard of living, to be automatically branded as “heretics”’. Conversely, in the light of the introduction of repressive measures ‘discontented groups’, such as those facing a decline in prosperity, ‘found it natural to oppose both the church and the state’ (Blockmans 1999, 130). The subsequent prevarications of Margaret of Parma, and the cruelty of Cardinal Granvelle, the stationing of Spanish garrisons in the

The Revolt 27

Netherlands, the reign of terror and persecution of ‘heretics’ by the Duke of Alva, and economic depression all provoked the conﬂict and alienated local moderates. The Iconoclastic Riots of 1566 were an initially spontaneous uprising focusing upon the purging from Catholic churches of ‘papist idolatry’ in the form of statues, stainedglass windows and other ‘idols’, as symbols of deﬁance to Spanish rule. Blockmans notes that William of Orange’s subsequent attempted invasion of Brabant in 1568 is the ‘military move that is traditionally considered the beginning of the Eighty Years’ War’ (Blockmans 1999, 133). Philip II’s prevarications, partly due to debts and pressing problems in the divergent interests of his empire, reﬂected in his competition with the Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean area and with England in the Atlantic region, also contributed. Blockmans argues that ‘indecision in Madrid produced a power vacuum in the Low Countries’, in which ‘the States [assemblies] of Brabant, Flanders and Holland were able to take decisive steps in formulating their own sovereignty’ (Blockmans 1999, 127). The second phase of the Revolt, in 1572, led by William the Silent’s Sea Beggars, focused on resistance in 26 northern towns, some of which had remained obedient in 1566. The name ‘Sea Beggars’ derives from an insult by the count of Berlaymont that the lower nobility were mere ‘beggars’, and the term subsequently became a ‘badge of honour’ for the rebels (Blockmans 1999, 133). The second phase was sparked off by opposition to the proposed Spanish imposition of a ten per cent sales tax, the ‘Tenth Penny’. This sales tax was designed by Alva as a permanent, direct and automatic source of revenue, and to ‘reduce the regional government’s dependence on both Spanish subsidies and the unreliable States’ assemblies (Blockmans 1999, 133). In 1574 Alva initiated a military campaign which not only failed to subdue opposition, but uniﬁed resistance against the Spanish and ‘further undermined the legitimacy of Spanish authority’ (Blockmans 1999, 135). Resentment against the Spanish grew, in Duke’s words, into a ‘strident hispanophobia’ (Duke 1990, 187). On Dutch attitudes to the Spanish, Swart (1975, 36–57) details how the Dutch, during the Revolt, popularised earlier criticisms of Spain, but did not themselves invent the potent Black Legend, though it was more virulent in the Netherlands than anywhere else in Europe. The third phase of the Revolt, of 1576, began in Brussels in the south, largely by Catholics in response to the uncontrolled destruction perpetrated by Spanish troops, unpaid because of Philip’s ﬁnancial bankruptcy. The Paciﬁcation of Ghent at the end of 1576, the publicly

28 Spinoza and Republicanism

issued terms on which Brabant, Guelders, Flanders, Holland, and Zeeland agreed to accept peace following the unauthorised massacre undertaken by mutinous troops, marked a further signiﬁcant grouping of provinces against the Spanish. But in 1579 some of the southern and eastern provinces (Artois, Hainaut, Namur, Luxembourg and Limburg), with a ‘growing aversion’ to the power of the Walloon nobility and Calvinist radicalisation, and with the promise of restored privileges and the removal of foreign troops (Blockmans 1999, 137), signed the Union of Arras, by which they swore to uphold the Catholic religion. Six of the ‘northern’ provinces (Brabant, Flanders, Tournai, Holland, Zeeland and Guelders) (van Gelderen 1993, xxii lists the provinces as Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Guelders and Groningen) signed the Union of Utrecht later the same year. The signiﬁcance of the Union of Utrecht for the later history of the Netherlands is enormous, since it represents the ‘only legal foundation’ for the subsequent ‘Republic of the north’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxii). Initially the breakaway of the northern provinces was only undertaken in response to the Union of Arras with Spain by the southern states. The idea of ‘forming a closer union of the northern provinces’ had long been broached by William of Orange (although as van Gelderen says, possibly ‘only for strategic reasons’), but was taken up and implemented by Holland and Zeeland (van Gelderen 1993, xxii). Under the Union of Arras the southern states reafﬁrmed their Catholicism in return for the restoration of the situation that had obtained under Charles V, namely stable government at a distance and the removal of Spanish troops from southern Netherlands soil, together with the reafﬁrmation of Philip’s overlordship (Rowen 1972, 260–1). The Union of Arras was intended by Spain to restore peace and repose, not as a ﬁrst step in the creation of a new political unit. The Duke of Parma and reconciled Catholics did not see the Arras agreement as accepting the permanency of a northern state above the Rhine–Meuse river line. On the northern side, the Union of Utrecht was not seen as the ﬁrst step to independent statehood either. The Unions of Arras and Utrecht in 1579 were to prove decisive, with the northern provinces forming the United Provinces and the southern provinces remaining until 1794 under the Habsburg dynastic rule that had been established in 1477 (Blockmans 1999, 111). But in 1579 both unions were perceived simply as extensions of the Paciﬁcation of Ghent. Moreover, as Kossmann (Kossman and Mellink 1974, 31–2) points out, the Union of Utrecht was simply a formal alliance to integrate the foreign policies and war

The Revolt 29

efforts of the northern provinces, in order to defend traditional provincial independence and customs. It was not designed to set up a new state. William of Orange’s efforts later in 1579 at the peace negotiations at Cologne to reafﬁrm the unity of the seventeen provinces failed. The Union of Utrecht declared the refusal of the northern states to join the Union of Arras, and announced their intention to form a perpetual alliance of existing sovereign states, but with no intention of creating a new constitutional arrangement (Rowen 1972, 68–9). Most importantly, the Union of Utrecht did not contain a renunciation of Spanish rule. This decision, or non-decision, calls to mind an earlier incident of a similar kind in two important respects. In the ‘vacuum that had been created by Charles’s [the Bold’s] unexpected demise’ in 1477, the Low Countries had not taken the opportunity to reorganise their dynastic allegiance. Blockmans comments that it ‘is striking that in this critical phase the States-General never thought of choosing another dynasty to rule over them’, even though ‘one possible candidate, the French king, demanded the return of his ﬁefs, Artois and Flanders, because there was no male heir to rule over them’. Instead they accepted Charles’s daughter Mary as their overlord. The States General did, however, negotiate a critically important set of concessions which ‘undid much of the centralising arrangements…begun under Philip the Good and intensiﬁed under Charles’. As a result, the ‘large cities, duchies, and counties thus regained many of the legal, ﬁscal, and other prerogatives that they had lost to the centralised Burgundian state’ (Blockmans 1999, 114). Second, it is noteworthy that, as Blockmans conﬁrms, the ‘respective States of the Low Countries opted to remain a union of principalities’. Blockmans accounts for this choice on the grounds that the ‘core regions of the Low Countries…had reached such a level of political integration that they desired to maintain their mutual ties’. The legal arrangement called the Great Privilege crucially established the ‘consensually derived conditions on which the new union would be based’ (Blockmans 1999, 114). It is clear that the precedent set in 1477 provided a pattern that played an important part in the decisions a century later in 1579, not to assert independence from dynastic lordship and to reafﬁrm the union between provinces. The extent to which the Revolt was a religious war of Calvinist versus Counter-Reformation positions is complicated by the history of Dutch historiography on the Revolt, in which the work of Geyl marked a turning-point. The conventional idea in Dutch historiography that

30 Spinoza and Republicanism

the Revolt took place between a Calvinist north and a Catholic south was successfully challenged by Peter Geyl in the twentieth century (see Renier 1946, 9). In an excellent article, Smit (1960, 11–28) re-evaluates the dispute among nineteenth- and twentieth-century Dutch historians. Smit’s view is convincingly more impartial than that of Renier, who is a disciple of Geyl. Kossmann again argues convincingly that the religious dimension in the Revolt should not be considered separately from its connection with the constitutional issue at stake. As early as 1566, he notes, the nobles, in their petition to the governess Margaret to mitigate the religious edicts, ‘expressed themselves carefully’. They ‘did not suggest that the States General had the right to take part in the legislation itself, they did not even suggest that they had the right to give the sovereign advice in this matter’. They ‘just stated that it was necessary for the sovereign’, that is Philip II, ‘to collaborate with the States if he wished to prevent the Low Countries being disturbed by, as they expressed it, “a universal rebellion bringing ruin to all the provinces and plunging them into utter misery”’ (Kossmann 1991, 284). Furthermore, as Kossmann notes, this was the ﬁrst time when ‘it was quite openly stated by a large group of distinguished personalities, Catholics as well as Protestants’, that ‘royal policy was catastrophic and should be revised with the help of a local representative assembly better equipped to judge what was beneﬁcial to the provinces in the given circumstances’. It was ‘taken for granted that the States General would, either for religious reasons or for political expediency, plead on behalf of toleration’. Moreover, pamphlet material of the time went ‘somewhat further than the nobles and vaguely hinted that there were ancient privileges and freedoms which seemed to suggest that the sovereign’s religious policy had always been subject to approval by the States General’ (Kossmann 1991, 284). What is clear, and is characteristic of the whole period under discussion, is the complex political mapping of disputes arising from religious differences on to political sources of contestation. Thus, conﬂict between Catholic and Calvinist groups – and later also between Remonstrant and counter-Remonstrant groups, as well as divisions within the Reformed Church, and tolerationist impulses – are intertwined in shifting ways with tensions between Netherlanders and the Spanish, regents and the House of Orange, regents and nobles, and between provinces. To return to 1566, Kossmann is right to emphasise the complex way in which ‘the religious problem was associated with the constitutional problem’. As a result, the ‘representative assembly, a

The Revolt 31

political body, was expected to take sides with the religious opposition without necessarily opting for the Protestant cause as such’ (Kossmann 1991, 284–5). Van Deursen concurs that the debate about ‘which had ﬁrst priority: politics or faith, the struggle for civil freedom, or for the church’, is ‘a false dilemma’ (van Deursen 1999, 151). The situation was complicated because the privilege of belonging to the Catholic church was balanced by the desire for freedom of conscience. A further complication was that, as van Deursen makes clear, the Calvinist model of a Protestant church, widely implemented in the United Provinces, ‘opposed full doctrinal freedom’ and ‘strove for a tightly structured church government, organised on local, regional and national levels’ (van Deursen 1999, 152). Kossmann reaches the important conclusion that, ‘thanks to the conditions prevailing in the Netherlands in the 1560s and 1570s the constitutional and the religious problems came to be united in a way not to be found in other parts of Europe’. In consequence, ‘toleration and a form of provincial autonomy in the face of central government appeared two aspects of the same principle’ (Kossmann 1991, 285). Van Gelderen agrees that the religious and political aspects of the revolt were crucially interconnected both for the Netherlanders and for the Spanish. He comments that ‘Philip was not the scourge of Dutch heretics only because he thought it was his duty as a Catholic monarch to protect the Roman-Catholic church’. Philip’s view was informed ‘maybe principally’ by the belief that ‘maintaining religious unity within the empire was a precondition for maintaining the empire itself’ (van Gelderen 1999, 189–90). Phyllis Mack Crew also argues plausibly that the success of the Calvinist preachers, which helped to trigger off the ﬁrst phase of the Revolt in 1566–67, was not due to their being a disciplined band of fanatics bent on revolution. They were certainly not a revolutionary vanguard, she argues. Their success lay in their being seen as a politically conservative reform movement. The ‘ministers were regarded by their adherents not as prophets of freedom from the dictates of the Catholic government, but as reformers who were also defenders of the traditional social and political hierarchy’ (Mack Crew 1978, 3). It follows that the question of whether the Revolt had a religious character cannot be resolved simply by concluding that the antiSpanish protest coincided with an anti-Catholic protest. Kossmann highlights the acutely signiﬁcant point that the issue of toleration is more fundamental in Dutch history and political relations, for the Dutch, ‘while professing to be a Protestant state based its religious

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policy on a theory which was shaped by, and drew its impetus from, an anti-Calvinist rather than an anti-Catholic bias’. Crucially, according to the ‘liberal interpretation of Dutch history the battle about toleration was indeed one between the Calvinist Church on the one hand and the libertarian urban patriciate mainly in Holland on the other’ (Kossmann 1991, 294). Kossmann and Mellink sum up the political signiﬁcance of religious disputes in this period. They argue that ‘religious issues played…a decisive part in the Revolt of the Netherlands only in their political form, that is, only in so far as they caused the problem of toleration to be discussed’ (Kossmann and Mellink 1974, xi; see also Schöffer, 1964). The provinces of the northern Netherlands that made a limited alliance in 1579 had far-reaching and long-standing differences, covering regional and linguistic sets of interests as well as their predominantly provincial loyalties. Wansink (1971) details the characters of the northern provinces and the tensions between them. Holland and West Friesland, together with Zeeland and Utrecht in the western part of the Netherlands, had commercial and seaborne trading interests in common. Groningen and Friesland in the north had common interests. And Gelderland and Overijssel in the east, the poorest provinces in the Union, with historical ties to the German states of the Holy Roman Empire, and the provinces most often overrun by Spanish and later French troops, shared common concerns. This complicated set of relationships between overlapping centres and peripheries, in local interests, regional perspectives, and traditional alliances and hostilities between provinces and within provinces, continued with other sources of tension to dominate the political debates of the seventeenth century, and to dictate the understanding of such notions as sovereignty in the northern Netherlands. Thus the history of the United Provinces in the seventeenth century derives from the 1579 Union not because this treaty represented a farreaching intention or statement of independence for them together – it did not. Neither was the Union of Utrecht a ‘constitution’ for a new polity, for it remained a legal international treaty between separate states, in a similar manner to the situation within the European Union based on a series of international treaties between states. The Union of Utrecht was crucial because its limitations and its ambiguities held in balance the various and complex interests, concerns, alliances, hostilities and loyalties of the parties, all framed by the ‘long tradition of autonomy in the Low Countries’ (Blockmans 1999, 112). And, to anticipate, when Spinoza a century later advocated a constitutional

The Revolt 33

balance, one does not have to look to Machiavelli or Harrington for his inspiration. Spinoza, like others in Holland, regarded the history of Holland in the context of the United Provinces as the primary exemplar of how a successful state could ﬂourish, and of how a successful politics could be built upon an intense fragmentation of loyalties. Spinoza’s work is as much a celebration of Holland’s achievement as it is an analysis of the civil state in the abstract. If Spinoza uses Machiavelli it is with a light and selective touch. This represents a very different relationship between political theorist and political events from that found in the case of Hobbes, who thought that his civil society, in England, was going disastrously wrong. The Union of Utrecht was followed two years later, in 1581, by the Abjuration of Spanish rule. This was the culmination of lengthy decision-making processes between the provinces and negotiations with the Duke of Anjou (brother of the French king). The Act of Abjuration (Acte van Verlatinge) by the States General declared that Philip II had forfeited his sovereignty of their provinces because of his tyranny and had thus broken his contracts with them. Speciﬁcally their resolution ‘declared Philip II, King of Spain, Duke of Brabant, Duke of Guelders, Count of Flanders, Count of Holland and Zeeland, Lord of Friesland etc. forfeited of his sovereignty over the provinces’ (van Gelderen 1992, 1). Van Gelderen’s description again highlights that the resistance of the Netherlanders to Philip, King of Spain, was mediated through the posts he held in the separate provinces, and this is a crucial aspect of the construction and reconstruction of the meaning of sovereignty in the United Provinces. Blockmans regards the Abjuration of 1581 rather than the unions of Arras and Utrecht of 1579 as a decisive point in the development of the Dutch Republic. Van Gelderen agrees, arguing that the Abjuration was the result of negotiations which in effect transferred a crucial aspect of sovereignty from the prince to the States General. From 1581 the States were, according to van Gelderen, in a ‘powerful position. They now expressly elected the lord of the country and had the right to renounce him in case of disloyalty’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxiv). Moreover, van der Bijl notes the importance of the precedent set by the ban, issued by the States of Holland in 1581, on the interference of the municipal militia in political decision-making (van der Bijl 1986, 70–1). But the Abjuration again did not, it must be stressed, announce the independence of the northern states, since they now simply transferred their overlordship to Anjou. According to van Gelderen, negotiations

34 Spinoza and Republicanism

with Anjou had been difﬁcult because while ‘Anjou demanded sovereignty, the Dutch deputies, arguing (rather beyond the truth) that the word did not exist in Dutch, insisted on the title of “highest lord”’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxiv). Distrust of all things French may also have played a part in the Dutch opposition to Anjou’s attempt to introduce Bodin’s conception of sovereignty into the negotiations, although the northern Netherlands also had a very strong set of political identities from which to resist such a notion. Van Gelderen details that in 1578 ‘Bodin was adviser to the duke of Anjou, who was about to become the “Defender of the Liberty of the Netherlands”, but not its new sovereign’. He reiterates that in ‘the negotiations with the duke, whose military and ﬁnancial assistance was eagerly sought by the leaders of the Dutch Revolt, the deputies from the Low Countries rejected the use of the word “sovereignty”, arguing that the word did not exist in the Dutch language’. Van Gelderen continues that this ‘was a ﬂat lie on the part of the Dutch polyglots, who were trying to avoid a painful confrontation with Bodin’s conception of sovereignty’. As a result, throughout the negotiations the Dutch insisted on using ‘the respublica mixta…as the leading example for the Dutch constitution’ (van Gelderen 2002, 197). This is an intriguing story, demonstrating the importance to the Dutch of maintaining their local and particularistic notion of sovereignty, central to which was the balance between a number of separate and independent provinces. However the tale does not fully support van Gelderen’s assertion that it shows that as early as 1578 Bodin’s ‘new conception of sovereignty started to have an impact on Dutch thinking’ (van Gelderen 2002, 197). The evidence seems to demonstrate rather the opposite case, that the Dutch successfully resisted Bodin’s absolutist conception. Neither did the Abjuration introduce a new theoretical foundation of the state. It only justiﬁed the revolt by repeating arguments for the right of resistance against tyranny (van de Klashorst 1986, x). Moreover, William of Orange’s negotiations to ﬁnd an alternative ruler had been in the name of the Seventeen Provinces, not simply the seven northern ones (Blockmans 1999, 139). As van Deursen notes, for William of Orange ‘the Revolt had been in the collective interest of all the Low Countries; he scarcely would have been able to imagine an independent state without the inclusion of Brabant and Flanders’ (van Deursen 1999, 144). The princes of Orange, in marked contrast with the political powers in the provinces and the States General, tended to appeal to ‘the whole Netherlands’, ‘our fatherland’, and ‘our dear fatherland’ (Duke 1990, 187). Such rhetorical appeals linguistically and

The Revolt 35

artiﬁcially constructed a whole that reﬂected the interests of the princes of Orange but did not reﬂect universal common usage. However, the Abjuration position established in 1581 did not remain a stable one. William of Orange was assassinated in 1584 and by 1585 the Spanish had reconquered most of Flanders and Brabant following Anjou’s unsuccessful attempt to retake Antwerp. Anjou’s territorial ambitions were out of line with the northern provinces’ aims, and his position had not been strong when groups such as the Walloon nobility refused to back him. Duke argues that the nobles ‘might have been induced to stand by the States General, if an acceptable alternative prince had been in prospect. Anjou was suspect in their eyes as a French prince’ (Duke 1990, 195). This is a good example of the long shadow cast by France over the Low Countries throughout this whole period. While the Revolt was waged against the Spanish, fear of the French also played an important part in motivating many decisions by many groups in the southern and northern Netherlands. Following the events of 1584 and 1585, a ‘dramatic exodus to the north’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxvii) took place, of refugees from southern towns like Ghent and Antwerp. The appointment by the States General in 1585 of the English Earl of Leicester as ‘Governor and Captain General’ was triggered in part by Elizabeth I’s alarm at the extent of the Spanish reconquest. But the appointment was short-lived when Holland, with the skills of Oldenbarnevelt, challenged Leicester’s ‘absolutist’ behaviour (van Gelderen 1993, xxvii). Like Anjou, Leicester sought to keep the centrifugal forces in check. But Oldenbarnevelt had, in Shetter’s words, ‘developed an ofﬁce of relative insigniﬁcance into a base for far-reaching power’. For example, Oldenbarnevelt ‘was able to see to it that Prince Maurits, the son of William of Orange, was appointed – over Leicester’s head – stadholder of Holland and Zeeland, general of the armed forces and admiral of the ﬂeet’. Leicester departed in 1587 in ‘disgrace and frustration’ (Shetter 1971, 80), only two years after his arrival. By 1588, having failed to enrol the services of an alternative overlord who could prove both trustworthy and effective in pursuing the objectives of the Northern Netherlanders, and with the Spanish suffering the defeat of their armada against England, the Northern (six at this point) Provinces abandoned the idea. They later became, by default rather than by design, and not irrevocably separated from the southern provinces, the ‘Dutch Republic of the Seven United Provinces’ (van Gelderen 1993, vii) or ‘United Provinces’ for short.

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Blockmans introduces an enriching complexity into understanding the Revolt and its outcome when he argues convincingly against a simple north/south divide. The number of refugees from the ‘Catholic’ south, as well as from other places including the exiled Protestant dissident ‘Polish Brethren’, destabilises any neat north/south split. Blockmans argues rather that core/periphery politics inﬂuenced the course of events along with more orthodox factors like the ‘religious zeal of the Calvinists’, the ‘selfconﬁdence of the local nobility’, the ‘moderation of regional Catholics’, the ‘growing class-consciousness of the artisans’, and the ‘Dutch love of freedom’. In contrast with an impression that ‘the revolt pertained only to “the North”, which became the Dutch Republic, or that the rebels all shared the same political objectives’, Blockmans makes a strong case that between the iconoclastic riots of 1566 and 1588, a ‘gradual radicalisation took place’ such that ‘moderate options, long supported by a majority, became unviable’ (Blockmans 1999, 128–9). At the time of the Abjuration in 1581, Blockmans insists, the inhabitants of the Low Countries were divided into three camps, not simply the two corresponding to the North and South. While ‘Flanders, Brabant, Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland declared the king deposed from his princely right to rule’, ‘Groningen and the Walloon (Frenchspeaking) districts (with the exception of Tournai) had already reconciled themselves with Philip’. A third camp, ‘[s]omewhere in the middle were Guelders, Utrecht, and Overijssel, which refused to adopt either position’ (Blockmans 1999, 129). Blockmans accounts for this arrangement of positions by noting that the ‘southern and eastern provinces like Artois, Hainaut, Namur, and Luxembourg – those areas least committed to the revolt – were relatively thinly populated, more agrarian, less commercialised, and lightly taxed’. These areas had only recently been ‘incorporated into the Habsburg empire’. Thus, Blockmans concludes, the ‘original fault lines’ were not between north and south but ‘between core areas, consisting primarily of the wealthy and urban coastal provinces, and the periphery, stretching from Groningen south to Luxembourg and Artois’ (Blockmans 1999, 129). Duke argues that instead of a simple north/south split, the character of the Low Countries was historically patterned by the ‘region’s ambivalent relationship with Germania and Gallia’. Equally important were ‘the incoherence of their political organisation and the absence of any sense of community between the Burgundian and the newly incorporated provinces’ such as Friesland and Gelre, ‘which looked Janusfaced both up and down the Rhine’ (Duke 1990, 186). Indeed the

The Revolt 37

provinces that broke away to form the United Provinces were those newest and least well-integrated into the Habsburg Netherlands, the remotest, and those with ‘peculiar social structure and independent political traditions’ which could ‘more easily detach themselves’ from the Spanish prince (Duke 1990, 197). In addition, against the simple north/south split, Duke notes the strength of feeling in a speciﬁc northern town against the United Provinces. After 1589 the town of Groningen, in the far north of the Netherlands considered, as the ‘armies of the Union slowly encircled’ it, ‘placing itself under the authority of the house of Saxony rather than suffer incorporation in the United Provinces’ (Duke 1990, 197). Furthermore, instead of a simple split between independent northern Protestants and dependent southern Catholics, Duke notes that a group of ‘stalwart Calvinists were still prepared in the mid 1580s to advocate a general peace with the king, provided the Protestants were granted a measure of religious freedom’ (Duke 1990, 195). Price points to another marked broad contrast within the United Provinces, that between east and west rather than north and south. He comments that Friesland took part in the (to some extent) ‘modernising, market-oriented western region’, while Overijssel, Gelderland, the countryside of Utrecht and Groningen, and Drente were all much more traditional in their outlook, not much touched by economic changes in the West. There is also a notable difference between the economic and political fortunes of predominantly urban or rural areas. Within the general picture of a boom in economic prosperity, some towns in the east even suffered economic decline in this period (Price 1994, 224). The east was much less linked into international trade, much less dependent on trade and manufacture, less reliant on imports and on exports to foreign markets. Agriculture was relatively more important, but less advanced and market-oriented. The economy was characterised by small-holding peasants and subsistence farming. But the biggest contrast within the United Provinces was between Holland and the other provinces. Price notes the ‘enormous imbalance’ (Price 1994, 278) resulting from Holland’s maritime concerns, and the fact that it contained 40 per cent of the population and more than half the wealth (Price 1994, 222). But, he maintains, the United Provinces was still a going concern because it was in the interests of both Holland and of the lesser provinces. In what follows, while recognising the importance of east/west and core/periphery divisions and tensions, ‘north’ and ‘south’ will be used as shorthand terms.

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The next milestone during the Revolt occurred in the 1590s. Oldenbarnevelt, who held the powerful ofﬁce of Advocate in Holland, and Maurice of Nassau, son of William the Silent of Orange, led the northern revolt in a ‘unity of purpose’ (van Deursen 1999, 151), a successful though unlikely team (Shetter 1971, 81). While Maurice of Nassau had been given the title of Stadholder (but now by the States rather than by the emperor) political power was vested in Oldenbarnevelt (van Deursen 1999, 150). Burke tells a story that indicates the power of the province of Holland at this time, and in particular of Amsterdam, and the priority given to continued economic activity with or without the war. In the 1590s, he notes, ‘leading Amsterdammers were engaged in trade with Spain, despite the fact that the Republic was at war with Spain at the time’. Their solution, he comments, was that ‘ships taking corn to Spain simply sailed under false ﬂags’. In the light of this trade, in 1596 there was a ‘conﬂict between the States-General, which forbade the export of corn to Spain and Italy, and the rulers of Amsterdam, who objected; it was Amsterdam which won’ (Burke 1994, 47). By the end of the 1590s, van Deursen notes, ‘the whole area north of the Maas and the Scheldt Rivers lay in the hands’ of the northern provinces. The military successes of the United Provinces contrasted starkly with the declining fortunes of the Spanish, reﬂected in the death of Philip II in 1598. But the ‘ultimate military aim’ of its military leaders was to ‘carry the ﬁght into Brabant and Flanders, the old centre of the Low Countries’ (van Deursen 1999, 153). Black outlines one example that illustrates this aim, of how all sorts of cultural products could further the rhetorical aims of the Dutch. The political purpose of Ortelius’ historical map of the Low Countries of the late 1590s is clear. The map purported to depict the area in the Roman period, but it ‘consists of the seventeen provinces belonging to the Habsburgs, creating a sense of territorial coherence that was misplaced for the earlier age’ (Black 1997, 10). The Truce with Spain in 1609, which ‘was not intended as a permanent peace’ (van Deursen 1999, 156), was regarded by some as Oldenbarnevelt’s triumph. As Rowen comments, with the Truce, the ‘independence of the States General of the United Provinces of the Netherlands – the Dutch Republic, as we call it – was an accepted fact although not yet acknowledged in law in Spain’ (Rowen 1972, 68). However, the signing of the 1609 Truce caused much apprehension in many quarters about the relationship between the northern provinces. As Price recounts, it was ‘feared that once the war was ended the

The Revolt 39

alliance would also collapse and with it the Union’. There was ‘no obvious or natural unity between the seven (or eight with Drente) provinces, never mind between them and the Generality lands’. Signiﬁcantly, the provinces preferred to speak to each other as ‘allies’ (Price 1994, 221). Braudel conﬁrms that, in the crisis of 1609, the ‘United Provinces were on the point of splitting up and demolishing what passed there for a state’ (Braudel 1979b, 185), as the religious (Remonstrant v. Contra-Remonstrant) and political (urban regents v. Stadholder Maurice of Nassau) conﬂicts became rolled into one. During the Twelve Years’ Truce, ‘both sides would send their troops eastward to ﬁght in Germany’, in the struggle between supporters of the Catholic League and the Protestant Union (van Deursen 1999, 157). The Thirty Years War (1618–48) shifted the centre of the conﬂict between Catholics and Protestants to Germany. Nevertheless, Israel argues that even in 1618, the ‘antagonism between the Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants…brought the Dutch Republic to the verge of civil war’ (Israel 2001, 270). Van Deursen identiﬁes that the reasons why the Twelve Years’ Truce was not extended and why hostilities in the Low Countries resumed ‘must be seen in the light of the German war’ (van Deursen 1999, 158). However, by 1618 Prince Maurice had won a notable military victory, and Oldenbarnevelt died on the scaffold in a public execution in 1619 after a systematic campaign by Maurice to discredit him (van Deursen 1999, 162–3). How can we account for such a reversal of fortunes over so short a time? Several explanations can be advanced. Price sees the threat of civil war as a key factor. He argues that when ‘Oldenbarnevelt seemed to be leading the country into civil war, Maurits emerged as the alternative pole of political power’ (Price 1994, 171). Van Deursen contends that suspicion of Oldenbarnevelt’s foreign policy (seeking alliance against the Spanish with France, a Catholic country) was compounded by his championing of the Remonstrant cause. The Remonstrant position sought room for a more tolerant Arminian Protestantism in the increasingly inﬂexible Calvinism of the Reformed Church that had been formed in 1572. Those supporting the Remonstrant cause were determined that the secular authority of the Holland States assembly, not the church, would decide the matter. In the eyes of the Calvinists Oldenbarnevelt’s one sin was a consequence of the other (van Deursen 1999, 160–1). Oldenbarnevelt’s defence was that, as the Advocate of Holland, he was ‘the principled defender of regional sovereignty’ in a conﬂict between Holland and the Generality (represented formally by Maurice). But van Deursen notes

40 Spinoza and Republicanism

that Oldenbarnevelt was a skilled and pragmatic politician who ‘did what was best for Holland’. Having lost his de facto pre-eminence with the States General, he could no longer force it to pursue the policy which was in Holland’s interests (van Deursen 1999, 164). At the same time the Synod of Dordrecht was convened and resolved upon something of a compromise settlement. While it settled the religious dispute in a strictly orthodox way, in favour of the strictly Calvinist Counter-Remonstrants, the decision was approved by the secular authorities. For, as Braudel comments, the consequence for church–state relations was that the church did not become independent. Crucially the ‘Reformed Church remained subordinate to the provincial and urban authorities’ (Braudel 1979b, 196). Wansink makes a case that Oldenbarnevelt’s fall was based less on the religious quarrel in which he became involved, than on Amsterdam’s revenge. He notes that ‘in the quarrels of the Twelve Years Truce (1609–21) Amsterdam’s opposition to Oldenbarnevelt, which eventually led to his fall, was based not so much on ideological grounds as on self-interest and wounded pride’. Amsterdam ‘had not forgotten Oldenbarnevelt’s resistance to its efforts to establish a West India Company, from which it expected enormous gains’. Wansink notes that not long ‘after the Advocate’s death the Republic got the Company and Amsterdam held a dominating position in its management’ (Wansink 1971, 137). The Dutch West Indies Company, founded then in 1626, developed interests in the area south of New York, along the northern coast of South America, and the southern coast of West Africa. The Dutch East Indies Company, founded in 1602, concentrated its efforts in what are now India, Pakistan and Southeast Asia, the southern tip of Africa, and the Caribbean islands. Van Bunge provides a different emphasis on the events which brought the United Provinces to the brink of a civil war during the Truce with Spain. In his view a purely academic dispute between theologians ‘spilled over into the political arena’. The dispute about the meaning of Calvin’s theory of predestination was politicised because the ‘two most powerful men in the Republic had chosen sides’ before a national synod could be called to decide the matter. Oldenbarnevelt, Advocate of Holland, took up the cause of the Arminian Remonstrants who had presented their petition to the States of Holland. Prince Maurice, Stadholder and general of the armies of the States General, championed the Counter-Remonstrant position and moved to isolate Oldenbarnevelt politically. Van Bunge attributes Maurice’s actions not to opportunistic political ambition but because

The Revolt 41

he was ‘worried over the failure of Van Oldenbarnevelt’s Arminian policies to restore order in the public church’. In van Bunge’s reading, the Synod of Dordrecht, meeting three months later, endorsed the Counter-Remonstrant position and ‘effectively banned all two hundred Remonstrant ministers, little less than a ﬁfth of the entire Dutch ministry, from the Republic’ (van Bunge 1999b, 12). Oldenbarnevelt’s very ‘triumph’, moreover, in negotiating the Twelve Years’ Truce, was another factor contributing to his fall, as peace did not appeal to all. The image of a brave, and basically paciﬁc, little United Provinces ﬁghting off the might of the Spanish for eighty years, would be inaccurate. As Harline points out (1989, 184), it was only in the 1640s that there was sizeable public feeling, as expressed in the pamphlets which accompanied every public debate, in favour of peace with Spain. During the 1620s, 1630s and into the 1640s the Truce was regarded, in Kossmann’s words, as ‘a disastrous experience, leading to civil strife and threatening the young republic with disruption’. It was ‘repeatedly stated that never again should the risk be taken of such a paciﬁc adventure, which divorced the state from its origin in war and from its true traditions’ (Kossmann 1963, 165). Harline sums up the point by remarking that, ‘[w]ar seemed the natural element in which alone the Republic could ﬂourish’ (Harline 1989, 187). The long, ﬁnal phase of the Revolt covered the period from the end of the Twelve Year Truce in 1621 to the Münster Treaty in 1648. Van Deursen comments that the ‘same peace conference that concluded the Eighty Years’ War with the Peace of Münster ended the Thirty Years’ War with the Peace of Westphalia’ (van Deursen 1999, 182). Indeed the town of Münster is located in the county of Westphalia, and the two treaties were actually signed in the same place. Price notes that the Treaty of Münster was not universally favoured among towns and provinces of the United Provinces. It was signed despite the abstention of Utrecht, and ‘ratiﬁed by the States General despite the refusal of Zeeland to assent to the treaty’ (Price 1994, 213). Israel discusses the curiously inconclusive role played by Holland. In this period political debate centred upon whether or not to accept Spanish peace terms. Holland, the most powerful province, and in particular Amsterdam, the most powerful town, he says, ‘failed to exercise effective leadership or exert decisive inﬂuence’ (Israel 1979, 41). Part of the explanation may lie in the way that in terms of relations between the United Provinces and the southern provinces, as van Deursen notes, the war had ‘actually helped the economy’ in the north, since the United Provinces had ‘blocked the Flemish harbours and closed the

42 Spinoza and Republicanism

Scheldt, Antwerp’s avenue to the sea’. Moreover this alone, he argues, had ‘prompted many Antwerp merchants to set up shop in the north, bringing with them not only money, but their expertise and their connections’ (van Deursen 1999, 147). Israel accounts for Holland’s indecisiveness by arguing that while the overriding domestic issue of the day centred on the Remonstrant/Counter-Remonstrant debate, it was the divergent and entrenched economic interests of the Holland towns (often expressed in the terms of the religious debate) that prevented Holland from acting decisively. Thus, for example, between 1629 and 1633 serious peace discussions were conducted, but the Holland towns were split. Israel observes that for ‘Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Dordrecht, the conﬂict was damaging; for Leiden, Haarlem, Gouda and also Utrecht, it was beneﬁcial (Israel 1979, 68). These were the lines along which the towns voted in the 1629–33 municipal votes over war or peace with Spain. As Israel comments, ‘economic as well as internal political and religious rivalries caused the sharp split between the two groups of Holland towns which is the most important feature of the Dutch response to the Spanish truce and peace initiatives of 1629–1633’. Or rather, ‘economic rivalry, between two competing sets of interests, formed an inherent part of the domestic political and religious rivalry which prevented any prompt or uniﬁed Dutch response to the peace proposals’ (Israel 1979, 68). Israel has shown that, contrary to what one might expect, the superior political and economic power of Holland and of Amsterdam was not necessarily reﬂected in decision-making power. In the context of how politics was conducted in the United Provinces, it is clear why it was often the case that Holland’s and Amsterdam’s stature did not result in a decisive domination over policy. For while Holland’s and Amsterdam’s economic superiority clearly improved their political clout, they lacked (and more importantly, did not seek) any overall authority to act for the whole. This situation persisted throughout the following century, and constitutes an important element of the political framework in which Spinoza saw himself as contributing. Israel details the complexity of the economic interests involved for Holland. In addition to the clash of interests between the European carrying trade (between the Baltic and the Iberian peninsula and Italy, in which the Netherlands played a crucial role) and the colonial trade of the East and West India Companies, he says, ‘there existed within the province of Holland a still deeper contradiction of interest’, between ‘sea-borne commerce and manufacturing, which like the

The Revolt 43

former difference, became linked to Remonstrant and CounterRemonstrant rivalry’ (Israel 1979, 65). Thus, as Israel demonstrates, the attitudes of the towns of Holland, as elsewhere in the United Provinces, to the question of war with Spain, in this period, was dictated by the sophisticated economic interests of particular towns. Towns with sea-borne or manufacturing interests had divergent attitudes to war and peace, and the spread of European and colonial interests similarly had conﬂicting implications. Hibben chronicles that of ‘all the Holland towns Gouda was the most vociferous advocate of peace’. But Gouda’s ‘opposition to any transfer of sovereignty is not to be explained by any nascent republicanism’, Hibben argues, but rather by the town council’s ‘anxious desire for peace’ (Hibben 1983, 174) to promote its interests. In addition, as the history shows, for military leaders, the Princes of Orange and the nobility, peace was much less attractive than for the merchants in Holland. Moreover Calvinists hoped to continue the war with Spain until the Spanish were driven out of the southern Netherlands. It was only after 1648, and especially in the De Witt period, that peace arguments were generally held to be compatible with the identity of the Republic. One indicator of the degree of passion invested by the Dutch in economic activity is the phenomenon of tulipmania in Holland, culminating in a massive market crash in 1637. At its height bulbs of certain varieties of tulip were sold for 10,000 ﬂorins, at a time when the average annual income was around 160 ﬂorins (Pavord 2000, 133). This episode signals the wider cultural and economic perspective in which politics was enacted. It also demonstrates Dutch dominance in some areas of the global marketplace, the sophistication of trade with Central Asia, and the thriving state of markets and commerce in Holland. Tulipmania also occurred as part of wider changes in structural patterns of trading. In the sixteenth century Lisbon and Antwerp had become more important trading ports than Genoa, with increased access to goods like tulips from Central Asia. Amsterdam beneﬁted from the decline in Antwerp as a trading port after 1585, after its sacking by Spanish troops (Pavord 2000, 147) and the blockade of the Scheldt river. Amsterdam developed a commodities market and stock exchange, facilitating dealing in many goods including exotic wares like silks, spices and tulips (Pavord 2000, 148). Israel comments that after the breakdown of peace discussions, apart from ‘a brief ﬂurry of truce moves initiated by the Cardinal-Infante in 1635–36, there were no other substantive negotiations between Spain

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and the Republic until 1643 when the Münster talks began in earnest’. There was thus a ‘lengthy prolongation of the war’ (Israel 1979, 61), due in part to northern resistance to settlement on any other than the most advantageous terms for the northern provinces vis-à-vis the southern provinces. The interests of the East and West India Companies, and of other trade and commercial advantages, helped to keep the different political interests in balance. Van Deursen also notes that the impetus towards peace was strengthened by the abatement of the danger of a Catholic victory in the German war, reducing the need for solidarity with the Protestant cause through continued conﬂict with Spain. The move toward peace was also increased by the need to consolidate the southern border of the United Provinces in the light of possible French interests in invading the Southern Netherlands once Spanish control weakened. The Seven Provinces decided not to attempt to regain the southern provinces into a broader Netherlands, and it was not in their interests to do so. The prospect of additional territory was not considered an advantage, Antwerp might prove ‘a formidable trading rival’ to Amsterdam, The Hague would lose its control over the Generality Lands annexed from Brabant and Flanders and, as van Deursen comments, ‘Holland’s leading position in the States-General would be challenged by the new provinces’. For all these reasons, the peace conditions at Münster in 1648 resembled those of 1609. Spain acceded to formal recognition of the Seven Provinces, ‘allowing it to trade freely with the Indies’, accepted ‘the closure of the Scheldt, and did not insist on privileges for Dutch Catholics’. In the light of these terms, the United Provinces ‘could regard itself as a victor’ (van Deursen 1999, 181). Thus the Revolt was carried on over eighty years. Its protracted length reﬂects not only the determination of the northern provinces to free themselves from Spanish interference, but also expresses the conﬂicting political and economic interests between provinces and between towns in the north, and the periods when conﬂicting and ﬁercely held political positions led to overall stalemate. For instance it is surprising to note, in view of its dominant role in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, that Amsterdam joined the Revolt only in 1578, the year before the Union of Utrecht. The reason lies in that Amsterdam had been ruled by a Catholic clique, which was purged in 1578. But despite the complex network of internal hostilities, the alliance of the Seven Provinces did not break up. For one of the most important factors helping to cohere the different phases

The Revolt 45

of the Revolt, from the Netherlanders’ point of view, was claims made about the protection of ancient privileges. The defence of privileges is a signiﬁcant key to the meaning of both the political and military struggle of the period and the political literature and political thought of the Revolt. Van Gelderen outlines the meaning of Dutch privileges. They ‘consisted of a diversity of charters acquired or extorted by cities, guilds, crafts, clergy and nobility from imperial princes, vassals, dukes and counts, who had ruled the Netherlands during the late medieval period’ (van Gelderen 1993, xiii). Woltjer speciﬁes the different types of privileges that played a vitally important part in the way political conﬂict in the Netherlands was articulated throughout this period. First there are privileges which are a collection of liberties equated with rules, freedoms, exemptions based on prerogatives, suspensions of the general law, ancient speciﬁc liberties of medieval towns and provinces obtained from the prince, over matters such as market rights. But it was not these that the insurgents against Spain primarily fought for, says Woltjer (1975, 21). It was the second category of privileges, those ‘concerning the administration of justice and local government’, that ‘certainly did play an important part in the Revolt’. Each ‘province and each city had its own form of government, often set out in charters that limited the power of the sovereign and guaranteed, in varying degrees, the conduct of government and justice by persons chosen from the local people’. Such charters ‘safeguarded an administration of justice that would be consistent with tradition and correspond to locally acceptable standards’. But as Duke notes, since the sixteenth century, between ‘the prince’s solemn obligation to uphold the privileges and the imperative to standardise legislation and legal practice in the interests of efﬁcient government there remained an unresolved and, in the end, irreconcilable tension’ (Duke 1990, 176). Moreover Woltjer conﬁrms that these privileges were not ‘rights of one town at another’s cost. In essence they ran in parallel for all towns and provinces alike. That is why towns and provinces could unite in the defence of these privileges’ (Woltjer, 1975, 22). Van Gelderen agrees that charters dealing ‘explicitly with the division of power between prince and subjects’ (van Gelderen 1993, xiv), like the famous Joyous Entry of Brabant of 1356 and the privileges (including the Grand Privilege) of 1477, played a very real and practical part in reafﬁrming the accepted parameters of the conduct of politics, administration and law. He notes that the charters ‘played a major role in the formulation and codiﬁcation of political rights and duties’. Van Gelderen makes the

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signiﬁcant observation that accumulated together, the privileges ‘began to form a sort of “implicit constitution”’, though not in any sense an explicit one. Combined with other written and unwritten customs and rules, they ‘restricted the power of the prince, codiﬁed participatory claims, guaranteed civic rights and, in doing so, secured the rule of law’ (van Gelderen 1999, 191). Most importantly, ‘the charters functioned as constitutional guarantees of liberty’, with the States assemblies ‘presented as [their] virtuous guardians’ (van Gelderen 1999, 192). Woltjer makes a strong case that the insurgents against Spain used the language of privileges because it provided ‘a legitimate basis for action’. The language of privileges provided a legitimation. Such language was not used ‘from a desire to defend all privileges at any cost’. Thus, for instance, in insisting on the punishment of heretics, ‘Alva’s violation of the privileges formed the justiﬁcation for the Revolt, not its primary cause’ (Woltjer 1975, 25). The primary cause of the Revolt, according to Woltjer, was that the overlord ruler had failed to treat his subjects with humanity, goodwill and moderation and had neglected to uphold good law. This was what had been argued in 1579 by representatives of the States General at peace negotiations in Cologne. Two things emerge clearly from analysing the role of the privileges during the course of the Revolt. The ﬁrst is that claims made about them change and strengthen over time. The claim being made about them in 1648 is different from that made previously. But in order to increase its plausibility and rhetorical power, the new claim is made as an assertion that the privileges have a constitutional status they had always had. The power of the new claim depended upon the denial that it was innovative. This habit of mind continues on after the Revolt into the Dutch Republic. The second thing that is clariﬁed by the discussion of the privileges is that the political community of the United Provinces was not a state and did not have a formal or written constitution. The privileges remained a disaggregated collection of symbols but the claims made on their behalf were not only symbolic. Such claims referred to concrete issues of self-government in the ‘real’ world. In addition, and to anticipate, under the Dutch Republic, the idea that the privileges were symbolic in forming a default constitution was a claim that was constantly reasserted until it became accepted as a fact.

Political thought during the Revolt Political debate at every stage of the Revolt, stimulated by and further stimulating written treatises and tracts, was intense. Van Gelderen

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notes that the ‘Dutch Revolt most deﬁnitely established books and treatises as the principal media for public dispute’ (van Gelderen 1992, 290). He documents that between 1555 and 1590 alone, more than two thousand works of political literature were published. A ‘booming printing culture’ in the Netherlands (with one Antwerp publishing house particularly important), and the ‘fragmentation of political authority’ (van Gelderen 1992, 289) enabled this political literature to ﬂourish. This body of material is largely pamphlet literature, petitions and declarations. They are often addressed to the prince and his subordinates, but are also designed as commentaries on and interventions in domestic political debates, sometimes but by no means always employing arguments from ancient and contemporary European authors to support their views and contest opposing ones. Moreover, van Gelderen shows that ‘authors of political treatises often anticipated the “common people” of the provinces as their audience’. While some treatises would have been expensive, a number of factors substantiate this viewpoint (van Gelderen 1992, 289–90) of a strong public domain. They include the relatively high rates of literacy, publication in the vernacular, the high number of copies of a treatise printed, a strong interest in political affairs among the public, and the perceived inﬂuence of political literature on the common people by contemporaries. The two most important modern collections of primary sources of political writings for the period are Kossmann and Mellink’s Texts Concerning the Revolt of the Netherlands (1974) and Van Gelderen’s collection (1993), though they are both limited to the early years of 1565 to 1588. Both collections reﬂect well the highly charged political climate of the times. Kossmann and Mellink’s texts cover declarations, treaties, letters, proceedings and remonstrances by the States and States General, noblemen, Philip, Orange, and citizens of particular towns. Van Gelderen usefully brings together ﬁve of the most important of these tracts from the early period of the Revolt. A Defence and True Declaration of 1570 is a petition written by a friend of William of Orange in an attempt to gain German support. The Address and Opening of 1576 is a plea addressed to the States General to open negotiations with Holland and Zeeland to rid the country of ravaging Spanish troops. The Brief Discourse of 1579 is one of many negative commentaries on the Cologne peace negotiations and arguing for the States’ right of resistance. Political Education of 1582 justiﬁes the Abjuration and the States’ demand that citizens take an oath of allegiance to the new regime. Finally there is the Short Exposition of 1587 by Vranck, in some ways the

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most important document, which is discussed below. Van Gelderen concludes that these publications exemplify that ‘the political debate of the Revolt was not only immense, but also comprehensive and, above all, passionate’ (van Gelderen 1993, vii). Kossmann identiﬁes a crucial aspect of political discourse in the Netherlands when he notes that in ‘the early seventeenth century neither the Dutch statesmen nor the Dutch intellectuals sought to provide a theoretical foundation for the republican government which most of them admitted now did exist’. As he says, few ‘analysed its character or praised it for any particular merit’ (Kossmann 1991, 288). Kossmann’s key insight certainly also covers the second half of the sixteenth century as well. Van Gelderen conﬁrms the characteristically traditionalist thrust of the political literature of the Revolt. In appealing to the privileges and the charters containing them, rather than seeking to articulate new arguments, this literature ‘placed itself ﬁrmly within a well-established tradition’ (van Gelderen 1993, xv). It is against the background of this intriguing lack of theoretical attention that we must see the political thought produced during the Revolt. Before examining further the character of political thought published during the Revolt, it is important to establish the nature of the inquiry. The term ‘political theory’ is an unstable and contested concept at the best of times, and its relation to political practice is constructed in different ways in different cultures. Political theory covers a spectrum of writing from journalistic reﬂections on a series of incidents, and commentaries on events through speciﬁc political perspectives, through ideological accounts which draw upon an intellectual legacy to support their claims, to normative political philosophy in which claims are justiﬁed more abstractly and in greater depth. It can also encompass, and does in the Dutch case, papers and documents, and the equivalent of ‘white papers’ and discussion documents, written by civil servants. In addition, in the Dutch case, these various categories of ‘political theory’ are not insulated from one another, and the best (in the sense of most abstract) political philosophy is also often intended as a contribution to a very local political debate. So in the case of the politics of the Netherlands over the crucial century or so under discussion here, the term political theory is deeply contested. On the one hand Kossmann represents the persuasive view that in general the political literature of the period was untheoretical and that its character is misunderstood if it is treated as abstract theorising. On the other hand van Gelderen very ably demonstates, and justiﬁes the view (van Gelderen 1992, 4–5),

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that much of the work situated around the middle of the political theory spectrum is worthy of serious attention by those studying political thought across Europe in this period. The position developed here holds that both viewpoints are correct. Van Gelderen’s plea for the recognition of a lively and diverse body of work going well beyond the classiﬁcation of ‘pamphlet’ (van Gelderen 1992, 288), and against an overly-narrow deﬁnition of political theory, rightly highlights the value of an under-represented body of political writing. Kossmann’s assessment taps into an enormously important and distinctive feature of the Netherlanders’ style of discussing, writing and doing politics. But while van Gelderen’s collection is an immensely important resource for studying a range of political thought in the second half of the sixteenth century, his categorisation of the subjects discussed by these writers is very general and blanches out to some extent the distinctive ﬂavour of the characteristic approach to politics and justiﬁcation captured by Kossmann. Van Gelderen says, ‘I concentrate on those treatises which have contributed signiﬁcantly to the formation and transformation of political ideologies of the Dutch Revolt, either by developing, substantially reasserting, refuting or innovating arguments on the issues which are central to this study, such as obedience, resistance, forms of government, sovereignty and the relationship between church and political authorities’ (van Gelderen 1992, 4). Conscious that the present work is addressed primarily to an English-speaking audience for whom ‘political theory’ suggests a prima facie abstract engagement with political questions, this book seeks to elaborate Kossmann’s insight premised on a different approach to political theory. It seeks to understand the intellectual context of Dutch republicanism more fully by attending to underlying features such as the practical, local, particularistic nature of the Dutch mentality, and by exploring the complex meaning of the Holland-centric approach to political life. It examines the meaning and value attached to the new-old claim about the ‘privileges’, and seeks to understand the unintended republic. It seeks a wider understanding of ‘political theory’ than the one undertaken by van Gelderen. Scott’s phrase ‘political power of public memory as a context for present action (and re-enactment)’ (Scott 2000, 163) sums up well the concentration of Dutch writers. This understanding is crucial for making sense of the puzzling features of political practice and explicitly reasoned thinking in this period. It is also vital to the aim of realising in an accurate manner the

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character of Spinoza’s contribution to political debate. Velema challenges Kossmann’s emphasis on the pragmatic, practical commonsensical view of Dutch political theory, and refers to Grotius and Spinoza as ‘high’ political theorists (Velema 2002, 9). But the two perspectives are not contradictory. Kossmann would not wish to deny the theoretical credentials of Grotius and Spinoza, but makes the point that Dutch political theory was characteristically practical in approach despite them. These two theorists do not ﬁt the norm of political thinking in the Netherlands. Moreover both hoped that their contributions would be taken up in political practice, and neither was entirely successful in overcoming the practical bent of political debate. In general terms political thought in the Netherlands, by proponents of the Revolt, between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth century, focused upon justiﬁcations for resistance and on the new claim in the form of an old claim about the protection of ancient privileges. As taught in the universities, political thought over this period centred upon upholding the defence of monarchical government. Resistance and privileges were intimately connected, because resistance could be justiﬁed only against a prince who ceased to uphold and protect the law as expressed in the ancient privileges. Resistance was bound up with a prince who infringed his rights. While Skinner rightly points to the inﬂuence in the Dutch Revolt of the Huguenot text of the right of resistance Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, van Gelderen (1986) argues convincingly that there was an even stronger, home-grown Dutch development of resistance theory. In terms of ‘high’ political theory, the four major Dutch writers discussed here are Erasmus (writing in the earlier half of the sixteenth century), Lipsius, Althusius and Grotius. They are introduced here in order to register the bearing they had in helping to frame the terms of political debate and because they were taken to have political inﬂuence, rather than to engage in close textual analysis. The discussion draws heavily on the work of van Gelderen, Kossmann and others. Vranck’s important Short Exposition is also considered. We shall then examine what use the Dutch made of their reading of Machiavelli, and ﬁnally in this chapter, discuss the issue of whether Dutch Revolt theory led necessarily to Dutch republicanism. Erasmus (1469–1536) is a key ﬁgure in the development of the notion of toleration in the United Provinces, the idea that princes could not rule over the consciences of their subjects. Toleration was thus politically a highly inﬂammable concept, as it directly challenged Catholic belief in the prince’s divinely ordained legitimacy, and

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because it opposed the synchronism between church and state. Erasmus was born at Rotterdam, went to school at Deventer in Holland where Alexander Hegius combined the humanist emphasis on the classics with the religious ideals of the Brethren of the Common life, and entered a monastery at Stein near Gouda. Erasmus later lived in Flanders in the southern Netherlands for many years, which was the centre of the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands. Tilmans elucidates Erasmus’ notion of humanism when she notes that the ‘Erasmian humanist strove for the revival of the Christian humanitas, which in political terms meant the revival of a Christian respublica. Sapientia is the highest possible political virtue.’ She notes that ‘Erasmus argued in his Institutio principis christiani (1516): “goodwill may sufﬁce in the ordinary citizen, since he is directed by laws; it is of little avail in a prince, unless accompanied by wisdom.”’ Tilmans notes Erasmus’ ‘plea for wisdom as the highest princely virtue, for an elective monarchy, government by consent and law, and political freedom’. She contends that to further these proposals, together with his ‘ﬁerce critique of political corruption and tyranny, Erasmus called upon a Ciceronian political language which he directed against contemporary political culture’. Tilmans registers that Erasmus is the ‘best known of the early Dutch humanist thinkers, but at the same time he is the most un-Netherlandish of them all, working as he did mainly outside the political context of the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands’ (Tilmans 2002, 108). However, Tilmans also notes that while Erasmus’ notion of citizenship is ‘universal, rather than urban or national, he has been, from a totally different perspective, of major importance for the development of ideas on national citizenship in the Netherlands’. In his ‘adage The Batavian Ear (1508), he ﬁrst formulated the idea of the Dutch natio as Batavian, and of its civic greatness since antiquity’ (Tilmans 2002, 113). In tracing how Erasmus’ humanist ideas were later taken up in subsequent political discourse, Tilmans argues that civic humanists provided later writers with the resources to think about ‘different levels of citizenship’ – urban, universal, aristocratic, and republican. ‘Civic humanism in the Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands starts out at the end of the ﬁfteenth century as humanist rhetoric in praise of the cities.’ But ‘in the course of the sixteenth century, it turns into republican rhetoric, entailing a moral philosophy committed to changing the body politic’. She ﬁnds a ‘strong continuity of civic or republican discourse extending from the sixteenth- to the seventeenth-century Netherlands’, and argues that the ‘ideological force of sixteenth

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century civic humanism in state formation seems so far to have been underestimated’ (Tilmans 2002, 124). Blockmans recounts how, after Erasmus had dedicated his work The Praise of Folly to Thomas More, the ‘two great humanists’ met in 1515, when More was in Bruges ‘to represent the interests of English merchants’. More was writing Utopia at the time, his ‘vision for an ideal society’, while Erasmus’ The Praise of Folly ‘used the theme of the world turned upside down to openly vent satirical criticism of all social roles, not least that of the clergy’ (Blockmans 1999, 126). Erasmus’ Christian Humanism in the ﬁrst half of the sixteenth century sought to integrate the humanist recovery of classical learning in the original Greek and Hebrew (regarded as having achieved an inspiring harmony between form and content that had not been surpassed) with a reformed, tolerant Catholic Christianity. Blockmans comments that while Erasmus wrote a ‘princely mirror’ for the future emperor Charles as well as works on war and peace, he considered his religious works ‘based on his critical study of the ancient Greek and Latin texts’ including his ‘new two-language publication of the New Testament…far more important’ (Blockmans 1999, 126). Erasmus’ ideal of a tolerant international church and an international community of scholars was overtaken by the Lutheran challenge to the Catholic church. But his Christian Humanist programme, for a time developed at the University of Leuven where scholars could study the Hebrew, Greek and Latin sources of the Christian faith (Blockmans 1997, 126), had a wide, though quiet impact in many European countries, including the Netherlands. According to Blockmans, Erasmus shared Luther’s and other theologians’ ‘critique of religious formalism and the worldliness of the church’, but he did not break with Catholicism, ‘even though he had no patience with the war-making popes of his day’ (Blockmans 1997, 126). Schöffer makes the important point (1964, 76–7) that the strength of the traditions of Christian humanism and Erasmianism, with their stress on good personal behaviour and toleration, helps to account for the slowness of the development of the Reformation in the Netherlands. Indeed he considers that the Reformation was able to take root at all only because of the Revolt itself. Harline makes the telling statement that Erasmus was ‘one of the few’ in sixteenth-century Holland to point out that Mars, the Roman god of war, was the ‘stupidest of all the Gods’ (Harline 1989, 190). Lipsius, who edited the collected works of Tacitus in the 1570s and 1580s, was appointed professor of history and law at the university at Leiden in 1579, to enhance the reputation of the new university. His

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book on politics, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (Six Books on Politics or Civil Doctrine) of 1589, is important here because, as van Gelderen comments, it went against the grain of the ‘traditional Dutch emphasis on the limits of monarchy and the authority of the States’. It provided an ‘eloquent plea for princely rule’ (van Gelderen 1992, 180). Lipsius ‘was in touch with the leading politicians of his day’, but in ‘his view the States’ government of the 1580s was a catastrophe’ (van Gelderen 1992, 187). Van Gelderen comments that the book was intended to instruct those in government ‘and princes in particular’ in how to establish civil life whose aim was the bonum publicum. Lipsius recommended, ‘in line with the humanist fashion of his time’ that rulers should be ‘guided by prudence and virtue’ (van Gelderen 1992, 181). But while it advocated monarchical government, the book argued that the prince needs advisers to enhance his prudence – counsellors on foreign affairs as well as with ‘opinion and speech’, and ministers to assist with practical matters (van Gelderen 1992, 182). Lipsius recommended to rulers a combination of humanist values (such as justice, clemency, modesty and prudence) but, like Machiavelli, argued that ‘the traditionally overarching virtues of justice and honesty should be set aside if the supreme value of the common good was at stake’. Van Gelderen notes that his work also ‘featured the characteristic Stoic emphasis on self-sufﬁciency combined with a detached concern for others’, and self-discipline and frugality. The ‘principal duty of the citizen’ was ‘dutiful obedience under the guidance of a virtuous prince’ (van Gelderen 1992, 183–4). Lipsius’ edition of the collected works of Tacitus was part of a wider development in humanist scholarship that occurred in the second half of the sixteenth century in the Netherlands. In the ﬁrst half of the century, Tacitus had assumed a notable importance because of the information on the Germanic peoples that was included in his History, and in particular for the value of his works as a historical source for the Batavian identity claimed by the Dutch. Interest in the Batavian heritage was further stimulated in the second half of the sixteenth century when Tacitus became seen, as Shöffer argues, as ‘the grand inspiration of a truly classical literary style, displacing Cicero, till then considered the purest model’. Schöffer notes that the work of Tacitus ‘proved, in addition, an inspiring source for the increasingly popular philosophy of Stoicism, soon to be accepted by humanist scholars as the prototype of public morality in the difﬁcult art of politics and government’. According to Schöffer, Tacitus in this way ‘came to constitute for many

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a learned humanist a counterweight, a healthy medicine against the “pernicious, immoral” inﬂuence of the writings of Machiavelli’. Indeed, he says, ‘rebellious Holland became the intellectual centre’ for ‘this new fashion of “Tacitism”’. The new university in Leiden, ‘founded in 1575 by William of Orange, needing some special focus of interest, opened its doors to this up-to-date humanism next to becoming one of the centres of Calvinist theology’ (Schöffer 1975, 87). Klashorst, Blom and Mulier also highlight that the works of ancient historians, and in particular of Tacitus, ‘were carefully studied and commented upon, as sources of practical political wisdom’. Likewise, Stoic ethical treatises on virtues such as constancy and prudence helped ‘shape the political outlook of the age’. The reason, these writers suggest, for the popularity of Tacitus and Stoic authors, was that they ‘emphasise the importance of the relation between political thought, classical philology and the study of history’ (Klashorst, Blom and Mulier 1986, xi) as a guide to political policy and action. Thus the picture that emerges of political thought during the Revolt is not of writers seeking to justify the emergent Republic with innovative republican ideas, but of writers responding to the Revolt by acting as conduits of classical exemplars and virtues which strike a chord in contemporary minds and hearts, and as writers transmitting humanist ideals and ideas of both Erasmus and Tacitus, from both northern and southern European sources. Kossmann points to another feature of the Dutch writers’ dependence on a range of traditional sources for legitimacy, including both home-grown ideas like the privileges and foreign texts. He reﬂects that, looking ‘back on the history of Dutch political thought during the Revolt what strikes one is its unadventurous character and its precision. The Netherlands apparently felt compelled to justify all their acts and decisions as based on law’. But while these writers ‘strained law and precedent to the point of misrepresenting them perhaps wilfully’, and ‘failed to put forward a consistent theory of constitutional government’, there was ‘something moving and impressive in their sometimes desperate and sometimes extraordinarily pedantic attempts to prove that all they did was legitimate’ (Kossman and Mellink 1974, 50) The way in which attempts at republican formulations of political theory could only be accepted if absorbed into a transmission of traditional ideas, and could not be accepted if described as innovative – even though the practical consequences constituted an innovation – can be seen in the political thought of this period. The enormous signiﬁcance of this disposition of Dutch writers, to habitually seek legitimacy for

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political proposals by invoking traditional sources, is a theme taken up in some of the following chapters. For as well as characteristic of a sound understanding of political thought during the period of the Revolt, this predisposition sets the intellectual context for later developments and for Spinoza’s works and their reception. Van Gelderen notes the on-going reafﬁrmation by the northern Netherlanders, in political debate, of local and particularistic traditions. He comments that the ‘Abjuration of Philip II in 1581 merely intensiﬁed the debates on the optimal state of the Dutch commonwealth and on the location of sovereignty in the peculiar Dutch interplay of towns, provincial States and States General’. The ‘most inﬂuential interpretation’ (van Gelderen 1999, 193) of this disposition to afﬁrm change by appealing to the force of traditional texts and practices is demonstrated by Vranck, the inﬂuential Pensionary of Gouda and a deputy in the States of Holland. Vranck’s Short Exposition of the Right Exercised from All Old Times by the Knighthood, Nobles and Towns of Holland and Westvriesland for the Maintenance of the Liberties, Rights, Privileges and Laudable Customs of the Country is very important in two respects. It was taken as an authoritative declaration in 1587 locating and reafﬁrming sovereignty in the separate parts, and especially in the States assemblies, and the authority it held over the subsequent eighty years was immense. It was also, much more locally, as Hibben remarks, a ‘defence of the authority of the States of Holland’ and as such was fully endorsed by the town council in Vranck’s home town of Gouda (Hibben 1983, 173). Van Gelderen calls attention to the enormous signiﬁcance of Vranck’s treatise by referring to it as ‘the “Magna Carta” of the Dutch Republic’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxviii). He describes how it was written to refute a Remonstrance of the same year by an English supporter of the Earl of Leicester, which had argued that the States assemblies could make no claim to sovereignty because they contained ‘mere delegates who acted on order and instruction’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxviii). Van Gelderen comments that while ‘Vranck admitted that the States were representative institutions whose work had to be seen in terms of delegation’ (van Gelderen 1999, 193), according to Vranck ‘this did not diminish the importance of the States’. Using a ‘distinction between the location and the administration of sovereignty’, Vranck argued that ‘although sovereignty resided with the people [that is, the towns and nobles], it was administered by their delegates, the States’ (van Gelderen 1999, 194). The force of the declaration was to deny sovereignty to the central organs of government, along the lines asserted by

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Leicester. Van Gelderen notes that the Short Exposition concludes by reasserting ‘how necessary it is to preserve the authority of the States’ for two reasons. The States are viewed as ‘the foundation on which the common state of the country rests, and which cannot be damaged without ruining the common good’. Second, ‘in all matters the sovereignty of the country is with the States’ (van Gelderen 1993, 238). This declaration was the ﬁrst in a long line of such afﬁrmations of a new de facto constitutional settlement, arrived at by contesting an opposing claim, and expressed as the conﬁrmation of tradition. Althusius, like Lipsius and Vranck, ﬁts into the pattern of reliance on traditional sources of legitimacy by writers on political thought during the period of the Revolt. Althusius is known to us as a writer whose right of resistance theory was written in response to the Revolt. But again the idea of a ‘right of resistance’ means something very speciﬁc to Althusius, couched in terms of reafﬁrming traditional ideas. In his Politica methodice digesta of 1603, as Kossmann describes, Althusius, among other publicists in the Netherlands of the sixteenth century, wanted to prove that ‘a representative body, or a body considered representative, had the right to resist a despotic prince’. Sovereignty was deﬁned by Althusius, Kossmann notes, ‘as popular in order to allow the so-called popular representatives to withdraw it from a ruler who exercised it in an illegal manner’. The crucial point was that sovereignty ‘was not used by Althusius as a creative and dynamic concept symbolising the soul of state power; sovereignty was not basically power to be exercised, it was power to resist illegitimate exercise of it’. Kossmann remarks that the ‘concept was thus interpreted – quite differently from the way in which Bodin or Parker used it – as an instrument to defend the constitutional tradition and not as an instrument to unify and strengthen the State’ (Kossmann 1987e, 136). In other words, for Althusius, ‘sovereignty is not intended to be positive, to make laws and to act as the creative centre of the State, but only to check government’ (Kossmann 1960, 93). The purpose of this notion of sovereignty, for Althusius, is purely to retain the right of resistance to tyranny. Van Gelderen also considers the meaning of sovereignty for Althusius. He raises the important point that sovereignty was understood in the light of late medieval traditions of ‘“holistic” and corporatist notions of the community’. When writers like Althusius and Vranck referred to a conception of ‘popular sovereignty’ they did not mean by it a modern notion but were alluding rather to ‘a network of ancient institutions, of councils, parliaments, colleges and estates, and secondarily, those who have a place in them’. At the same time the important and distinctive

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Netherlanders’ political practice of bargaining toward consensus and concord ensured that the views of the wider public could not be ignored. Institutions were regarded as representative, not in the sense of assemblies ‘appointed by the people to give expression to popular will’. Rather it meant that such institutions ‘more or less personiﬁed the people, embodying the social bond which unites people in society’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxx). As to the character of the new political community, Kossmann notes that ‘the question was never explicitly put’ in this form. This ‘hesitation, this inability to come to grips with the most urgent task’, he says, ‘can be clearly demonstrated by an analysis of the important and great work published in 1603 by the Calvinist theorist Althusius … Politica methodice digesta’. This work was, says Kossmann, ‘a rationalisation of, and an apology for, the Revolt’ (Kossmann 1960, 92). Kossmann sums up that the ‘political theory which accompanied the Revolt had always remained more or less negative’. It had ‘above all been intended as the justiﬁcation of a revolt, not as a justiﬁcation for creating a new state. This is why this justiﬁcation had for so long been based on positive law.’ Political theory at this time, he notes, ‘stated again and again that old privileges were being defended against a tyrant, and one simply did not feel the need to ask oneself what kind of state was taking shape’ (Kossmann 1960, 92). Althusius was widely followed in accepting monarchy as the norm. Political theory in the early seventeenth century in the universities considered monarchy the oldest and in most cases the best form of government. But monarchy was to be distinguished from despotism. These writers argued that all European monarchies were forms of mixed government, and they worked to assimilate the United Provinces into this formula. Signiﬁcantly, no special status was given to the peculiarity of the form of political organisation with which the United Provinces found itself, although some teachers accounted for its remarkable freedom in terms of the state being more thoroughly mixed than were other European states (Kossmann 1991, 289–90). Grotius and Paul Buys were two writers who did seek to offer positive alternatives to the paradigm which Althusius’ work was considered to represent. Grotius was actively involved in politics in support of Oldenbarnevelt’s government as well as being a writer and lawyer. Grotius’ De antiquitate de statu reipublicae Batavae of 1610 was written in an effort to supersede the Calvinistic theory of resistance as put forward by Althusius. As Kossmann remarks, Grotius’ ‘defence of a nonmonarchical, almost unadulterated aristocratic form of government,

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deciding that this was the system adhered to by the Dutch from time immemorial’ was an innovation, attempting to ‘explain and glorify the State in the form it possessed in 1610’ (Kossmann 1960, 94). It praised ‘the republican form of government which’, according to Grotius, ‘Holland had possessed since its birth, 1,700 years ago’ (Kossmann 1991, 289). The popularity of this work by Grotius, given a vernacular translation soon after 1610, and reprinted seven times in the seventeenth century, can be understood in terms of his appeal to or appropriation of a Batavian past whose positive moral status was clear to his readers. Schöffer underlines the way in which Grotius ‘offered his readers … his view of the exemplary way in which the Batavi had organised their government’. As Schöffer comments, the ‘date of publication was certainly no accident. The Twelve Years Truce had just been signed, a ﬁrm legitimation of the independent existence of the young Republic, from the best sources, was urgently needed’. Schöffer asks rhetorically, ‘[w]ho but the erudite Grotius, himself nurtured in the Batavian atmosphere of neo-Tacitean Leiden, could so well muster the arguments drawn from the age-old classical documents?’ (Schöffer 1975, 92). Van Deursen is even more blunt. Grotius’ Liber de antiquitate et Statu reipublicae Batavae ‘is a political treatise’, he insists. While Grotius was a jurist, historian and theologian, he was also able to ‘use his scholarship as a political instrument’. Using historical arguments, Grotius ‘sought to prove that the supreme power in Holland belonged to the States – not to the prince, or to the people’. Likewise Grotius’s Ordinum Hollandiae ac Westfrisiae pietas, van Deursen recounts, ‘is a defence of the church policy of Oldenbarnevelt, of whom he was a close and trusted associate’. Grotius’s political purposes were just as clear in the Mare liberum which, as van Deursen notes, directly defended ‘the right to free trade on the open seas vis-à-vis other states, whose established or growing interests were threatened by Dutch shipping’ (van Deursen 1999, 178). The Mare liberum was intended as an argument against the Portuguese (van Bunge 1999b, 14). It was originally chapter 12 of the longer work De iure praedae, but was published separately in 1609 because of the important topical relevance of the argument. As Van Gelderen comments, the ‘freedom of the seas was a key issue in the peace negotiations between Spain and the Dutch Republic which led to the truce of 1609’ (van Gelderen 1999, 203). Van Gelderen notes that in De iure praedae, in ‘line with the political thought of his rebellious Dutch predecessors’ (van Gelderen 1999, 202) like Vranck, Grotius defends the ‘authority of the States assemblies

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with reference to the old Dutch charters’. Grotius regards the assembly of the States as the ‘supreme magistrate which maintains the law of the commonwealth and the citizenry’. Van Gelderen argues that Grotius ‘puts the full weight of his justiﬁcation of the Dutch Revolt on the basic principles that the commonwealth is the source of civil power and that government is based on contractual consent’ with a prince. The power given to the prince can be revoked if the prince ‘exceeds his bounds, because then ipso facto he ceases to be regarded as a prince’ (van Gelderen 1999, 203). Van Gelderen also notes that De iure praedae contained ‘a meticulous political defence of the activities of the Dutch East India Company’ (van Gelderen 1999, 204). Paul Buys, like Althusius, was very impressed by Bodin’s writings. The connection is pertinent since, as noted earlier, Bodin had been councillor to the Duke of Anjou when Anjou was offered the sovereignty of the northern Netherlands in 1580. But the attempt of Buys, a jurist, in 1613 in De republica libri tres, to outline the inner limits of government (as opposed to Althusius’ right of resistance to government) in order to advocate an aristocratic republic, did not exercise much inﬂuence. As Kossmann conﬁrms, republican theory ‘in the ﬁrst decades of the seventeenth century was never developed into a really coherent doctrine’. Kossmann makes the important point that republican theory could not achieve recognition – despite the reality of republican practice – in the context of ‘the body of humanistic and Aristotelian thought so predominant in Dutch and other universities’ (Kossmann 1960, 95). Monarchical Dutch political theory, dominant especially after the fall of Oldenbarnevelt in 1618 and the development of the United Provinces in the direction of a monarchy, was as Kossmann comments, ‘essentially traditional. It was Aristotelian, humanistic and Calvinistic’ (Kossmann 1960, 96). In a reversal of our expectations perhaps, Kossmann also registers the signiﬁcance of the point that it was Calvinist educational principles, and not a republican impulse, that was ‘directed towards developing civic virtues and preparing its pupils for a life of responsible leadership’. Government, he afﬁrms, ‘should, according to the humanistic theory that can hardly be distinguished from Calvinism, be exercised by the best, by the virtuous, by the well-educated’ (Kossmann 1960, 101). It was the traditional, and not the republican, theory that upheld the classical republican virtue of the active civic life of the citizen in high esteem. Moreover, Calvinistic theory was dominant not because it was Calvinistic but because it coincided with the traditions of classical and humanist learning which were dominant in the Netherlands.

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These dominant features are seen in the Idea politica of 1644 by Frank Burgersdijk, a professor at Leiden university. The popularity of this work is demonstrated by the successive re-edited publications of it in 1649, 1657 and 1668. In addition, Kossmann comments that a group of Dutch Calvinist university teachers used their Althusius to refute the ‘horrible doctrines of Hobbes’ (Kossmann 1960, 96). Kossmann aptly characterises political thought in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century in terms of a ‘sterility’ which accounts for ‘the profound crisis to which Calvinistic politica eventually led’. For this theory, he comments, ‘was monarchical not so much because it preferred the monarchy to all other forms of government, and certainly not because it was Orangist, but simply out of inner, logical necessity’ (Kossmann 1960, 98). In addition, the problem persisted that this theory could not be made to ﬁt the real situation in the Netherlands where there was no monarch. Kossmann takes the view that it is not surprising that the challenge, from around 1650, to this ‘absurd’ political theory taught in the universities, came from outside the universities. It came from Lambert van Velthuysen, the De la Court brothers and from Spinoza, drawing on Dutch political practice as well as using ideas from Hobbes and Descartes. It coincided, Kossmann reminds us, with the establishment of ‘a pure republican form of government in ﬁve of the seven provinces’ of the north, after the conﬂict of 1650 between the Stadholder William II and Amsterdam (Kossmann 1960, 99). While it is clear with historical perspective that the Revolt, and the Republic it led to, would have to be acknowledged in theoretical form, sooner or later, it was by no means obvious that this was so to contemporary commentators. The categorisation employed by Klashorst, Blom and Mulier (1986, xii–xiv), of four types of political thought in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, is interesting. Instead of taking account of the republican challenge from around 1650 that Kossmann describes to the ‘sterility’ of traditional categories, it continues to classify political theory as mirroring unreﬂectively the traditional concerns of humanism, Aristotelianism, law and Calvinism. The ﬁrst type, political thought in the literary-historical style, predominant in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century and in the universities, brings together writers like Lipsius and others who analyse historical situations, often from Roman history or through Tacitus, to derive political lessons. The De la Courts are also included in this category. The second type, philosophical political thought, refers to Spinoza, but as an exception to political thought studied in philosophy departments

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in universities, in the academic Aristotelian tradition, by writers such as Busius and Burgersdijk. The third type, according to Klashorst, Blom and Mulier’s taxonomy, encompasses the contributions of jurists to Dutch political thought, mainly in the last third of the seventeenth century, in the works of Huber and others. This category also includes earlier works by Grotius (De jure belli ac pacis) and his pupil Graswinckel (1667 and 1674). The fourth type of political thought described is the theological-political, mainly concerned with the relation between the Reformed Church and the secular state, and covers the debate between Arminians and orthodox Calvinists, repeated in 1642 and again in 1688–90. Coming now to the use by the Dutch of Machiavelli, it is not surprising, from what has already been described, that the traditionalist political thought of the universities regarded Machiavelli as cynical and immoral. Machiavelli was regarded as in a sense dangerously modern, in contrast with Tacitus who offered comfortably ancient historical and moral exemplars. Pieter Hooft exempliﬁes the Dutch preferences well. Best known for his drama and poetry, and for his early work, Baeto or the Origins of the Hollanders (1617), which was in the tradition of the Batavian myth, Hooft also wrote a work of history and politics about the Revolt, the largest part of which was published in 1642. Hooft is typical, not only in the scope of his different writings, but also in that his great examples were Tacitus and Erasmus, not Machiavelli (Kossmann 1987c, 215–18). Like Machiavelli it was commonplace for Dutch writers at this time to be concerned with the notion of liberty. But they meant by it the defence of concrete examples from their own history of ancient liberties or privileges laid down in documents, expressed in speciﬁc laws. Dutch writers at this time were not concerned to articulate an abstract notion of liberty as a political concept as such. As Van Gelderen rightly notes, there is a crucial difference between Dutch and Machiavellian views on liberty: ‘unlike Machiavelli’s, the Dutch republican view of the political order was built on the trinity of liberty, privileges and States and was not developed out of the republican language of the Machiavellian moment’. Political thinkers and writers during the Revolt did refer to the classic authors of republican theory. However, as van Gelderen emphasises, they ‘did not conceive of the ﬁght for the preservation of the old freedom and the old political order – for that is how they represented the resistance of abjuration – in terms of a ﬁght between virtu and fortuna’ (van Gelderen 1990, 218). Moreover van Gelderen makes a good case (1990, 218–19), that there were two sound

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reasons why the theory outlined by Machiavelli on republican liberty was not followed, in political debate in the northern Netherlands after the Union of Utrecht. First, Florence had suffered the fate the Dutch were trying to avoid and, secondly Machiavelli was associated in Dutch minds with the calculating political behaviour in the southern Netherlands of Philip II, the Duke of Parma and Farnese. For the Dutch, political thought was about reafﬁrming the value of speciﬁc ancient liberties and privileges, always backward-looking. It was not about needing to look for new values or new forms of legitimation for constitutional arrangements. The mismatch between values and arrangements did not matter. So long as the fundamental values were expressed through the arrangements, it did not signify that the constitutional arrangements did not entirely or explicitly spell out the nature of the political reality. Thus the contemporary disjunction was partly due to the political arrangements (in terms of institutions and processes) not being signiﬁcantly changed after the break with Spain, even though that was so fundamentally important a political fact. This disconnection was also partly due to the Dutch not perceiving a need to account theoretically or in constitutional justiﬁcation for political change. The ﬁnal reﬂection to be made on political thought during the Revolt is that it did not lead necessarily to the speciﬁc form later taken by Dutch republicanism, and could even have led instead to an Orangist monarchy. It is important to stress the contingency and indeterminism involved here, since at least one important commentator seeks to establish a much closer connection and see the seeds of later republican theory in the political thought of the Revolt. Van Gelderen’s initial aim, ‘to reconstruct the development of Neostoic and republican patterns of ideas during the Revolt and to indicate their relation to the political language of the Machiavellian moment’ (Van Gelderen 1990, 205), is not problematic. His view that conceptions of liberty were crucial in the political debate following the Union of Utrecht is common ground, and his observation that Dutch republicanism differs from Machiavelli’s is sound. However, van Gelderen’s argument that writers in the Dutch Revolt were putting forward republican views, needs perhaps to distinguish more clearly that republicanism is not a necessary consequence of a love of liberty. Van Gelderen expressly states (1990, 221) that ‘the vision of the Dutch political order…built upon liberty, privileges and sovereign States, contained a conception of republican self-government’. The following chapter seeks to show that republican implications were not drawn out until the second half of the seventeenth century, and the Dutch Revolt was not

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itself republican in character. The same difference of opinion occurs when van Gelderen says that ‘privileges were not just about rights, they were also about participation’. He argues that ‘when theorists of the Dutch Revolt appealed to the privileges they were not merely demanding the protection of rights, they were also demanding participation in the decision-making process especially for the state’, whose principals were cities. ‘In short’, he argues, ‘if the political authors of the Dutch Revolt were employing the “language of law”, for them this language was perfectly suited to express republican claims’ (Van Gelderen 1990, 222). In this way van Gelderen asserts that the Dutch used the language of law (that is, privileges) to express republican claims (that is, to take part in a federal body and its decision-making), and not just to guard privileges from central control. This view is at odds with Kossmann’s persuasive argument that Netherlanders during the Revolt ‘had no experience with republican government and tended to look upon it as something alien or even unnatural’. Furthermore, Kossmann notes, ‘some pamphleteers considered the merits of republicanism but without transforming their reﬂections into a concrete proposal or programme’ (Kossmann 1991, 287). In addition, while van Gelderen’s view assumes a selfconsciousness in their reﬂection on political practice on the part of the Dutch, Blockmans points out the precise absence of this approach in the Dutch. Blockmans makes the important point that it ‘did not matter very much to them if they practised’ the post-Spanish political reality ‘with or without a monarch, as long as he had no real power over them’ (Blockmans 1988, 154). Van Gelderen’s view is also problematic in that it has difﬁculty in accounting for the political leaders’ active and multiple attempts, after their ‘independence’ from Spain with Abjuration in 1581, to ﬁnd themselves a new sovereign. Neither is van Gelderen justiﬁed in identifying a desire for participation with claims to republican status. For, as was noted earlier, it was the Calvinist and traditional political thought that emphasised civic virtue. Second, as Kossmann argues strongly, the development of provincial responsibility and organisation arose as a result of the ‘anarchy, disintegration and civil war’ of the long period of the Revolt. The provinces, he notes, retreated into ‘an old-fashioned particularism’ and did not embrace any revolutionary ideals of republicanism (Kossmann and Mellink 1974, 2). Van Gelderen’s (1986) attempt to draw new lines of ‘inﬂuence’ from resistance theory in the Dutch Revolt, to Spinoza and republicanism, can also be questioned. There are several strong arguments challenging

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van Gelderen’s view. The theory developed in the Dutch Revolt was open in the sense that it did not have to lead on to republicanism. The Orangist/monarchist strain was strong during the Revolt, particularly after Oldenbarnevelt’s fall in 1618. Also, the Dutch Revolt is a good illustration of the role of contingency in historical understanding. Dutch Revolt theory was not the origin of Dutch republicanism in any necessary sense, but only in the sense that the story, whose connections are contingent, can conveniently, though arbitrarily, start here. As Haitsma Mulier rightly notes (1990, 253), ‘[n]o real republican theory emerged during the Revolt from which the Dutch Republic originated’. Indeed, Haitsma Mulier also argues (1987, 181) that after the Revolt the only group who had a sense of identiﬁcation with the United Provinces as a whole were the orthodox Calvinists of the Reformed Church, which included some of the Holland regents. They hoped to create a new Israel, and looked to the House of Orange for support. Furthermore, Kossmann warns against reading the term res publica as ‘republic’ in Dutch writings of the period. Dutch sources conﬁrm, he says, ‘that in seventeenth century Latin “res publica” retained its old meaning’, that is, of ‘commonwealth’ rather than ‘republic’, ‘whereas in the contemporary vernacular it stood most often for non-monarchical government’ (Kossmann 1991, 289). This chapter has sought to provide an outline of the major political events and political writings that make the Revolt intelligible, to describe how politics was conducted, and to indicate the complex political mapping of religious dispute on to political dispute. It has also sought to indicate the extent and importance of the mismatch that existed between political theory and political practice during this period, and the contemporary perception of the situation as unproblematic. Finally the chapter began to indicate some of the grounds against employing the term ‘Dutch Republic’ to describe the United Provinces at any time during these eighty years before 1648. This question is taken up again in the following chapter.

2 The Dutch Republic

The date of the Dutch Republic Haitsma Mulier (1987) is one of several commentators who quite conﬁdently use the term ‘Dutch Republic’ to describe the northern Netherlands before 1648, whereas Kossmann (1991) accurately comments that the term was not much used at this time in the United Provinces, and that it misdeﬁnes how the northern Netherlanders regarded themselves. The United Provinces’ shyness of the title ‘Republic’ illustrates their reluctance to recognise that a new state of affairs was emerging. Furthermore, the list of thresholds and milestones toward ‘a republic’, which historians can identify with hindsight, represents in retrospect moments when aspects of what it meant to be an (unintended) republic were consolidated. The argument developed here is that it was only with the advent of De Witt’s regime that the United Provinces can fully be called a republic and even then, only in a speciﬁc Dutch sense. Spinoza’s political work represents the pinnacle of the elaboration of that conception of republicanism. The successful establishment of an independent polity after the victory over the Spanish was cemented in 1648 is all the more remarkable considering that it went against the tide of politics in Europe. Scott makes a good case that the trend that dominated European politics in the seventeenth century was ‘the counter-reformation advance’ (Scott 2000, 30). Indeed the Revolt can be understood as a series of occasions when the Dutch fought against the ‘destabilising impact of European developments’ (Scott 2000, 166). The dynastic succession that led to Philip’s disastrous rule was none of their choosing. They defended themselves against Spain’s interfering efforts and against the Counter-Reformation assaults represented by the power of 65

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the French king. They defended themselves by clinging to their claim, by reiterating the value to them of their iconic charters and privileges in their changed circumstances, and thereby reinventing the claim that was made. They rejected Spanish and other attempts to reform their political, constitutional, legal and religious traditions. Another very important factor supporting a cautious use of the term ‘Dutch Republic’ lies in recognising the ﬂuidity of the situation on the ground during the course of the Revolt. Shifting alliances among the seventeen provinces, and shifting borders between north and south (and with France), make a conﬁdent territorially based attribution impossible until quite late on. The dramatic ﬂows of refugees, for instance in 1585 from southern towns to the north, make assumptions about stable populations in the ‘Dutch Republic’ and the southern Netherlands unfeasible. A fascinating article by Welu (1975) on Vermeer’s cartographic sources, reveals just how slippery are the territory and image of the ‘Dutch Republic’. Maps were regarded at the time as works of art in their own right as well as scientiﬁc and practical documents, and printed maps were fashionably associated with the new form of technology and culture of print. The Netherlands was the centre of map printing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, led by the leading cartographer Abraham Ortelius. The symbolism of maps was just as important as their topographic accuracy. The emblems, heraldic insignia and other ornamentation, as well as the topography included or left out, carried powerful wider social values and attitudes about the area depicted. In the seventeenth century (before the widespread use of the compass consolidated the orientation of maps to the north–south line) the convention of orienting maps with the north at the top was not yet stable. Some maps of the time were oriented (‘orientation’ coming from the Latin word for ‘east’, deriving from the word for the direction from which the sun rises) with the north at the top, but this was not standardised practice. Until the sixteenth century most ‘European world maps had east at the top’, because it represented the ‘direction of Paradise’ (Kaiser and Wood 2001, 50). Black notes that even ‘at the end of the seventeenth century, there was no standard alignment of maps, but in the following century the convention of placing North at the top was established’ (Black 1997, 15). Many maps, including some of those of the Netherlands in Vermeer’s paintings, were oriented with the west (that is, the coastal area) at the top of the frame. Confusingly, the east or south could also be represented at the top of the frame, showing that different habits and emphases ﬂourished concurrently.

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However, whatever compass point is placed at the top of the map tends to be regarded as most important (Kaiser and Wood 2001, 52) and the alignment of the west at the top in maps of the Netherlands certainly signals the high value of Holland and seaborne trade. Moreover, evidence from maps in Vermeer’s paintings suggests a different attitude toward territory from that held later on. For a start, extensive land drainage and reclamation (poldering) during the seventeenth century changed the topography, and increased the area of the United Provinces dramatically. Also, all Vermeer’s maps were printed in Amsterdam, and a wall map clearly identiﬁed as ‘Europe’ dates from 1613, and another (probably from around 1652) is labelled, even at this date, ‘the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands (Germania Inferior)’. Maps of the ‘Seventeen Provinces’ continued to be issued as standard in the north long after the division of the northern and southern Netherlands, and long after the full independence of the United Provinces in 1648. This may perhaps be due to a disjunction similar to the one between theory and practice noted previously, or perhaps in order to trade on the glory of the earlier, larger (and more stable?) political identity. Because some of the measures by which to deﬁne the inauguration of the new polity do not give us clear answers, dating the beginning of the Dutch Republic, and the meaningfulness of the date, is shrouded in ambiguity. Let us consider the main possibilities. With the Union of Utrecht in 1579, undertaken in response to the Union of Arras in the south, the northern provinces separated from the southern provinces. Drente joined the 1579 Union but left again in 1580 with the ‘defection of Rennenberg’, because they were primarily a Catholic province and saw the Union ‘as a yoke imposed by the hollanders’, says Geyl (1955, 176), and sought Parma’s protection. Braudel contemptuously characterises the United Provinces as ‘an assembly of seven minuscule states’ (Braudel 1979b, 180). The United Provinces did not, however, renounce Spanish sovereignty over their country until 1581, with the Abjuration of Philip II. At this point, however, the United Provinces did not take on the responsibility of sovereignty, initially assuming that it belonged to the Duke of Anjou, and then offering it to several European monarchs. It was only in 1588, when Leicester returned to England (after losing his legitimacy following an ill-advised plan to take over several Holland cities), leaving the United Provinces to their own devices that the country, for the ﬁrst time, had no overlord. Vranck’s Short Exposition of 1587 had reafﬁrmed the political power of the separate provinces. At

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this point the United Provinces, in a technical and very narrow sense, became a republic. The United Provinces thus consisted in 1588 of a ‘federation of autonomous provinces’, six in number, but seven ‘after the Republic’s seizure of Groningen in 1594’. Van Deursen lists the provinces in order of priority. The ‘Duchy of Gelderland retained its ﬁrst rank in the ofﬁcial pecking order, followed by the country of Holland, and then Zeeland, Utrecht, Friesland, Overijssel and Groningen’. Van Deursen also clariﬁes that an ‘eighth province, Drenthe, was granted self-rule but enjoyed no representation in the States-General’. In addition, the ‘so-called Generality Lands – conquered portions of Brabant and Flanders…were ruled directly by The Hague’ (van Deursen 1999, 148). But rather than proclaiming or conceptualising this state of affairs in a positive light, Blockmans describes the default position the Dutch fell back upon. Driven ‘more by negative experiences than a consistent theory, the States-General no longer sought a sovereign to rule over them. They would now simply appropriate that role for themselves’ (Blockmans 1999, 140). Van Deursen draws the contrast that in 1588 the permanent division of the Low Countries ‘still seemed highly unlikely’, whereas ‘in 1648, people regarded the division as both natural and inevitable’ (van Deursen 1999, 144). If 1579, 1581 and 1588 are all rejected as inconclusive, four further key markers for dating the Dutch Republic are 1592, 1606, 1609 and 1621. It was in 1592 that the northern provinces were recognised as an independent state by France and England, as the ‘States-General of the United Provinces’ (Rowen 1972, 68). Acknowledgement of one’s independent status by other countries is one sign of a sovereign polity. But in this case the northern provinces did not implement the constitutional changes that would take account of that recognition by France and England. In 1606 the Archdukes of the southern Netherlands declared their willingness to negotiate with the United Provinces as an independent state, but this invitation was not taken up. The Twelve Year Truce with Spain, agreed in 1609, as well as being a personal victory for Oldenbarnevelt, demonstrated Spain’s agreement in principle to formally recognising the de facto independence of the northern provinces. Grotius’ works of around this time represented important articulations of popular policies and perspectives in the United Provinces. Mare liberum, published in 1609, made a strong case for the United Provinces’ shipping policy, and his inﬂuential work on Holland’s Batavian past of 1610 asserted a quasi-republicanism in terms of 1,700 years of self-government. But it was the United

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Provinces that was more reluctant to agree peace conditions, and in 1621 the war with Spain resumed. The eighth possible, and in some ways the most likely, date for the beginning of the Dutch Republic is 1648. The Treaty of Münster in 1648 ﬁnally ended the war, and Spain renounced any further claim to the republic. However the peace, and Spain’s acknowledgement of the independence of the United Provinces, was made against the will of William II, whose ambitions required a continuation of the war. It was only with the sudden death of William II in 1650 (the ninth possible date) that the northern provinces became, according to Lockyer, a ‘republic in fact as well as in name, for the ﬁrst time in their history’ (Lockyer 1979, 436), inaugurating a period of Stadholderless rule. William II had begun the process of a coup d’état in 1650, in alliance with parts of the Reformed Church and the ‘Further Reformation’ movement which was inspired in part by the English Puritans. But with his sudden illness and death the coup was averted. With the government of De Witt, 1653–72, the United Provinces became for the ﬁrst time a republic in spirit as well as in name. It is this tenth date, 1653, that perhaps most accurately initiates the Dutch Republic. But there are yet at least four other possibilities. In 1675, William III ﬁnally accepted the defeat of his attempt to make the House of Orange the royal family of the United Provinces. He remained Stadholder of the separate provinces and captain-general of them all. Federal institutions were slow to develop. It was only in 1718 that the frontier between the United Provinces and the Austrian Netherlands was conclusively established. Black recounts how the use of a map to establish the border marked a highly signiﬁcant and novel development in international diplomacy, and signalled a change in ‘mind-set’ from the medieval ‘approach to territory in legal/feudal’ terms towards a spatial perspective on territory in the modern age (Black 1997, 17). One can see how the development of nation-states and centralised governmental authority in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries following the Treaty of Westphalia was underpinned by this transformation of ‘mindset’ from legal to spatial territoriality. Black notes that societies in the seventeenth century ‘lived with a pronounced degree of tension over frontier zones, areas of overlapping jurisdiction and divided sovereignty’ (Black 1997, 17), that was sometimes resolved but sometimes exacerbated by the move to precision mapping of territory and borders. Black describes the import of employing a map to delineate the frontier as an integral ‘part of an Anglo-Dutch treaty of 1718’. This is an early example of the practice whereby, as ‘maps were more and more widely

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used, they increasingly gave form to political territoriality and resulting interests and concerns’ (Black 1997, 16). The 1718 map ‘owed much to the publication in 1711 of the Fricx map of the Low Countries, the ﬁrst relatively large-scale military map of Europe’. Black comments that the ‘frontier was ﬁxed literally on a map, signed and sealed by plenipotentiaries as an annex to that treaty’ (Black 1997, 16). While 1718 might seem far too late a date for the deﬁnitive establishment of the Dutch Republic, de Waele comments that it was only in 1839 that ‘the separation between Belgium and Holland was settled’. Territorial stability between the two countries was not established for almost two centuries after 1648. It was the Treaty of Münster ‘which at the request of the Dutch ofﬁcially decided the closure of the Scheldt in 1648’. The decision indicated the extent of the antagonistic interests between the northern and southern Netherlands and it ‘cast a long shadow’. When the separation was settled, ‘the terms regarding the Statute of the Scheldt and the waterways between the Scheldt, the Meuse and the Rhine were perceived as distinctly disadvantageous in Belgium and its main port Antwerp’ (de Waele, 2000, 115). It was not until 1798 that an assembly was inaugurated which represented the whole nation and not just the separate provinces of the Dutch Republic. And it was not until 1806 that a legislative body was estab1ished in which members voted without instructions from their provincial constituents (van Raalte 1959, 2). Yet the Republic, by the end of the eighteenth century, ‘had been consigned to that indeterminate category of states neither truly sovereign nor yet completely subordinate’ (Schama 1977, 2), and remained under French inﬂuence for some time. Nevertheless van der Bijl detects the inﬂuence of the De la Court brothers’ recommendation of an isolationist Republic (proposed in the 1660s), in a political proposal of 1848. In the middle of the nineteenth century the minister Van Bosse ‘pleaded for the primacy of economic interest and expressed his preference for territorial reduction by agreeing to give Limburg away to Germany’ (van der Bijl 1986, 90). The reluctance of the United Provinces to accept their republican status was conﬁrmed by Sir William Temple, the ablest diplomat employed abroad by Charles II, and by James Harrington. Temple considered that the United Provinces was a league. It cannot, he said, ‘properly be styled a commonwealth, but is rather a confederacy of Seven Sovereign Provinces united together for their common and mutual defence, without any dependence one upon the other’ (Temple 1932, 56). Furthermore, he accurately observed that sovereignty lies in

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the cities and towns of each province, not in the province as a whole. Harrington, who visited the United Provinces in the 1630s, also regarded the Seven Provinces as a league (Pocock 1977, 3). The ambiguity surrounding the date at which the Republic was established is due to several factors. It points up the mismatch that occurred between the extremely successful republican or quasirepublican practice and the weak monarchical theory predominant for much of the period we are considering. Moreover, as Kossmann points out, in practice, sovereignty resided in the confederation of States, but neither politicians nor political writers or theorists would, for the most part, throughout the seventeenth century, rationalise this state of affairs (Kossmann 1960). Thus the mismatch occurred because the focus of Dutch interest was the new-old claim for the preservation and reafﬁrmation of ancient liberties and privileges, and on protecting the authority of the separate provincial assemblies, the States. Only limited federal institutions existed. The only federal arrangements to be found in the 1580s and throughout the next century were the military council of state, the mint, the admiralty boards, and the audit ofﬁce. Primary executive power rested with the seven provinces, but effective power lay with the councillors of the ﬁfty-seven towns represented in the provincial States and in all the other, local, posts occupied increasingly by the regents. These included aldermen, burgomasters, pensionaries, secretaries, and judges, as well as posts in the admiralties, and army commissions and diplomats, who together with the increasingly marginalised nobility constituted the entire ruling class of the republic (Parker 1977, 141; Roorda 1964, 116). The date of the Dutch Republic is also ambiguous, Blom argues (2002, 96), in part because it ‘did not come about as the result of a conscious process’. Rather it was ‘the outcome of particular circumstances, of a particular cultural climate, of party conﬂict, and of philosophical achievements’. These unintended factors rendered the outcome difﬁcult for the Dutch to accept. Moreover it is ambiguous because its ‘essentially contested nature’ was not resolved, and the Dutch Republic emerged through ‘dissent and criticism’ (Blom 2002, 95). The Dutch Republic was not born of a common history, language or religion, but in common resistance to the Spanish attempt to abolish their (different) ancient privileges. Language was not a common bond. The western, maritime, provinces spoke Dutch, Friesland had its own language, the eastern landward provinces spoke either Oosters or Low German. The House of Orange and its court spoke French, as did immigrants from the south. But while the common bond was resistance to the

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Spanish and the claim about the privileges, it is important to recognise that the situation regarding sovereignty did not in practice change with the coming of independence. The different provinces retained control over positive law, administrative procedures, policy-making, religion, and the courts. Calvinism was the ofﬁcial religion, but it was administered by individual provinces and therefore observance varied. The Reformed Church was not a national church institution. There were different legal systems and law codes (the Netherlands had hundreds of different legal systems), different local institutions such as supreme courts, parliaments, and ﬁscal laws, and different charters of liberties. Each province also retained economic autonomy to create tariffs and customs and duties charged, as they thought ﬁt (Parker 1977, 60). Thus, as far as the Dutch were concerned, their republic consisted in sovereignty residing in the provinces and towns, the freedom of those provinces and towns to make policy, the local election of the representatives of those towns, the local election of the representatives of each province to the States General, whose authority derived entirely from the towns, and the election of the Stadholder. The States General was not a sovereign body: the deputies to the assembly were not free agents but merely the spokesmen of their provinces, and their unanimity was necessary before any action could be authorised. The Prince of Orange, except for the period 1650–72, was considered acceptable as Stadholder, so long as he was elected to the post and the ofﬁce was not made hereditary. Only a hereditary Stadholderate would be anathema to the spirit of the republic, it was felt. The ambiguity over the date of the republic was due in part, then, to the mismatch between practice and theory, its unintended and contested nature, and to the catalogue of forms of local difference. The obscurity over the date lies also in another factor, that as Harline notes, the republic was founded on the war against Spain, and was ‘a military alliance, not a cartel’ (Harline 1989, 191). This provenance meant that, in a sense, there was less reason for a common identiﬁcation of the northern provinces after the end of the war with Spain, than before when the common enemy provided the focus of identiﬁcation. Thus, the ambiguity over the date at which the Dutch Republic was established, an ambiguity that persisted throughout its entire history, derives not from historians failing to provide a date, but from the contemporary Dutch mentality which did not focus primarily on externals like names and dates. Moreover, their entrenched perception was that the whole was not as important as the separate provinces. The

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northern Netherlanders’ traditions and outlook geared to practice meant more to them than attending to formal externals, with which they were uneasy anyway. But in a more positive light, the indeterminacy of the conclusive dating of the commencement of the Dutch Republic was to the Dutch both deliberate and beneﬁcial. Price makes the important point that ‘only such a severely limited set of central institutions could have served’ the purpose of holding ‘the Republic together for over two centuries’. The Republic was composed of the two contradictory principles of provincial sovereignty and a union of provinces, and ‘any attempt to impose stronger leadership on the “united” provinces would have broken the Union apart’ (Price 1994, 209). As Price perceptively puts it, ‘the ﬁction was always maintained that the political system was being preserved just as it always had been, except that a ruler who had attempted to subvert the system had been removed – thus, pre-Revolt precedents retained their force afterwards’. But this ‘ﬁction’ created problems. Price signiﬁcantly observes that ‘this attitude of mind was not particularly beneﬁcial to the States General, which had never played a directing role in government before the Revolt’ (Price 1994, 214). There was a deep ambiguity kept in play. The States General in its post-Revolt form was a product of the Revolt, but the ﬁction was maintained that its power had deep roots in Netherlands history. The States General was the tangible sign that ‘the Union was in fact something more than a mere alliance of fully independent powers’ (Price 1994, 214). But that tacit recognition was not translated into theoretical and constitutional form. Formally sovereignty lay with the provinces, and the States General and the Republic had very few and restricted legal independent powers. The ambiguity remained, says Price, ‘because it was in the provinces’ interests to assert both the indissolubility of the Union and the autonomy of its members at the same time’ (Price 1994, 214). The outcome was an extremely successful republic and practical problems were dealt with at the level of practical politics. Indeed, the ambiguity extends beyond the issue of the ‘Dutch Republic’. From being the ‘Low Countries’, or the ‘Netherlands’, neither of which was a very positive attribution in terms of identity, the northern provinces eventually took their name from the dominant province, Holland, and were seen as ‘Dutch’. The reasons why the United Provinces ‘remained deaf’ (Smit, 1968, 26), for instance, to Venice’s request for an exchange of ambassadors between the sisterrepublics in the 1650s, to which we will return in a later chapter, derives from this ambiguity with which the Netherlanders lived.

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This survey of the different dates that could be used to mark the inauguration of the Dutch Republic has been undertaken to point to the complexity of the issues involved in establishing the meaning and identity of this entity ‘Dutch Republic’, to outline the contingencies that can be discerned in the historical process, and to explore rather than solve the ambiguities involved. It has also highlighted the importance in this development of the reluctance of the Netherlanders to recognise their republican status, and to place in context Spinoza’s theorisation of this ‘Dutch Republic’.

Political thought in 1648 In 1648 the war with Spain was formally ended and the United Provinces were (with the reservations outlined above) an independent, sovereign political system. But their republican status was more openly acknowledged and recognised by other countries than it was at home. As Kossmann notes, ‘Dutch diplomacy was generally not eager to underline the republican character of the state it represented’. Treaties were made by the States General of ‘this State’. Kossmann comments that only ‘in treaties with other republics was the word “republic” used with any regularity’, as in the phrase ‘both republics’. But crucially, ‘the United Provinces were never called “The Republic of the Netherlands” or “The Dutch Republic”’ (Kossmann 1991, 288). This shyness may be in part due to the persistence of monarchical political theory still being taught in the universities, with resistance still included and safeguarded but no longer emphasised. But it is also and more crucially due to other aspects of the traditional character of political thought. The ambiguity surrounding the date of the Dutch Republic, and the ‘ﬁction’ that traditional political practice was merely being reafﬁrmed, did not present a climate sympathetic to innovative political theorising. A political culture that concentrated on reinforcing the power of old ideas did not encourage the emergence of abstract and normative theorising grounded in ﬁrst principles of a ﬁgure like Hobbes or Kant or Hegel. In consequence the state of political theory in the United Provinces at this time, before the ﬂowering of De Witt’s ‘True Liberty’, the ﬁrst Stadholderless period and the republicanism of the De la Court brothers and Spinoza, was still tied to four traditional principles grounding four political claims. The four principles were the protection of privileges; the notion that sovereignty resides in the individual provincial assemblies, the States, and in the towns represented in those States; the

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Batavian myth, so helpfully dramatised by Grotius and Hooft; and the idea of 800 or even 1,700 years (depending on the source) of uninterrupted peace and continuity of tradition in Holland and Zeeland. The role of religion is not highlighted here, for its importance in affecting political thinking was indirect. As Schöffer argues (1964, 83), the victory of the strict Calvinist Counter-Remonstrants in 1618, along with the downfall of Oldenbarnevelt and of tolerant Calvinist Remonstrants, and the coup d’état of Prince Maurice of Orange, did not lead to the Reformed Church becoming the cultural centre of the Dutch Golden Age. While the Counter-Remonstrants dominated the ofﬁcial Protestant Reformed Church, and ﬁnally won over the adherence of a narrow majority of the population, the circumscribed range of the code of acceptability it insisted upon limited its political and cultural inﬂuence. It is important to note that the Reformed Church never became a national church in the way that the Church of England did in England. We shall now look at each of the four traditional principles in turn. The protection of privileges This section builds upon the discussion of the privileges towards the end of Chapter 1. Van Gelderen makes a strong case that the ‘image of the Revolt as the struggle for ancient liberty became a foundational idea of Dutch political culture’. He observes that ‘Grotius provided the classic statement of the argument’. In his Apology of the Lawful Government of Holland (1622) Grotius ‘maintained that the Spaniards had tried “to persuade the public that the old government of the Netherlands had been absolute rule by the Prince”’. Grotius retorted that, ‘from immemorial time the power of the prince had been limited by both the privileges and the power of the States’. Indeed, van Gelderen notes, between ‘1566 and 1581 the position of the States was upgraded almost every year until it reached the level of sovereign powers’ (van Gelderen 2002, 200). Van Gelderen’s comments demonstrate well that the protection of privileges was the basis of old claims of resistance against the Spanish as well as of new claims asserting provincial sovereignty. The privileges stood for shared assumptions about the way politics was done. Boone and Prak make two important points about the privileges. They capture well the way in which the new claims made about the privileges were at the same time deeply conservative and very radical. They reﬂect that ‘[p]aradoxically, the very same rebellions’ that have been hailed ‘as the foundations of a bourgeois society have been

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condemned by others as utterly conservative affairs, attempts to retain Medieval structures, disregarding the requirements of the modern era’. They consider that the ‘apparent contradiction’ is ‘to a large extent the result of an anachronistic evaluation of early modern society’, and argue that ‘these opinions can very easily be reconciled’ (Boone and Prak 1995, 128). And second they indicate that the urban elites could ‘mobilise substantial segments of the populations under their jurisdiction’ in their struggle against centralising authorities. The reason for their capacity to mobilise extensive support was that the struggle for urban independence was not fought for some limited and narrowly self-serving interest, ‘but in the name of the urban community in general’ (Boone and Prak 1995, 128). At the same time, urban elites were thereby vulnerable to claims, which they resisted, particularly from local burgher groups, to enhanced political participation and representation (Boone and Prak 1995, 129). The new and old claims about the protection of privileges, a notion of enormous power and importance in structuring debate about the public domain in the Netherlands, was associated with the late medieval style of government and political mentality during the time when the Netherlands had been the jewel in the crown of the dukes of Burgundy. And it is worth looking brieﬂy at the Burgundian background of the notion since, while in the seventeenth century it had the force of a myth, the protection of privileges was also understood as resulting from a set of actual historical events whose details could be articulated if necessary. The new claim made about the privileges thus had a dual potency, and the slippage from the old claim to the new was regarded unproblematically. Parker rightly points up the link between the Burgundian history of the Netherlands and the defence of ‘privileges’. ‘Local loyalties’, he writes, ‘were the more tenaciously defended because the “privileges” or “liberties” of each town and province predated the “State”. A central government appeared relatively late on the scene in the Low Countries.’ Indeed, there ‘was no political or dynastic union to embrace the entire area until 1548–9’, and the ‘defence of local privileges against the encroachments of the new central power’, that is, Spain under Philip II, ‘proved to be the mainspring of the early opposition to Philip II’ (Parker 1977, 13–14). A good example of the continuing force of the medieval, Burgundian, political arrangements in the late sixteenth century, is found in how the Abjuration of Spanish rule was framed in 1581 by the northern states. It was framed as Rowen comments, ‘on the

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grounds that he [Philip II] had broken his contracts with them, such as the Joyous Entry of Brabant, and therefore his legitimate power had ceased to exist’. On ‘this principle, it was not they who were breaking their oath to their Lord, thus committing the feudal crime of felony, but he who had broken his oath to them, and thus dissolved their obligation of allegiance’ (Rowen 1972, 92). It is worth exploring this link between the Burgundian history and the defence of privileges more fully, since the Burgundian association in the ﬁfteenth century had a great impact on the outlook of the Netherlands, and its bearing on political theory in the seventeenth century is crucial. The Low Countries became part of the Duchy of Burgundy in the early ﬁfteenth century under Philip the Bold and John the Fearless. It was John’s son Philip the Good who severed the fortunes of Burgundy from those of France and of Anglo-French struggles. The comparative peace that Philip’s dominions then enjoyed made them prosperous and their ruler rich. The last Valois duke, Charles the Bold, pressed his ambitions too far, and when he died in 1477, the Burgundian territories had not sufﬁcient unity to maintain their integrity. They were divided up between Louis XI of France and Maximilian of Austria. It was by marrying Mary of Burgundy that Maximilian I increased his Habsburg empire beyond its Austrian base. And by arranging the marriage of his son, Duke Philip of Burgundy, to Joanna of Spain, he opened the way to a further extension of Habsburg power, into the Iberian peninsula (Lockyer 1974, 186). Consequently, the territories of Maximilian’s grandson, Emperor Charles V, embraced most of Christendom except for France. The sudden dissolution of the Burgundian territories in 1477, at the death of a prince, illustrates well the risks attached to dynastic politics of the late Middle Ages. The quality of rule available through the system of lordships, brought together by family arrangement and maintained by military force, was at best casual. It could constitute a power which, while appearing imposing, was in practice weak because it was politically and socially incoherent. The multiplicity of local customs and languages made government as a single unit impossibly difﬁcult. The territory became a pawn in the dynastic power game. ‘Lordship’ implied a proprietary right to territory and a right to govern the people who lived on it. Like property it could be transferred or bought and sold. It did not necessarily imply what we now call sovereignty. Moreover lordship was not necessarily a personal right, for emperors in the past had granted lordships to corporations in the city communes of Italy, but most often it was so.

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‘Liberties’ deﬁned in joint community or political terms, were regarded as more important than an individualistic freedom in sixteenth-century states in Europe, and the Netherlands provides a good example of this. The Duchess Mary’s granting of the ‘Grand Privilege’ at the States General at Ghent around 1480, when she was engaged to the future Emperor Maximilian, and faced with a French invasion, formally ratiﬁed the separate customs, laws and liberties of the cities and provinces of the Netherlands. The subsequent charters in which she conﬁrmed these ‘liberties’, ‘undid much of the work of centralising ducal authority’ (Lockyer 1974, 7). In the Middle Ages all over Europe, power had been diffused and the ruler’s authority had been held in check by customary law, private and corporate franchises, representative assemblies, and a socially dominant aristocracy. But while this system persisted in the Netherlands, elsewhere in Europe central government, during the sixteenth century, steadily strengthened its authority. Customary law was modiﬁed or superseded by Roman law, with its emphasis on the rights of the ruler. For instance, Morrall argues that the reintroduction of Roman law fostered the development of the secular state in Europe. In the late Middle Ages the close connection between Sacerdotium and Regnum gradually separated. According to Morrall the ‘transformation of the latter into the State with its own autonomous functions was the logical outcome of the rediscovery of Roman law and Aristotle as well as of the economic and political changes brought about by the rise of a literate, wealthy and administratively competent laity’ (Morrall 1958, 132). Private and corporate franchises were resumed by the crown, and representative assemblies were bypassed or dispensed with. Nobles were replaced by ‘new men’ educated at the universities, trained in law, totally committed to royal service (Lockyer 1974, 187). Thus occurred the emergence of powerful monarchies determined to assert their authority over all their subjects. This was not the result of an abstract or theoretical belief in the virtues of absolutism, but was the outcome of a practical alternative to aristocratic factionalism that brought about the collapse of so many governments in the late Middle Ages. If this is the general picture of changing political arrangements in European countries in the sixteenth century, we need to ask why this pattern was not repeated in the Netherlands. Increased wealth and prosperity, which the Dutch wanted to hold on to, is certainly one factor. Challenge by infringement on the traditional style of government by post-Valois rulers, is how the Dutch saw it. But it is also worth asking why this challenge occurred in the Netherlands more successfully than elsewhere. One answer lies in the

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circumstance that when the Burgundian Netherlands was given to Maximilian, there was then no intervening level of government between the provincial States and minor nobility, and the Emperor. Whereas in the German case, for instance, the German Princes were the net gainers of power in the German states at the end of the Thirty Years War, in the Netherlands, once the Spanish were vanquished in the north, there was no other established seat of power above the States. The United Provinces saw themselves as a monarchy, but had no monarch. Furthermore, seen from a different perspective, as Blockmans notes, the city-state system – a communal, federative and constitutional political system – based on the supremacy of the major cities in the Middle Ages in Brabant and Flanders, provided the model for Holland and the United Provinces in the seventeenth century. It followed that, as Blockmans puts it, faced ‘with an immobile and increasingly inadequate legitimation of the monarchy’, the ‘highly urbanised provinces of the Netherlands could easily shift to their alternative of a state organisation which they had been developing during nearly three centuries of revolts and constitutionalism’ (Blockmans 1988, 154). Moreover, as Kossmann argues, the Burgundian rulers’ overall strategy for the Low Countries had been to collect ‘as many principalities as they could’, and they ‘had attempted to govern them as much as possible from the centre established in Brussels’. In the provinces, however, they had ‘not abolished the old institutions, regulations, instruments, and habits of mind but merely superimposed a federal structure upon them’. In consequence, Kossmann comments, in ‘the various provinces those who objected to the central government and succeeded in withdrawing their region out of its reach were able to use the traditional local governmental systems’ (Kossmann 1991, 286). Indeed Kossmann goes so far as to identify this situation as the key to the Revolt. This circumstance ‘made the whole Revolt possible and it is in no sense astonishing that provincial sovereignty should have been maintained’ at the same time as the establishment of the United Provinces (Kossmann 1991, 286). As Roorda shows (1964), the Revolt itself helped to accelerate the process of the decline of central, Burgundian government, and the corresponding rise in power of the provinces, and especially of the towns. This led, interestingly, to the diminishing of political accountability of rulers to citizens, for in general regents and magistrates came from the more narrowly based urban patriciate, drawn largely from the merchant class. The best example of the growth of provincial power during the Revolt is

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Holland, of course. Before the Revolt the most powerful city in the Netherlands was Antwerp, and Holland had not been particularly important. With the economic and political changes brought about by the Revolt, Holland became the dominant province. But at the same time, the regents of Holland became more and more aristocratic as the seventeenth century progressed, and wider popular rights diminished and died, according to Roorda. Van Nierop conﬁrms the ‘aristocratisation’ of the urban patriciates and notes that the regents ‘tried to get knighthoods and patents of nobility’ (van Nierop 1984, 212). Furthermore, the changes in Holland’s political status were accompanied not by constitutional changes, but by recurrent purges. As Roorda says, the history of Holland is characterised by purges; for instance, of the ruling Catholic clique in 1578, of Oldenbarnevelt’s men in 1618, and of De Witt’s in 1672. The lack of constitutional development, both in theory and practice, is seen by some as due to the economic wealth and prosperity of the United Provinces, as led by Holland, allowing anachronistic political arrangements to be cushioned from change. While this economic factor may have played some part, the other element at work here, perhaps decisively so, is that the Netherlanders continued throughout the seventeenth century, as well as in the sixteenth, to see themselves as in an essentially medieval relation with a sovereign. They were habituated to the arbitrary and impermanent nature of sovereign lordship, witnessing different sovereign lords coming and going as the titles of Count of Holland and Zeeland, for example, were passed around the dynastic houses of Europe since the ﬁrst Count of Holland in 860. Two consequences followed from this experience. In the ﬁrst place, and this represents another reversal of modern expectations, the Netherlanders were quite accustomed to seeing the issue of sovereignty as quite separate from that of the power to govern, and indeed saw these two things as necessarily separate. The sovereign lord was meant to look after foreign relations and wars with those threatening to invade or actually invading the Netherlands, in return for adequate money raised through taxation. Meanwhile the detailed governing and administration of the provinces (called, signiﬁcantly, ‘countries’) was entirely within the hands of the provincial States and their largely urban oligarchies in the towns. It was in this spirit that the United Provinces offered their sovereignty to Anjou, France and England in turn after the Abjuration of Spain in 1581. In the second place, the Netherlanders had a highly developed idea of their own power in relation to the sovereign. They protected their

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power tenaciously, and justiﬁed it with what seemed to them unassailable arguments in terms of ancient privileges, charters granted, ancient rights, and historical tradition. Because this was the status quo, one which had always been so back into the mists of time, real or imagined, was in itself more than sufﬁcient reason in their eyes for it to continue. All innovation in politics had to be justiﬁed by demonstrating its conformity with traditional practice. This is an important part of the background against which we need to read Spinoza’s views. Woltjer brings out well the role of privileges in legitimating innovation in the traditionalist mentality, where historical proof was sometimes available but not usually required. He notes that ‘when something just was accomplished it was seen as a restoration of the ancient laws, or at least of ancient justice’ (Woltjer 1975, 34). As he says, ‘the appeal to the privileges implied that the world had once been more just’, and that ‘the present was a debased version of a golden age about which no details were available but in which justice and righteousness had most certainly prevailed’. Furthermore, to ‘put an end to all injustice it was necessary to return to olden times. With or without documentary evidence, the past had been better than the present’ (Woltjer 1975, 34). Moreover, Woltjer notes that the ‘passionate desire for a more equitable society’, which ‘could not be achieved without breaking with historic rights, continued still to reappear at the end of the eighteenth century, dressed up as a longing for the restoration of the past’ (Woltjer 1975, 34). Behind this political make-up lies a conservatism of such power that change can only be accepted and acknowledged if it is expressed in terms of the continuity of tradition, and the safeguarding of privileges. This situation helps to account for the persistence of the medieval form of government over such a long period, and also for the curious way in which ad hoc measures instigated during and after the Revolt changed the substance of political realities but not the form. Thus it becomes clear why the United Provinces were so reluctant to acknowledge their republican status. While the substantive issues of republican government – self-government, independence, sovereignty – had been fought for long and hard, an overt recognition of change was not to be welcomed. Two processes reinforced each other – the soundest defence of innovation was to root it in the past, and in the light of such a powerfully traditionalist outlook change meant a break with tradition and that was unacceptable. The accommodation of change to tradition was crucial to the northern Netherlanders for the sanctioning and authorising of political arrangements. This disposition constituted an

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enormously powerful element in the manner of conducting politics in the Netherlands. But the Burgundian medieval dispersal of power, the late integration of the separate parts in 1549, the understanding of privileges, and the Dutch mentality of making claims and introducing change only by casting it in the form of reafﬁrming traditional constitutional arrangements, only partly explain the failure of the Netherlands in the late ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries, let alone in the seventeenth century, to conform to the general pattern of political development in Europe, that is, towards centralised absolutist states, and only partly explain the character of political thought in 1648. These developments, anomalous in the context of the trends developing in Europe, were also due to the strength of the notion of sovereignty residing in the States of the individual provinces, and to the signiﬁcance of the Batavian myth and the idea of Holland’s unconquered past. The sovereignty of individual provincial assemblies The notion of sovereignty has already arisen in Chapter 1 and in the discussion of privileges, but it is useful to highlight separately the curious understanding of sovereignty that was current at this time. On the one hand there is the paradox that, as Haitsma Mulier describes, ‘political theory in the new republic in the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century focussed almost exclusively on monarchy and its institutions’ (Haitsma Mulier 1987, 252). And on the other hand there was the trenchantly held awareness that the power to govern and administer lay with the provincial States and the towns represented in those assemblies. Geyl argues ‘that the Republic in respect of its particularism, was a medieval survival rather than an example of modern institutions’ (Smit 1960, 26). Thus on one side sovereignty lies with a monarch, but there is no monarch, and on the other side sovereignty lies with the provinces, but what then is the status of the United Provinces as a whole? Kossmann emphasises the important point that these problems and paradoxes remained unarticulated, as Dutch teachers of political theory in the universities took refuge in the ﬂexibility of the traditional notions of mixed government and mixed monarchy. He argues that it was a ‘commonplace in Dutch political literature’ to ‘equate the Stadholdership with the monarchical’ element, and ‘the assemblies of the Provincial States, of the States General and of the town councils with the aristocratic or democratic elements’. In consequence, ‘the Republic could be interpreted as a perfect monarchia-aristocratico-democratica’. This did not tally

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with ‘pure juridical theory’, since ‘sovereignty [did] not reside with the Provincial States and were the Stadholders not appointed by those assemblies; and if this was true, how could anyone justify the term monarchia?’ Nevertheless, Kossmann concludes, ‘however that might be, the usage was widespread’ (Kossmann 1987c, 223). Moreover, Velema makes the valuable argument that while Orangism cannot be equated with monarchism, it ‘remains true…that the most intense anti-monarchism surfaced among the opponents of the Stadholderate’. He conﬁrms that the ‘opposition between Orangists and Staatsgezinden’, that is the adherents of the States or States party, ‘that took shape in these years would dominate Dutch political debate until the ﬁnal decades of the eighteenth century’ (Velema 2002, 12). Furthermore, the Dutch understanding of the sovereignty of the States assemblies reconceives centre–periphery relations. In the Dutch case the centre is in an important sense suppressed, or alternatively multiple centres cohere around a central periphery. The perplexing issues surrounding the notion of sovereignty – which, as we have seen, the Dutch themselves did not regard as perplexing – raises further important points that will be considered later. There is the question of the ability of the Dutch to live with such ambiguities, and to go on teaching the theory of Aristotelian mixed government in the universities, despite the mismatch with practice in their country. It is also signiﬁcant to note at this point that this mismatch did not directly prompt the De la Court brothers or Spinoza to reﬂect on this situation. These writers were instead prompted to theorise by De Witt’s republican regime, and saw themselves as primarily lending support to that regime, rather than as contributing to or addressing the university tradition of political theory. Third, the issues around sovereignty highlight the exceptional quality of the 1650–72 period, which was without a Stadholder and thus without even a minimum justiﬁcation for seeing the republic any longer as a mixed monarchy. And ﬁnally, it was the absence of a Stadholder in Holland that was decisive. Some of the other northern provinces did have a Stadholder in that period. This demonstrates the effect of the Holland-centric view, and not just Holland’s dominating power, in shaping the political climate in the United Provinces. The Batavian myth The Batavian myth played a very important part in the political struggles subsumed under the title of Dutch Revolt. Sympathisers agreed with the claim that, in van Gelderen’s words, in ‘its confrontation with

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the Spanish monarchy the Dutch rebellion is the renaissance of Batavian liberty’ (van Gelderen 1999, 186). Schöffer outlines the case that the Dutch understanding of their past, from the early 1500s and for the subsequent 300 years, centred on the Batavian settlement in Roman times. Holland claimed a close link for modern Holland with an ancient Batavia. This consciousness was untouched by the Renaissance and by the upheavals of the Reformation (which was only successful in the Netherlands after 1560). The articulation of the Batavian myth coincided with the rediscovery of Tacitus’ History, and was written up by Aurelius and Geldenhauer. We have already seen that Erasmus, Grotius and Hooft all wrote about the Batavian past in a way that promoted the Dutch claim. In The Batavian Ear of 1508 Erasmus introduced the ‘idea of the founder of the Dutch nation, Baeto…not as an hereditary king but “the most virtuous citizen of all his free and most noble people”’ (Tilmans 2002, 113). The Batavian defeat of the Romans was used by Lipsius, the young Grotius and Hooft as an exemplar during the Revolt. Moreover, as Schöffer speciﬁes, it ‘was the Batavian situation rather than Batavian history … that was exemplary and edifying’ (Schöffer 1975, 85), in a society where exemplars of virtues and qualities like courage and love of freedom were noted, respected and followed. The location of the Batavian history of the Dutch in the Roman past added to its prestige. Schöffer notes that in this way the Dutch identiﬁed with the Roman past rather than with the German elevation of their Teutonic past, which had ‘an anti-Roman colouring’ (Schöffer 1975, 85). Lipsius, for instance, in his famous edition of Tacitus’ collected works, highlighted the glorious role played by the Batavian leader. As Schöffer says, Lipsius ‘wrote a jubilant comment when he edited the description of the rebellion of Claudius Civilis: Claudius indeed had shown what courage a Batavian could and would show when public liberty was in danger’ (Schöffer 1975, 88). Grotius’ treatise of 1610 on the antiquity of the Batavian Republic made a strongly polemical and partisan case that ‘Holland had always been a virtuous republic’. The treatise had great popular appeal, but this did not translate into a political recognition of republican status by the United Provinces. Many other less famous histories featuring the Batavians were also published in Holland from the 1580s (Schöffer 1975, 88). Kossmann comments that Grotius drew heavily on the high reputation of Tacitus, ‘who considered the Batavians the best of the Germanic peoples’ (Kossmann 1987f, 172). Van Gelderen remarks that in ‘Grotius’s hands the ancient constitution of Holland reached the age of antiquity with amazing ease’. He quotes Grotius’ view that the

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‘Batavian resistance against the Romans was presented as “the just beginning of a free republic, constituted in liberty by a people of free origin”’ (van Gelderen, 1999, 194). Though there was some historical foundation for the account, the ancient Republic of Batavia was unlikely to correspond to the territory of modern Holland as claimed. Nevertheless Sir William Temple, writing in his Observations of 1673, takes seriously the claim of Holland to be the ancient Batavia (Temple, 1932, 4). The signiﬁcance of the Batavian myth, however, lies in the political claim being made at this time that it helped to articulate and strengthen. It assisted in giving meaning to and in sanctioning the longstanding sense of the liberty of the United Provinces, in the context of the Dutch struggle against the Spanish. In particular Grotius interpreted that struggle in terms of a republicanism whose meaning derived directly from the belief in a mixed commonwealth and so, as van Gelderen phrases it, an ‘overt anti-monarchism’ (van Gelderen 1999, 194). The uninterrupted peace, continuity of tradition and independence of Holland and Zeeland The idea of Holland’s long and unbroken history of peace was another commonplace of political thought in 1648. Vranck, the Pensionary of Gouda, proudly proclaimed in his Short Exposition of 1587, that ‘in 800 years the State of Holland and Zeeland was never conquered by the sword or brought into subjugation as a result of foreign or civil wars’ (Kossman 1974, 275; see also Kossmann 1991, 287). Rejecting the belittling by Leicester’s supporter of the States’ right to sovereignty, Vranck argued, as van Gelderen notes, that ‘for 800 years Holland had been governed by Counts in close cooperation with the States of the country’. Vranck maintained that the ‘Counts had never taken major political decisions without “the advice and consent of the nobles and towns of the country”, for they simply had no power in their own right’ (van Gelderen 1993, xxviii). Kossmann also registers that ‘the immemorial antiquity of the Dutch state [was] a favourite topic among humanist scholars and artists in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth centuries’ (Kossmann 1987c, 232). The idea of 800, let alone 1,700 years of uninterrupted peace in Holland and Zeeland, like the other ideas through which the northern Netherlanders expressed their political aspirations and that governed their political conduct, contained a large element of myth. But the power of these notions to advance their political claims was quite unaffected by the notion that they may not be supported by strict historical evidence.

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Two points are worth noting here about the idea of Holland’s long history of peace and independence. First it is pertinent that this claim was made, like that concerning the Batavian past, speciﬁcally by the province of Holland for itself, not for the United Provinces as a whole. However, since the political culture of the United Provinces was in important ways dominated by that of Holland, the notion of uninterrupted independence and of Batavian heritage became, by extension, identiﬁed with the political experience of the United Provinces as a whole. This remained the case, even where the reality was of territory, especially in the south and east, fought over and invaded countless times. Second, it is important to see how this notion continued to be used later, in the second half of the seventeenth century. For example, Jacobus Lydius, a Calvinist minister in Holland, published his Belgium gloriosum (meaning the ‘glorious Northern Netherlands’) in 1668, praising the northern Netherlands’ ‘unbroken tradition of more than 1,700 years’ (Kossmann 1987f, 162–3). Spinoza, signiﬁcantly, also refers to the Northern Netherlands as ‘Belgium’ twice in his political works (TTP, 182 and TP, 360) when he described De la Court as the ‘prudentissimus Belga V.H.’ (Kossmann 1987c, 219). As Kossmann comments, ‘Lydius did not think that the Republic was at all young and unﬁnished. On the contrary, it was immensely old. More than 1,700 years of unbroken tradition gave the Republic an antiquity and a nobility hardly equalled by any other nation’ (Kossmann 1987f, 171). Here we have a good example of the Dutch disposition to absorb the new by integrating it into the old, into the tradition. But it is also very important to note that with Lydius, this strand is now allied to a strand of a peaceful and isolationist outlook, which was characteristic of the republicanism of De Witt’s time. This peaceful outlook, though not the isolationism, represents a change from that current for most of the Revolt years, when it was the glory of war that was emphasised, along with the religious view that war was ultimately out of human hands, and that, in a multi-faceted way, the Revolt could be understood as a just war. Harline (1989) describes how during the 1640s there was, for the ﬁrst time, a large increase in the number of pamphlets in favour of peace. They show, he argues, new ‘moral’ attitudes to these three old themes, and the arguments for peace came to predominate in the run-up to the end of the war with Spain in 1648. But while, as Kossmann notes, Lydius’ ‘gloriﬁcation of the Dutch Republic and of peace consciously isolated the country from its European neighbours’ (Kossmann 1987f, 162–3), the classical scholar

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R.H. Schele emphasised the moral responsibility of the Dutch Republic to establish in Europe the perpetual peace and domestic liberty which they had at home (Kossmann 1987f, 164). Kossmann continues that the ‘whole spirit of that age, this age of John de Witt, was characterised by…[the] limited aspirations’ of ‘isolationism, paciﬁcism and collective self-gloriﬁcation’ (Kossmann 1987f, 163). These strands of thinking will be explored more fully later, but it is relevant to note here how the republican political theory of the 1650s and 1660s drew on earlier thinking, not simply through historical continuity, but also because of the persistence of the value placed on tradition and traditional practice in doing politics.

3 De Witt’s Republicanism

Johan De Witt became the effective ruler of the United Provinces for an important and lengthy spell from 1653 at the age of 27, until 1672 when he resigned and an Orangist coup led by William III seized power. This chapter will examine the circumstances of De Witt’s rule, including his coming to power and fall from power. It will also explore the nature and implications of foreign policy under De Witt, and the character of De Witt’s inﬂuential but controversial True Liberty ideology. The chapter also examines the role of ideas derived from the political works of the De la Court brothers in supporting his government, and the distinctive character of De Witt’s republicanism. As Pensionary of Holland, De Witt held the most powerful civil service executive post in the United Provinces, all the more powerful without a Stadholder to claim a rival form of inﬂuence. De Witt’s two decades of leadership represented a triumph for the Holland peace party over the war party associated with the House of Orange’s monarchist aspirations and expansionist aims in foreign policy. The period in which De Witt ruled was exceptional in coinciding with the ﬁrst Stadholderless period, and he developed what was for the ﬁrst time a truly republican government in the United Provinces. As Lockyer says, after the death of William II in 1650, until 1672 when his posthumous son, William, came of age, ‘the United Provinces were a republic in fact as well as in name for the ﬁrst time in their history’ (Lockyer 1974, 436). There had been an earlier, brief blossoming of quasi-republican thought and practice (but not Stadholderless rule) when Oldenbarnevelt had been Advocate of Holland in the early part of the century. Although he was a Catholic, Oldenbarnevelt had championed the Remonstrant cause, but this had been a factor in the politics leading to 88

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his downfall in 1618 and the subsequent supremacy of Maurice Prince of Orange, supporter of the strict Calvinist anti-Remonstrant faction. It is pertinent to note that Spinoza attributes Oldenbarnevelt’s fall to his having been too closely involved with the religious issue. De Witt ruled through his appointment to the ofﬁce of the Grand Pensionary of Holland (the name had been changed from Advocate in 1618). Price argues that De Witt’s style of government was ‘to a very large extent a reaction to the actions of Willem II in 1650’. William’s sudden death during his attempt to seize power in a coup d’état enabled, under De Witt, the ‘development of a more systematic and principled republicanism’ (Price 1994, 164). Van Deursen agrees that the way in which De Witt came to power after William II’s failed coup attempt and early death ‘opened the way for an entirely new solution to the constitutional problem’. In characteristically pragmatic fashion, says van Deursen, ‘Holland dispensed with the problem of the stadholder’s role by simply abolishing the position’. In the power vacuum that followed, De Witt, as ‘the other high ofﬁcial in Holland’, took the opportunity to ﬁll it (van Deursen 1999, 186). There are strong parallels between De Witt’s republic and Oldenbarnevelt’s quasi-republic. Like Oldenbarnevelt, De Witt was a leader of Holland who effectively became political leader of the United Provinces. Just as his predecessor had championed quasi-republican political principles against the House of Orange, and met a violent death, so De Witt followed the same pattern with fully republican ideals. The elements of republicanism that both Oldenbarnevelt and De Witt stood for were ﬁrst, anti-Orangist (against a monarchical element in government); second, opposed to an Orangist foreign policy which favoured territorial expansion and a warlike attitude in Europe; and third, favoured Holland’s interests, which were commercial and required peace to ﬂourish. All three features are closely related. What was new with De Witt was the Stadholderless condition, his ‘True Liberty’ strategy, and of course the Republic’s now independent status. Aspects of republicanism tended to ﬂourish in periods when the Dutch were not at war. Considering that the United Provinces were at war for a good deal of the time covered by this study, it is intriguing that republican ideals were able to ﬂourish at all. At the same time, however, the United Provinces displayed a, to modern sensibilities, puzzling reticence over its republican status. Smit (1968) describes how even under its most self-consciously reﬂective political leader – De Witt – the United Provinces did not wish to extol its republicanism, either

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within Europe or in its colonies in Asia and South America. The Dutch refusal of a Venetian request for an exchange of ambassadors between the two republics demonstrated the reluctance of the United Provinces to form diplomatic alliances which might enmesh them in the power struggles of France and Spain in Europe. Van Deursen argues that De Witt and the proponents of True Liberty ‘preferred…not to speak of a Republic; the regents referred to seven independent republics, since every province was fully sovereign’. He suggests that the reason is that ‘Holland’s interests were best served in this conception, since the weaker the central authority, the better the position for a strong regional power like Holland’ (van Deursen 1999, 187). Moreover, during the 1650s and early 1660s the Dutch aimed to make treaties of commerce and navigation, with other states, that fell short of obligations of mutual defence. Their international diplomacy under the True Liberty banner was undertaken in the service of a trading nation which did not desire to be a power expanding its territorial aims within Europe (Smit 1968, 26). In one sense De Witt was following an established and traditional history of resistance to territorial expansion. Precedents had been set in 1579, for instance, when German states adjoining the Netherlands had applied to join them in the Union of Utrecht, and had been rebuffed (Smit 1968, 17). A similar refusal had taken place with the Treaty of Münster in 1648. De Witt’s deliberate policy of isolationism in Europe thus represents a continuation of previous policy, but also expresses a marked difference from William II’s attempt to renew hostilities with Spain. The planned coup of 1650 was in part designed to force compliance from a reluctant Holland for this strategy (van der Bijl 1986, 71–2). De Witt’s isolationism also follows from the traditional importance attached by the Dutch to safeguarding economic interests. The protection and encouragement of commercial, ﬁnancial and shipping interests, especially those of Holland, was a powerful economic motive in the formulation of foreign policy throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dutch network of interlinked worldwide economic interests was very vulnerable to disruption through war almost anywhere in the world (Smit 1968, 27–8; see also Braudel 1979a, 600–1). Expanding the territorial base of the United Provinces in Europe would not advance those primary interests. Indeed, according to Wansink, a ‘contractionist’ foreign policy was very much Holland’s view. ‘Interested only in seaborne trade the Holland regents did not see any point at all in territorial gains’ (Wansink 1971, 142).

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There was also another traditional feature at play here. As Smit comments, before the Revolt foreign policy ‘had been the exclusive prerogative of the Habsburg princes’ (Smit 1968, 16), so it was only after the establishment of the Republic that the United Provinces took responsibility for foreign policy. Furthermore, it was only after 1648 that foreign policy was not deﬁned by struggle against the Spanish. The tradition of paying as little attention as possible to the adventures and ambitions of the Habsburg princes, and of seeing as folly their intention and practice in involving the Netherlands in them, can be seen in both De Witt’s refusal to behave like the French or Spanish monarchs, and in continuing republican distrust of the House of Orange, identiﬁed as a potential European monarchy with hegemonic ambitions. The sharp contrast between the attitudes of De Witt and the House of Orange on this crucial matter remained a source of tension throughout the De Witt period. Even in the 1570s the House of Orange had attempted to use the States General as a federal legislature, a move which was ﬁercely resisted by the provincial States (Kossmann and Mellink 1974, 30–1). After 1579, as Stadholder the House of Orange was no longer the representative of the Crown, but was an appointment crucially controlled by the different States. The history of the Netherlands in this period is littered with examples of this kind, of ad hoc measures taken to adapt to new circumstances (in this case a crucial step toward the independence of the northern states from the Spanish crown), but not followed through in new constitutional arrangements. As a result, the ambiguity in the House of Orange’s position persisted. However, as van Deursen emphasises, it would be wrong to give the impression that the opposition between the Orangists and the regents was expressed in a sustained ‘political polarisation which offered a clear choice between the Orangists and the States’ party, as the True Freedom group was often called’. Multiple political factions existed, that had shifting allegiances depending upon the pragmatic particular and common interests of the different political actors, and politics was not practised through formal political parties (van Deursen 1999, 190). Price conﬁrms that United Provinces urban politics is explained in terms of complex factional conﬂict rather than through a notion of party differences (Price 1994, 154). De Witt was not alone in distrusting the House of Orange. He was fully supported by the inﬂuential regent patriciate in Holland, whose importance increased in this period. The regents were not the nobility but were ‘highly born’, combining money and status, education and

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high culture, belonging, as van Deursen puts it, to the ‘very highest ranks of the bourgeoisie’ (van Deursen 1999, 187). Roorda describes the source of the antipathy of the Holland regents towards the House of Orange. It was due, he says, not just to the regents’ claims to power, for as the democratic element in the Holland political structure diminished, the regents became more oligarchic in character. Nor was the Holland regents’ antipathy due just to their commitment to the loose polycentric confederal structure of the Republic and to maintaining the strong local attachments of the patriciate. Neither was it attributable just to the economic interests of the regents and merchants. Roorda argues convincingly that ‘the crux of opposition to the Stadholder lay in the dynastic ambitions of the princes of Orange’, because the dynastic foreign policy which Orange princes tried to impose on the country clashed directly with the mercantile interests of the ruling classes (Roorda 1964, 124). Roorda adds the interesting point that the House of Orange’s ‘cosmopolitan court with frenchiﬁed airs could scarcely absorb the strong burgher atmosphere of the regents of Holland’. It followed that ‘cooperation between monarchical and aristocratic elements such as was possible elsewhere, where monarchy was an established institution and the aristocracy had a landed character, could not, therefore, be realised in Holland’ (Roorda, 1964, 124–5). The regents of Holland under De Witt agreed with the De la Court brothers’ republican portrayal of Orange princes as driven by dynastic ambition. Kossmann makes a strong case for recognising a ‘remarkable shift’ in the House of Orange’s outlook during the course of the seventeenth century, and argues that De Witt was right to be suspicious of their ambitions. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the House of Orange ‘still considered themselves as a political’ faction, but ‘at its end they had risen above this status. It was loyalty to a dynasty…that then inspired them’ (Kossmann 1987f, 168). It is at least in part in this light that we need to view De Witt’s negotiation of the secret Act of Seclusion with England in May 1654, regarded as a key event in De Witt’s period of leadership. With the recent coup d’état attempt of William II still fresh, and showing a degree of foresight uncharacteristic of the Dutch, De Witt sought to institutionalise the permanent exclusion of the House of Orange from the role of Stadholder. The Act of Seclusion debarred the infant William III from succeeding to his father’s appointments. In his famous Deduction or Demonstration of July 1654, which was written by De Witt but issued in the name of the States of Holland, De Witt justiﬁed the Act of Seclusion. Following this important document

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De Witt was appointed head of the federal administration, and by persuading the States General to delegate much of its work to committees endowed with plenary powers, he ran the United Provinces very effectively. The proximity of the States General’s meeting place in The Hague, the capital of Holland, in the same building as that used by the States assembly of Holland, facilitated efﬁcient government. But while De Witt showed unusual forethought in transacting the Act of Seclusion, it is signiﬁcant that he did not attempt to further reform the Republic’s de facto constitution to reﬂect the other changes that had been introduced. Instead De Witt carried on using the traditional structure to his own advantage. It was a very Dutch way of going about things. Rowen’s assessment linking Dutch and English politics is valuable here. ‘Thanks to the peace concluded with England’, he remarks, ‘Holland was able to ride out the storm over the Seclusion Act’. In Rowen’s assessment, John de Witt ‘proved to be a supple and superb leader for Holland and for the republic as a whole, but one who was stubborn in the defence of “republicanism”’, which he tellingly deﬁnes as ‘the rights of Holland within the Union and of government without a Stadholder’. Other historians, however, consider that the Act of Seclusion was prompted, not by De Witt’s intention to weaken the House of Orange, but to appease Cromwell (Stoye 1969, 138). If this is so, it represents yet another example of an ad hoc measure not fully followed through in new constitutional arrangements. Moreover, as Rowen adds, there was ‘no effective resistance to this policy until the English republic collapsed in 1660 and King Charles II, who was the uncle of William III, came to the throne’ (Rowen 1972, 197). On the English side the Act of Seclusion was recognised more directly as nulliﬁed in 1660, once the Restoration placed Charles II on the English throne. On the Dutch side it is clear that Holland feared not just the House of Orange’s monarchical aspirations, but domination by England under an Orange–Stuart alliance as well. Thus perhaps De Witt’s Deduction deserves its reputation as a republican tract, on the grounds that the reason De Witt favoured a republic was because only within a loose confederal alliance could Holland’s views and interests be assured of the dominance De Witt thought they deserved. The sharp contrast in the attitudes of De Witt and the House of Orange towards foreign policy in Europe also demonstrates how the House of Orange faction regarded the United Provinces as a whole or unity which could be enlarged. De Witt, in comparison, retained an essentially traditionalist view of the United Provinces as the loosest of polycentric confederal alliances, with crucial sources of power not at

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federal level, but in the provinces and towns. Wansink reports Pieter de la Court’s view, expressed in The Interest of Holland, that Holland itself was a league of eighteen city-republics, in which people felt an overriding loyalty to their city, and only after that to Holland. De la Court’s view, which represented, as Wansink says, ‘more than a ﬂirtation with classical tradition’ (Wansink 1971, 136), reﬂected a commonly held belief, and was designed to support the De Witt regime. It is important to emphasise that De Witt’s championing of Holland’s interests is thus not to be interpreted as promoting a hegemonic ambition by Holland, but rather as part of the complex context in which there rested a consensus that all the provinces quite properly pursued their own economic and political interests. This understanding of the United Provinces as, at least in part, an instrumental balance of local and particular interests was the accepted modus operandi within the Republic. It helps to account for the importance in Spinoza’s political theory of the use of the notion of balance in all forms of political organisation. The disjunction in foreign policy under De Witt, between the colonial and European spheres, is very striking. In the pursuit of colonial interests the Republic showed itself to be aggressive and ruthless, in marked contrast with its attitude closer to home. The East India Company in particular established a powerful empire for the Republic, and the West India Company was extremely aggressive in ﬁghting off especially Spanish and Portuguese colonial interests in Brazil. It is also signiﬁcant that the Dutch colonies of the East India Company were treated purely in terms of economic exploitation, with no attempt to introduce ‘civilising’ social and educational values or the establishment of a stable administrative structure. De Witt’s True Liberty was not extended to the populations of these colonial possessions of the United Provinces. As Smit notes (1968, 26), when ‘De la Court extols Europe as the birth-place of the republican idea he has no missionary intentions, and instances of such are few indeed among his fellow-republicans: their ideal was not for export’. Relations between the United Provinces and England in particular were also complicated by competing and rival interests in both colonial exploitation and the European seaborne trade. Competition between the two increased in intensity during the early period of De Witt’s rule, as the English Protectorate government was able to turn its attention to international trade and commerce after the end of the Civil War. The three Anglo-Dutch wars in the second half of the seventeenth century, of 1652–54, 1665–67 and 1672–74, were all fought over these issues. English and Dutch republicanism are compared in more detail in the following chapter.

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We come now to an examination of De Witt’s important ‘True Liberty’ perspective. This was an ideological statement of republican self-government, a reafﬁrmation of provincial particularism, an international relations strategy, an economic plan, and a tolerationist policy document all rolled into one. Kossmann identiﬁes the distinctive contemporary meaning of the phrase ‘True Liberty’, a meaning which is surprising to modern readers taking for granted the modern liberal understanding of such a phrase. In De Witt’s political system of True Liberty, Kossmann comments, the ‘term “liberty” was used in the classical sense of “libertas”’, that is, freedom from monarchy (Kossmann 1987d, 191). True Liberty (ware vrijheid) referred to a ‘genuine republicanism not allowing any interference in political matters by the Orangist court’ (Kossmann 1991, 291). Van Deursen goes even further in identifying a singularly local meaning for the term, arguing bluntly that ‘True Freedom was the right of the regents to be masters of their own lands and their own cities.’ The implications were that this ‘freedom was no longer limited by the stadholder, and it would no longer be subordinate to the higher unity of the Union’ (van Deursen 1999, 187). In other words the central purpose and signiﬁcance of ‘True Liberty’ was to underline the particularist and separatist disposition shared by the provinces and cities. Also important is Smit’s argument that ‘the system of True Liberty was an elaborate example of seventeenth century interest-of-state theory’. He says that the ‘core of the system is the inseparable connection between the economic nature of the Dutch state, its political constitution and its place in international affairs’. According to Smit, ‘[t]rade being put forward as the eminent interest of the state, it follows as self-evident that the form of that state must be republican and its character bourgeois’. Trade, Smit comments, ‘it is argued, cannot survive in a monarchy or under the government of a military nobility, because there the rule of law and justice is lacking’ (Smit 1968, 23). Kossmann makes the important point that what was new with True Liberty was the addition, in the 1650s, of a fourth element in the Dutch understanding of liberty, ‘the conviction that the independent, federal and tolerant state should have a clearly deﬁned republican form of government if it wished to be truly free’ (Kossmann 1991, 286). However, as Kossmann warns, there is ‘no logical link between these elements’ (Kossmann 1991, 286). Keenly attuned to the Dutch mentality of not over-theorising what works well in practice, Kossmann notes that these four elements in the Dutch understanding of liberty grew up through historical accident. They are related contingently and are not

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necessarily internally connected. Indeed, one of the remarkable features of True Liberty is the extent to which it was theorised at all, remarkable because it goes against the grain of so much Dutch practice in politics. There has been a debate about the role of the De la Court brothers in contributing to De Witt’s ideology. Smit makes a strong case for minimising the inﬂuence of the De la Court brothers on De Witt’s formulation of the idea of True Liberty. Smit notes that it was the late 1640s that were ‘the formative period of the ideology of True Liberty’ (Smit 1968, 23), while the thinking of the brothers De la Court, who produced some of the few systematic expositions of the True Liberty ideology, was done in the 1650s and 1660s. However, although De Witt formulated the principles of True Liberty independently of the De la Court brothers, their political works did provide De Witt with valuable arguments in support of his policies. But De Witt was careful not to associate himself too closely with their more radical and so controversial proposals. For instance a section of Political Discourses recommended that the clergy be supervised and inspected by a government agency. Van der Bijl describes how the De la Court brothers’ attacks on ‘clergymen striving for supremacy’ resulted in Pieter De la Court being censured by the church council of Leiden. He notes that De Witt, who normally acted against clergy with political ambitions, chose not to intervene on his behalf (van der Bijl 1986, 73). According to Wildenberg, the De la Court brothers ‘had a reputation of being little more than political pamphleteers’ (Wildenberg 1986, 173). If this is taken to mean that the De la Court brothers were writing directly in response to political developments in the United Provinces, then it is accurate. However, the political works of the De la Court brothers are more broadly based and general than those represented in the single-issue based discussions in the lively tradition of political pamphlets. At the same time the approach of the De la Court brothers is still practical rather than theoretically oriented. The signiﬁcance of the De la Court brothers’ work in the history of Dutch political thought of this period is threefold. As well as in the support their publications supplied to De Witt, the De la Court brothers provided something of an alternative voice in political debate to that expressed in university political theory. Indeed van der Bijl describes their work as ‘daring’, as ‘mostly dissenting from the general pattern’ (van der Bijl 1986, 65), and identiﬁes their position as not within the mainstream republican circle (van der Bijl 1986, 72). They also helped to stimulate Spinoza’s political reﬂections. However, while The Interest of Holland

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(one of their best-known works) was taken up by some French and English writers in the eighteenth century, contemporaries in the United Provinces interpreted their works primarily as an espousal of the policies of John de Witt in radical form. Tuck (1993, 200, 348) presents Grotius as an important ﬁgure in anticipating this later republican writing. However, while the brothers De la Court were well-read and alluded to early modern political theorists and Roman writers, their focus of interest was always justiﬁcation of De Witt’s regime and policy recommendations for reform rather than abstract theorising. Kossmann more accurately captures the primarily practical source of the De la Court brothers’ interest in republicanism, and also conﬁrms that ‘[o]nly in the second half of the seventeenth century did some Dutch writers develop an elaborate republican theory’. His estimate is that the ‘best, and best known, among them were Johan (1622–60) and Pieter (1618–85) de la Court and Spinoza who used their work’. Kossmann underlines the difference between contemporary political debate and academic political theory in this period, and the antagonism felt by the De la Court brothers, when he notes that the ‘De la Court brothers were businessmen in Leiden who felt deep contempt for the political views circulating in the universities’. The De la Court brothers, he comments, ‘admired Machiavelli, Descartes and Hobbes, intellectual radicals and realists in their opinion, and spurned the eclecticism, vagueness, dullness of traditional Aristotelianism, and the authoritarian conservatism of Calvinist orthodoxy’ (Kossmann 1991, 290). For this reason, van der Bijl comments, a ‘responsible statesman’ like De Witt had to keep his distance from the De la Courts. The De la Court brothers’ views held considerable appeal, articulating ‘what many in the republican circle thought and felt’. Nevertheless, the relationship between De Witt and the De la Court brothers was, according to van der Bijl, on a par with that between the Stadholders and the ‘explosive doctrines of the Reformed clergymen’ (van der Bijl 1986, 72). Pieter De la Court was trained in the law but followed his father into the business of textile manufacture at Leiden. Israel refers to him as ‘the celebrated economic theorist of seventeenth century Leiden, Pieter de la Court’, notable for analysing the reasons for the post-1648 weakening of his native Leiden’s textile industry, in Het welvaren van Leiden. Handschrift uit het jaar 1659 (Israel 1979, 68). Of the two brothers, Pieter was the economic theorist and Johan the political commentator, and it is generally agreed that Pieter edited and published the political works that mainly Johan wrote. Pieter’s role increased after the death

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of Johan in 1660. The key to understanding the De la Court brothers’ political writings lies in the close links that can be clearly seen between the active business interests of both brothers and the political recommendations made in their works. In view of this connection, Malcolm’s emphasis (1991) on the De la Courts’ academic connections could lead to a misunderstanding of them – and Spinoza – purely as abstract thinkers, detached from the tradition of practice in politics in Holland. The brothers were ideologically committed to the political and economic ﬂourishing of their country, and advocated freedom of enterprise, the primacy of Holland’s interests and a vigorous republicanism, in the service of this aim. The De la Court brothers are known for three major works, the ﬁrst of which was Consideratien en exempelen v staat (Political Considerations and Examples concerning the Foundations of Various Forms of Government) published in 1660. The book supported De Witt’s Act of Seclusion against William III becoming Stadholder and sought to disclose ‘the hidden agenda of princes’ (Blom 2002, 106). This work was such a success that it was reprinted several times, with the second (1661) and subsequent editions (the third, fourth and ﬁfth published in 1662) renamed Consideratien van staat ofte polityke weegschaal (Political Considerations or Political Balance). Blom rightly highlights the centrality, for the De la Court brothers, of the fortunes of rulers being linked closely with those of subjects (Blom 1995, 160). The work considered monarchical, aristocratic and democratic forms of government, rejecting mixed forms, with the aim of establishing the best form of republic. One noteworthy element of this work was the recommendation (as found in Holland and the United Provinces) of a political assembly as the highest institution of government, a feature also found in Spinoza’s political works. The brothers’ second major political work was Politieke discoursen (Political Discourses) of 1662, and addressed issues of the distribution of power between cities confronting the Dutch Republic. Their third notable political work was Interest van Holland, ofte gronden van Hollandswelvaren (The Interest of Holland or the Grounds for Holland’s Prosperity), also of 1662 (Kossmann 1987c, 219; Malcolm 1991). This third work analysed in detail the consequences for Holland’s mercantile interest of the international situation in the wake of the Münster and Westphalian peace treaties of 1648, and weighed up the advantages and disadvantages to be gained from alliances with either England or France. According to Rowen, De Witt himself read over the manuscript of this third work and contributed parts of several chapters. Blom contends

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that De Witt collaborated in the editing of the book and contributed two chapters (Blom 1995,159). The work aroused furious controversy, in part due to its extreme isolationist stance, which was increasingly out of touch with the reality of international politics in the 1660s (van der Bijl 1986, 83). Other elements of the work that antagonised Netherlanders were the rationalistic temper of the writing, and the De la Court brothers’ aggressive advocacy of leadership by Holland over the United Provinces, and even of isolating Holland from the other provinces by the use of waterways to create an island (van der Bijl 1986, 86–7). Controversy resumed on the republication of this third work in expanded form in 1669 as Aansysing der heilsame politike grondel en maximen van de republike van Holland en West-Vriesland (Indication of the Sound Political Grounds and Maxims of the Republic of Holland and West Friesland) (Rowen 1972, 201). The parochial and particularistic focus of the De la Courts’ work, and the importance they assign to economic prosperity, is a characteristic feature of their writing. As Blom notes, the 1669 work describes ‘the political institutions and policy aims of the Dutch predominantly in terms of the economic conditions of their society’. The De la Courts deﬁned the ‘welfare of the people’ in terms of ‘[p]roﬁtable occupations, thriving markets, and a numerous population’, and the main sources of welfare not in moral, religious, social, or political terms but as ‘ﬁshing and trade, and in particular maritime trade’. For the De la Courts the importance of political institutions was not in themselves but that they should serve this primary objective, and those ‘appropriate to sustain this economy could be easily summarised’, Blom observes, ‘as religious tolerance and responsible government’ (Blom 2002, 91). Likewise republicanism is valued not in principle but because it best served the interests of Holland (Blom 2002, 95). The De la Courts’ practical perspective in this sense reﬂected a strong tradition in the United Provinces and especially Holland. What De Witt gained from the De la Court brothers, and what they had adopted from Hobbes, was a conception of government which challenged the regnum mixtum of the dominant previous political theory, which saw the House of Orange as performing the legitimate monarchical element of the mixture. They were not to ﬁrst to use and praise Hobbes, however. Velthysen, a Dutch Protestant and a ‘loyal disciple’ of Descartes, published in 1651 an enthusiastic defence of Hobbes’ De Cive (Kossmann 1960, 101). Hobbes’s notion of an indivisible sovereignty was both theoretical ballast and ammunition for De Witt to justify a government without the House of Orange or the

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Stadholderate, a government that did not need a monarchical component because sovereignty was indivisible and not mixed or separable into pieces (Kossmann 1987c, 221). Velema judges the signiﬁcance of the De la Court brothers in terms of their supplying the prime example of anti-monarchical political theory in the ﬁrst Stadholderless period. He notes that to the De la Court brothers the ‘greatest threat to the liberty of the country was posed by the Stadholderate, which was viewed as the ﬁrst step in the direction of monarchy’ (Velema 2002, 24). Further strong common ground between the De la Court brothers and De Witt is found on the meaning and signiﬁcance of peace. As seen in the Indication (Rowen 1972, 200–13), Holland’s interests – peace, commercial prosperity and anti-Orange republicanism – were all closely interconnected and interdependent, and were identiﬁed as crucial too to the well-being of the Republic. Van der Bijl refers to the De la Court brothers’ striking image of the commercial Dutch Republic as a peace-loving cat, surrounded by aggressive powers chasing dynastic ambition like ‘devouring animals, lions, tigers, wolves and bears or the cheating foxes’. Approving the practical rather than theoretical ﬂavour of the work van der Bijl considers that the De la Court brothers’ imagery is ‘much more revealing than any well-wrought explanation’, and accurately reﬂected the voice of the regent class (van der Bijl 1986, 79). Van Gelderen notes that in Political Balance the De la Court brothers criticise the Roman Republic for its bloodthirstiness. In line with Dutch political theory the brothers ‘favour peace, concord, moderation and prosperity’ (van Gelderen 2002, 215). As self-styled radical reformers, advocating the breaking of the monopoly of the East India Company, and introducing a new way to manufacture textiles, the De la Court brothers had read some Machiavelli and admired his approach. Haitsma Mulier recounts that large ‘parts of the Politike Discoursen, especially on conquest and defense, are taken literally from the Principe’ (Haitsma Mulier 1980, 134). The Machiavellian tone of some of the declarations in the Indication, such as the statements that it is not necessary to adhere to disadvantageous treaties, and its assaults on the Calvinist preachers, led to the work being banned by the States of Holland. Van der Bijl accents the way in which the religious commitments of the Netherlanders and their complex impact on political divisions, are reﬂected in the De la Court brothers’ work. He notes that one effect of the great Reformation Protestant challenge in all its diversity to Catholic orthodoxy, was to align some forms of Protestantism with

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secular, rationalist and humanist trends, and this alignment can be perceived in the De la Court brothers’ work (van der Bijl 1986, 66). The connection between De Witt and the De la Court brothers’ work raises some interesting points. There is the question of how much weight we should give to the Machiavellian colour of De Witt’s notion of ‘liberty’. Skinner elucidates with great clarity the character of Machiavelli’s understanding of ‘liberty’, that ‘[h]aving connected liberty with greatness, Machiavelli completes his argument by adding that it is only possible to live “in a free state” under a self-governing republic’. Skinner adds that, ‘in general he makes a sharp distinction between the freedom of republics and the slavery imposed not merely by tyrants but even by the best kings and princes’. The ‘essence of Machiavelli’s republicanism’, he says, is the notion that ‘no city can ever attain greatness unless it upholds a free way of life’, and that ‘no city can ever uphold a free way of life unless it maintains a republican constitution’ (Skinner 1990b, 140–1). Machiavelli’s selfconscious view of the city-state’s values is also found in De Witt’s True Liberty. The De Witt period, with the works of the De la Court brothers and Spinoza, was the ﬁrst era in the United Provinces in which the combination of the values of liberty, suspicion of monarchical government and a republican political system were championed in a positive way. However, two differences between ‘liberty’ in the Dutch case and in Machiavelli are perhaps equally important. The identiﬁcation of Dutch greatness with its commercial and trading success represents an inﬂuential context very different from that of the Italian city-states. The ideas of the De la Court brothers were formulated very much from within the perspective of the merchant ethos and economic interest at home, dictating the commitment to a ‘fortress of neutrality’ internationally (van der Bijl 1986, 90). Second, the Dutch reluctance to match republican practice, and for the ﬁrst time an attempt at theory, with constitutional reform, is deeply rooted in traditional and traditionalist political practices in the Netherlands. Even under De Witt, the Stadholderate was not abolished completely but remained in two provinces (though not, crucially, in Holland). Stoye describes how the balance of powers between provinces and between cities prevented constitutional reform and how, consequently, politics in the United Provinces, more than ever before, now required ‘perpetual bargaining between individual provinces and cities’ (Stoye 1969, 137–8). Furthermore, De Witt’s republicanism did not take on the aspect of Machiavellian republican values concerned with civic virtue. It was

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those in the political camp opposed to De Witt in the United Provinces that stressed the importance of civic virtue, allied as they were to the university teaching of politics in the United Provinces, which was still largely Calvinist in character and followed Aristotle’s advocacy of mixed government. University political theory was also inﬂuenced by its strong humanist tradition, in which the essence of citizenship was civic virtue, and which held that the educated elite were best ﬁtted to govern. Kossmann makes a strong case that the aspect of liberty, in the Dutch context of the relation between the individual and the state, that was most valued by the De la Court brothers and Spinoza was religious toleration, and that their discussion of ‘freedom’ needs to be read in this light. Kossmann’s assessment, based on his very detailed knowledge of local political debates and practice, thus leads to a meaning of ‘freedom’ which differs signiﬁcantly from that found in Machiavelli. Kossmann, discussing the climate of toleration in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, makes an important contribution to the debate in providing an alternative to what he calls the ‘liberal’ interpretation of toleration in this period. The ‘liberal’ understanding of toleration under De Witt takes a rather cynical and functional view of its meaning. The liberal view interprets the tolerance of the ruling elite as their merely paying lipservice to strict Calvinist demands for the suppression of books, debate and religious practices that offended the puritan outlook, while at the same time in practice implementing only ineffectual Calvinist edicts. The True Liberty of the Dutch regents certainly had important enlightened practical effects. Van Deursen notes, for example, that Descartes ‘was given more latitude in the Netherlands for his controversial views than he would have been given in his Catholic homeland, and many of his followers succeeded in attaining teaching posts at Dutch universities’ (van Deursen 1999, 189). For the rather cynical liberal view of the meaning of True Liberty as toleration, undisguised political expediency was a major factor at work, deriving from the social composition of religious divisions in the United Provinces. Against this view, Kossmann points out that ‘forty percent of the not yet two million inhabitants of the Republic and about one third of the population of Holland alone’ (Kossmann 1991, 297) were Catholic, and that many regents were in fact strict Calvinists. Moreover, Kossmann makes a strong case that political expediency must be considered together with economic imperatives in the recognition by the regents that a lack of toleration would drive

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away manpower and businesses needed to sustain the thriving and varied United Provinces economy (Kossmann 1991, 297). Kossmann provides the valuable insight that ‘[w]ithout denying that patricians and writers regularly advanced enlightened ideas about the value of toleration, it was generally speaking not the logic of a principle but the force of a situation which brought about the freedom prevailing in the Netherlands’ (Kossmann 1991, 298). Kossmann’s evaluation in terms of ‘the force of the situation’ rather than ‘the logic of a principle’ at work here, needs to be carefully distinguished from the ‘liberal’ interpretation of the meaning of toleration at this time, and sums up well the importance of practice in the mentality of Dutch politics. Thus in Kossmann’s view the most important merit of the political works of the De la Court brothers and Spinoza lies in their ‘courageous and convincing defence of some fundamental principles – that of toleration in the ﬁrst place – rather than’ simply ‘rationalising the Dutch or the modern state in general’ (Kossmann 1960, 105). He underlines the way in which Spinoza was stimulated by the De la Court brothers’ Political Discourses in particular (Kossmann 1960, 102), and notes for instance that Spinoza’s identiﬁcation of right and power in the TTP can also be found in the earlier work (Kossmann 1960, 104). Political Discourses contains a notable proposal for immigrants to be granted citizenship in the Dutch Republic more quickly than was currently the case. The De la Court brothers also attacked Calvinist constitutionalism as intolerant and monarchist, in favour of a Hobbesian absolutism which was felt to liberate men from the old pattern (Kossmann 1960, 103). The state had a positive role to play, in raising men out of the state of nature to true freedom (Kossmann 1960, 104). That the kernel of the meaning of true freedom ‘is the rational mastering of one’s passions’, was the basis of political theorising for both the De la Courts and Spinoza, observes Kossmann (1960, 103–4). Kossmann also identiﬁes how the political thought of the De la Court brothers and Spinoza made little impression on Dutch university teaching of political theory, in fact less impression than that of the ‘foreigners’ Descartes and Hobbes. But in the case of Hobbes, the attention given to his work was addressed to refuting him, and condemning Hobbes became an essential part of the curriculum (Kossmann 1960, 105). According to Kossmann it is only with Ulric Huber’s work of 1672, De jure civitatis libri tres, that ‘a synthesis was achieved’ for the ﬁrst time of the two streams of thinking, that is, the university teaching and the republican thought of the De la Courts and Spinoza (Kossmann 1960, 109–10).

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The connection between De Witt on the one hand with the work of the De la Court brothers and Spinoza on the other is also considered by Blom. He issues two cautions against overstating the closeness of the link. First Blom warns against identifying the republicanism of the De la Courts and Spinoza with the general ideology of the regents, even under De Witt. As Roorda makes clear, De Witt belonged to the aristocratic urban patriciate in Holland, which had gradually ‘penetrated the gilds, the civic guards, even the Church, none of which they had at the start of the century wanted or managed to control’ (Roorda 1964, 129). The De la Court brothers and Spinoza, however, comments Blom, took a ‘critical stance towards oligarchic tendencies among the “regenten”, the political elite composing the governing bodies’. Blom notes here a signiﬁcant point, for criticism of the oligarchic tendency of the regents marks an important feature of their republicanism (Blom 1988, 205). In the same way, Velema observes that the De la Court brothers ‘warned against the closing of the regent elite and pleaded for expanded political participation of well to do citizens’ (Velema 2002, 24). Indeed in Political Balance they condemn the boldness of the excesses of the regents and call for a softening of the division between regents and citizens (without of course suggesting popular government). They propose balloting procedures and the rotation of ofﬁces to offset the narrowing of the regent class and prevent its tendency toward oligarchy. Van der Bijl notes that the De la Court brothers proposed that the oligarchic tendencies of regent government be restrained through accountability to a larger section of the population. But the De la Courts were a long way from recommending democratic government (van der Bijl 1986, 74). Van der Bijl comments that precedents for appeals for wider participation could already be found in the Act of Abjuration of 1581 and to a certain extent in Vranck’s Deduction of 1587. However, a right of consultation had been inﬂuentially rejected by the States of Holland in 1581 when it decided that neither the militia nor citizen-corporations were to be allowed to inﬂuence politics (van der Bijl 1986, 76). Boxer and Braudel provide evidence that substantiates the De la Court brothers’ and Spinoza’s warnings about the changing nature and reputation of the regents. Boxer details the nepotism of the regents and how the regents of Holland became a closed and self-perpetuating oligarchy (Boxer 1965, 37–8, 45–7). Braudel notes important changes in the character of the patriciate in the second half of the seventeenth century. The regents not only became an increasingly closed political oligarchy and monied elite. They also withdrew from their trading and

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merchant roots, investing their surplus capital in government stocks, ﬁnance and credit operations and landed property. Some took up the French language and favoured French culture in preference to the local language and culture, and ignored the previously held strictures against ostentatious display by openly parading their wealth and luxury (Braudel 1979b, 197). Roorda conﬁrms that by 1652, ‘complaints were already heard at Amsterdam that the regents had lost their interest in overseas trade’ (Roorda 1964, 127). Blom’s second caution centres on the importance and complexity of Church–State relations. He observes that the political debate between the republican anti-Orange and anti-republican Orange factions was by no means the only one taking place during De Witt’s regime. In line with Kossmann’s and van der Bijl’s understandings, Blom highlights the importance of religious matters in Dutch politics. Church–State relations were deeply contested throughout much of the history of the Dutch Republic, and we have seen earlier, in Chapter 1, how entwined political and religious divisions were. While the House of Orange did not always subscribe to anti-tolerationist policies, their association with the powerful anti-liberal, anti-Remonstrant wing of the Reformed Church remained a strong source of the House of Orange’s political support. Conﬂict emerged again in the mid-1650s, issuing in a pamphlet war in 1654 and 1655 which was neither the ﬁrst nor the last of its kind (Blom 1988, 208). Price reminds us of a few points that indicate the complexity of the tension between church and state. The substantial Catholic minority were barred from full participation in politics and so had strong grounds for a sense of grievance. While a minority of Protestants were not part of the Reformed Church (Price 1994, 263), a challenge was also mounted to the Reformed Church from liberal movements within it (Price 1994, 265). Most importantly the inﬂuence of the role of religion in the United Provinces was always mediated through the politics of provincial interest. Within the overall picture of the religious heterogeneity in the Netherlands, membership of the Reformed Church was a rare unifying element that parts of the ruling elites held in common across provinces (Price 1994, 260). It is pertinent to refer here to Blom’s argument that Spinoza’s republicanism, with its aim of promoting the individual’s freedom to pursue the intellectual love of God, ﬁts into and proposes a solution to the Church–State debate as much as into the republican debate (Blom 1988, 210). Blom questions the view of Spinoza as a ‘progressive’, ‘struggling against the reactionaries of orthodox Calvinism’, and disparagingly labels this evaluation ‘traditional Spinozistic historiography’. Blom

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makes a case for recognising the value of a more recent approach which emphasises the similarities as much as the differences between those involved in the political debate (Blom 1985, 215). Blom concedes that ‘Spinoza did transform the structure of classical republicanism’ in order to support De Witt’s republican aims. However, Blom contends, ‘Spinoza’s republicanism is, for all its radicalism, ﬁrmly in accordance with the Dutch religiously coloured conception of community; for all its rationalism, it properly reﬂects the contingencies of political life’ in Holland (Blom 1988, 212). This view may gain some support from the close connection between religious toleration, individual freedom and political liberty which had been understood in the United Provinces since the Remonstrant/Counter-Remonstrant crisis that had led to Oldenbarnevelt’s death in 1618. Braudel reinforces the value of the argument for the importance of Church–State relations in politics during this period by stressing the religious diversity of the United Provinces. In assessing the political signiﬁcance of religious toleration in the 1620s and afterwards, he notes that the United Provinces was ‘a country where there were many Catholics, where Lutherans were to be found in the eastern regions and where dissident Protestants were still active’. In the end, Braudel concludes, ‘toleration prevailed and was strengthened along with the individual liberty encouraged by the fragmentation of political authority’ (Braudel 1979b, 185). De Witt’s True Liberty, and Spinoza’s concern with freedoms of various kinds in his three major works, along with this tradition of religious contestation and religious toleration in the United Provinces, indicates how intertwined individual freedom, provincial privileges, political liberty and religious toleration were for the Dutch, and for Spinoza. To conclude this chapter on De Witt’s republicanism, we shall look at the reasons for his downfall, and sum up the character of his republicanism. In 1672 England, France, the bishop of Münster and the Elector of Cologne (the latter two positioned on the United Provinces’ eastern border) all declared war on the Republic (van Bunge 1999a, 25), and France invaded the United Provinces and quickly captured Utrecht. Or as Scott puts it, ‘an Anglo-French attack’ attempted ‘to annihilate and partition, the United Provinces’ (Scott 2000, 171). The Dutch turned to the House of Orange’s military expertise to assist in ﬁghting off the assault. On the Dutch side an alliance was forged in 1673 with the Emperor, Spain (sic), and Lorraine, turning, as van der Bijl says, the ‘punitive expedition against the merchant Republic into an almost pan-European war against France’. Moreover in January 1674

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Charles II was ‘forced by parliament’ to withdraw from the war and settled a second Westphalian peace with the United Provinces (van der Bijl 1986, 89). Van Deusen makes a sound assessment of De Witt rule. For nearly twenty years, he says, De Witt had ‘functioned as the Republic’s real chief’, due to his talents of persuasion, the ‘weight of his ofﬁce, and the dominance of Holland’. For nearly two decades, he had balanced his roles of paid civil servant in Holland and leader of the Generality. He ‘largely succeeded in satisfying both his masters in Holland and in ﬁnding enough support among the six other provinces’. De Witt ‘never became a dictator, and his position remained precarious’ (van Deursen 1999, 186). By the early 1670s De Witt had already lost much of the conﬁdence of the regent and merchant classes through his handling of the renewed threat from France and his policy of placating the French king. With the Triple Alliance of 1668 the Dutch together with England (with Sir William Temple as negotiator) and Sweden had sought to maintain the status quo against France. As his position became untenable in 1672 De Witt resigned, William III was made Stadholder and became effective ruler of the United Provinces, and De Witt and his brother Cornelius were assassinated. Pontalis describes the circumstances surrounding De Witt’s fall from power. He shows that, contrary to received opinion, De Witt was not toppled by the Orange coup. The sequence of events was that De Witt had already resigned and the Prince of Orange had already been made Stadholder, both before the assassination of the De Witt brothers took place. The Prince of Orange, William III, was appointed captain and admiral-general of the States General early in 1672 when it became clear that the French were preparing to attack, and later in the year was proclaimed Stadholder. Thus while there was a major political crisis in 1672, it is also important to remember that it was not the case that the assassination prompted William III to seize power. Van Deursen concurs that the series of events were that ﬁrst, ‘William’s elevation to stadholder became inevitable, and he assumed ofﬁce in July 1672’, and second that ‘De Witt asked for and received his own dismissal’. However the two events were not unrelated, for after De Witt and his brother were murdered and horribly mutilated by a vigilante mob in The Hague the following month, ‘William III never punished the perpetrators’ (van Deursen 1999, 194). Pieter De la Court, together with some other ‘Wittians’ sought refuge in Antwerp (van der Bijl 1986, 76). Some historians consider that De Witt’s own policies were primarily responsible for his downfall. Others take a less personalised view, and

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regard De Witt’s course as doomed by the larger European situation, in particular the growing power of France, and by the declining power and underlying vulnerability of the United Provinces (Israel 1982, 440–1). With the secret Pact of Dover in 1670 between England and France, Europe’s two major powers, the United Provinces had already lost its place in the balance of alliances and the battle of international diplomacy in Europe. Smit agrees with this almost inevitabilistic thesis when he argues that while True Liberty established as the model of success the seafaring city-state, the reality of the United Provinces’ position was very different. For the United Provinces were ‘but a small and vulnerable territorial state with the wealth of a great power’. According to Smit’s perspective, foreign policy built on the city-state model, then ‘failed completely within a few years of its creation’ (Smit 1968, 25). Several other historians contribute to a complex picture of the reasons for the collapse of De Witt’s government, and attribute his fall from grace to factors beyond his control. For example, Lockyer comments that in ‘the last resort the survival of the regent regime depended on the maintenance of peace, but this was something over which De Witt had no control’ (Lockyer 1974, 441). Van der Bijl agrees that once the United Provinces were again embroiled in war by William III in 1672 and afterwards, Holland’s mercantile interests were seriously damaged (van der Bijl 1986, 89–90). In addition Lockyer remarks that as long as William was a minor, there was political force strong enough to challenge the regents’ authority, but in 1671 the Prince of Orange came of age (Lockyer 1974, 440–1). Boxer also supports this view, commenting that despite the resentment of the increasingly aristocratic regents and admiration by some for the French-style court of the House of Orange, ‘for much of the time most people were content to accept the regents as their natural leaders’. Boxer makes the important point that for most people, recourse to the House of Orange was regarded as a last resort. The pattern of only turning to the House of Orange in times of acute danger was played out again with ‘the French invasions of 1672 and 1748’ (Boxer 1965, 47). Lockyer also notes another factor outside De Witt’s direct control when he says, the ‘Dutch army, sapped by provincial particularism and the generally paciﬁc attitude of the regents, was in no state to offer effective resistance’ to the French invasion (Lockyer 1974, 441). Furthermore, as Jones notes, De Witt’s loss of control over the European situation, and over the delicate balance of provincial politics, economic interests and military institutions at home, led to ‘the

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difﬁculties of De Witt’s position and the limits of his power’. As a result De Witt ‘could not control or override virtually independent entities such as the East and West India Companies, Amsterdam, or the States and Admiralty College of Zeeland’ (Jones 1968, 44). Woltjer also assesses that De Witt’s political demise was due to circumstances beyond De Witt’s control. He identiﬁes the way in which the traditional notion of privileges was instrumental in the political crisis of 1672 and De Witt’s downfall. There was not a strong tradition of burgher inﬂuence in Holland (Woltjer 1975, 27), but burgher resentment had developed in recent decades at the widening gap between them and the increasingly closed regent aristocracy. In times of crisis like 1672, Woltjer argues, ‘the people’s distrust of the urban regents could ﬂare up violently’. They ‘grasped at real or imagined privileges which gave the burghers some inﬂuence over the municipal authorities’ (Woltjer 1975, 33). Braudel accounts for the burghers’ resentment as stemming from the Revolt, which had ‘consecrated the power of the regent class’ (Braudel 1979b, 196). Historians also point to declining economic conditions in the United Provinces in the second half of the seventeenth century, again a factor outside De Witt’s control, as playing a part in his political ruin. The population of the United Provinces was a quarter of that of England and a tenth of that of France (van Deursen 1999, 183). In 1672 the Dutch faced war on two fronts, against the English with the best navy in Europe and against France with the best army in Europe (van Deursen 1999, 193). Furthermore, Stoye notes that as the ‘general terms of trade became less favourable after the middle of the century’, Amsterdam business circles ‘struggled all the harder to defend themselves’ (Stoye 1969, 146). Similarly Lockyer notes that ‘proﬁts from foreign trade now had to be worked for’ (Lockyer 1974, 440), and William III’s gathering supporters ‘blamed’ De Witt ‘for all the misfortunes that had fallen upon their country’ (Lockyer 1974, 442). Wansink comments on the conjunction of economic and constitutional problems in De Witt’s loss of authority. During the depression in trade in the late 1660s, he reports, Amsterdam opposed De Witt’s policies and wanted to pursue other plans more favourable to them, but many of the other towns of Holland, jealous of Amsterdam’s power, supported De Witt. On the face of it, then, De Witt was often supported by a majority in the Holland States assembly. But as Wansink argues, the underlying situation was rather different. Indeed Wansink makes a case that Amsterdam’s opposition to De Witt was more decisive in leading to De Witt’s fall than was the conﬂict between

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Orangists and Republicans (Wansink 1971, 137–8). The depth and impact of particularist views and traditionalist practices is demonstrated well by Wansink when he notes that while Holland and Zeeland used the new Gregorian calendar, the other provinces only accepted it in 1700 when the Protestant parts of Germany also took it up (Wansink 1971, 145). Stoye, on the other hand, argues for a close connection between Orange–Republican rivalry, the balance of provincial power, and De Witt’s downfall. In the Deduction, he says, De Witt had ‘laid down the basic political arguments in favour of “true freedom”’. Stoye contends that De Witt’s True Liberty ideology was fundamentally deﬁned by the Act of Seclusion against the House of Orange. But, says Stoye, in ‘fact, Holland had strained this freedom to the limit by using its power to determine both foreign and domestic policy’. In consequence, Holland ‘trenched on the freedom of other provinces but stiffened the whole government of the Union’. In consequence, over the two decades of De Witt’s regime, ‘Holland gave way inch by inch’ to the House of Orange (Stoye 1969, 139). Smit, however, makes a persuasive case when he sums up the De Witt period and the contribution of True Liberty more generously. Because the ideology of True Liberty, he says, ‘expressed the notions of Dutch interest so convincingly, and in a terminology so widely accepted’, even after the ‘downfall of the Grand Pensionary De Witt’s government in 1672, many adherents of the new leader William III still formulated their so-called new policy in the phraseology of True Liberty’ (Smit 1968, 22). The republican and economic focuses of True Liberty were accurately suited to the United Provinces’ circumstances, Smit argues, and are found, he notes, even in the writings of one of De Witt’s ﬁercest enemies, in Pieter Valkenier’s Europe Confused (Smit 1968, 25). The heart of Smit’s argument is that, although the True Liberty ideology of the De Witt government put forward an unrealistic view of the Dutch republic in European affairs, from which De Witt then departed, and which therefore failed and resulted in the Orangist coup d’état, nevertheless De Witt’s enemies shared much of the ideology of True Liberty and its rhetoric remained in use. On the question of De Witt’s unrealistic view of the Republic Smit notes that, in desperation, the ‘Dutch had to bargain and beg for the international peace upon which their highly advanced trade system, but not that of other nations, depended’ (Smit 1968, 28). The policy was unsuccessful. On the issue of De Witt’s reversal of policy, Smit notes that the ‘First Anglo-Dutch War, Sweden’s imperialism in the

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Baltic, and the continuing Franco-Spanish War all made it clear to De Witt that the dogma of neutrality did not work’. Cognisant, says Smit, ‘of the dangers of the European situation, De Witt gradually became the architect of a Dutch alliance system and the inventor of new diplomatic forms’. De Witt ‘still strove for peace as the sole interest of his country, but he recognised that this interest was linked with those of many nations in Europe’ (Smit 1968, 29). Where Smit elucidates the careful political calculation of a thoughtful leader, Malcolm sees, behind Dutch foreign policy, ‘a study of all the tricks and devices of diplomacy and warfare’ (Malcolm, 1991, 545). Stoye agrees with Smit that, although William III became Stadholder in 1672, the changes in membership of the local governing bodies in the towns were slight. ‘In this vital respect’, he remarks, ‘”true freedom” had been preserved’ (Stoye 1969, 139). Evidence supporting the argument of Smit and Stoye about the lasting impact of De Witt’s republicanism is found in Menso Alting’s series of fourteen historical maps published in 1697 and 1702. Alting, the Burgomaster of Groningen in the north of the United Provinces, produced his historical atlas professing to depict the United Provinces ‘from the ﬁrst century BC until after the major North Sea ﬂoods of the thirteenth century’. Black comments that the maps, which represented the ‘most ambitious regional historical atlas in the period’, ‘gave a sense of continuity to a polity that in fact was a sixteenth-century creation’ (Black 1997, 23). Regardless of their historical accuracy, it is clear that Alting’s purpose in creating the maps at this time was to reinforce the sense of and claim for the Republic’s continued longevity. To sum up, elements contributing to De Witt’s downfall include hostile international politics in Europe, increasingly unfavourable economic conditions, Dutch vulnerability because their international trade depended on the maintenance of peace, Orange–Republican rivalry, the end of the period of William III as a minor, the poor shape of the army, resentment towards the increasingly aristocratic regents, the failure of De Witt’s own policies in several areas, and opposition from Amsterdam to De Witt. But in addition two other elements are important. De Witt could no longer keep in balance and constructive tension all the different groups and interests of this polycentric confederal alliance, and so particularism came to dominate. Finally, De Witt had not reformed the de facto constitutional position and the ambiguous situation was readily exploited by the Orangist faction. Having analysed the complex reasons for the collapse of De Witt’s republican government, we come, ﬁnally, to an assessment of

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De Witt’s republicanism. It is constructive to begin by considering whether the Dutch Republic looked to any models, ancient or modern, for its formulation of republican government. Ancient examples of republics such as Athens, Rome, Sparta and Israel were certainly available to and used approvingly by seventeenth-century Netherlanders to some extent. But their value to the Dutch was rhetorical rather than substantive, since as van Bunge importantly notes, ‘classical sources from a religious point of view were neutral’ (van Bunge 1999b, 8) and so could not be claimed exclusively by either side of the Remonstrant/Counter-Remonstrant dispute. The Roman Republic in particular was a source of inspiration through the writings of Cicero and Tacitus, and there is evidence that the regents of Holland compared their republic with that of Rome. Both Haitsma Mulier (1987, 183) and Kossmann (1987f, 170) comment on how Calvinists in particular looked to the example of ancient Israel as an inspiring model of a republic. Indeed, the humanist culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands was predisposed to place a greater signiﬁcance on ancient models rather than recent or contemporary ones in many areas of life. This point, together with the primary importance of the Netherlanders’ pride in their own traditions and practices as an ancient republic in their own right, accounts for the notable lack of impact of modern examples on Dutch republicanism. Haitsma Mulier, and other writers who seek to make a strong link between Dutch and Italian city-state republicanism, tend to look for evidence of models for the Dutch in the seafaring commercial republics of Venice and Genoa (Haitsma Mulier 1987, 183). However, it must be remembered that the Dutch were suspicious of Catholic Venice as a model, and Genoa’s reputation was tarnished by association for the Dutch because it was under Spanish rule. Moreover as Mastellone (1983) argues, the more important line of inﬂuence travels in the opposite direction. It was Italian authors who saw the Dutch Republic as a model at this time, not primarily vice versa, and who praised the Dutch rebellion against the Spanish and saw it as a model for southern Italy and other countries still suffering under the Spanish yoke. Van Gelderen conﬁrms that in 1612 and 1648 Italian commentaries ‘took the new Dutch republic as the model for political innovation’ (van Gelderen 2002, 195). In sum, the myth of Venice was not nearly as powerful as the model of Dutch republicanism itself to Netherlanders in this period. Haitsma Mulier (1980, 54–76) tends to overstate the impact of Venice as a republican model on Netherlanders. Moreover, his chapter on the De la Court brothers’ political works,

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Political Balance and Political Discourses, highlights the inﬂuence of Machiavelli and Florence, and of their native Leiden in Holland, just as much as Venice, and indeed indicates that the De la Court brothers’ view of Venice was not all positive. Kossmann (1991) reinforces this evaluation when he remarks that the Dutch were not looking for a model. If the Dutch had been seeking a political identity to emulate, other perhaps more plausible candidates than Venice and Genoa could have been Geneva, some of the German states, Hamburg and Danzig, the Swiss cantons, or England. One might think that Calvin’s Genevan republic would have represented a clear model for Calvinists in the Netherlands. But Dutch Calvinists tended to look to ancient Israel rather than to Geneva. In addition, as Kossmann (1960) notes, Dutch Calvinist writers preferred a traditional constitutionalism that favoured monarchy, rather than advocating republican government. The German states could have represented a powerful and proximate example of a republic that was also a confederation. The political importance of privileges in German states and towns was similar to that found in the Netherlands, as was the overlord situation and the fear of the neighbouring absolutist monarchy of France. However the German princes fulﬁlled the monarchical role in a regnum mixtum constitution much less ambiguously than did the House of Orange and, moreover, the humanist culture of the Netherlands led the Dutch to spurn their Teutonic background and to stress a Batavian past located in Roman history. Smit comments that ‘De Witt had a contempt for German affairs which was traditionally Dutch’ (Smit 1968, 29). On the other hand, the Dutch regarded Hamburg and Danzig, also free commercial cities, as having more in common with them than Venice or Genoa did (Smit 1968, 34). But overwhelmingly the Dutch much preferred their own example to any other contemporary instance of a republic. The relationship with the English republic, another potential but spurned modern model for the Dutch, is the subject of the following chapter. Some writers discern a strong parallel between the Oldenbarnevelt period and the De Witt period, and even seek to see Oldenbarnevelt’s rule as a precursor of De Witt’s republicanism. De Witt’s Stadholderless rule as Grand Pensionary of Holland, supported by Spinoza, ended in an Orangist coup d’état with some of De Witt’s supporters imprisoned in Loevestein castle. This sequence is compared with Oldenbarnevelt’s regent-led rule as Advocate of Holland, supported by Grotius, ending in an Orangist coup d’etat with Grotius imprisoned, though ‘in the company of his wife and a ﬁne library’ (van Bunge 1999b, 16), in

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Loevestein castle. While there are similarities between the two series of events, it is clear that Oldenbarnevelt’s rule occurred very much in the context of the on-going Revolt against the Spanish, and that he shared power with the Orange Price Maurice of Nassau. Oldenbarnevelt’s style of rule was more narrowly regent-led and Holland-centric and was not inspired by a wider vision like De Witt’s ‘True Freedom’ republicanism. At best Oldenbarnevelt’s rule represents in retrospect a shadow- or quasi-republicanism for the De Witt period, bearing in mind that, as we have seen, the term res publica was understood to mean ‘commonwealth’ rather than ‘republic’ for much of the seventeenth century. A more plausible connection between the two periods is found in the notion of a pattern characterised by a pendulum effect in Dutch politics, whereby instances of regent-led government alternate with Orange leadership. Wansink comes close to concluding that all the ‘two republican periods’ of Dutch seventeenth-century history really amount to is two instances when inﬂuential politicians in Holland (Oldenbarnevelt, and later De Witt) put forward a Holland-centric policy (that fostered the aims of seaborne trade of the dominant Holland towns) to apply to the whole Union or Generality. Supplementing this view emphasising the role of personal leadership in history, Wansink makes the judgment that Holland sometimes tended toward isolationism or ignoring the other provinces, while at other times sought to impose their policies on the whole. Oldenbarnevelt and De Witt were in favour of the permanent exclusion of the House of Orange, and what they proposed is therefore, by elimination, a republic. Certainly in 1650, after William II’s attempted coup d’état, a ‘strong republican, anti-monarchical feeling now prevailed’ (Roorda 1964, 125). But neither Oldenbarnevelt’s nor De Witt’s exclusionist policy was based on theoretical grounds nor done in a self-consciously republican way. In both cases the policy was implemented rather because it was in Holland’s interests to permanently remove the Stadholder (Wansink 1971, 143). Does ‘republican’, for the Dutch, thus mean no more and no less than ‘anti-Orange’? If Dutch republicanism consisted only in an anti-monarchical stance, then it could have allowed any number of other types of government to prevail. While anti-Orange feeling resonated strongly with the republican sentiment, the Dutch Republic also had other features that it valued as ‘republican’. These included the particular meaning of tolerance as a vital part of the ‘free state’, the new/old claims about the privileges, and the balance between the seven provinces, resulting in a polycentric confederated alliance and provincial self-government, such

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that no province could assume absolute power over the others. This balance guaranteed provincial and so municipal autonomy to a very high degree indeed. The constitutional situation was virtually unchanged since the 1580s, the only federal institutions, apart from the States General, being the admiralty boards, the military council of state, the mint and the audit ofﬁce. The States General could only take action upon the unanimous decision of the provincial deputies, who had no power to act except purely as delegates on instruction from their provincial States assemblies. Pieter De la Court even described Holland as a collection of eighteen states. There were regular elections of deputies, and ofﬁces were held in rotation, though in practice these democratic procedures were dominated by ‘contracts’ between members of the governing class, who formed an increasingly closed oligarchy. Moreover, when the Dutch Republic included a Stadholder, it was seen as crucial that the ofﬁce-holder was elected by the separate States as their agent, and that the ofﬁce was not a hereditary possession of the House of Orange. The Dutch Republic was also a secular state in the sense that church and state were never fused. The organisation of the Reformed Church was province-based and it did not become a national Established institution, nor was it endorsed with special status by the States General. A signiﬁcant deﬁnition of De Witt’s regent republicanism is, then, that it was in effect a Holland-centric, tolerant, and Stadholderless government over a confederated alliance of, in very important respects equal, states. By highlighting these features it is clear, in addition, that Tilmans’ judgement is over-optimistic that a full ‘transition from republicanism as an urban theory to republicanism as a state theory within the new Dutch Republic’ occurred (Tilmans 2002, 125). Part of the meaning of regent republicanism was also gained at the expense of the democratic element in the regnum mixtum, but this element was not created by De Witt. Roorda takes a severe view, arguing that since 1581 politics in Holland towns had became increasingly oligarchic and the ‘citizens’s inﬂuence, even on local affairs, soon disappeared entirely’ (Roorda, 1964, 115), to the extent that the ordinary ‘citizens no longer had an opportunity to exercise any independent inﬂuence’ (Roorda 1964, 121). But regent republicanism did reach its culmination in the De Witt period. Roorda observes that ‘[a]ristocratic tendencies are not, of course, peculiar to the seventeenth century. But it was only during De Witt’s period that aristocratic rule in Holland was so widely regarded as natural and inevitable’ (Roorda 1964, 130). Sovereignty lay with the individual provinces, which felt local political obligations to

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be greater than those to the United Provinces as a whole. There was no ‘national’ obligation or identity as such, and no ‘national’ authority that could override that of the provinces. The political life of the country involved on-going elaborate, dynamic and delicate negotiation based, in the end, on the economic and political autonomy of individual cities. De Witt’s republicanism was, furthermore, constitutionally speaking, only a slight adaptation of the system in operation since 1477 if not earlier. Geyl identiﬁes 1477 as the date at which the ‘Burgundian state became essentially a Netherlands state’ (Geyl 1955, 30). For no real constitutional change accompanied the loss of the southern provinces, and the sovereignty held by Philip II had been very ambiguous in character. The Abjuration of the sovereign overlord had, in constitutional terms, simply consolidated the sovereignty of the provinces. The strong element of de facto constitutional continuity played an important part in shaping contemporary political practices and political debates. De Witt notably did not attempt to centralise the form of government. He continued to work within the same system of provincial States assemblies and the municipal government, and the same shared assumptions about how to conduct politics. The Dutch really did continue to see the political arrangements in their country in terms of late medieval patterns of government. This predisposition was strengthened by their awareness of the absolutist tendencies of European monarchs. Perhaps these points help to account for the important observation on how little political theory in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century was inﬂuenced by ‘foreign’ ideas from the Italian Renaissance, France, Spain and England. Both prospering trade patterns and increases in the availability of information in printed form enabled the intellectual range of the educated bourgeoisie of the United Provinces to extend across the whole of Europe. And yet the commitment to traditional practices and an essentially practice-oriented mentality remained dominant. But in 1688 part of the remaining spirit of De Witt’s republicanism, as seen in the Act of Seclusion and the Deduction, was transformed when the ‘original Anglo-Dutch agreement to deny William III his political birthright was turned upside down, and he ruled in both countries’ (Stoye 1969, 140).

4 English and Dutch Republicanism

This chapter explores some of the grounds for comparison between English and Dutch republicanism, in the light of Anglo-Dutch relations in the second half of the seventeenth century (see Jones 1968). It seeks to highlight the commonalities but also what is distinctive about republican theory and practice in these two seventeenth-century cases. It leads on to the discussion in the following chapter of two of the most important features of Dutch republicanism, which become apparent in part through the comparison with English republicanism. The English Republic of 1649 to 1660 and the Dutch Republic of 1653 to 1672 might, at ﬁrst glance, be thought to have much in common. They were successful sister republics. They were both Protestant in religion after the treaties of Münster and Westphalia established a settlement in Europe which favoured resistance to France and to Catholicism. They had common cause against the Catholic and absolutist French monarchy. Scott argues strongly for the recognition of the importance of the religious dimension to English republicanism. He contends that the new approach to religion, originating in the fusion of sixteenth-century christian humanism, ‘was almost as central to the republican as to the civil war phase of the revolution’ (Scott 2000, 232). The English and Dutch Republics also had common cause against a Stuart–Orange alliance. Liberty from monarchy, while by no means the only feature of their republicanism, ﬁgured strongly in both cases. The Stuart–Orange alliance was consolidated, for example in 1641, when Charles I’s daughter Mary married William II, and again in 1649 when the Prince of Wales (later Charles II) ‘took up residence at The Hague, where he was welcomed by William’. The alliance had some public support. For example, Lockyer notes that the execution of Charles I 117

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‘evoked outbursts of public anger against the English republicans’ in some quarters in the United Provinces (Lockyer 1974, 435). Sidney’s view in Court Maxims, that Charles II’s ‘scheming’ to ‘incite…war against the Dutch’ in the mid-1660s was aimed to be ‘to the detriment of Dutch wealth and in order to promote William of Orange to the stadholderate’ (1996, xix), points to the close connections between the two dynasties and between politics in England and politics in the United Provinces. The Stuart–Orange dynastic alliance was also reafﬁrmed later, with William III’s marriage to Mary, the elder daughter of James II, his cousin. Cromwell and De Witt might be thought on the face of it to have had even more in common, since Cromwell ruled a new republic after centuries of monarchical government and De Witt ruled over the United Provinces’ ﬁrst Stadholderless period. Evidence for the initiation of a close connection between the sister republics might be found in the ambassadors sent by Holland upon the establishment of the English Commonwealth, following the refusal of the States General – dominated at that time by William II – to do so. There was certainly a strong awareness in both countries of a potentially positive republican connection. John Milton, for instance, outlines with approval the results of the events of 1581 leading to the Dutch Abjuration of the Spanish, though he ends with a warning to the Dutch. He says, ‘In the yeare 1581, the States of Holland in a general Assembly at the Hague, adjur’d all obedience and subjection to Philip King of Spaine; and in a Declaration justiﬁe thir so doing; for that by his tyrannous goverment against faith so many times giv’n & brok’n he had lost his right to all the Belgic Provinces.’ Milton goes on to say that ‘therfore they depos’d him and declar’d it lawful to choose another in his stead’. He estimates that from ‘that time, to this, no State or Kingdom in the world hath equally prosperd’, but ends with a caution to ‘let them remember not to look with an evil and prejudicial eye upon thir Neighbours walking by the same rule’ (Milton 1991, 25–6). Dutch republicanism also resembles the English version in (as Scott puts it) defying classiﬁcation within the alternatives often used as a framework in discussing political theory, of either ‘classical republicanism’ premised on a ‘(classical) language of virtue’ or ‘modern, liberalism’ based on a language of rights (Scott 2000, 291). The upshot of this very important point is that both examples resist ‘attempts to appropriate them’ as ‘harbingers of modernity’ (Scott 2000, 290). Like the Dutch, Scott identiﬁes that the ‘nature of English republican ideology was deeply inﬂuenced by the practical experience of republicanism’

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(Scott 2000, 296). Like the Dutch, the English ‘republican experiment…appeared vital to its participants in practice because government was a key means for the attainment of’ a collective purpose. But while Scott identiﬁes that purpose in the English case to be a ‘moral good’ (Scott 2000, 322), in the case of the Dutch the concern of government was as much to do with providing a framework for the play of provincial interests to be achieved. Indeed, the differences between the interests of the two countries, and between their brands of republicanism, prove to be much greater than the similarities. There is a deep asymmetry between the English and Dutch cases, especially when viewed against the background of ideas, use of ideas, and the conduct of politics in the two countries. English republicanism was inﬂuenced by civil war and the Levellers’ claim for popular sovereignty in 1647, while Dutch republicanism was shaped by the struggle against foreign intervention. Moreover, Cromwell and De Witt were very different kinds of republican leader. Furthermore, Sharpe argues persuasively that in England, the ‘civil war desacralised authority and fully politicised culture’ (Sharpe 2000, 22). In the United Provinces political authority had been partially desacralised during the war against Spain and in the events of 1581 and 1588. However the Netherlanders’ reluctance to advertise the independent republican status of their country, and the ambiguous status of the Stadholder as a remnant of overlord authority, suggest that full ‘desacralisation’ occurred after it had happened in England. The primary status of the two countries as rivals and enemies becomes fully apparent when events in England are viewed, as Scott urges, in the contemporary international political and military context that was dominated by France. Scott is right, that it would be inaccurate to impose on England and the United Provinces an ‘anachronistic modern separation of national histories’ (Scott 2002, 61), and as we saw in Chapter 2 a modern spatial attitude to territory only developed in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the politics of international relations in Europe in the seventeenth century is not without boundaries between political communities, however shifting and porous they are. Indeed the Dutch Revolt was in part about renegotiating the multiple political communities to which the Netherlands belonged. Scott’s vision of an international context (as contemporaneously understood) is important in redressing an insular view of, say, English politics or Dutch politics, in making visible the crucial role of France in seventeenth-century politics, and in taking account of the signiﬁcance of cross-country dynastic politics at this time. It should not be confused

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with the idea of a post-globalisation international context that demotes the roles of states. Moreover Scott’s point is understood in the light of Onuf’s comment that it is ‘anachronistic to speak of international thought – ways of thinking that are speciﬁc to the world of states – before there was such a world’ (Onuf 1998, 3). Again, while Scott is right to argue against an insular view of England’s politics and to highlight the role of French power in English decisions, Pocock makes a good case for remembering the domestic context. He argues that, along with the importance of the international context, the power of ‘the French court, the calculations of William of Orange, and the decisions of the Amsterdam regents’, the national context – events in England, and in Scotland and Ireland – must not be overlooked (Pocock 1997, 19). This national context comprises political–religious relations, constitutional problems, the role of ‘radical Whigs’, and a ‘three-kingdoms approach’. These considerations provide additional evidence for the diversity of republican practice and echo a caution against regarding ‘republicanism’ as a concept with a homogeneous meaning extending across time and place. One way of casting the comparison is between an English revolution which consisted of radical ideas and, despite the formal roles in politics and government occupied by various English republican writers, was not immediately reﬂected in ‘an institutional occurrence’ (Scott 2000, 33), and a Dutch struggle whose emphasis was on practice not theory. Worden lends weight to this view of the Dutch case when he notes that in the perception of English republicans, admiration for the Dutch case was ‘curbed by a suspicion that its constitution, a bizarre and improvised solution to the needs of war, could not last’ (Worden 1991, 446). Moreover English republicanism was, as Scott comments, ‘a product of the 1650s’, following the violent execution of the king, and to it ‘fell the task of attempting to ﬁll this void’ (Scott 2000, 37). Dutch republicanism was in a very real sense developed in order to reafﬁrm the rejection of the interference of an overlord who was (and should have remained, according to the Dutch) a ‘foreign absentee’ (Scott 2000, 84). At the same time Price reconstructs the complex relation between republicans and Orangists in the United Provinces, a complexity which is not mirrored in the English case. The pre-eminent importance of provincial politics for the Dutch adds a complicating factor. Price argues that it is ‘important not to exaggerate the extent to which the two sides were in conﬂict. Republicanism and orangism were closely related in terms of both political theory and practice, and both were

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expressions of the interests of a narrow political elite’. In the ‘day-today business of political life there were no real differences between the two sides’ (Price 1994, 154), or at least not on ideological grounds. The ‘dichotomy between republicans and orangists is being discarded as unhelpful anachronism: faction operating at the provincial level, not party, is seen as the reality of the time’. But at provincial level the dichotomy holds. In the case of Holland, for instance, ‘support for the States of Holland, on the one side, or for the Stadhouders, on the other, were the two deﬁning orientations of political life’, and ‘similar polarities probably existed in the other provinces as well’ (Price 1994, 154). As Pocock shows, the contexts in which the English and Dutch republican episodes occurred were very different. In the United Provinces the legitimacy of the States General was widely supported, whereas the legitimacy of the English set of transitions (Charles I, Oliver Cromwell, Richard Cromwell, Charles II, James II, and even William and Mary) was not. Pocock notes that the execution of Charles I was ‘not a liberating discovery of democratic principle, but a harsh and painful discovery’ that something would have to be put in its place (Pocock 1992b, xii). Pocock also makes the important point that ‘the history of constitutional government needs to be situated in the context of a history as well ecclesiastic as civil’. Sharpe agrees that ‘the greatest objection to the religious explanations of the civil war is the attenuated notion of religion that informs them’. Religion, he says, ‘was not just about doctrine, liturgy or ecclesiastical government; it was a language, an aesthetic, a structuring of meaning, an identity, a politics’. For instance, the term ‘“popery” conjured ideas of corruption, whoredom and anarchy, as well as doctrines of merit or the mass; and Protestantism became a polemic, a rhetoric and symbol as well as a faith’ (Sharpe 2000, 12). Pocock comments that the events of 1688–89 were not just a ‘climax of a [constitutional] history beginning in 1603’ with the accession of James I, ‘in which the power of the Crown began increasing and the will of the Commons to resist its increase increased correspondingly’ (Pocock 1997, 18). The civil wars happened in part ‘because of a breakdown of consensus as to how the king could exercise that headship of the church, combined with that headship of the realm probably in Parliament, which the Tudors had made the necessary structure of the kingdom’. Moreover, he argues, ‘there seemed to be irreconcilable differences as to how that headship was to be restored. A catastrophic breaking point was reached when leaders controlling armed force decided to liquidate the whole problem and the

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monarchy with it, but this revolutionary solution could not be sustained’ (Pocock 1997, 14). Pocock is persuasive that a ‘solution of religious pluralism and toleration, the separation of church and state’ was ‘simply not available, since it could be enforced only by a power so little legitimised that it must rely on revolutionary dictatorship and armed force’. Pocock notes that we can only speculate on whether ‘Cromwell’s solution (a religion divided into sects, with a government in the role of constable to keep the peace among them) could ever have attained legitimacy’. But it is clear that ‘it did not obtain legitimacy during his lifetime, and it had not begun to obtain legitimacy when Hobbes published Leviathan in 1651’ (Pocock 1997, 14). Nevertheless, as Worden notes, English republican writers, while demonstrating a religious commitment, were ‘sharply anti-clerical’ (Worden 1991b, 472), and in Harrington and his successors there is ‘little theological substance’ (Worden 1991b, 474). Later on, the ‘deliverer’, the ﬁgure of the saviour in one country (England), in supplying legitimacy to government in a fabricated return to the Tudor settlement of King as head of church and state, was the challenger to the progressive political movement in tune with the majority of the people in the other (United Provinces). English republicanism was an episode sandwiched between civil war and the reconstruction of monarchy, and William achieved what Charles II and James II had failed to do. In England monarchy was the norm and the republic was a radical episode, a deviation from the norm. In the United Provinces, strong municipal self-government was the norm, and deliverance from Spanish and French threats through military action organised with the help of the House of Orange (who went on to have monarchical ambitions) was the recurrent deviation. However, the relationship in the United Provinces between the States and States General on one side and the Stadholder on the other was deeply ambiguous. But it was left in an ambiguous position because it worked in practical politics for it to be so. The cost was the twice-realised problem of Orange ambition when the Stadholder capitalised on his military powers to gain real political executive powers, and the legitimacy or illegitimacy of this was left unclear. It is in consequence difﬁcult to characterise seventeenth-century United Provinces politics accurately. Price notes that ‘after 1618 either the States or the stadhouder had to dominate’ in Holland – a pattern that repeated itself until the middle of the eighteenth century (Price 1994, 171). The train of events can be seen as an uneven oscillation of power between the States and the House of Orange. United Provinces

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politics can also be ﬁgured overall in terms of an increasingly encroaching shadow cast by the power of the French. Along with these two stories there is an important third one, which characterises United Provinces politics in terms of a dominant norm of States’ power with deviant Stadholder episodes, and a republican practice that established important foundations for all later periods of Dutch history. This story is supported by Price, for whom Stadholder ascendance in 1618 and 1672 remain spectacular anomalies. As he says, at ‘two points during the seventeenth century the stadhouders were able to mobilize their support to particular effect: the wetsverzettingen [shifts in the law] of 1618 and 1672’. But in both cases, as Price comments, ‘the orangist domination of the voting towns’ did not ‘last for more than a few years’ (Price 1994, 157). As noted above, Scott’s argument for the very great extent of the ‘moral ambition’ of republican ideas in England can also be contrasted with the Dutch case. De Witt’s True Liberty was the closest the Dutch came to being tinged with moral aspiration, and even its credentials on this score can be questioned. Notwithstanding its tolerationist aspect, Van Deursen, for instance, argues that True Liberty was no more than another way to frame Holland’s interests. He says bluntly that ‘True Freedom was the right of the regents to be masters of their own lands and their own cities’ (van Deursen 1999, 187). Price is also clear that to De Witt’s republican followers the ‘true interest of the Dutch state lay in the pursuit not of honour, but of general prosperity, and only a republican government could be relied upon to concentrate on this end’ (Price 1994, 162). Republican caution against too close an identiﬁcation of the state with the Reformed Church led to a policy of close control over the ofﬁcial church and toleration of moderate Protestant dissent. Strongly inﬂuencing this view was the sense that, in view of the population’s religious heterogeneity, religious persecution was bad for trade. In consequence Catholics, for instance, were ‘allowed a certain degree of freedom, not on principle but out of necessity’ (Price 1994, 162). In both the English and Dutch cases innovation was abhorred. But while, as Scott characterises, English republican ideas were radical ‘in the sense of cutting to the roots of contemporary arrangements’ (Scott 2000, 233), in contrast Dutch republicanism was always about reafﬁrming what was regarded (even in the light of contrary evidence) as a pre-existing status quo. Scott makes a strong case that in England, the ‘interregnum challenge lay not in liberation from, but reconceptualisation of government’. He says the ‘republican result was movement beyond the

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Leveller reaction against subjection, to a christian humanist politics of citizenship’ (Scott 2000, 296). In the United Provinces, in comparison, the Netherlanders considered that they already had a very strong tradition of governing and politics. Moreover they were not concerned with revisiting who was a citizen and who wasn’t, let alone the concept of citizenship in the abstract. Scott makes the further distinction, that in ‘general English republicanism deﬁned itself in relation not to constitutional structures but moral principles’ such as justice, charity and truth (Scott 2000, 317). By contrast, one of the most characteristic features of Dutch republicanism is its insistence on the importance of ancient charters performing a crucial constitutional role. Furthermore, while the English republican ‘experiment’ may have been centrally committed to instantiating through government a ‘christian humanist politics of virtue’ (Scott 2000, 323), the key concern of Dutch republicanism was balancing provincial interests in a manner that promoted their self-government and economic prosperity. The English Commonwealth and the United Provinces could both be described as unwilling republics, the outcome of a prolonged period of political instability labelled ‘England’s troubles’ and ‘the Dutch Revolt’. But they are unwilling republics in different ways. In England, legitimation through the notion of the divine right of kings, the immemorial constitution, natural law and common law was followed by ‘a deeply sensed and unwanted historical crisis’ (Pocock 1992b, xvi). The events of the civil war were followed by regicide, the establishment of a republic, the Protectorate, and then by the reconstruction of monarchy. Pocock contrasts Harrington’s historical assessment of the early events as a revolution, with the evaluations of later historians of the events in hindsight as only ‘a devastating series of contingencies and accidents’ (Pocock 1992b, xx). The execution of Charles I was not part of a republican plan, and once performed the Commonwealth was blundered into, almost by default. As Scott notes, ‘[n]otoriously the fact of English republicanism arrived slightly in advance of the theory’ (Scott 1993, 142). Pocock notes that ‘the King was put to death by men who still believed in the kingly ofﬁce, but it was an appalling paradox that, for this reason, they could not judge the man without abolishing the ofﬁce; the logic of resistance theory had pointed in this direction, but not all the way’ (Pocock 1992b, xii). Worden comments that ‘it was only after the execution of the king that the aim of emulating’ Venice and classical republican constitutions ‘was extensively canvassed’ (Worden 1991b, 449). Well into the 1650s English governments ‘were reluctant to encourage candid republican speculation’ (Worden 1991b,

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456). Again, when conﬁdence in the Commonwealth dwindled, Charles II was restored almost for want of any better idea. In the Netherlands, medieval political forms of overlord and privileges, and the Dutch traditionalist mentality had led, through the war with Spain, to an unintended republic. With De Witt’s government the republican status of the United Provinces was for the ﬁrst time properly acknowledged and celebrated. But the reintroduction of an Orange Stadholder in 1672, and his monarchist and centralising attitude to the United Provinces, demonstrated by his aspiration to replace a system of provinces in balance by a uniﬁed nation-state, made the republican status of the United Provinces very ambiguous again. Worden makes a case that a ‘signiﬁcant legacy’ of English republican values and ideas like classical ‘political language, and the doctrine of the balance’, together with ‘vindications of oligarchy’ and deism persisted well into the eighteenth century and ‘entered the mainstream of English political culture’ (Worden 1991b, 475). However, overall the English Republic is but one rather uncharacteristic episode in what Scott calls the ‘century-long process through which the principal institutions of English religious and political life were ﬁrst destroyed, then gradually reconstructed’ (Scott 2000, 29). Dutch republicanism, by comparison, has much stronger roots, in the jealously guarded and often-reiterated claims to privileges signifying the independence and self-government of the separate provinces and towns. In both the English and the Dutch political cultures, a conservative habit of mind can be discerned in the seventeenth century, but the two can also be interestingly contrasted. When Burke defended an ancient constitution, he was at least in part describing a traditionalist cast of mind which had been current in seventeenth-century England. The ancient constitution, which was immemorial and customary, was seen as containing the wisdom of experience, where the reasons for speciﬁc laws were lost in the mists of time, in time beyond memory. Such wisdom could not be reduced to rational principles but could change over time by adapting to experience. The common law tradition that developed in England but not in other European countries was distinctive. It follows that, in disputing the view that law is identiﬁed with custom, Hobbes stood out from the predominant opinion in England. In the early part of Chapter 26 of Leviathan, on the civil laws, Hobbes argues that custom and tradition do not, in themselves, give law its legal status. Laws are in force now, he is adamant, ‘not by virtue of the prescription of time, but by the constitutions of their present sovereigns’ (Hobbes 1946).

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Dutch conservatism was very different from the English form. The Dutch saw themselves as defending a status quo which was located very speciﬁcally in particular legal contracts between medieval overlords and local subjects, in privileges and liberties whose justiﬁcation was still clear, a status quo which could not envisage change over time. These privileges were seen as embodying a political relationship that would not change. When new situations arose, the innovativeness of the new relationship was resolved by being assimilated into the language of the status quo. There are, however, also signiﬁcant similarities between English and Dutch conservatism. In both, rights are not justiﬁed by abstract reason but are an inheritance under the law, and in both the appeal of antiquity is crucial. In the two cases there is a historically grounded antiquity and a traditional consensus about its value which reafﬁrm each other. In both cases there is an appeal to the past rather than to abstract principles, to ancient constitution or law rather than to natural right or reason. While both republics ‘failed’, Scott argues convincingly that in the English case, the Republic was followed by a period in which ‘by restoring the old structures, the settlement of 1660–67 restored the old problems’ (Scott 2000, 167). The Dutch Republic found its most fully formed state between De Witt’s coming to power in 1653 and the Orangist coup of 1672. But in contrast it was followed by a long period of further instability in which republican values were never completely lost. A similar trajectory in the English case can only be achieved by now discredited Whig historians, for whom the events of 1688–89 were an ‘endgame in the progress from absolutism to constitutionalism’ (Nenner 1997, 1). While both republics were overthrown, in both instances some radicalism was integrated into the conservative settlements. In England, republicanism was part of a broader radical challenge to sacralised monarchy which continued in the 1670s. But Sharpe contends interestingly that the cultural roots of the failure of republicanism in England need to be highlighted. He argues that, ‘not least because they have largely ignored the visual, the symbolic and the emblematic, historians of republican discourse have underestimated the pervasiveness of monarchy in the culture of early modern England’. The forms that authority took were not only ‘institutions or rational arguments but a nexus of customs and cultural practices’. Sharpe argues uncompromisingly that the ‘failure of republican politics was a failure to forge a republican culture that erased or suppressed the images of kingship, images that sustained a monarchical polity, even in the absence of the king’ (Sharpe 2000, 224). Ultimately

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the gain from republicanism was in the gradual development of parliamentary government and increasing real restraints on monarchical power after 1689. In the United Provinces the republican challenge had a long legacy, a more successful one than befell the Orangists, and many republican values endured after the Orangist coup of 1672. Having examined some of the political, religious, historical and cultural differences that help to identify the particular meanings of republicanism in England and the United Provinces, it is interesting to consider the view of the Dutch in British historiography. A good example is found in the events of 1688–89, when the Stadholder who helped to bring down De Witt’s republican government became king of England. Dynastic politics thus proved to be a stronger force for establishing a closer union between the two countries than did the idea of sister republics. These events are central to the later phases of English republicanism, and throw into relief the relationship between the Dutch Republic and its Stadholder. Scott’s deﬁnition of William and Mary’s acquisition of the English crown as the ‘Dutch invasion of 1688’ (Scott 2000, 33) is startlingly different from the received view both of the Dutch and of some English writers, who take at face value that William ‘had been invited by Parliament to accept the English throne’ (West 1990, xxvi). Certainly van Deursen dates ‘William’s international ambitions’ back to the 1650s, but at the same time frames William’s motives by the view that ‘William felt honour-bound to support his in-laws in the House of Stuart’ (van Deursen 1999, 184). And Zook complicates the picture of the crisis leading up to 1688 by pointing to the active work and conspiratorial politics of ‘radical Whigs’ who ‘had made the manipulation of the royal succession a viable and acceptable alternative to a Catholic monarchy’ (Zook, 1997, 91). Sharpe goes further in recommending the Whig view of history, not as ‘a synonym for a teleological approach to the past’, but as ‘a necessary polemical response to the 1688 Revolution’. He argues that ‘the Whigs who forcefully removed James II to bring in William of Orange needed to make that violent fracture into a natural succession of government’. The Whigs, Sharpe argues, ‘needed to marginalize the Jacobites and appropriate from them the languages of scripture, law and history through which all authority in seventeenth-century England was validated’. Sharpe adds that, unlike ‘their republican predecessors of the 1650s, the Whigs triumphed politically because they secured a cultural dominance’ (Sharpe 2000, 4). Pocock also enriches the picture with his argument that the ‘wickedness and turbulence of

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Restoration politics occurred because’, with Charles II, ‘the Crown had not been properly restored to headship of the national church and was tempted to assume either a Hobbesian or a popish relationship with a plurality of churches’. Pocock identiﬁes James II’s ‘desertion of the church, followed too late by his return to it’, as the sequence ‘which produced the invitation to William of Orange and brought about what would have been a civil war if the nature of military power had not changed drastically within a single generation’ (Pocock 1997, 17). The putative cause of William’s action, Scott underlines, was ‘the defence of protestantism, and liberties, embodied by representative institutions, in the face of a European threat to both’. Protestantism and the English polity and nation were seen as in need of urgent defence from the power of the French, and this was an indirect motive for the Dutch action. But, Scott argues, the direct reason for the ‘invasion’ on the English side was the fragility and deterioration of the restoration process, such that ‘William’s invasion did not cause, but exploited’ the troubles in Britain (Scott 2000, 452). Scott develops the important line of argument that on the Dutch side the reason for the invasion was that ‘William was forced to this desperate expedient primarily by the immediate situation in the United Provinces’ (Scott 2000, 214), namely of ﬁghting off the French threat. Thus William’s ‘actual purpose was the rescue of the political functions of monarchy, and the ﬁscal powers of the House of Commons, that they might be put to use in Dutch interests in the continental military theatre’ (Scott 2000, 453–61). Scott argues, in addition, that one of the primary ‘Dutch objectives was the preservation of the English monarchy’. This was regarded by William as in both English and Dutch interests, since the English nation did not desire a return to republican government and the Dutch feared the power of a renewed English republic. As Scott frames it, ‘William in particular intervened in the third and ﬁnal crisis of the Stuart monarchy partly to rescue it from…Dutch-style republicanism’ (Scott 2000, 462). Speck provides an interesting aside to Scott’s view about William’s motive in preserving the English monarchy. He notes that when Charles II took the throne at the Restoration in 1660, he ‘dated his reign from the day of his father’s execution’, with the purpose of denying a break in monarchical rule. In contrast, William and Mary ‘dated their joint reign from 13 February 1689, the day they gave their assent to the Bill of Rights’. The settlement of 1689 acknowledged that the ‘throne had been vacant since the ﬂight of James II the previous December’ (Speck 1995, 178), and ‘established rather than restored mixed monarchy’ (Speck

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1995, 179). Speck also throws an interesting light on William’s perception of the comparative power he held after 1688 as Stadholder in the United Provinces and King of England. One would think that a king (even with the English Parliament) exercised more power than a Stadholder. But he cites William’s joke that ‘he was indeed StadholderKing, albeit a stadholder in England and a king in the United Provinces’ (Speck 1995, 184). A recent book by Sorti and Monaldi (2002) adds a further dimension to the picture of William as an actor in the tangled web of international politics in Europe. The book argues that William accepted a large grant from Pope Innocent XI to overthrow James II. The pope desired to have a powerful Protestant ally and considered James II to be too closely connected to the French king. This radical view of the actions of William of Orange is very different both from that found in the literature on Dutch history, which still tends to paint William’s actions in terms of an altruistic Dutch response to an English invitation, and from the received picture of English history. Scott contends that it has ‘suited’ the orthodox story in England to ‘regard William’s intervention as personal and dynastic’ (Scott 2000, 456). Hoak perhaps represents this view when he describes Anglo-Dutch relations as fused in the phrase, ‘the Anglo-Dutch Revolution of 1688–89’, characterised as a ‘dynastic putsch’. But he goes beyond a simple personal, dynastic view when he adds interestingly that this ‘revolution’ was ‘undertaken…by a Dutch prince in concert with powerful Dutch commercial interests’ (Hoak 1996, 26). Scott marshalls historical evidence about William’s military support to back this view, concluding that ‘this armada was by far the greatest naval operation ever mounted in Atlantic waters’ (Scott 2000, 215). Kishlansky (1996, 287) details that William III brought ‘15,000 soldiers, including crack cavalry regiments, his Dutch guards and a detachment of hardened Danish mercenaries. These joined the 20,000 men that the Duke of Schomberg had commanded for the past year – a collection of Germans, Dutch, English volunteers’ and Scottish and English planters. This brief examination of the events of 1688, in the light of the argument of the previous chapters, challenges the assumption made about Anglo-Dutch relations by much British history that ‘the Dutch’ are a homogeneous group. The tendency to equate William with the Dutch deeply misconceives the role of William as Stadholder in Dutch politics. Scott’s assessment of 1688 as an invasion by William gains strength from its acknowledgement (Scott 2000, 457) of the complexity of the relationship between the Stadholder and the States and States General as a major fault-line in Dutch politics.

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Having considered some of the similarities and differences between the two republics, this section goes on to discuss Anglo-Dutch relations through the period of the Anglo-Dutch wars. It then considers the character and role of republican writings in England as the basis of a comparison between the two countries. The competition between the two republics dominates the history of relations between England and the United Provinces in this period. The rivalry was expressed in the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of 1652–54, 1665–67 and 1672–74. All three wars were concerned with establishing precedence in areas of directly conﬂicting interest, in the new postMünster, post-Westphalian international situation. Such areas included the drive to achieve European maritime supremacy, commercial and trading rivalry in the Channel and the Mediterranean as well as in the Archangel trade, competing colonial advantage in Asia, and the competing interests of the Dutch and English East India Companies. These areas of competition were complicated by the semi-piratical activities of the Dutch West India Company antagonising English interests in Europe (Jones 1968, 44–5). Thus relations between England and the United Provinces were crucial on both sides, since both countries pursued the same goals of pre-eminence in the European and world seaborne carrying trade and colonial dominance, and were for a time reasonably evenly matched. At the heart of the tension in Anglo-Dutch relations was a long-standing conﬂict in which the English claimed the sovereignty of the Narrow Seas and the right to free trade elsewhere. In direct opposition the Northern Netherlanders followed the doctrine developed by Grotius of mare liberum in home waters and mare clausum throughout their commercial empire. Smit notes how Grotius ‘had performed a consummate act of legalistic contortionism by demanding rights for the Dutch on the basis of mare liberum, which he then denied to the English when it did not work in the Dutch interest’ (Smit 1968, 28). The First Anglo-Dutch War took place between the only two Protestant republican countries in Europe. War was precipitated by the English Navigation Act of 1651 which, in a thinly disguised threat to Dutch commercial interests, ‘stipulated that foreign ships could only import goods if these vessels originated in their own country’ (van Deursen 1999, 191). In negotiations between Cromwell and De Witt in 1654 which De Witt had solicited, there was little recognition in the peace terms offered by Cromwell of a potentially common republican or Protestant cause, apart from the clause to permanently exclude the House of Orange from the Stadholderate in the Netherlands. This was

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demanded by Cromwell in order to protect English republican interests. Interestingly the Dutch refused to include the clause, viewing the young William III differently, but they did reach a secret agreement in the Act of Seclusion, ‘in which Holland pledged to prevent the ofﬁce of stadholder from ever falling to William III or his descendants’ (van Deursen 1999, 191). The Act was effectively nulliﬁed only six years later, however, by the restoration of Charles II in 1660. In the Peace of Westminster of 1654, the Navigation Act remained in force, evidence of the strength of the English. The Second Anglo-Dutch War, between the restored Charles II and De Witt, again over international sea trade, commercial advantage and colonial interests, was this time won decisively by the Dutch with their enhanced ﬂeet. It concluded with haste on the Dutch side with the Treaty of Breda in 1667, because of Dutch concern about the implications of a French invasion of the Southern Netherlands in 1667. As part of the Breda treaty the Dutch gave up New Netherlands (New York) to the English but gained Surinam in Asia. In the Third AngloDutch War between, in part, uncle and nephew Charles II and William III the Dutch defeated the combined Anglo-French ﬂeet. The war was settled in 1674 on terms similar to those of Breda. But having faced war against France as well as against the English De Witt had become over-committed. With Gelderland, Utrecht and Overijssel experiencing French occupation for a time (van Deursen 1999, 197), De Witt’s foreign policy had become domestically discredited and he did not live to see the end of the war. The English republican government’s annexation of adjoining territory in Scotland and Ireland highlights how different English and Dutch colonial attitudes were. In the second half of the seventeenth century the English developed four types of empire – the commercial empire in South-East Asia, English colonies on the Eastern coast of America, sugar and other plantations in the Caribbean operated by a steady stream of slaves brought from Africa, and forms of conquest in Scotland and Ireland. Braudel, in his discussion of the development of the Dutch empire, argues that Dutch imperial possessions were built on the back of the Dutch East India Company’s trade and protection of trade in the Indian Ocean. He notes that the Dutch empire ‘reached its true dimensions’ in the 1650s and 1660s (Braudel 1979b, 215). Braudel contends that the ‘Dutch, like the English in Elizabethan times, preferred to live off plunder than to assume the burdens attendant upon any stable settlement in empty or hostile lands’ (Braudel 1979b, 232). While religious debate was such a feature of life in the United

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Provinces in the seventeenth century, the Dutch saw their colonies purely in terms of trade and exploitation for trade. The Dutch did not sustain and develop their empire. Braudel reasons that their ‘mistake had been to try to erect a commercial superstructure without gaining control of production, without colonising the territory in the modern sense of the word’ (Braudel 1979b, 233). However, this mistake, Braudel continues, only became apparent in Latin America and the operation of the West India Company, and in their failure to wrest Brazil from the Portuguese. This point leads Braudel to ask whether the more fundamental, ‘real mistake’ was ‘perhaps to think that the New World could be taken over like the islands of the Far East … whose native populations could be ill-treated with impunity?’ In the Americas, ‘Holland was up against European opposition: England which encouraged Portuguese resistance, and Spanish America which was more solid than appearances suggested’ (Braudel 1979b, 235). The Dutch, instead of establishing settled commercial patterns and stable government, sought out ‘countries which could be exploited rather than settled and developed’, concludes Braudel plausibly (Braudel 1979b, 235). In consequence, apart from the ‘privilege of access to Japan, the only effective and permanent monopoly in Dutch hands was that of ﬁne spices’ (Braudel 1979b, 218). The patterns of colonial experience in England and the United Provinces are part of a broader story of different attitudes to economic management between the two countries. Morrill notes that in England, ‘gradually, a single, integrated national economy was emerging’ (Morrill 1984, 292). However much the Dutch beneﬁted in the short term from the domestic problems of its trading rivals, England and France, in the longer term over the seventeenth century, the role of the United Provinces as a world economy declined. The jealously competitive and separate economies of the separate provinces, with Holland playing a dominant role, and the continued reliance on older forms of economic activity such as trading and sea-borne commerce, help to account for this development. Moreover, as Braudel notes, the ‘rise of England and France was taking place slowly but surely at Holland’s expense’ (Braudel 1979b, 205), and by the 1680s the more general economic decline of the Dutch had become evident (Braudel 1979b, 203). Relations between England and the United Provinces then, were dominated in the 1650s (the period of direct overlap between the two republics), as they were in the rest of the second half of the seventeenth century, not by republican fellow feeling, but by republican rivalry and the long shadow cast by dynastic Orange–Stuart politics. As

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Rowen notes on the Dutch side, the ‘struggle between the Orangists and the States party’ in the United Provinces was ‘complicated by the dynastic connection established between the House of Orange and the English royal family by the marriage of Frederick Henry’s son, the later William II, to Princess Mary Stuart in 1641’. England, Rowen sums up, ‘for a quarter century after the conclusion of the Münster peace in 1648, was to be the principal rival of the Dutch’, not only in trade but also in ‘competition for colonies, and for maritime supremacy’. After England and the United Provinces ‘were driven into alliance against Louis XIV, it was England which snatched trading and naval domination from the United Provinces’ (Rowen 1972, 177).

English republican writings Republican writings in the two countries, and their role in politics, are also very different in character. The purpose in discussing English writings here is to capture the particular ﬂavours of debates about the meanings of their republicanism, rather than to examine the contents of republican writings in detail. Exploring the debates in the modern literature about English republicanism is an important way of approaching the meaning of republicanism. The difference between the intellectual climates and mentalities in which ideas were deployed account for some of the differences between English and Dutch republicanism. The relation between ideas and practice is different in the Dutch and English republican cases. In both countries political practitioners in republican government were also writers of important republican works. In both cases ideas reinforce practice, legitimate and articulate practice, and are practical. But in the English case in addition, ideas are used also to work out a new practice, drawing more fully on, for instance, ancient Roman and Spartan examples to justify it. In effect ideas are doing more work in the English case. Worden reinforces this case when he contrasts the principal contribution of English republican ideas to the history of political thought, with the emergence of the independent United Provinces, which ‘produced little systematic exploration of republican principles’. At the same time Worden conﬁrms that English republicans were writing ‘in order to shape events’ and ‘adapted their arguments and their emphases to immediate circumstances’ (Worden 1991b, 443). Nevertheless, according to Scott, the ‘rich intellectual terrain’ of English republicanism contrasts sharply with its ‘abject practical failure’ (Scott, 1993, 139).

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English republican writings are characterised by the diversity of their ideas. What are also distinctive are the equal measures of collective purpose and alliances, and tension and hostility, found among some of these writers. As with republicanism in the United Provinces, English republicanism was expressed not just or even largely in the political theory and high political discourse of a writer like Harrington. In England, as Sharpe (2000) reminds us, republicanism was inﬂuentially expressed also in lesser-known writers, pamphleteers, parliamentary debate, in iconography, broadsides, and tracts. Given these internal differences and diversity Worden’s structuring of republican writings is very helpful. Worden makes a strong case that ‘republicanism’ in England, rather than having a coherent and consistent meaning, is best identiﬁed in three stages of republican writings. Worden’s structure thus portrays English republicanism as extending well beyond the ‘between kings period’, which is only the ﬁrst of the three phases he identiﬁes. The primary writers associated with the ﬁrst stage, the Interregnum of 1649–60, were Marchamont Nedham, John Milton and James Harrington. The second stage, according to Worden, in direct response to the political crisis of 1675–83, is reﬂected in the work of Algernon Sidney. Then, ‘fresh constitutional anxieties of the 1690s produced a third group of writings (Worden 1991b, 443–4) but here, says Worden, republicanism sometimes ‘seems merely to reﬂect the reestablishment of aristocratic political values in that period’ (Worden 1991b, 463). Republican views during the ﬁrst phase were developed, says Worden, as ‘a response to the execution of Charles I in 1649, to the abolition of monarchy and of the House of Lords in the same year, and to the ensuing failure of a series of improvised Puritan regimes to provide a durable alternative to kingship’ (Worden 1991, 443). They included, according to Worden, a measure of ‘social radicalism’ in Nedham and Harrington (Worden 1991, 463). But Burgess’s identiﬁcation of the internal turbulence of the interregnum period must also be borne in mind. He considers that ‘during the Interregnum the ancient constitutionalist ideal of a paciﬁed polity was recast ﬁrst as an absolute monarchy and then as an absolute republic’ (Burgess 1998, 227). Burgess’s comment brings out a further feature of English republicanism, and one that to some extent cuts across Worden’s three phases. For English republicanism changed in character as writers sought to respond to changed political conditions in the government of England. In the second stage, after the Restoration, for instance, Harrington the

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prophet who, in Worden’s words, had ‘explained the collapse of the Stuart monarchy’, ‘appeared to have [been] proved wrong’, and Nevile’s commitment to republican values appeared ‘almost anachronistic’ (Worden 1991b, 459). In the 1670s the Stuart monarchy seemed to republicans to be ‘moving towards an invincible tyranny’. As a result republicanism ‘changed its role accordingly. It became a defence of constititutional liberty against the threats of popery and of a standing army’ (Worden 1991b, 459). Speck refers to another example of ideas changing their meaning in response to new circumstances. He makes the case that, rather than the Civil War and Interregnum having destroyed the basis of the idea of monarchical rule by divine right, it ‘boosted the theory’ in that the ‘great rebellion had discredited other alternatives’ (Speck 1995, 177). Not only did the character and political role of English republican writings change in response to English political events, however. English republicans do sometimes sound like their Dutch counterparts. Sidney and Nevile, for instance, appealed to ‘landmarks of medieval liberty’ like the Magna Carta, and ‘declared it “impossible” and “not to be imagined” that any people would in time past have surrendered the rights which monarchs now claimed over them, and which, being inherently in the people, were in any event inalienable by them’ (Worden 1991b, 471). However, the more characteristic style of English republican writers was not to draw upon, as they saw it, a largely discredited rhetoric of ancient custom and common law, but to individually appropriate republican examples from Rome and Sparta – and from Machiavelli. Dutch republican writers, in sharp contrast, consistently reappropriated the language of privileges and of a Batavian inheritance, in general only supplemented by references to ancient texts, to negotiate the new, independent, status of the United Provinces. English republican writers were much more imaginative in their development of ideas, but perhaps the Dutch writers were less imaginative because they had less need to be. There is an important debate about the source of republican ideas in England. Pocock argues that the premises upon which English republican writers rested ‘were immensely remote from those at the foundations of normal English political thinking’ at the time. This ‘is why republican theories are hard to ﬁnd in England before 1649, and why there were none to which the regicide regime could appeal’ (Pocock 1992b, xiii). Worden also makes a good case for the novelty of republican views in the Interregnum. Before the Civil War, he argues, ‘it is doubtful whether anyone…believed that the fundamental principles of

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the ancient constitution could be changed’. Even later in the seventeenth century, to most people it seemed that monarchy was ‘indispensable’, and ‘the lessons to be drawn from classical politics were not necessarily republican ones’ (Worden 1991b, 445). At the same time Dzelzainis argues strongly for a revision of the dominant historical assessment that the regicide was performed by fanatics (drawing on Hobbes) but gave rise to a more pragmatic republicanism. He contends that this view contains a ‘deeply conservative message’ and that the actions of the regicides can be defended on rational grounds (Dzelzainis 2002, 32–3). Against the general consensus of opinion that has highlighted the novelty of republican ideas in England after 1649, and insists that the emergence of republicanism post-dated the regicide, Peltonen (1995) issues a dissenting voice which is being taken seriously by leading scholars. Worden notes that Peltonen, along with the renowned historian of political literature David Norbrook is impatient with the distinction between ‘the civil vocabulary voiced before the civil wars and the arguments for kingless rule deployed in the 1650s’ (Worden 2002, 309). Worden registers that Peltonen and Norbrook ‘detect incipient republicanism on two pre-civil-war fronts. First, and more prominently, there is the classical humanism of the Renaissance. Secondly there is constitutional theory’ (Worden 2002, 310). However, it remains to be seen whether Peltonen’s argument establishes a case for modifying the dominant language, tradition or world-view, and its relation to recessive traditions. Peltonen contends that ‘humanism as political parlance was not completely over-shadowed by other vocabularies in the mid-sixteenth century. On the contrary, its central convictions were forcefully rehearsed throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ (Peltonen 1995, 308). Certainly the broadness of his deﬁnition of classical republican and civic humanist ideas may be problematic. Peltonen argues against the view, attributed centrally to Pocock, that classical republican and civic humanist ideas are not found in England between the mid-sixteenth century and the civil wars. Peltonen contends that a continuity between classical republican and civil humanist voices before and after the 1640s can be discerned, and he challenges the assessment of ‘the Civil War period as an absolute turning point’ (Peltonen 1995, 6). Skinner develops Peltonen’s argument in a further, interesting direction. He argues that while historians have placed ‘an overwhelming emphasis on English common law as the main instrument for challenging the extra-Parliamentary powers of the crown’, this view

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‘implied that the constitutional debates of the early Stuart period were largely immune from broader legal inﬂuences’. Skinner shows that ‘one of the most potent sources of radical thinking about the English polity in the years immediately preceding the outbreak of civil war in 1642 was provided by classical and especially Roman ideas about freedom and servitude’. As a correction to the prevailing view, he argues that far more ‘than has generally been realised, the outbreak of the English revolution was legitimised in neo-Roman terms’ (Skinner 2002, 14). Scott offers a contrasting picture which emphasises connections between the English and the Dutch. He argues that ‘English and Dutch republicanism emerged from a connected practical, as well as intellectual context’. According to Scott, ‘from the 1580s to the 1690s the Dutch and British troubles were crucially intertwined. They were so by common religion and political issues, by political and dynastic alliance, and by military interventions in one another’s affairs’. Scott goes on to say that the ‘inﬂuence of the Dutch example upon the English, in particular, was fulminated against by Stuart monarchs and ministers; raised by English republicans’ like Milton and Sidney, and ‘blamed by Hobbes among others for causing the English civil war’ (Scott 2002, 62). However, according to Blom the history of the connections between English and Dutch republican ideas was ‘mainly one of misunderstanding and conﬂict’. He comments, for instance, that ‘[n]otorious are the misunderstandings between the leaders of the Commonwealth and the De Witt government, leading to the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch War’ (Blom 1995, 218). Sharpe presents a more convincing case than Scott’s on this issue, that despite ﬁrst-hand accounts of the political upheavals in the United Provinces in the sixteenth century and the ﬁrst decades of the seventeenth century, ‘there is almost no evidence that such knowledge or claims posed new questions about the commonweal in England’. He agrees with the view that it ‘was difﬁcult for Englishmen to appreciate the relevance of…ideas remote from their own legal traditions until an open breach between King and Parliament, an overt contest for the sovereign lawmaking power forced them to do so’ (Sharpe 2000, 58). Sharpe makes a very important point that the replacement of a mentality predisposed to see a ‘commonweal united as one, all its parts in harmony’ (Sharpe 2000, 60), with one predicated on the principle of elections and adversary politics (Sharpe 2000, 13) by the end of the century, was gradual and painful. Reinforcing this point, and coming now to the debate about the political purpose of English republican writings, Worden along with

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many others follows Pocock’s inﬂuential evaluation on the internal variety of English republicanism, that it was ‘a language, not a programme’. In part this understanding helps to explain, as Worden notes, the range of attitudes towards the idea of monarchy, in which only ‘rarely’ were republicanism’s ‘exponents uncompromisingly opposed to kingship’ (Worden 1991b, 446). Worden argues that republicans ‘never claimed that the existence of the English monarchy was constitutionally invalid’. He contends that the ‘republican complaint was rather that the true character of the monarchy had been perverted’ (Worden 1991b, 446). Republican writers, says Worden, ‘offered ﬁrst and foremost a criticism of tyrants rather than of kings’ (Worden 1991b, 447). Sharpe describes the underlying political culture that helps to make sense of this point. He comments that ‘for all the tensions and disputes of the early Stuart decades, politics was still not conceived as a contested pursuit of power, but as a matrix of duties and rights held harmoniously in balance by law’ (Sharpe 2000, 86). Pocock’s dictum of ‘a language, not a programme’ also accounts for the different and changing attitudes by republican writers towards the equivocal ﬁgure of Cromwell as a republican political leader. Worden speciﬁes that even ‘in the 1650s, when it was much easier to argue publicly against monarchy than it became after 1660, Harrington and his followers were prepared to concede a role for a “single person” in government, albeit usually a temporary one’ (Worden 1991, 447). Pocock’s maxim, situated within his wider work on republicanism (Pocock 1975, 1987), has led Sharpe to call for a broader approach to describe idioms of politics. He notes that the ‘linguistic approach to the history of ideas’ has led to the ‘neglect of other aesthetic and cultural practices in which values and assumptions are encoded’, such as processions, rituals, celebrations and other performances, as well as artifacts like medals, ﬂags, pictures, buildings, woodcuts, frontispieces and other iconography. Sharpe’s point that the ‘tendency of all recent discussion has been to see verbal discourse as the locus where all meaning is constituted’ (Sharpe 2000, 42) is a good one, especially in relation to the representation of ideas in the early modern period (Prokhovnik 1991). Another interesting source of comparison is found between English and Dutch political thought more generally, over the issues of sovereignty and the constitution. In England the issues are mixed and interrelated, partly perhaps because of the continuous history up to 1649 of the monarchy there. But in the United Provinces these two issues could be distinguished, and indeed were considered separately. While

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the constitution of the Netherlands continued more or less unchanged from the medieval period to the end of the seventeenth century, its sovereignty could be seen, ambiguously, to belong to an overlord, and then later with the provinces within the republic. This historical difference is reﬂected in the works of Hobbes and Spinoza. We come now to the key writers associated with the ﬁrst phase of English republicanism, during the Interregnum – Nedham, Milton and Harrington. Worden characterises Nedham as, although ‘the liveliest writer among the English republicans’, an ‘opportunist’ in his adoption of republicanism. He portrays Nedham as a royalist caught plotting against the new regime. He ‘earned his pardon by becoming editor in 1650 of the government’s newspaper Mercurius Politicus and by writing, over the next two years, editorials to justify the abolition of monarchy and to win support for the republic’ (Worden 1991b, 449). Worden notes that ‘Nedham’s newpaper gave a mouthpiece to a republican group in parliament which included Algernon Sidney’ (Worden 1991b, 449). The single major piece of English republican political theory published in this period was Harrington’s Commonwealth of Oceana. With its text liberally littered with references to classical Roman texts and to Machiavelli, it is no surprise that Pocock characterised it as the epitome of classical republicanism in early modern England. But the quality of the theory is not a guide to its importance in deﬁning English republican writing. As Scott notes, ‘Harrington was a deeply idiosyncratic member of the English republican ﬂock’ (Scott 2002, 64). Begun in 1654 and published in 1656, Oceana aimed to demonstrate that ‘the dissolution of this [balanced] government caused the [civil] war, not the war the dissolution of this government’. Oceana was, Pocock notes, ‘a mixture of history and utopia’ (Pocock 1992a, xvi), combining explanation in terms of longterm historical processes with a ‘ﬁctionalised and instantly recognisable England’ (Pocock 1977, 23). Scott registers that Harrington, ‘[a]lone of the major republican writers…was not himself actively involved in the cause’ (Scott 1993, 148). He ‘played no part in the republican experiment in practice’ (Scott 2002, 65). Oceana was concerned with establishing a durable and stable political system, a ‘model’ at, as Pocock says, ‘a moment of historical exhaustion and opportunity’ (Pocock 1992a, xvii). It was concerned with setting out an elaborately detailed ‘initial construction’ rather than with ﬁnding the key to managing the dynamic process of practical politics (Worden 1991b, 465). Scott argues that Harrington’s Oceana sought to place the collapse of the English monarchy and the republican

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experiment in historical perspective. It ‘appropriated classical republican language’ to argue in the English case not for virtue but for stability against the destructive effects of the passions (Scott 2000, 324). Two of Harrington’s key aims in Oceana were to advocate the stability which the authority of law could bring, and to make sense of the upheavals in government in the service of the commonwealth cause. These two aims are summed up in Harrington’s line of reasoning that, ‘[n]ow government is no other than the soul of a nation or city; where fore that which was reason in the debate of a commonwealth, being brought forth by the result, must be virtue; and forasmuch as the soul of a city or nation is the sovereign power, her virtue must be law’ (Harrington 1992, 19). Scott goes on to argue that, in his pursuit of stability, Harrington ‘abolished “liberty”, the foundation of the classical republican tradition. In its place he has substituted another foundation, not moral but material: the balance of property’ (Scott 1993, 152). Scott’s argument here leads to the conclusion either that Harrington is not a republican, if a key republican principle is absent from his work or that, more likely, ‘republicanism’ is an extremely internally variegated concept. Worden argues that Oceana was written ‘as an attempt to come to terms with the brutal abolition of the old order’ (Worden 1991b, 451), while Pocock notes that it was also ‘a response to Oliver Cromwell’s seizure of power in 1653’, when he assumed the role of ‘Protector, constable, and dictator’ (Pocock 1997, 15). Worden intimates that, while Oceana ‘was ostensibly loyal to the Protector, whom it invited to ﬁll the role of republican lawgiver’, it is likely that Harrington’s sympathies lay with the ‘commonwealthmen’, a ‘group of parliamentary and army leaders who wished to restore the republic Cromwell had destroyed’ (Worden 1991b, 451). Pocock makes a strong case for Oceana’s signiﬁcance not so much as utopian or republican writing, but in that ‘it confronts the problem of de facto authority’. It offers, says Pocock, ‘for the ﬁrst time in intellectual history, an explanation of the English Civil Wars as a revolution, produced by the erosion of one political structure and the substitution of another through processes of long-term social change’ (Pocock 1992a, xix). Pocock also contends that Oceana’s accurate contemporary intellectual context is as one of a number of republican writings, such as Nedham’s 1656 collection of newpaper editorials, The Excellency of a Free State, concerned not with the ‘revolutionary transition from monarchy to republic’, but with ‘the discontents of the Cromwellian Protectorate’ (Pocock 1992a, ix). Worden refers to another element of

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the context for appreciating Oceana when he argues that it is a plea for the historical understanding of Machiavelli and for a return to an ‘ancient prudence’, rule of law, and liberty undermined by modern monarchy (Worden 1991b, 451). According to Worden Oceana was written as a rebuttal to the ‘scorn for the lessons of history and experience, for classical political thought, for the principle of mixed government, and for civic participation’ shown by Hobbes (Worden 1991b, 450). Harrington regarded his contribution to political theory to lie in the ‘doctrine of the balance’, the notion of the ‘balance of dominion’. According to Harrington, says Scott, ‘in any state the stable potential political arrangements of the superstructure were circumscribed by the position of property in the foundation…by the “balance of dominion”’ (Scott 2000, 314). The balance of dominion operates such that political power always follows economic power, which Harrington identiﬁed with landed power. Worden asserts that the ‘secret of political stability’, according to Harrington, ‘was to ensure that the balance of political power in a nation reﬂected the balance of economic power’. Harrington ‘turned the principle of the balance into the starting point of constitutional design’ (Worden 1991b, 451). According to Harrington, in ‘absolute monarchy’ property is monopolised by the monarch and rule is maintained by a mercenary army. ‘Mixed monarchy’ is characterised by landownership by great magnates, and where this aristocracy and their retainers are the bearers of arms. A ‘commonwealth’ comes into being where landownership is sufﬁciently dispersed so that no aristocracy can be formed, and thus the armed forces are a citizen militia. But Scott pours scorn on the intellectual quality of Harrington’s solution in terms of the ‘balance of dominion’, arguing that the idea that ‘political behaviour might amount to anything more serious or complicated than the division of material spoils seems not to have occurred to him’ (Scott 1993, 153). Worden estimates that Harrington was a republican in his desire to see England emulate the glory of the Roman republic, and because he took the view that Charles I had seemed a tyrant ‘only because the commons had lacked power commensurate with their property’ (Worden 1991b, 453). Harrington’s attitude to Cromwell was at best equivocal. Harrington was not a republican in the sense of directly favouring the regime that followed Charles I’s execution. Neither was Harrington a republican in the modern sense, conjoining a republican constitution with democratic politics. As Worden notes, ‘Harrington’s classical instincts rebelled against all pure forms of government’,

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whether they be monarchical, aristocratic or democratic (Worden 1991b, 452). Harrington’s greatest inﬂuence on practical politics in England came with the crisis of 1659–60. His The Prerogative of Popular Government was taken up by a group of MPs in a way that Milton’s work was not. The group, headed by Henry Nevile, tried, notes Worden, ‘to persuade parliament that the Protectoral constitution was unworkable’(Worden 1991b, 457). Harrington drew upon Machiavelli but also worked within an English tradition, to defend a primarily agrarian, anticommercial republic where, as Pocock (1987) points out, property and arms help to deﬁne the state. Harrington’s republicanism also stressed the duty of citizens to participate in government. De Witt’s republicanism differed in every point, being primarily urban, commercial, upholding the political oligarchy of the urban regents, peace-loving and isolationist, with no sense of civic virtue. Kossmann addresses directly the question of whether Harrington’s republicanism had an important impact in the United Provinces and notes, ‘it would seem that the republican model described by Pocock cannot be easily applied to the theories of Harrington’s Dutch contemporaries’ (Kossmann 1987c, 223). Kossmann also comments that ‘the very fact that Hobbes’s work was made available to Dutch readers and Harrington’s was not, suggests that the latter’s inﬂuence in the Netherlands was much smaller if it existed at all (Kossmann 1987c, 221). Tuck’s discussion (1993) of a broader range of Dutch and English republican writers from the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century is a very welcome addition to this ﬁeld. The shifts in Milton’s political convictions is one example of how an English republican writer faced changing political circumstances. Milton was one of the ﬁrst English republican writers to get into print. Dzelzainis comments that within two weeks of the execution of Charles I, Milton had ‘published a vindication of the proceedings against Charles, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (largely written while the trial was in progress)’ and arguing against the Presbyterians. Milton’s stirring prose is captured in his argument, couched in abstract language but speaking to a very local dispute, that ‘since the King or Magistrate holds his autoritie of the people, both originally and naturally for their good in the ﬁrst place, and not his own’, it follows that ‘then may the people as oft as they shall judge it for the best, either choose him or reject him, retaine him or depose him though no Tyrant, meerly by the liberty of right of free born Men, to be govern’d as seems to them best’ (Milton 1991, 13). Dzelzainis notes that Milton

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‘was rewarded for his unsolicited efforts a month later by the newly constituted Council of State’. Henceforth ‘Milton was responsible not only for handling much of the Commonwealth’s diplomatic correspondence but was also in effect its chief propagandist’, commissioned to write further political tracts (Dzelzainis 1991, ix). However, Dzelzainis registers that Milton then had to temper his enthusiasm for the principle of overturning governments by revolutionary acts, as the Commons in January 1649 ‘ﬁrst proclaimed the sovereignty of the people and then promptly vested supreme power in themselves’ (Dzelzainis 1991, xviii). Milton’s A Defence of the People of England of 1651 is a far less radical text (Dzelzainis 1991, xxv). Worden contrasts Milton’s eloquence in his ‘tributes of praise’ to Cromwell on becoming Lord Protector in 1653, with his ‘loud…silence’ in the late 1650s, offering ‘no tribute to the military and naval exploits of the protectorate, no lament on Cromwell’s death’. In August 1659, Worden remarks, ‘four months after the fall of Richard Cromwell and of the protectorate, the silence was broken’. At this point ‘Milton described the Cromwellian regime as “a short but scandalous night of interruption”: interruption, that is, of the Long Parliament, which Cromwell had expelled by force in April 1653’ (Worden 1998, 243). Dzelzainis traces how, as the interregnum regime ‘disintegrated in a succession of experiments and expedients’, and with the imminent return of Charles II in 1660, Milton wrote two works ‘in which he sought to stem the tide’. The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth ‘urged a revived commitment to republicanism’, while Brief Notes upon a Late Sermon ‘advocated more despairingly that, if there must be a king, it would be better to elect one rather than restore the Stuarts’ (Dzelzainis 1991, ix). Worden notes that Milton was a critic of Harrington (Worden 1991b, 455). Milton put forward a much more full-hearted and enthusiastic defence of republican values, on the grounds that ‘politics are a public projection of the war waged between reason and passion within every soul’. Early on he hailed ‘the “glorious and heroic deed” of regicide, an event seen by other republicans as the victory not of their principles but of brute force’. Worden judges that Milton also supported the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, ‘unlike all the republicans except his friend the trimmer Nedham’ (Worden 1991b, 456). According to Worden, it was only in 1660, with the political crisis of 1659–60, in The Ready and Easy Way, that Milton’s ‘republicanism became uninhibited’ (Worden 1991b, 456). Now Milton advocated a sovereign lifemembership ‘standing senate’, accountable to decentralised local

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communities, as a more securely republican foundation than Harrington’s principle of ‘rotation’ (Worden 1991b, 457). Like Harrington, Milton and Sidney advocated citizen participation in politics. But whereas Harrington proposed participation on the grounds of property, for Milton and Sidney the criterion was the distribution of merit. Worden outlines that they were ‘particularly anxious to respect the Aristotelian principle that virtue’ should be ‘rewarded by ofﬁce: if one man stood out from his countrymen he should be king’, whereas ‘if a few were prominent they should rule as a nobility’, and ‘where men were equal they should rule equally’ (Worden 1991b, 469). Scott argues that the ‘central terrain’ shared by Milton’s Paradise Lost (1658–66), written largely after Milton’s retirement from active politics, and Sidney’s Court Maxims (1664–65) was the view that the ‘reconstruction of monarchy was explicable’ in the light of ‘tragic but unsurprising public moral failure’ and sin, which nevertheless ‘did nothing to undermine the nobility of the republican experiment’ (Scott 2000, 348). Scott identiﬁes Nedham and Milton, both employed by the republican Council of State, as the major writers who established the main themes of republicanism in the early English republican period of 1649–53, and argues for the centrality of political practice in their work. He sees Harrington as important in the extension of republican ideas, now in opposition to the Protectorate. Scott makes a strong case that because the ‘revolution was ideological rather than institutional in focus’, the ‘reconstruction of the institutional fabric of the old order did not end it’ (Scott 2000, 344). Moreover ‘Restoration did not…achieve the recovery of an imagined early Stuart religious and political “normality”’. Instead the period is ‘depicted as lurching from one crisis to another, with every aspect of its religious and political “settlement” in dispute’ (Scott 2000, 345). Sidney, the key ﬁgure of Worden’s second phase of republican writing, is seen as a central opponent to the restored monarchy from his continental exile in the Netherlands. Scott argues that English republican writers drew strongly on Aristotelian natural law theory, Ciceronian rhetoric of liberty, and Livian and Machiavellian militarism, as well as on a homegrown constitutionalism. Worden argues for the centrality, in English republican writings, of ‘the classical vision of Italian Renaissance humanists’, a ‘desire to learn from and to emulate the achievements of the commonwealths of classical antiquity – principally Sparta and, above all, Rome’ (Worden 1991b, 444). Sharpe agrees that the ‘classical idiom’ represented ‘another shared language of values among the governing classes of England. It was an idiom that reinforced a vision of a moral universe and a harmony

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secured through moderated passions’. Indeed, ‘classical culture was a culture of discipline and self-regulation for governors and subjects alike’ (Sharpe 2000, 90). But this ‘classical idiom’ was not universally liked among the political elite. For instance, Scott comments that for ‘Hobbes, classical republicanism was a recipe for perpetual civil war. This was demonstrated by the violence of the classical Greek, republican Roman, and Renaissance Italian political worlds’ (Scott 1993, 161–2). However, Sharpe argues that this classical idiom did not adequately provide a means of expressing republican ideals. The ‘republicans had the legacy of no indigenous discourse to represent a new order’. Sharpe contends that although ‘a large uncommitted public remained to be converted, the republicans never found the way to reach them. Republican politics were doomed by the failure of republican rhetoric’. Nevertheless, says Sharpe, ‘[r]hetorically as well as politically, however, Restoration had to be fought for’ (Sharpe 2000, 370–1). Scott makes a case for the theoretical legacy of English republicanism as ‘a theory of and by, rather than against, government’, the ‘key text’ of which is Sidney’s Discourses Concerning Government. English republicans were responding, he argues, to the ‘practical circumstances of the interregnum’ (Scott 2000, 246). He contends that ‘[m]ost English republicanism combined the language of classical republicanism, natural law theory and ancient constitutionalism’. These features ‘were now adapted to speciﬁcally republican purposes, accompanied by republican analyses of the Old Testament’, the latter in a hostility to ‘clerical religious compulsion in general’ and ‘a national church in particular’ (Scott 2000, 295). Algernon Sidney was ‘emphatically a political man’ (West 1990, xvi). Blom comments that in the mid-1640s, while ‘unwavering against compromises with the king, he nevertheless also opposed the radicals and denied Parliament…the right to sentence the king, which attitude brought him Cromwell’s enmity’ (Blom et al. 1996, xii). From 1652 Sidney held government posts in foreign affairs. He was active in promoting, Blom argues, ‘an aggressive policy, culminating in the outbreak of the ﬁrst Anglo-Dutch war in 1652’. This foreign policy was ‘more informed by economic interests than by the apocalyptic puritanism of the preceding years, and the previous political ambition of a union of protestant nations was replaced by a head-on attack on England’s commercial rival’. However, Blom notes, then after Cromwell’s dispersal of the Rump Parliament by armed force, Sidney ‘regarded Cromwell as the incarnation of the vices of monarchical power and tyranny’ (Blom et al. 1996, xiii).

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In exile in Holland after Charles II regained the throne, Sidney wrote his Court Maxims, Discussed and Refelled in 1664–65. Notwithstanding his previous involvement in ﬁghting the Dutch in the ﬁrst AngloDutch war, Sidney ‘intended this text to unite English republicans, and possibly their Dutch counterparts as well, into an effort to re-establish the Commonwealth in England’ (Blom et al. 1996, xi), by arguing against ‘the growing bond between the Orange and Stuart dynasties’ (Blom et al. 1996, xv). According to Blom, Sidney’s Court Maxims ‘addressed a particular audience and had a particular political purpose. The “godly English”, predestinarians and excited millenarians of the mid-sixties as well as the more sedate Restoration dissenters, had to be inspired to act together with other opponents of the Stuarts, including if possible the Dutch’ (Blom et al. 1996, xvi). The Dutch republic is held up as a shining example of a country experiencing, in the absence of a monarchy, prosperity and ﬂourishing trade as well as freedom of religion, in contrast to England under Charles II. Court Maxims is designed to appeal, says Blom, to ‘an elite of the mind, to a moral aristocracy’ (Blom et al. 1996, xx). According to Blom, the ‘vices of monarchy, or even its inherent viciousness as Sidney has it in the peroration of the Court Maxims, cannot be checked by the institutional balances of a perfect constitution’. Recourse is needed to ‘the liberty provided by laws’, for a king will always act in his own interest (Blom et al. 1996, xxiii). However, as Blom remarks, De Witt ‘turned his proposal down; he was probably afraid of possible adverse consequences for the Dutch republic in the case of a failure’ (Blom et al. 1996, xiv). Sidney was ‘already in the process of losing ground as a politician among English exiles on the Continent because of his abrasive character’ (Blom et al. 1996, xi). In addition ‘Sidney’s compatriot republicans’ were not ‘eager to make common cause with the Dutch, among other reasons because the Republic had recently not prevented the abduction of three regicides from Dutch territory’ (Blom et al. 1996, xiv). In consequence, Blom concludes, ‘the shifting political situation made its [Court Maxims] publication inappropriate and left it gathering dust in the archives’ (Blom et al. 1996, xi). The neo-Harringtonian campaign was led from the Lords (restored along with the monarch in 1660) by the earl of Shaftesbury from 1675. His was a vision, notes Worden, ‘in which the medieval nobility was restored to the glory of which Harrington’s diagnosis had deprived it’. Sidney had been ‘an inﬂuential member of the Commonwealth government in 1652–63’ (Worden 1991b, 460). But now, building on

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Milton’s praise for the medieval barons, Sidney looked back to the virtues of the Saxon rather than Norman nobility, ‘a large class, too large for the crown to corrupt it’, supplying ‘natural leaders of the freeholder class’ (Worden 1991b, 459). As Worden comments, Sidney was ‘executed for treason in 1683 for plotting against Charles II’ (Worden 1991b, 460). His two major works, both concentrating on critique rather than constructive alternatives, but demonstrating a preference ‘for a mixed government in which aristocracy is the predominant form’ (Worden 1991b, 460), were published posthumously. Court Maxims was, as we have seen, written in the mid-1660s, while he was in exile in Holland, ‘in the hope of inciting a rising in England during the second Anglo-Dutch war and of securing the aid of Dutch republicans in the party of John de Witt’. Discourses Concerning Government, possibly more inﬂuential than any other English seventeenth-century republican writing, written in 1681–83, also had ‘an insurrectionary purpose’, in Worden’s words, calling as it did for resistance and tyrannicide, ‘and the manuscript of it was cited by the prosecution at Sidney’s trial as evidence of treason’ (Worden 1991b, 460). Sidney’s unﬁnished Discourses Concerning Government were written in 1681–83 in response, as Locke had done, to Filmer’s Patriarcha: A Defence of the Natural Power of Kings against the Unnatural Liberty of the People, published in 1680 but written forty years previously. The Discourses were, as Blom remarks, a characteristically ‘forthright rebuttal’ of Filmer’s work (Blom et al. 1996, xv); they were published posthumously in 1698. But as well as offering a ‘point-by-point rejoinder to Filmer’s argument’, Blom argues that Sidney’s ‘targets were evidently to promote a revolt in England, to re-establish the credibility of parliament after its virtual abrogation by Charles II, and to urge the obligation of the people to undo or kill its tyrant’ (Blom et al. 1996, xv–xvi), drawing on arguments from the Court Maxims. Sidney’s argument is based on the view that ‘no government was thought to be well constituted, unless the laws prevailed above the commands of men; and they were accounted as the worst of beasts, who did not prefer such a condition before a subjection to the ﬂuctuating and irregular will of a man’ (Sidney, 1990, 6). Sidney developed an argument about political obligation in many ways similar to that of Locke, but put it to an overtly republican cause. Like Locke, he argues for a pre-political freedom, from which derives a right that cannot legitimately be violated by a king. But Sidney argues more forcefully than Locke for a right of resistance against hereditary monarchy, in what West views as amounting to a ‘manifesto for…revolution’

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(West 1990, xxxvi). Section 6 of Chapter 1 of the Discourses is called, uncompromisingly, ‘God leaves to man the choice of forms in Government; and those who constitute one form may abrogate it’. We come now to Worden’s third phase of English republicanism. Nevile, like Sidney a member of the republican Council of State, was instrumental in the early 1680s, with his Plato Redivivus, in seeking ‘to inﬂuence the parliamentary opposition which sought to exclude the king’s Catholic brother, the future James II, from the succession’. Worden argues that Plato Redivivus repeated the thesis of Oceana. Nevile ‘urged Charles II’, though in vain, ‘to do what Harrington had urged Cromwell to do: to recognise that his path to both survival and glory lay in a voluntary reduction of his powers’ (Worden 1991b, 458). Morrill maintains that while the ‘abolition of the monarchy and the experience of republican rule’ in England in the middle of the seventeenth century had ‘had a very limited direct impact’, later on, in the 1690s, devolutionary republican feeling was strong. He contends that the alternatives for England were on the one hand ‘a strengthening of the central executive and administration at the expense of the independent county gentry’, or on the other to witness ‘a further withering away of the centre, turning England into a series of semi-autonomous county-states, self-governing, undertaxed, stagnant’. The latter course of action appealed to a spectrum of interests. It was the preference of ‘a range of “Country parties” visible in the Parliaments of the 1620s, the neutralist groups in the Civil war, and many Whigs in the 1670s and 1680s.’ It was also the choice of ‘republicans such as John Milton, who admired the Dutch republic’. Morrill continues that, ‘[m]ost dramatically’, the devolutionary impulse ‘was the ideal of democratic groups such as the Levellers’, groups who ‘wanted to make governors more accountable, government subservient to the liberties of a sovereign people, and who therefore urged devolution of power to elected local magistrates and juries’. However, he notes, ‘these “Country” ideologies were incompatible with the development of a global empire’ (Morrill 1984, 342). Thus it may be the case that there was more sympathy with De Witt’s republicanism in England during the 1690s than there had been in the 1650s. Indeed Pocock asserts that Harrington’s ideas, as reinterpreted by the neo-Harringtonians or ‘commonwealth’ style of political discourse, ‘helped make the eighteenth century what it notoriously is, the most classical-minded of English centuries’. Pocock argues that in political thought, ‘the humanist Renaissance came late to England, and that it was Harrington and the neo-Harringtons who

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gave it its true form’ (Pocock 1972, 127). Worden conﬁrms that after the Restoration in 1660, ‘it was “country party” or “country Whig” politicians and landowners to whom republican works came to be principally addressed and among whom republicanism – albeit in a diluted form – exerted its political inﬂuence’ (Worden 1991b, 445). Worden argues that the third phase of republican writings in England, in the 1690s, reﬂected an anxiety no less great than in the previous stages, that corruption and European absolutism cast long shadows over government in England. On the one hand, ‘the Revolution of 1688–9 did produce a tendency to think of England less as a victim of a general European trend than as a country which, through providence or geography or mere luck, had retained a liberty that the rest of Europe had lost.’ But at the same time the fear was strong that ‘England might succumb at any moment’, and the urgent task was that ‘the constitution be reformed “in time”, before decay had made renovation “too late”’ (Worden 1991b, 470). In summing up the character of English republicanism and comparing it with Dutch republicanism, a number of factors complicate but do not compromise the enterprise. Notwithstanding Peltonen’s work, there is still a strong case for the absence of a pre-Civil War active tradition of republican thinking in England. Important differences in ideas and background among the heterogeneous group of republican writers in England also militate against easy deﬁnitions. On both these counts there is a strong contrast with the position in the United Provinces. In English republican writers there can be found justiﬁcations of regicide and uneasiness about regicide, support for Cromwell and resistance to Cromwell, the elimination of politics and recommendations by ‘radical Whigs’ for violent overthrow of government (Burgess 1998, 227), sometimes over time within the same author. Dzelzainis points out that ‘Hobbes was the ﬁrst to conceive of regicide and republicanism as twinned but opposite phenomena’ (Dzelzainis 2002, 32), but English republican writers varied in their attitude to this twinning – sometimes across the course of their own careers. In summing up English republicanism Scott makes the useful point that it ‘cannot be reduced to that antimonarchical component which was a negative precondition for the achievement of positive objectives’. Nor, he says, ‘can it be reduced to a particular language or a particular constitutional vision since these things were held by most republicans to be secondary forms’ (Scott 2002, 61). At the same time it is difﬁcult to see how Scott’s generalisations hold across all English republican writers or even across their own careers.

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A second complicating feature is the relationship between ‘commonwealth’ ideas and republican ones, and of both with the ‘radical Whigs’. The complex connections between these ideas and groups also render it hazardous to make unconditional generalisations about English republicanism. Worden calls attention to what Kelsey, a historian of iconography and ceremonies, ‘calls the “vernacular” or “practical republicanism” of the [Interregnum] regime’, which ‘may, like so much that was argued on the government’s behalf, be better described as a commitment to parliamentary sovereignty’ (Worden 2002, 326). Worden notes, for instance, that one of the Commonwealth’s new political symbols, the Great Seal, ‘advertises the rule, not of a republic, but of a parliament’. Another example concerns the replacement of the regnum usage for dating the years, for instance ‘the ﬁrst year of our reign’, with the new form of words, ‘the ﬁrst year of freedom by God’s blessing restored’ (Worden 2002, 327). Another factor militating against a simple deﬁnition of English republicanism is the constitutional diversity of the proposals submitted by English republican writers. The constitutional framework with which most republican writers continued to work, or to challenge, recommended in turn monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or mixed forms as alternative institutional mechanisms, instruments which did not for all of them necessarily have political values immediately attached to them as they do now. Understanding this constitutional framework is a hurdle for a modern understanding to overcome, ﬁxed as it is in equating republicanism with democratic government. Shifts in political circumstances during the interregnum period, between the Restoration and events of 1688–89, and in the post-1688 period, together with strong continuities across the whole period (Harris 1990, 2) compound the matter. This series of dramatic shifts in power contrasts strongly with the ongoing modiﬁed pendulum effect of politics in the United Provinces. A further factor is that Cromwell’s status with republican writers was at best as an equivocal republican political leader. In the United Provinces, in comparison, De Witt attracted a strong republican consensus and never became a dictator. The army, ‘at once a source of radical demands and a stimulus to them’, was also a signiﬁcant political player in the English case in a way it was not in the Dutch case. Worden notes that Cromwell’s army ‘called for guarantees of liberty of conscience and for an end to tithes. Hostility and mistrust characterised the relations between parliament and army over religion as over much else’. Worden concludes that ‘[e]ven so, Cromwell looked for

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common ground’ (Worden 1998, 245). While it nevertheless makes sense to speak of English republicanism, it is not a united or programmatic practice or set of ideas, whereas De Witt’s ‘True Liberty’ policy did contain a political programme that was supported during the 1650s and 1660s by a broad consensus. In thinking about what English republicans shared, Worden argues strongly that equality ‘had never been an absolute aim’ (Worden 1991b, 463). While extremes of ‘wealth and poverty’ were regarded as ‘enemies of both virtue and stability’ (Worden 1991b, 464), even Nedham had sought not equality but ‘an equability of condition among the members, so that no particular man or men shall grow over-great’. Harrington’s ‘equal commonwealth’ was designed to implement the same principle (Worden 1991b, 463). Importantly, in line with the absence of an aim of radical equality, ‘equal’ for these writers could either mean ‘more equal’, or ‘equality “proportionate to merit”’, or a ‘fair distribution of ofﬁce-holding’ achieved by the principle of rotation (Worden 1991b, 464). English republicans favoured the ‘Aristotelian location of virtue in the mean’, variously identiﬁed as the gentry, the nobility (the middle of the three estates), or the class of freeholder-citizens (Worden 1991b, 464). Davis argues, following Scott’s view of Harrington as a ‘subverter – rather than a transmitter – of the language of classical republicanism’ (Davis 1998, 241), that Harrington’s recommendation of equality in Oceana cannot be taken at face value. Equality for Harrington ‘does not mean personal equality of property ownership’, for the ‘“levelling of men’s estates” may be seen as “an odious thing”’ (Davis 1998, 230). According to Davis, ‘Harrington’s use of equality is to suggest not equal rights or privileges but equal subordination’ (Davis 1998, 241). Moreover, for English republicans the notion of liberty entailed more than ‘a mere absence of restraint’. Worden identiﬁes that ‘Milton’s distinction between “liberty” and “licence” was drawn, too, by Nedham and by Sidney’, and despite his ‘aversion to political tension and disorder, Harrington subscribed to’ a similar ‘idea of civil virtue and participation’. Harrington ‘was at one with his fellow republicans’ in agreeing with Machiavelli’s distinction between courts which ‘inevitably generated “luxury” and its “inseparable companion, idleness”’, and commonwealths ‘distinguished by the “frugality”, “industry”, “sobriety”, and “honest poverty” of their citizens’ (Worden 1991b, 468). Worden argues soundly that deﬁnitional problems around the term English ‘republicanism’ do not invalidate the usefulness of the term. It is true, he says, that ‘[n]o single deﬁnition of republicanism can claim

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historical authenticity for itself’. Indeed, he notes, ‘[n]o one in or before the Puritan Revolution called himself or herself a republican. “Republican” and “republicanism” were terms of abuse and caricature’. But, says Worden, that ‘does not necessarily make them useless to us’. The term ‘“Puritanism” was a smear too, rejected by those to whom it was applied. Yet its usages corresponded, however indiscriminately, to a movement of belief at the centre of the civil war for which we need a word and for which Puritanism, provided we know what we mean by it, is a good and perhaps the only one’. While, Worden argues, only ‘the very loosest deﬁnitions of republicanism would award it a comparable centrality’, nevertheless, ‘that word too, provided we know what we mean by it, has its purpose and perhaps even its necessity’ (Worden 2002, 307). Worden remarks that English republican writings repeatedly contrast ‘the shameful paciﬁsm and humiliating betrayals of Stuart foreign policy and the glorious exploits, equal at least to those of Greece and Rome, which had been achieved by the Long Parliament’. In particular, Worden refers not only to that ‘parliament’s annexation of Ireland and Scotland’, but also to ‘its proposed union with the Dutch’. He notes that these policies ‘excited an interest in the question how new territorial acquisitions could be best governed: as colonies, or through the formation of equal or unequal leagues, or through the naturalisation of the conquered peoples’ (Worden 1991b, 467). In retrospect (by no means the only legitimate perspective) the English republican ‘experience’ is part of a story of the development of the increasingly uniﬁed, centralised state, and the development of constitutional monarchy and liberal democracy. The increasingly powerful role of the Westminster parliament is central to all three developments. Political life was ‘more focussed on the national scene’, with England a centralised state ‘more directed from the capital city, London’. The political elite were largely drawn from the landed aristocracy, and politicians appealed to central power such as ‘state patronage, to help them overcome their rivals’ (Speck 1995, 174–5). The Westminster Parliament (especially after the Union of Parliaments of England and Scotland in 1707) was a natural focus for this organisation of political life. The crisis of 1688–89 is the deﬁning and culminating moment of a process of instability that goes back to 1642, if not to 1603. The republicanism of the Interregnum had been one brief phase in this process. After 1689 a less turbulent process can be perceived, moving towards the consolidation of parliamentary sovereignty and government and away from monarchical power.

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Dutch republicanism is part of a story of tenaciously reasserted local and particularistic self-government by the States and town councils in the context of regional complementarity, not attached to a centralising trend or ﬁxed-boundaried territory. The United Provinces were ‘notoriously the most decentralised polity in Europe’, Speck argues, and political life was dominated by the political elite of urban municipal and provincial oligarchies. Dutch republicanism emerged as the outcome of a defence of a way of doing politics. Importantly, the art of compromise developed in part to avoid the intervention of central authorities such as the army, and so to ‘contain conﬂict within the locality’ (Speck 1995, 175). There are two very different rhythms at work here in English and Dutch politics, and the contrast between these mid-seventeenth-century republican episodes needs to be placed in this context. By the end of the seventeenth century the legacy of republicanism was more strongly evident in the United Provinces than in England, but a broader section of the population in England were represented in a formal institution of political participation. As Speck comments of the seventeenth century, ‘monarchical England was more “democratic” than Republican Holland’ (Speck 1995, 187).

5 Dutch Republicanism

Chapter 4 explored the grounds for comparison and afﬁnities between English and Dutch republicanism, and accented the distinctiveness of the two cases. This chapter identiﬁes two further, crucial dimensions of Dutch republicanism, before going on to address Spinoza’s Dutch perspective, and the key elements and character of his republicanism in the following chapters. This chapter thus completes the analysis of the context in the light of which Spinoza’s political works are being considered. Speciﬁcally this chapter examines the signiﬁcance of the Dutch mentality for the character of Dutch republicanism, and considers the role in Dutch republicanism of the Holland-centric factor.

The signiﬁcance of the Dutch mentality Van Gelderen conﬁrms that ‘[f]rom the very beginning of the protest against the policies of Philip’s government, Dutch authors built their conceptions of good government on the constitutional legacy of their provinces and cities’ which ‘consisted of the great charters of the late medieval period’ (van Gelderen 1999, 191). Hibben’s study charts in detail an example of the particularistic perspective of the different provinces and towns (Hibben 1983, chapters 5 and 6). The particularistic recourse to local historical precedent described by van Gelderen and Hibben, and its continuity through the seventeenth century, is profoundly signiﬁcant for understanding the nature of Dutch – and Spinoza’s – republicanism. This construction and reconstruction of a sense of continuity contrasts sharply with the painful and protracted transformation of foundational sources of meaning that English political culture underwent, and informing political discourse, from the idealisation of harmony to the assumption of adversary politics, 154

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discussed by Sharpe (2000). In the Netherlands the ‘living’ indigenous legacy was regarded as a primary and active force mediating political and legal thinking and practice. Because of the widespread consensus about the importance of and belief in a traditionalist practice informing political debate and action, and the assimilation of innovation to it, this shared predisposition deserves to be called a mentality. Memory of iconic charters ﬁgured prominently in this Dutch mentality, as does the deeply ingrained habit of political consensus-building from a plurality of provincial interests acknowledged as legitimate. The conception of a Dutch mentality that emphasises a political identity based on traditionalist practice gains its force from the Dutch perception – and Spinoza’s – that it was the primary organising framework informing political culture, political debate, and the conduct of politics. Whether or not the tradition ‘really’ existed, and whether or not other factors were ‘really’ at work can neither be proved nor disproved. In order to fully understand what Spinoza intended in what he wrote about politics, to understand his distinctive intention for what it was, in terms of the rhetorical resources he regarded as available to him, we need to see how the political culture of Spinoza’s time came about. The focus is on what political actors in the United Provinces thought their political culture was, their shared consciousness about the meaning of the claim about the privileges, and how they construed it through their actions and words. Certainly we have already seen that the new/old claim about traditional practice in the form of the privileges stood as shorthand for many aspects of political meaning and practice. Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk refer to a useful conception of political culture by Keith Baker as ‘a “set of discourses and practices” through which members of a political community make claims upon each other and interact politically’ (Castiglione and Hampsher-Monk 2001, 2). This notion of political culture is useful in helping to specify the signiﬁcance of the Dutch mentality. Shetter also usefully describes culture as ‘a type of patterned behaviour’, a ‘set of rules imposed on a basic physical and social reality’ (Shetter 1971, 10, 11), although his suggestion of an underlying ‘reality’ is less so. Sharpe’s deﬁnition of a political culture is also pertinent. For Sharpe, political culture is ‘conceived as that network of languages, customs, practices and rituals through which and by which contemporaries discerned and constructed meaning and the values of their society’ (Sharpe 2000, 348). Lloyd and Gatens’ discussion of a social imaginary as ‘lodged in social practices and institutional structures in ways that make it an anonymous feature of collective mental life’ (Lloyd and Gatens 1999, 39) also

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serves to enrich the idea of mentality used here. The Dutch political mentality referred to here, in terms of a general disposition to appeal to forms of traditionalist practice, the privileges, and to prefer practice to theorising, cuts across different social classes and ideological positions. It follows that we need to take seriously the notion of political culture, and so of the Dutch mentality. Tradition in this form existed as a powerful imaginary. The imagined tradition exercised a potent inﬂuence over political perception, discourse, action and the forms of contestation. The transcendental argument that underpins these claims operates by working at one remove from the subject-matter, but its force is gained also from the ﬁercely held belief, shared by Spinoza with the Dutch, in the explanatory power of this form of tradition. The Dutch and Spinoza operated politically in terms of a traditionalist political identity and they invoked the tradition and its uniqueness to legitimise their political debate and action. Indeed it was the assumption that there was an ongoing tradition, even in the face of radical de facto constitutional innovation, that enabled the Dutch to engage in political life. There was no rupture in the rhetorical resources used to respond to new political challenges as Sharpe and others describe as being present in the case of England’s ‘troubles’. This chapter, then, represents the ﬁnal part of this context for understanding Spinoza’s political intervention. The book as a whole aims to contribute to showing what is distinctive about Spinoza’s republicanism in the light of Dutch political culture in this sense. The use of the transcendental argument also avoids two problems that can be associated with a term like the ‘Dutch mentality’. By methodologically staying at one remove from the question of how Dutch political reality should ‘really’ be characterised, one avoids falling into an essentialist trap, whereby a collection of diverse phenomena over time is ‘explained’ in circular fashion by an essence which is external to them. This understanding of the ‘Dutch mentality’ also avoids resort to a problematic deﬁnition of national characteristic as a catch-all explanation of events. Historians of collective mentality such as Braudel make a strong case for the autonomy of this branch of history, and for the view that mentality is an independent variable which is not determined by economic conditions or other factors. The term ‘mentality’ is employed here primarily to highlight the importance of the background of values and language in which ideas are expressed, for understanding intellectual history in the context of political history. Taylor makes use of the same understanding of the

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term in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (1989, 191). Hampsher-Monk (1992, x–xi) also presents a well-expressed short account of the role of ‘language’ in the study of political thought that supports the approach taken here. Sharpe’s description of a ‘world-view’ (Sharpe 2000, 85) also intersects with what is meant here by the distinctive Dutch mentality. Both terms deﬁne and promote a shared and normative predisposition to understand and express experience in certain conventional ways. Both provide a lens reﬂecting a shared understanding of the world and a shared language for describing and challenging it. In both, experience is interpreted and reinterpreted in the light of dominant ideas and beliefs. The signiﬁcance of the Dutch mentality is that, throughout the shifting patterns of groupings of provinces, and parts of provinces, throughout this period, that habitual mentality does not alter. The Dutch mentality provides a thread through puzzling aspects like the reluctance of the Dutch to recognise their republican status, the mismatch between theory and practice, the ambiguous constitutional position and, in part, the negative reception given to Spinoza’s political contribution. Rather than other, or plural, forms of legitimation such as a language of universal rights, natural law or some other form of philosophical claim, or ancient pan-European cultural principles or rational policy, the attitudes informing Dutch politics exhibit a strongly practical, habitual and parochial perspective. This perspective is closely associated with the vital assumption of the regional complementarity framing the heterogeneous interests of the provinces and towns. Van Gelderen describes this distinctive Dutch mentality, in which deep symbolic meaning about the value of the political community is invested in tangible objects, when he comments that the ‘charters were the expression of a long-lasting, powerful ideological current in the Low Countries’. In particular, the ‘charters of 1477 and the Joyous Entry were the expression of this ideal of self-government’ (van Gelderen 1999,191) by the different cities and provinces, legitimating both political practice and resistance. The history of the Dutch Republic exhibits not only an entrenched mismatch between theory and practice in politics, but also a persistent disjunction between the terms of political life and constitutional form. Along with these two normalised anomalies goes a profoundly practical habitual outlook to solving political problems, and a predisposition towards consensus-building. These four features of Dutch political life describe an attitude that is quite distinctive, and does not characterise

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the political and intellectual life of its European neighbours in the same way. The term ‘Dutch mentality’ is used to underline the importance of the features that combine to form this distinctive attitude. In the light of these considerations we can recognise just how remarkable the De Witt period is, in its attempt to advance a fresh political agenda, a byproduct of which was the partial overcoming of some of the mismatch between theory and practice, and in its attempt to provide a reﬂective rationale for political policies, in the True Liberty system. Moreover, by highlighting the importance of the Dutch mentality we can recognise how Spinoza, while being closely engaged with the politics of his time and closely identifying with the republican project, demonstrates his spectacular ‘un-Dutchness’ in at least four ways. Spinoza’s approach is distinctive in the way that he seeks a theoretical answer to the problem of politics, and in that he assumes a philosopher’s correspondence between a practical political problem and a theoretical solution. The transgression of some aspects of a Dutch mentality in Spinoza’s political theory is also evident. Spinoza assumes that systematic thought can be brought to bear upon the problems of the practical world, and supposes that reﬂective thought can to some extent replace traditional practice as a means of dealing with the practical world. Identifying the ways in which Spinoza’s contribution to political thought can and cannot be assimilated, integrated into and accommodated within the Dutch context, are important to enunciate in order to come to understand more fully the character of his thought. But one of the aspects of the Dutch mentality to which De Witt and Spinoza both subscribe very strongly is a political perspective with two positively regarded elements. The ﬁrst is the idea that interests are legitimate in politics, so long as private individual interests are subordinate to and promote public provincial or municipal interests. It must be remembered here that the legitimacy of interests in this context differs markedly from the later Anglo-American liberal tradition in which self-interest is associated with assertive individualism or personal advantage, the polar opposite from a notion of a community good or solidarity. The second is the positive acceptance, not resignation to nor disappointment at, the fact that interests are irreconcilable. In the United Provinces the solidarity that comes from regional complementarity is based on the acceptance of different provincial and city identities and interests. The Dutch mentality is most clearly exhibited in the political and constitutional history of the United Provinces, in particular in the

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absence of a move towards centralisation in the decades after 1579 and in the De Witt period. Rowen speciﬁes the extraordinary manner in which the contingent arrangements of 1579 persisted for two further centuries without further serious attempt to resolve their ambiguities. The Union of Utrecht instantiated two contradictory impulses. It both recognised a limited central body of government, the States General, for the seven northern provinces, but also ‘proclaimed that the sovereign rights of the individual provinces remained intact’. Vranck’s Short Exposition of 1587 reafﬁrmed the two antagonistic propositions. The practical upshot of the Union of Utrecht, as Rowen notes, was that the ‘resulting ambiguity made disputes over authority a virtual certainty’. There was, he conﬁrms, ‘no intention to create a new state nor to create a new constitutional arrangement of power’. However, as Rowen concludes, ‘the Union of Utrecht remained the fundamental law – one might almost say, the substitute for a constitution – until 1795, when the Dutch Republic was extinguished’ (Rowen 1972, 68–9). It is highly signiﬁcant that an international treaty between allies was used, successfully over a long period, in lieu of a constitution in this way. What is extraordinary about this situation is not only that it persisted for two centuries, but that it was accepted, without further serious theorising, reﬂection or amendment, as the basis of governing. Wansink conﬁrms this static constitutional picture when he answers the question, ‘Was there a natural development towards unity?’ by demonstrating that there ‘was no such development. At the end of the eighteenth century the Republic was not markedly more uniﬁed than at the end of the sixteenth century.’ Wansink afﬁrms that it ‘would be quite wrong to consider Dutch political history as a groping for unity’ (Wansink 1971, 155). The resilience of the de facto constitutional settlement can perhaps be understood, at least in part, in terms of the conscious or unconscious pattern provided by an earlier settlement. There is a close resemblance between the Union of Utrecht’s major principle with that of the 1477 settlement with Mary of Burgundy in the form of the ‘Great Privilege’. In both cases a commitment to regional complementarity was established, which both acknowledged a measure of political integration and reafﬁrmed the ﬁercely held independence of the separate provinces. Under De Witt the role and power of the United Provinces were at their most striking, but striking also is the difference between the country’s role and power from its implicit constitutional status. While De Witt recognised and promoted the republican status of the United Provinces, he did not attempt to reform or to formalise its constitutional structure to reﬂect Holland’s dominance.

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Some writers have wanted to account for the lack of constitutional development and its failure to reﬂect either theory or practice, by referring to either economic or strategic factors. Some economic historians, for example, see the economic prosperity of the northern provinces between the middle of the sixteenth and the middle of the seventeenth centuries as the key to this anomalous situation. According to this view, the increase in material wealth, particularly in Holland, and speciﬁcally in Amsterdam, to the cost of blockaded Antwerp, was as the result of Holland becoming ‘the centre of a world-economy’ (Braudel 1979b, 211). These developments occurred at the expense of attention to reﬂection on the domestic political constitution, this argument runs. Thus an important connection is asserted between the success of the Dutch Republic as a major European power and its economic success. The link is thought to be supplied by the ﬂexible structure provided by the Republic being more like a league than a sovereign state. But this concentration of attention leads Braudel, for example, to misinterpret the political strength of the United Provinces’ government. While attributing the respect granted to the United Provinces as a European power by other countries (Braudel 1979b, 193–206) to economic power, he characterises the government, with its ‘amazing degree of decentralisation’ as weak (Braudel 1979b, 179–80). This verdict is based on taking the surface of Dutch politics too literally. The ‘weakness’ was a balance of powerful forces held in tension, often constructively so. It can be argued with at least the same degree of plausibility that the United Provinces’ success was as much due to political as to economic factors. Indeed Price argues forcefully that ‘this political system worked remarkably well in practice’, and that ‘it did so not despite its extreme decentralisation of effective power but because of it’ (Price 1994, 3). He considers that the decentralisation of power was a strength rather than a weakness, a source of stability, successfully working with the grain of local loyalties and identities rather than against them. According to the strategic argument, the very ambiguity of the United Provinces’ de facto constitution was useful to the Dutch in their struggle against the Spanish, allowing for maximum cooperation between the seven provinces with minimum formalised commitment, and thus not ruling out any potential alliances. This perspective maintains that, while this situation continued after 1648, the strategic balance of tensions within the Republic also played an important part in preventing any constructive reform from taking place. However, neither the economic and political nor the strategic arguments can fully account for the hold of tradition on the Dutch

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political mentality. Kossmann describes well this peculiarly Dutch connection between tradition, practice and ideas. He notes that from ‘the late sixteenth century onwards the Dutch had developed a set of ideas and worked out a set of ways to implement them that were eminently practical and, though unsystematic, nonetheless not incoherent’. This loose relationship between ideas and practice that resulted, he remarks, ‘is the astonishing aspect of the Dutch seventeenth century’. Although the history of the United Provinces, Kossmann comments, ‘is full of incidents, odd contradictions, uncompleted tendencies’, with hindsight ‘we can organise this past quite easily in such a way that it looks as if it possessed a logic of its own’. Kossmann reﬂects that while it is clear that ‘freedom in the sense of independence, of provincial sovereignty or particularism, of a non-monarchical, republican form of government and religious and intellectual freedom’ are all ‘different conceptions not necessarily belonging together’, nevertheless ‘it is as if in the Dutch seventeenth century they are quite naturally united in an organic whole’ (Kossmann 1991, 282–3). This Dutch mentality, which goes beyond the kind of necessary contingency highlighted by Rorty (1989), is very evident in Kossmann’s work itself, and it is this understanding that helps to make his perspective on the United Provinces in the seventeenth century so valuable. It is explicit again in Kossmann’s strictures against reaching for too theoretical a coherence in the piece of political and intellectual history being studied here. Kossmann asks, ‘[s]hould we even try to look for a single underlying principle in the chaos of measures taken, executed, withdrawn, or left dormant by all sorts of federal, provincial, and local authorities in a bewildering variety of circumstances?’ The answer, he says, ‘to all these questions is probably “no”’ (Kossmann 1991, 297). Looking speciﬁcally at the practical use to which the Dutch put their valuing of liberty, Kossmann contends in the same vein that, we ‘do not need romantic notions about the nature of the Dutch people to see why the various freedoms it cherished came to be regarded as a coherent whole’. He takes the view that such freedoms ‘resulted from practice rather than from principle’. Kossmann puts forward a strong case that ‘in the Dutch seventeenth century the rulers used freedom’ – that is, ‘independence, provincial autonomy, republicanism, and toleration’ – as an ‘instrument to maintain a precarious equilibrium in an economically, politically, and culturally dynamic society’. That society ‘was in constant danger of being disrupted by the multifarious interests, ideals, convictions, ambitions, and traditions which characterised it’. Kossmann concludes that the ‘Dutch experience showed that

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liberty is an excellent tool to keep a society going’ (Kossmann 1991, 297–8). The way in which Kossmann sees liberty as a ‘tool’, a device or instrument, rather than as an idea or an ethic is indeed an example of the practical-oriented cast of mind being analysed here.

The Holland-centric factor With the beneﬁt of hindsight it became clear that with the Union of Utrecht and subsequent events, and decisively from 1588, but only unalterably with the Peace of Munster of 1648, the dominance of Flanders over the seventeen provinces was superseded by the preeminence of Holland within the seven northern provinces. Correspondingly, the dominance of Antwerp was replaced by that of Amsterdam which, by the end of the sixteenth century was ‘the commercial capital of Europe’ (van Deursen 1999, 145). Moreover, as van der Bijl comments, the death of William II in 1650 increased the power of Holland, in the absence of the counterweight of the Stadholder (van der Bijl 1986, 71–2). Nearly all the writers and political ﬁgures we associate with the Dutch Republic took a pointedly Holland-centric view. Grotius’ book of 1610 on the ancient Batavian Republic, which was inﬂuential across the whole of the United Provinces, focused only on Holland. The De la Courts brothers’ important book of 1662 was called The Interest of Holland, not of the United Provinces. The expanded version of 1669 was likewise called Indication of the Sound Political Grounds and Maxims of the Republic of Holland and West Friesland, noting the traditional association between the two provinces, but not the almost century-old association between the seven northern provinces. Pieter Hooft, a seventeenth-century writer of poetry, drama and history, gloriﬁed Amsterdam and Holland in his work. Vondel, another celebrated ﬁgure among contemporaries, was a dramatist with similarly Holland-centric values. Kossmann comments that both Hooft and Vondel continued ‘the tradition of late medieval drama in the Netherlands, the drama of ideas’ (Kossmann 1987b, 202). Huygens, renowned as the scientist that discovered Saturn’s rings (Skinner 1965, 166), also felt a primary loyalty to Holland. It is no accident that Oldenbarnevelt and De Witt, key political ofﬁce-holders in the United Provinces in the seventeenth century, were both Hollanders and promoted Holland’s interest as the interest of the United Provinces in general. Wansink describes clearly the Hollandcentric policy that dominated the Union. Holland treated the other

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provinces, he says, merely as ‘allies’, who ‘were supposed to know their place’ (Wansink 1971, 143). But Holland’s attitude was not so much that it should dominate the whole, although it did think this, as that what was good for Holland was good for the rest. Roorda identiﬁes (1964, 126) that after 1650 the ‘Republic was virtually run by the regents of Holland’. To ‘emphasise the unlimited sovereignty of the States of Holland’, he observes, some of ‘their supporters went so far as to propound absolutist political theories’. In ‘practice, their power was restrained neither by an “eminent head” of princely birth nor by the “subjects”’. Roorda concludes that on ‘the whole, this system of government worked better than might have been anticipated’ (Roorda 1964, 127). De Witt’s Deduction argued the same point of view openly. As Wansink crucially demonstrates, ‘the Hollanders did not take a supraprovincial point of view’. This attitude, he notes, ‘can be discerned in the famous Deduction (1654) issued by the States of Holland, in which the author (De Witt) justiﬁed the Act of Seclusion’. Wansink argues that ‘De Witt’s reasoning is perfectly simple: whatever was good for Holland was good for the other provinces as well’ (Wansink 1971,143). It is worth emphasising that the one political force in the United Provinces which did not take a Holland-centric view was the House of Orange. Thus the tension between the House of Orange and quasi-republican ﬁgures like Oldenbarnevelt and republican leaders like De Witt can be seen as due not only to commitments to different types of government, but also as the outcome of the House of Orange being regarded as a challenge to the dominance of the Holland-centric viewpoint. Duke identiﬁes a strong historical reason for Holland’s distinctiveness in the Union. Holland, he says, ‘the least Burgundian of the patrimonial provinces, had preserved a large measure of political autonomy’ (Duke 1990, 188). Holland led the way in asserting self-government and independence from the Spanish at least in part because it had a strong tradition of doing so in the Burgundian period. Duke makes the important point that the ‘political dominance of Holland’ in large measure replaced the role of the overlord for the authority of the Union (Duke 1990, 197). Thus far we have looked at only one part of the Holland-centric outlook. For it also contained ramiﬁcations for the other provinces, for foreign relations and for the signiﬁcance of the republican character of the United Provinces. The perspective, held by all Hollanders, was that what was good for Holland was good for the United Provinces in

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general, but without at the same time seeking to encroach upon the territory of the other provinces or extend or impose Holland’s administration over them. But Holland-centricity is more complex than a simple assertion of Holland’s pre-eminence. What underlay this perspective was the assumption of an entrenched pattern of ‘regional complementarity’ which was both economic and governed political allegiances. Regional complementarity had also long enabled the heterogeneity of the different provinces and towns to be a stable feature of political life. This pattern of regional complementarity is a strong feature of the reconceived centre–periphery relations referred to in Chapter 2, for it upsets conventional modern centre–periphery expectations. In the Dutch case the regions form multiple centres that cluster around an ‘absent middle’, the States General. Blockmans describes the network of provincial interdependence and regional complementarity dating back to 1300 that framed Holland’s position. Within an overall shifting pattern of advantage, he shows that Holland’s rising commercial success in the late medieval period ‘cannot be understood apart from its surrounding regions’ (Blockmans 1999, 76). Van Deursen notes that the ‘Low Countries had long grown wealthy from a highly diversiﬁed system of trade and ﬂourishing commercial markets’, and makes the important point that ‘[a]lthough this wealth was not evenly distributed across the region, it was not restricted to just a few cities or provinces’ (van Deursen 1999, 145). But Holland’s taxation contribution gave it important political clout in negotiations in the States General. Van Deursen underlines that ‘Holland paid more than 58 percent of the natural tax burden, and it often gave more.’ Price observes that Holland’s ﬁnancial supremacy was reﬂected in its contribution to the republic, which amounted to more than the other provinces combined (Price 1994, 235). Because, he argues, ‘the Republic could not survive without Holland’, the ‘Generality was prepared to give the province a large say in the affairs of the Republic’. In the light of this reality, van Deursen comments, ‘Holland and the other six provinces seldom failed to reach agreement on the main points of policy’ (van Deursen 1999, 185). As a result any initiative was a non-starter if Holland would not pay its share (Price 1994, 236). Formally Holland’s inﬂuence in the States General was limited to its one vote, like the other provinces. In practice its inﬂuence was often but not always much greater. Price reminds us that through the ofﬁce of Advocate, as held by Oldenbarnevelt, or Pensionary of Holland as held by De Witt, Holland was ‘for long periods the effective head of the government of the Republic’ (Price 1994, 235).

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Kossmann raises the important and perplexing question of why Holland did not ‘make use of its hegemony to transform the Republic into a more united state under its own leadership’ (Kossmann 1991, 286). He articulates the centrally important point that it is difﬁcult to answer this question because in the seventeenth century it was never posed in this form. Van Deursen conﬁrms that in principle and juridically, all seven provinces represented in the States General had equal power, and ‘equal authority to block important decisions with their veto’ (van Deursen 1999, 148). Holland, Kossmann relates, ‘happily abided by the system of provincial sovereignty and obviously did not consider it inimical to its interests’, even though ‘it permitted its partners to exercise a political inﬂuence out of all proportion to their real importance’ (Kossmann 1991, 286–7). Van Deursen points to the importance of the art of ‘persuasie’ practised by all the provinces. This art acknowledged that ‘[o]nly negotiation, compromise, and consensus building offered a way of making policies on divisive issues’, if the balance between the desire to maintain regional independence and the close cooperation required to collectively defeat Spain was going to be maintained (van Deursen 1999, 149). The view that what was good for Holland was good for the United Provinces in general was also expressed in Hollanders’ attitudes to prestigious political posts available in the service of the Union. Roorda speciﬁes how, because of the Revolt, ‘not only did the central government no longer exercise any real power over the towns’ in the seventeenth century, but that also the increasingly oligarchic regent families ‘attached a greater importance to the burgomastership of their own town than to any weighty post in the service of the province or the Union’ (Roorda 1964, 116). Indeed, according to Burke, so little prestige was commonly attached to representing one’s province at the States General, that ‘appointment to these posts outside the city was a kind of banishment for leaders of a losing faction in the Town Council’ (Burke 1994, 45). These very important elucidations by Kossmann, Roorda, and Burke demonstrate how Holland-centrism thus implied not only the importance of Holland but also, ultimately, the relative lack of importance of the Union in the face of the value given to politics and power at municipal level. In this respect the primacy of Holland in the relationship with the United Provinces was reinforced by its mirroring of the same relationship between Amsterdam and Holland (van Deursen 1999, 198). Moreover, Holland-centricity was enhanced by a similar prioritising in the other provinces of town over province, and of province over the United Provinces.

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Holland’s insularity towards the other provinces was complemented by a contractionist foreign policy. For instance, Wansink remarks that ‘Holland opposed the attempts of 1647 at Westphalia to conquer the fourth quarter of Gelderland’. While the ‘prince of Orange warmly favoured the idea of a campaign against Spain and tried to interest the other provinces … Holland’s inﬂuence prevented the realisation of his plans’ (Wansink 1971, 142). Furthermore, again in 1647, Wansink notes the important point that ‘Holland proposed not to admit the provinces of Overijssel, Gelderland and Utrecht as full members to the Union’ (Wansink 1971, 143). But despite Holland’s dominant position, its contractionist foreign policy, and its low regard for the interests of its ‘allies’, Wansink concludes that ‘Holland’s predominance had a unifying effect. It was in Holland’s interest that the federal institutions should function’. Holland ‘tried to dominate the Union, rather than to obstruct its functioning’, and ‘in proportion to its economic resources, Holland’s inﬂuence in the Republic was surprisingly limited’. In fact, Wansink postulates that one ‘could indeed argue that the power of the other provinces was relatively too strong. They could certainly obstruct Holland’s interests rather effectively’ (Wansink 1971, 152). The Holland-centric policy of Holland’s pre-eminence, framed by a long-standing and dynamic pattern of regional complementarity (Blockmans 1999, 78), dominated the United Provinces for nearly two centuries. It was only in the 1780s, with the Patriot Movement, that the ‘political and intellectual hegemony’ of Holland was challenged. It is signiﬁcant that most of the leaders of the Patriot Movement, as well as the ideas, came from the ‘more backward, land-orientated, agrarian areas’ of the Outer Provinces (Wansink 1971, 149). Furthermore Wansink makes the very important observation that the Patriot Movement and its ideas were, for the ﬁrst time, ‘genuinely nationalist’ (Wansink 1971, 150), thus challenging not only Holland’s dominance but also Holland’s fostering of provincial insularity. Two conclusions can be drawn from the examination of the Holland-centric factor for an understanding of the history of the Dutch Republic and of Dutch republicanism in the De Witt period. First we can see that the features of Holland-centrism – insularity, regional complementarity, persuasie, and contractionism – characterise not only the De Witt period, but other, ‘non-republican’ episodes in the Republic’s history as well. Secondly it is clear that Holland-centrism is a very important part of Dutch republicanism in the De Witt period. Whereas Kossmann deﬁnes ‘genuine republicanism’ rather narrowly, as ‘not allowing any interference in political matters by the Orangist court’ (Kossmann 1991, 291), it is clear that Holland and Zeeland were

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so dominant in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that without their economic and political power, the Republic could not have been established or maintained. Holland, and in particular the commercial ports of Amsterdam and Rotterdam, had beneﬁted most from the ending of competition with Antwerp when that city was blockaded and remained in the southern provinces at the Union of Utrecht. Blockmans notes that ‘Antwerp’s rapid rate of growth’ had been ‘the most striking economic phenomenon of the sixteenth century’ (Blockmans 1999, 121). Another, at least as important, feature of the ‘genuine republicanism’ of the De Witt period was, thus, the way in which Holland dominated the Union economically, politically and intellectually, within the context of a balance of tensions and a tradition of political compromise in which Holland did not always get its own way. It is important here to be careful not to regard the economic factor deterministically. Wansink perceptively observes, as already quoted, that ‘in proportion to its economic resources, Holland’s inﬂuence in the Republic was surprisingly limited’. By contrast, Braudel, for instance, tends to engage in economic reductionism when he says, for example, that the ‘interests which Dutch policy and life were unceasingly defending and safeguarding, throughout all these favourable and hostile circumstances’ in the seventeenth century, ‘were those of commerce as a whole’. Braudel affords rather too much weight to economic factors when he argues that such ‘interests dictated and outweighed all else, something which neither religious passion…nor national sentiment…were ever able to do’, concluding that ‘in Holland commercial interests effectively replaced raison d’état’ (Braudel 1979b, 205). The political understanding current in the United Provinces, anchored in the role of claims about legal privileges, in the Dutch mentality and in Holland-centric republicanism, was more important than baldly economic motives. This complex political understanding accounts more satisfactorily for why Holland did not always get its own way in political negotiation, as well as for the absence of a development towards a more explicitly uniﬁed and centralised Dutch state. The high status and value accorded to provincial insularity and provincial independence which Holland-centrism fostered, and which regional complementarity permitted, can be related to the Dutch mentality of valuing traditional practice. The two are linked, in that provincial autonomy was seen to be justiﬁed in the name of the protection of privileges. This, then, is the connection, explored in the following chapters, which can be seen as operating in Spinoza’s statement that ‘it is exceedingly difﬁcult to revoke liberties once granted’ (Spinoza TTP, 74).

6 Spinoza’s Dutch Perspective

This chapter begins to explore the character of Spinoza’s two political texts. Previous chapters have laid the groundwork, providing a framework for understanding some of Spinoza’s assumptions, objectives, and intentions in those works. The signiﬁcance of the history of the United Provinces since the Revolt, and including the De Witt period, has been examined. The style of political practice shaped both by that experience of resistance to Spanish rule and by older, persistent traditions of thinking, interpreting, and doing politics, summed up in part by the notion of a Dutch mentality, has been explored. The precise nature of the Holland-centric factor in the political life of the United Provinces has been discussed. The character of two prime political concepts underpinning political debate in the United Provinces, republicanism and sovereignty, has been examined through this history and in a comparison with England, and the meaning of De Witt’s ‘True Liberty’ system explored. Attention now turns to Spinoza’s political works, in this chapter outlining the Dutch perspective which is clearly evident there. Later in the chapter the Holland-centric factor and the Dutch mentality are assessed in the light of Spinoza’s Marrano status in the United Provinces. Chapter 7 goes on to explore in detail the crucial notions of liberty and sovereignty in Spinoza’s political works. The following chapter builds upon the points established here, and sums up the character of Spinoza’s republicanism. The discussion in this chapter will, then, take the form of ﬁrst describing the political works, and analysing the wealth of evidence of the Holland-centric approach and Dutch mentality they demonstrate in Spinoza’s approach to the conduct of politics. The argument developed in this and the next chapter in particular incorporates a number of quotations from both of 168

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Spinoza’s political works in order accurately to illustrate for an Englishspeaking audience the ﬂavour of the style and content of his writing. Part of the argument of this and the subsequent two chapters is that close attention to the second of Spinoza’s two political treatises, often regarded as secondary or subsidiary, is crucial. It is in the light of both treatises that a fuller understanding is gained of the meaning for Spinoza of democratic and aristocratic government, liberty and sovereignty, and for the character of his republicanism. Balibar also takes seriously the Tractatus Politicus (TP), and emphasises the marked change that can be discerned between the two political treatises. He comments that ‘the two books seem to belong to two entirely different worlds’ (Balibar 1998, 50). However, while Balibar detects a lowering of Spinoza’s horizon of expectations about what politics can achieve in the TP, the second political treatise can also very plausibly be read as Spinoza’s mature and enriched reﬂections on politics and government.

The political works Petry is correct that the primary aim of the De la Court brothers, in publishing their political writings, was to provide arguments recommending certain policies to De Witt and the Dutch public, policies it was in the interest of Holland to pursue (Petry 1984, 153). In contrast Spinoza saw himself as a philosopher, reﬂecting on Dutch politics through an analysis of the basis of good government in general. However, Spinoza’s political works, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP) published in 1670, and the Tractatus Politicus (TP) published posthumously in 1677, also express a Holland-centric perspective no less deeply held. Indeed, Spinoza’s Dutch perspective can be identiﬁed at several levels in his work. His praise of Amsterdam; his many references to Holland and the United Provinces; and his views on religious toleration, liberty, natural rights, sovereignty and representation, all demonstrate a Hollandcentric perspective. The Holland-centric viewpoint is also evident in his attitude to international relations; in the value he attaches to practice over theory in civil life; in his esteem of traditional practice; and in his respect for the moral value attached to traditional practice. The Dutch perspective is also clear in the attention Spinoza gives to the moral value of political policies such as liberty and toleration at the expense of attention to political concepts like authority and obligation in the manner of Hobbes. The ﬁrst part of this chapter, then, will look at the general character of Spinoza’s political works and elicit the Dutch perspective they

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contain, and then discuss brieﬂy the complex Jewish aspect of Spinoza’s Dutch background. Then in the following chapter, Spinoza’s understanding of two key political concepts, liberty and sovereignty, in the TTP and the TP will be considered. Chapter 8 continues the close attention to Spinoza, and will look at the reception his political works received from contemporaries, and then assesses the character of his republicanism in the light of what has been said earlier about Dutch republicanism and Spinoza’s political thought. The focus of attention on Spinoza in this study is of the Dutch context of political meanings summed up in the term republicanism, that was an important framing of his political works, and of the contribution he intended to make to that context. Thus these chapters are intended to complement or enrich, but do not attempt to either replace or replicate, a comprehensive discussion of Spinoza’s political philosophy (see Montag 1999, den Uyl 1983), the links with the Ethics (see Lloyd 1996, Lloyd and Gatens 1999), nor a detailed outline of Spinoza’s radical theology (Smith 1997, Yovel 1989). In the TTP, the earlier of the two political works, Spinoza is ﬁrst concerned to establish the deeply radical proposition that theology and reason are separate, each having its own ‘domain’. The sphere of reason, he argues, is ‘truth and wisdom’, while the sphere of theology is ‘piety and obedience’ (TTP 194). His argument travels from criticising and reinterpreting the notions of superstition, prophecy, divine law, and miracles; setting out a radical rational basis for the interpretation of scripture; downgrading scripture in the notion that scripture teaches simple doctrines; reassessing faith; and culminates in the enormously controversial proposition that the knowledge of revelation and knowledge of philosophy are separate. The massively disputatious force of the argument was to segregate religious knowledge and authority away from the arena of political society, and to establish natural reason as the proper guide in the public domain. Having laid his grounds for analysing politics, government and the political community in civil and not religious terms, Spinoza then goes on to consider the foundations of the state, natural and civil rights, the sovereign’s rights, and concludes that one need not, nor can one transfer all one’s rights to the state. He then examines lessons drawn from the commonwealths of the Hebrews, England, Rome and Holland, asserts the sovereign’s right over matters spiritual, and the work concludes with the recommendation of freedom of speech in a free state. The TTP is a theological-political treatise precisely because Spinoza takes it as signiﬁcant to demonstrate that the realms of theology and

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politics are connected and interrelated, and yet must also be differentiated. Man’s (sic) highest aim, for Spinoza, is to live in a commonwealth which enables him to live out his love of God, to follow the path of God. Spinoza is committed to the view that man’s aim is ultimately religious, but that it requires the necessary political context which allows and enables that aim to ﬂourish. All three forms of government that Spinoza describes are civil forms of government; theocracy is ruled out. Spinoza makes it quite explicit in the Preface to the TTP (6), that the Dutch Republic already fulﬁls this aim: Now, seeing that we have the rare happiness of living in a republic, where everyone’s judgment is free and unshackled, where each may worship God as his conscience dictates, and where freedom is esteemed before all things dear and precious, I have believed that I should be undertaking no ungrateful or unproﬁtable task, in demonstrating that not only can such freedom be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot ﬂourish nor the public peace be secure. In other words, individual freedom, and the ability to grant it, deﬁne good government. As Spinoza reafﬁrms towards the end of the TTP (259), ‘the true aim of government is liberty’. In a famous passage, Spinoza makes clear that liberty is both the end to which good government aspires, and the means of reaching it (TTP 258–9): It follows, plainly, from the explanation given above, of the foundations of a state, that the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. In fact, the true aim of government is liberty. The practical and pragmatic aspects of Spinoza’s theorising are most clearly registered in the TP, which was Spinoza’s last major work, for

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instance when he contends that, ‘on applying my mind to politics, I have resolved to demonstrate…not what is new or unheard of, but only such things as agree best with practice’ (TP 288). The TP, a desacralised account of politics and government, remained unﬁnished at his death. In it Spinoza rehearses the material in the TTP which is directly relevant to political life, taking as given the argument for the strict separation between truths gained from religious knowledge and natural reason, and provides a lengthy examination of monarchical and aristocratic forms of government. The section on democratic government is only three pages long and is incomplete. It is clear that Spinoza intended to follow the section on democracy with chapters on other, general issues (TP 269). The structure of the argument of the work begins with rather perfunctory considerations of natural right, and the rights and functions of the supreme authorities. The section on the best state of a dominion, and then especially the detailed examinations Spinoza undertakes of monarchical, aristocratic and (in intention) democratic dominion, overshadow the early chapters. It is important to note here – a point to which the discussion will return – that the notion of the ‘supreme authorities’ is understood by Spinoza, in the TP, in the very tangible and concrete sense of actual ﬁgures in authority, and not in the sense of a concept of authority as such. It is also highly signiﬁcant that Spinoza’s estimation of democracy undergoes a marked change between the two treatises which is often unacknowledged by Spinoza scholars. In addition his notions of rights, liberty and sovereignty change within the TP. Spinoza’s motivation in writing the TP appears to be two-fold. He demonstrates here more fully the roles played by political and cultural traditions in a particular dominion and its speciﬁcation of liberty. It is likely that he also intended his political ideas to be presented in a more direct and accessible form. His intention differs markedly from Hobbes’s, for whom successive revisions of the political theory are undertaken to reﬁne the conceptual content and make the argument as a whole more coherent. It is noteworthy that, in developing his political views in the TP from those enunciated in the TTP, greater reliance on the practical mentality and on a Holland-centric understanding are clearly evident. Spinoza’s style of argument in the chapters on monarchy, aristocracy and democracy in the TP is marked in this respect in several ways. First the highly conventional structure of his analysis, concentrating largely on a traditional classiﬁcation of types of government, rather than in terms of concepts, expresses the practical character of his theory. But the way in which Spinoza discusses political concepts within the

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context of the three different constitutions (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy), goes beyond the demands of the conventional form. His discussion of political ideas suggests strongly that for Spinoza, abstract concepts change their meaning according to the practical form in which they are found. Second, Spinoza’s examination is prepared to acknowledge that all three types of government may be valid if properly constituted and in line with the traditions of the country being discussed. The three alternatives differ essentially only in the institutional balance by which they organise the polity. The rights and liberties of subjects are the same under any of the three forms of government. For Spinoza, individuals retain the same natural rights, liberty and freedom of worship, whichever of the three models of free dominion they live in. Democracy does not extend and develop rights and liberties, or the importance of political debate, more than other forms of government. Spinoza’s praise of democracy is not opposed to equal commendation for other forms, as it would be today. Again the conventional form carries a further purpose, registering a view that demonstrates the traditionalist character of his theory. The role of practice in Spinoza’s theory is also found in his important view that legitimacy rests upon the recognition by rulers of the value of social practice, expressed in the form of respecting distinctive local honoured legal customs and traditions. As Lloyd and Gatens conﬁrm, ‘normativity, for Spinoza, is grounded in the judgements of political powers and institutions, including the historical legacy of past institutions that are continuous with those in the present’ (Lloyd and Gatens 1999, 128). Third, Spinoza develops his argument in these chapters by ﬁrst laying down what he regards as the true ‘foundations’ of monarchy, and then adapting only what is necessary when he progresses to aristocracy. Thus he does not start afresh with each form of government, but sees them all as sharing a strong and common foundational basis. The conventional nature of this procedure also enables Spinoza to make a point with forceful local meaning. The foundational metaphor is a very important part of Spinoza’s argument in these chapters, and it expresses Spinoza’s aim of providing an institutional basis of government appropriate to any country and which takes into account its own customs and traditions, strong enough to withstand the internally corrupting inﬂuences at work. According to Spinoza, external threats can only partially be safeguarded against, by building adequate city fortiﬁcations etc., whereas internal threats can be safeguarded against completely, through careful measures of institutional design. Spinoza is a proceduralist in this sense.

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Spinoza’s faith in institutional design here clearly arises from his reﬂections upon the shortcomings of the De Witt government. Spinoza relates his discussion of aristocracy directly to the situation in Holland and the United Provinces under De Witt, and his attitude is very Holland-centric. He argues explicitly ‘that the Dutch thought, that to maintain their liberty it was enough to abandon their count, and to behead the body of their dominion, but never thought of remoulding it, and left its limbs’. In consequence, says Spinoza, ‘it is no wonder that most of its subjects have not known, with whom the authority of the dominion lay’ (TP 376). According to Spinoza, De Witt should have reformed the constitution and restructured the political institutions of the United Provinces if he had wanted to keep the Stadholder out permanently. But his criticism of De Witt is qualiﬁed. Spinoza concedes that De Witt’s government was ‘far too few to govern the multitude and suppress their powerful adversaries’, and so De Witt is not to be blamed. Spinoza defends De Witt, probably self-consciously in opposition to conventional Dutch opinion after De Witt’s fall, when he takes the view that ‘the sudden overthrow of the said republic has not arisen from a useless waste of time in debates’. Spinoza had argued earlier that political debate is valuable, in opposition to many in the United Provinces who had criticised De Witt for allowing too much talk, negotiation and appeasement, and for taking too little decisive action. In contrast with our modern conﬂation of ‘politics’ and ‘democratic politics’, the high importance Spinoza attaches to political debate (and the council as the highest organ of government) is quite separate for him from the issue of whether a democratic or an aristocratic structure of government is to be preferred. Coming back to Spinoza’s faith in institutional design, in a direct and sympathetic reﬂection on the downfall of De Witt’s regime, Spinoza attributes its end to ‘the misformed state of the said dominion and the fewness of its rulers’ (TP 376). In other words, according to Spinoza, De Witt’s republic could have become an aristocracy of several cities – Spinoza’s preferred form of aristocracy – and thus a less personalised regime, if it had followed and implemented the institutional arrangements described by Spinoza in this chapter. Again intervening in a very local political debate, Spinoza argues that swearing an oath on one’s country’s safety and liberty is more effective than an oath to God (TP 369). This is one of many examples of Spinoza seeking to set out watertight rules to guard against the corrupting effects which characterise men’s natures (selﬁshness, lust for power

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and self-interest, etc.). Spinoza holds the view that if these rules are given an institutional basis in the foundations of the dominion, the state will be protected from a loss of liberty that occurs through the deterioration of the commonwealth due to corruption (TP 357, 361, 367, 372 and generally throughout Chapters 8 and 9). Although the thrust of Spinoza’s argument in the TTP was to defend civil liberties and religious toleration, he does not go on to frame his discussions in the TP of different forms of government in terms of what will promote the liberty of the subject. In these chapters Spinoza is concerned to set out proposals for the proper institutional structures which will be enduring and incorruptible, and which will form the true foundations for the (in theory) three possible types of free dominion. However, while Spinoza argues that each of the three types of government may, if properly constituted, result in a civil state – a free dominion – Spinoza’s own mature preference is quite clear if we compare his general deﬁnition of different types of dominion with the conclusions of his argument in the chapters on monarchy, aristocracy and democracy later in the TP. Much has been made of Spinoza’s statement in the TTP in favour of democracy, but in the TP it is clear that one type of aristocracy (of more than one city) is preferred, in part because it best highlights the central role Spinoza wishes to give to the council. Haitsma Mulier makes a similar point when he notes that ‘Spinoza situated his version of aristocracy quite close to democracy …by deﬁning these two forms in a singular fashion’ (Haitsma Mulier 1980, 187). Thus when Spinoza introduces the notion of dominion, in the chapter on natural right, immediately after the Introduction, he argues (TP 297) that he holds dominion, to whom are entrusted by common consent affairs of state – such as the laying down, interpretation, and abrogation of laws, the fortiﬁcation of cities, deciding on war and peace, etc. But if this charge belong to a council, composed of the general multitude, then the dominion is called a democracy; if the council be composed of certain chosen persons, it is an aristocracy; and if, lastly, the care of affairs of state and, consequently, the dominion rest with one man, then it has the name of monarchy. The chapters on monarchy, however, show that Spinoza wishes to limit severely the powers of the monarchy, and to this effect he grants much of the effective power under monarchy to a council. Spinoza restricts the monarch in several crucial ways. In the monarchical

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constitution he outlines, the several councils for decision-making, law and local city administration ﬁgure centrally. The monarchical constitution is not at all about elucidating the monarch’s powers. The type of positive law Spinoza outlines limits the monarch’s actions as much as any citizen’s. The justiﬁcation given for these restrictions on the monarch’s powers is that the monarch must be insulated from the political life of the country so that he can choose, on its merits, one of the opinions offered by the council without knowing who put it forward in the council. The monarch’s power to make decrees is therefore severely circumscribed by the range of opinions offered by the council, giving the council the power of agenda-setting. Spinoza defends this outcome on the grounds that, ‘the people’s welfare is the highest law, or the king’s utmost right’. It follows, according to Spinoza, that the ‘king’s utmost right is but to choose one of the opinions offered by the council, not to decree anything, or offer any opinion contrary to the mind of all the council at once’ (TP 330 and Chapter 7 generally). Spinoza’s political concerns are clear when the king’s ‘right’ resembles no more than a duty. His political preferences are also evident when he engages with the widely discussed view in favour of monarchy on the grounds that ‘war is much more happily conducted by kings’. Spinoza argues that ‘it is manifest folly, I say, that men should choose slavery in time of peace for the sake of better fortune in war’ (TP 330). The local resonance of this argument would not have escaped Spinoza’s Dutch audience. Furthermore it is important to note that this is an example of Spinoza utilising and providing a justiﬁcation for a commonly held Dutch political belief, and not using speciﬁcally ‘republican’ ideas from other, foreign, sources. When Spinoza argues that ‘a king…cannot by himself…know what will be to the interest of the dominion’ (TP 330), it is clearly evident that Spinoza’s estimation of monarchy in fact resembles closely the view held by the regent republican government of De Witt, with its de facto constitution based on cities, as in Holland (TP 330). The carefully worded Holland-centric and anti-Orange references of some of Spinoza’s other provisions for monarchy are also clear, for instance in the distrust of alliances with foreigners. Spinoza is at pains to insist that the ‘king must not be allowed to contract a foreign marriage, but only to take to wife one of his kindred, or of the citizens’. The resonance of this prohibition as a commentary on the dynastic marriages between the Stuarts and the House of Orange during the seventeenth century would have been immediate with Spinoza’s audience. Moreover, if the king were to

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marry a citizen, Spinoza speciﬁes that it is on condition that ‘her near relations become incapable of holding ofﬁce in the commonwealth’ (TP 326). Spinoza’s notion of democracy, like his proposals for monarchical government, leans towards aristocracy. Indeed he limits the scope of the democracy such that it is only on a technicality that it is not an aristocracy. In a democracy, according to Spinoza, all citizens, as deﬁned by the law of the dominion, ‘have a right to demand…the right to vote in the supreme council and to ﬁll public ofﬁces’ (TP 385). However, Spinoza crucially envisages that the law may legitimately set out conditions, such as an age qualiﬁcation, being the ﬁrst-born or specifying a certain compulsory money contribution, which very effectively restrict these democratic rights. Such dominions are still democracies, argues Spinoza, even though they may result in the supreme council being composed of fewer citizens than in an aristocracy. The key feature that distinguishes democracies from other political forms, Spinoza continues, is that there is an element of ‘destiny’ involved in the rulers. Dominions ‘of this kind should be called democracies, because in them the citizens, who are destined to manage affairs of state, are not chosen as the best by the supreme council, but are destined to it by a law’ (TP 385). For Spinoza, democracy differs from aristocracy only in the method of selection of its governing elite, not in the kind of politics conducted in it. Spinoza’s deﬁnition of selection for aristocratic government is similarly strange to a modern audience, since he asserts that patricians are chosen by the supreme council, supposedly on merit, and are accountable to those that chose them. Thus his conditions for aristocratic and democratic government are in important respects exactly the opposite of our modern deﬁnitions. However, for Spinoza neither democracy nor aristocracy assume the electoral process which is a deﬁning feature of modern liberal democracy: choice is sometimes made on the basis of election and sometimes by nominated appointment. According to Spinoza’s deﬁnition, modern representative democracy would be regarded as an aristocracy, because our legislative bodies, let alone our governments are, like his deﬁnition of aristocracy, ‘composed of certain chosen persons’. Both of Spinoza’s deﬁnitions make sense when they are set against the views and provisions of De Witt’s regent republicanism. Of the three types of government Spinoza discusses, therefore, aristocracy is the only one that is the same in both the early deﬁnition and the later discussion. Aristocracy acknowledges, according to Spinoza, the greatest power of the council – to govern and also to

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choose its own members. It is apparent from Spinoza’s argument throughout the TP that his central concern is to promote the power of this supreme council and that, as aristocratic dominion does this most effectively, that Spinoza’s own mature preference is for this type of government. Indeed, Feuer (1978, 65–6) argues that the TP remained incomplete because Spinoza lost conﬁdence in democracy. It is also clear that Spinoza’s preference, as outlined by him in general terms, coincides with his preference for Holland in particular. Not only does Spinoza discuss the Dutch case directly. He also subdivides the category of aristocracy in a way that intervenes in a very local debate. The dilemma was keenly felt, of weighing up the beneﬁts of the power and regional complementarity of the separate and independent provinces, as against the advantages of the leadership, effectively of the United Provinces as a whole, of a ﬁgure from Holland like De Witt with a strong republican vision. In aristocracy, Spinoza maintains (TP 346), The patricians are most commonly citizens of one city, which is the head of the whole dominion, so that the commonwealth or republic has its name from it, as once that of Rome, and now those of Venice, Genoa, etc. But the republic of the Dutch has its name from an entire province, whence it arises, that the subjects of this dominion enjoy a greater liberty. The unacknowledged slide from the general to the particular that occurs in Spinoza’s argument here also shows the extent to which Spinoza had in mind the local situation of politics and government in the United Provinces in the treatise. Van Deursen’s description of how important to the Dutch was the practice in politics of ‘meeting in council’, is very pertinent to the discussion of Spinoza’s approach to politics. The interests of provincial autonomy led to both the Dutch practice of consensus building called ‘persuasie’ and the development of a political structure that inhibited the individual concentration of power. As a result, says van Deursen, it ‘was normal to give authority not to a person, but to a council’ (van Deursen 1999, 149). Spinoza’s clear preference for an aristocracy of several cities, his distrust of the centralised power of a monarch, and his provision that even in a monarchy the council plays a decisive role, all recall the Dutch habit of ‘meeting in council’. Spinoza’s Holland-centric outlook on the Dutch Republic, and his identiﬁcation of the Republic with the best form of aristocracy, is

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plainly stated here and in other places in the TP. For example, Spinoza’s discussion of the relationship between cities in an aristocracy – of their unequal power, of the ‘bonds’ between them of a senate and a court of justice only, that cities must be able to ‘yet remain, as far as possible, independent’, and that patricians ‘have supreme right over their own city’ (TP 371) – accurately describes the letter and the spirit of De Witt’s republic. Furthermore the peculiarly Dutch suppression of central power, already noted in Spinoza’s claim that the only ‘bonds’ binding the dominion together are in the senate and court of justice, is reinforced by him in the limits he ascribes to those bodies. While the senate, the legislative body he propounds for the whole dominion, is the only body, says Spinoza, that can make or repeal laws for the whole dominion, it cannot make or repeal a law without a majority of the cities (that is, the patricians of each city) agreeing to it (TP 372). The force of this argument, that by holding on to considerable power, the cities can safeguard their independence, was keenly felt in the United Provinces, and it is important to note that Spinoza subscribes to the view wholeheartedly, despite the problems which it throws up for the formal location of sovereignty. Another example during Spinoza’s discussion of aristocracy of practical concern with the Dutch Republic is found when he asserts that secretaries and other ofﬁcials to the councils should come from the commons (not from among the regent oligarchy). Spinoza speaks directly to local political debate when takes the opportunity to launch a bitter and explicit attack on what has happened in this regard in Holland. Overdependence on such ofﬁcials ‘has been fatal to the Dutch’, he contends. Spinoza expands on this theme (TP 367) that to this evil the dominion will be more or less liable, according as it was well or ill founded. For the liberty of a dominion is never defended without risk, if it has not ﬁrm enough foundations; and, to avoid that risk, patricians choose from the commons ambitious ministers, who are slaughtered as victims to appease the wrath of those, who are plotting against liberty. But where liberty has ﬁrm enough foundations, there the patricians themselves vie for the honour of defending it. This passage indicates not only Spinoza’s identiﬁcation of the Dutch Republic as an aristocracy, but also that his critique of De Witt’s government rests on his analysis that it is through good ‘foundations’ that the strength of a dominion will be secured. Finding the right proportion

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between councillors and population is one way of laying sound foundations for a dominion (TP 346). If a dominion has good foundations, then Spinoza is conﬁdent that ‘all the absolutely fundamental laws may be everlasting’ (TP 356), although it is important to monitor the dominion’s operation, ‘to see that the constitution of the whole dominion is preserved unbroken’ (TP 374). Factions and political parties are to be avoided (TP 345), for they have a corrupting inﬂuence on a dominion, and patricians must all share the same basic religious principles, as set out in his TTP, for the same reason. For ‘it is above all to be avoided, that the patricians themselves should be divided into sects, and show favour, some to this, and others to that, and thence become mastered by superstition, and try to deprive the subjects of liberty of speaking out their opinions’ (TP 368). At the end of the chapters on aristocracy Spinoza identiﬁes these foundations with the constitution, and argues that ‘if any dominion can be everlasting, that will necessarily be so, whose constitution being once rightly instituted remains unbroken’. Indeed, Spinoza contends, ‘the constitution is the soul of a dominion. Therefore, if it is preserved, so is the dominion’ (TP 383). Spinoza’s extolling of the supreme value of the constitution in this manner has strong local resonance, since the beneﬁts to De Witt’s republic of persisting with the peculiarly Dutch tolerance of the mismatch between theory and practice and the de facto constitution were ultimately dramatically outweighed by the costs. Spinoza concludes that both forms of aristocracy – that governed by one city and that governed by several cities – can issue in ‘eternal’ dominions, except if destroyed by ‘some inevitable fate’ such as external conquest (TP 383). Spinoza makes it clear that aristocratic dominion is superior to monarchical rule (TP 346–7), and its superiority lies precisely in the ways that the power of the council is more effective under aristocratic government. While Spinoza acknowledges that the formation of oligarchies is a problem with local signiﬁcance in aristocratic government (TP 386), he proposes that nevertheless aristocratic dominion can overcome its limitations, by laying the correct foundations, and can become the best form of government (TP 347). The conclusion that aristocracy is Spinoza’s preferred type of government on mature reﬂection, goes against the view put forward by some commentators, who see Spinoza’s comment in the TP that democracy is the ‘perfectly absolute dominion’ (TP 385) as his simply reiterating his praise of democracy in the TTP (TTP 205–6, 263) (Wernham 1958, 28; Hampshire 1962, 208; Harris 1992, 104; Negri 1991, xviii; Den Uyl

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and Warner 1987, 292; Boscherini 1977, 101–2; Misrahi 1977, 395; Roth 1929, 138; Curley 1996, 317; Gildin 1979, 377; Zac 1977, 554). However, it is clear from the above analysis that the situation concerning Spinoza’s political preferences is a considerably more complex matter. While Spinoza starts the TP from the position that any of the three forms of government could be the basis of a free dominion, his analysis in the TP discloses that monarchy is only acceptable if tightly controlled by a council, and that the inclusiveness of democracy can legitimately be severely limited by qualiﬁcation restrictions and so ultimately also resemble an aristocracy. Spinoza’s views on inequality and his dislike of the masses are discussed in the following chapter, but it is clear from the publication of the TTP and TP in Latin rather than in the vernacular that Spinoza had no intention of appealing to the masses to endorse his political views. It is also plain from the discussion in the TP that Spinoza’s estimation of democracy was greatly reduced between 1670 and 1677, and that the meaning of the term ‘absolute’ in ‘absolute dominion’ is by no means transparent. This issue is developed further in the following chapter in conjunction with the examination of Spinoza’s understanding of sovereignty. It is also worthwhile remembering that in 1672, between the publication of the TTP and the writing of the TP, the De Witt brothers were murdered by an angry mob. This episode caused Spinoza immense distress, and also put Spinoza’s own life in danger. Spinoza called the De Witts’ murderers ‘the ultimate barbarians’ (Feldman 1998, xliv). Certainly, distrust and fear of the ‘democratic’ multitude are common sentiments in the TP (see TP 347). It is thus important to take into account the events that intervened between the writing of the two political treatises, and to take the TP seriously as an expression of Spinoza’s conception of politics and government, instead of regarding it as a less theoretically interesting adjunct to the TTP. It is not necessary to see Spinoza as holding a ﬁxed view of democracy along the lines advanced in the TTP. His preference for aristocratic dominion in the TP makes sense if we see the TP both as a set of reﬂections on government and politics in Holland, and as a set of general reﬂections on government and politics which rest on the experience of recent politics in the United Provinces. Spinoza is defending politics as a public domain of debate, not the democratic form of government. Having explored the general character of Spinoza’s political works and focused on his treatment in the TP of the three types of dominion, the chapter now examines further evidence in the TTP and the TP of Spinoza’s Dutch perspective. Towards the end of the TTP, Spinoza

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sums up his argument with the assessment that, in ‘proportion as the power of free judgment is withheld we depart from the natural condition of mankind, and consequently the government becomes more tyrannical’. He continues (TTP 263–4) that, In order to prove that from such freedom no inconvenience arises, which cannot easily be checked by the exercise of the sovereign power, and that men’s actions can easily be kept in bounds, though their opinions be at open variance, it will be well to cite an example. Such an one is not very far to seek. The city of Amsterdam reaps the fruit of this freedom in its own great prosperity and in the admiration of all other people. For in this most ﬂourishing state, and most splendid city, men of every nation and religion live together in the greatest harmony, and ask no questions before trusting their goods to a fellow-citizen, save whether he be rich or poor, and whether he generally acts honestly, or the reverse. His religion and sect is considered of no importance: for it has no effect before the judges in gaining or losing a cause, and there is no sect so despised that its followers, provided that they harm no one, pay every man his due, and live uprightly, are deprived of the protection of the magisterial authorities. In other words, the rule of law, indifferent and fair, is best found in Amsterdam, wherein, consequently, ‘free judgment’ can ﬂourish. Moreover, while Spinoza was critical of the increasingly oligarchic character of government under De Witt, this quotation clearly demonstrates his admiration for the policy of religious toleration pursued by De Witt. Spinoza’s references to Holland and the United Provinces provide a strong theme running throughout the political works, and these comments are always favourable. For example, when Spinoza argues that ‘every dominion should retain its original form’ (TTP 244), a viewpoint itself drawing on the traditionalist mentality, he contrasts the ‘United States of The Netherlands’ very favourably with both ancient Rome and contemporary England. Spinoza argues that ‘peoples have often changed their tyrants, but never removed them or changed the monarchical form of government into any other. The English people furnish us with a terrible example of this fact’ (TTP 243). In arguing in this manner Spinoza demonstrates his traditionalist assumption that, when it comes to politics, historical explanation is more powerful than an abstract right. He then relates a version of the history of the Civil War

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– the execution of Charles I, the establishment of Cromwell as a ‘new monarch…hailed under a different name’ (TTP 243), and the restoration of the monarchy. Spinoza shows no republican fellow-feeling for the attempt of the English to establish a republic. His traditionalist viewpoint overrides the superﬁcial resemblance between the two republics. In the ‘United States of the Netherlands’, Spinoza continues with pride, ‘the rights of sovereign power have always been vested in the States, though the last count endeavoured to usurp them’. In consequence, says Spinoza, it is ‘little likely that the States should give them up, especially as they have just restored their original dominion, lately almost lost’ (TTP 244). Spinoza’s direct reference here to the attempted coup d’état of William II in 1650 is an example of his propensity to demonstrate the relevance of history and recent political practice to political thought (see also TP 376). It is interesting to note in addition that, for Spinoza, the idea that the rights of sovereign power have ‘always’ been with the States, is sufﬁcient argument in itself for establishing their legitimacy. The same reasons for valuing customary arrangements – that people are used to them, familiar with them, more likely to carry on complying with them, along with the importance of continuing them – are found when Spinoza argues that the ‘form of the dominion ought to be kept one and the same’ (TP 339), on the grounds that ‘a multitude that has grown used to another form of dominion will not be able without great danger of overthrow to pluck up the accepted foundations of the whole dominion, and change its entire fabric’ (TP 340). Spinoza also uses a comparison favourable to the contemporary United Provinces to support his argument, in his chapter emphasising that natural rights cannot, nor need be completely transferred to the sovereign power. The passage sums up for Spinoza the contemporary and locally crucial distinction and compatibility between being in some sense ‘fellow-citizens’ while also belonging to only loosely confederated polities. In Chapter 17 Spinoza discusses the Hebrew Republic set up by Moses, and argues that following the death of Joshua there was no general-in-chief, and after the tribes had established themselves in different territories, they ‘became separated’, such that (TTP 224), the need for a single commander ceased, for the different tribes should be considered rather in the light of confederated states than of bodies of fellow-citizens. In respect to their God and their religion, they were fellow-citizens; but, in respect to the rights which one possessed with regard to another, they were only confederated:

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they were, in fact, in much the same position (if one excepts the Temple common to all) as the United States of the Netherlands. Spinoza continues, very signiﬁcantly in the light of Locke’s and Hobbes’s different views on property, that the ‘division of property held in common is only another phrase for the possession of his share by each of the owners singly, and the surrender by the others of their rights over such share’ (TTP 224). The discussion of the rise and fall of the ancient Hebrew theocracy in Chapter 17 also pointedly contained a commentary on Calvinist ministers in the United Provinces, who regarded themselves as the new chosen people. Spinoza’s habit of directly relating, and often justifying, his theoretical reﬂections on political arrangements in terms of what happens or has happened in Holland and the United Provinces is a distinctive feature of both the political treatises. The habitual character of the linkage indicates a more general assumption Spinoza makes about a signiﬁcant connection between theory and practice of this kind. Indeed a notable feature of Spinoza’s political writings is the unacknowledged slippage between conceptual argument and Holland-centric example. The close relation between theory and practice is demonstrated in further examples. For instance, when discussing the advisability of selling rather than renting land and houses to subjects who are not patricians, Spinoza endorses his view with the phrase, ‘as is done in Holland’ (TP 350). And in a complex argument relating levels of taxation, aristocratic and monarchical dominion and government policies of peace or war, Spinoza asks rhetorically, what ‘nation ever had to pay so many and so heavy taxes as the Dutch?’, and refers the reader to the work of ‘that most Prudent Dutchman V.H.’ (TP 360), that is, the De la Court brothers, for further elucidation on the matter. We have already seen that, in discussing the character of aristocratic government, Spinoza argues (TP 346) that The patricians are most commonly citizens of one city, which is the head of the whole dominion, so that the commonwealth or republic has its name from it, as once that of Rome, and now those of Venice, Genoa, etc. But the republic of the Dutch has its name from an entire province, whence it arises, that the subjects of this dominion enjoy a greater liberty. Spinoza’s reference to cities, and ‘the head of the whole dominion’, is also clearly to be taken as an empliﬁcatory allusion to the roles of

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Amsterdam and Holland in the Dutch Republic. Moreover, when he refers to the city ‘which is the head of the whole dominion, and has the supreme right, ought to be more powerful than the rest’ (TP 349), Spinoza is plainly seeking to justify Amsterdam’s superiority above the other cities in Holland and in the United Provinces. Likewise when Spinoza observes, at the beginning of the second chapter on aristocracy in the TP, that it ‘is now time to treat of that, which is in the hands of more than one city, and which I think preferable to the former’ (TP 370), the local reference to the United Provinces is again clear. The United Provinces is also held up for commendation when Spinoza discusses the history of the Aragonese on the Iberian peninsula – a story which is plainly designed to both express Spinoza’s negative view of monarchy as a form of government, and to provide a parable from which the Dutch can draw lessons. According to Spinoza, the Aragonese, having thrown off the yoke of the Moors, resolved to choose themselves a king. They sought advice from the Pope (TP 342–3), and he advised them not to choose a king, without ﬁrst instituting customs equitable and suitable to the national genius, and above all he would have them create some supreme council, to balance the king’s power…and to have absolute right to determine the disputes, which might arise between the king and the citizens. Later, ‘having by these customs given themselves a constitution to the mind of all, they continued for an incredible length of time unharmed’ (TP 344), with the powers of the king and his subjects in balance. The Aragonese ‘retained their liberties after the time of Ferdinand, though no longer by right but by the favour of their too powerful kings, until the reign of Philip II’. Philip II, says Spinoza, making the comparison explicit, ‘oppressed them with better luck, but no less cruelty, than he did the United Provinces’ (TP 344). Spinoza then concludes this section on monarchical government, again elevating a very Dutch understanding of liberty as traditional privileges protecting the people from the encroachments of monarchical power, by maintaining that ‘the multitude may preserve under a king an ample enough liberty; if it contrive that the king’s power be determined by the sole power, and preserved by the defence of the multitude itself’ (TP 344). Indeed it is signiﬁcant that Spinoza’s whole history and moral tale concerning the Aragonese is written in a manner very familiar to the Dutch public from such narratives about their own past. The mixture

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of history and cautionary tale in political discussion, and the discussion of good and bad government in terms of a traditional discussion of monarchy (rather than in terms of concepts like sovereignty and obligation in an abstract discussion such as Hobbes gives) are familiar. The emphasis on the necessity of customs ‘suitable to the national genius’ as a bulwark against bad government, and the stress placed on a ‘supreme council’ to ‘balance’ the king’s power and ‘determine’ disputes, such that it is clear that sovereignty lies in this council, are familiar. The admirable longevity of this ‘balanced’ form of government, and the notion of liberty in the sense of traditional privileges as protection against encroaching monarchical power, are familiar. In using these features in his narrative, Spinoza draws upon a thoroughly traditional Dutch perspective. In the Preface to the TTP, where Spinoza outlines the overall argument of the work, he asserts (TTP 10) that, In order to establish my point, I start from the natural rights of the individual, which are co-extensive with his desires and power, and from the fact that no one is bound to live as another pleases, but is the guardian of his own liberty. I show that these rights can only be transferred to those whom we depute to defend us, who acquire with the duties of defence the power of ordering our lives, and I thence infer that rulers possess rights only limited by their power, that they are the sole guardians of justice and liberty, and that their subjects should act in all things as they dictate: nevertheless, since no one can so utterly abdicate his own power of self-defence as to cease to be a man, I conclude that no one can be deprived of his natural rights absolutely, but that subjects, either by tacit agreement, or by social contract, retain a certain number, which cannot be taken from them without great danger to the state. This passage, which brings to mind to an English-speaking audience something of both Hobbes and Locke, is important in several ways in the discussion of this chapter. In the ﬁrst place Spinoza demonstrates a thoroughly Dutch understanding of the role of the sovereign powers (which Spinoza tellingly refers to in the plural) in relation to the individual. Our rulers gain their power to order our lives by the transfer of our natural rights to them, and they are established because they are those ‘whom we depute’. The word ‘depute’, as well as recalling the election of deputies to the States and States General, is also much closer to Locke’s notion of government on trust than to Hobbes’s idea

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of the individual almost succumbing to, rather than dispassionately electing to join, civil society. Second, this passage illustrates a thoroughly Dutch, relaxed attitude to the question of whether or not an ofﬁcial social contract is established between individuals. It contains an easy assumption as to what the individual retains, namely privileges, and the basis upon which the individual can challenge their obligation to the sovereign power. This constitutional ﬂexibility is in line with a very familiar perspective in Dutch political discussion. While Hobbes, for instance, wants the constitutional arrangements of his civil society to be watertight, Spinoza and the Netherlanders appeal to a natural justice in law, under the banner of liberty and tolerance, as superior to mere rational argument as in Hobbes. Whereas some of the elements of Spinoza’s attitude here may seem to recall Locke, there is a crucial difference between them. Locke’s abstract appeal to the imperatives of a universal pre-political natural law, underpinning his proposals for civil society, is in sharp contrast to Spinoza’s emphasis on what is appropriate for a particular community within its own history, traditions and habits. Third, this passage shows how Spinoza regards the notion of sovereignty, not as an abstract principle to be safeguarded, but in the practical terms of the distribution of powers and duties. Indeed in this passage Spinoza speaks of the powers of rulers rather than using the more theoretical term sovereignty, and he generally refers to sovereign power or powers rather than to sovereignty. Spinoza’s respect for traditional practice in politics is also clearly demonstrated in the subtitle to the TP. The full title of the second political treatise is Tractatus Politicus. Wherein is Demonstrated, How the Society in Which Monarchical Dominion Finds Place, as Also that in Which the Dominion is Aristocratic, Should be Ordered, so as Not to Lapse into a Tyranny, But to Preserve Inviolate the Peace and Freedom of the Citizens. Pocock (1987) takes this to indicate that the TP refers only to Holland, but it is clear that Spinoza is concerned with the United Provinces as the political context for the province of Holland. The comparison with Hobbes is again apposite in highlighting the practical and traditional elements in Spinoza. While Hobbes would never tolerate either the relativism implied in this subtitle or the indulgence towards the traditional division of types of government which Spinoza shows here, Spinoza indicates that his focus of attention is on improving existing political practices, and not on proclaiming a theoretical and conceptual correctness. Spinoza’s subtitle here recalls his argument, already discussed (TTP 243–4), that ‘every dominion should retain its original

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form’, an argument which only holds water (given the conceptual weakness of the notion of ‘original’) if one accepts Spinoza’s practical and traditional Dutch perspective. See also his statement that ‘I am fully persuaded that experience has revealed all conceivable sorts of commonwealth, which are consistent with men’s living in unity’ (TP 288). The subtitle of the TP, with its emphasis on the importance of upholding the ‘freedom of the citizens’, also recalls Spinoza’s statement, mentioned earlier (TTP 74), that ‘it is exceedingly difﬁcult to revoke liberties once granted’. Spinoza’s recognition of the value of liberties and freedom whose basis is customary, is fundamental to his understanding of the value of custom in the law, in contrast with Hobbes’s bald and uncompromising equation of law with the pronouncements of the sovereign. Spinoza’s respect for the value of traditional practice is also demonstrated in his attitude to history. Although, he estimates (TTP 61), the truth of histories cannot give us the knowledge and love of God, I do not deny that reading them is very useful with a view to life in the world, for the more we have observed and known of men’s customs and circumstances, which are best revealed by their actions, the more warily we shall be able to order our lives among them, and so far as reason dictates to adapt our actions to their dispositions. Spinoza’s preference for the practical over the theoretical is further indicated when he argues that while physical laws depend on natural necessity, and while there are laws of human nature, the manner in which men live together is another matter and depends on human decree. He continues (TTP 58), I have stated that these laws depend on human decree because it is well to deﬁne and explain things by their proximate causes. The general consideration of fate and the concatenation of causes would aid us very little in forming and arranging our ideas concerning particular questions. Let us add that as to the actual co-ordination and concatenation of things, that is how things are ordained and linked together, we are obviously ignorant; therefore, it is more proﬁtable for right living, nay, it is necessary for us to consider things as contingent. So much about law in the abstract. Both of these quotations indicate important differences from Hobbes’s views. For Hobbes held in his political thought that history can teach

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us no lessons, nor give us guidance about the right way to construct a commonwealth, and that custom is just the irrational expression of cultural difference, from which we can learn nothing. Hobbes also held that right reasoning would overcome the uncertain kind of knowledge derived from contingencies. When Spinoza argues that, ‘I have not written with a view to introducing novelties, but in order to do away with abuses, such as I hope I may, at some future time, at last see reformed’ (TTP 189), he is not simply attempting in a conventional manner to persuade by claiming that his thesis is to be understood as part of a body of orthodox material. It is an appeal by Spinoza to his Dutch audience, for whom ‘novelties’ were always repugnant and suspect. The value Spinoza attaches to practice is also demonstrated by his view that ‘a compact is only made valid by its utility, without which it becomes null and void’ (TTP 204). He does not think that a promise is validated simply by the binding quality of pledges, but only if it is useful when cashed out in practice. This, again, is very different from Hobbes’s view whereby, by a promise or contract a person incurs an obligation which is binding, and cannot be broken because of any practical considerations or mitigating circumstances (TTP 203, 308). Once again, Spinoza’s disdain for theory which is divorced from practice is shown in his remark that if ‘no cause for this state of things were forthcoming…all I have said in this chapter is mere theorising, or a kind of speculative reasoning which can never be of any practical use’ (TTP 254). A few pages later Spinoza supports an argument by underlining, with some pride, that this ‘doctrine we can conﬁrm from actual custom’ (TTP 260). Further, according to Spinoza, the best form of government is where ‘practice agrees best with theory’ (TP 347). The Genoese custom of choosing their justices from among foreigners, whilst criticised by Spinoza as inappropriate for Holland, is not rejected in principle. It is accepted by him as valid for the Genoese, in that it expressed ‘the genius of their own race’ (TP 364) – that is, their practice – rather than with what is right in theory. Spinoza argues, furthermore, that the details of political arrangements ‘may be devised in every dominion agreeable to the nature of its situation and the national genius’, on the grounds that this attention to practice and to traditions will lead subjects to ‘do their duty rather spontaneously than under pressure of the law’ (TP 382). The priority which Spinoza imparts to practice over theory is also seen in his use of several terms, used interchangeably, to describe the state. He speaks of the state, civil state, dominion, commonwealth,

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nation and body politic, and employs the term dominion to refer to both the state and someone’s right to govern over it. This habit, along with the signiﬁcance of Spinoza’s disposition to refer to sovereign power, rights of the authorities, etc., rather than to sovereignty and authority, will be discussed in the following chapter. Spinoza’s lack of attention to international relations has often been noted (De Salas Ortueta 1990, 203). But while it is true that his primary concern is with the domestic rather than with the foreign relations of a dominion, Spinoza does address the issue of relations between countries. Like Hobbes, Spinoza regards different commonwealths as existing in a state of nature with each other. It follows for Spinoza that commonwealths can declare war on one other unilaterally, but can only make peace through mutual contract. Spinoza takes the view, however, that such contracts may be broken if found to be disadvantageous at a later date, since ‘every one of the contracting commonwealths retains the right of consulting its own interest’ (TP 307). Signiﬁcantly, in the case of aristocracies in the hands of more than one city Spinoza makes it clear that the different cities are not in a state of nature relation with each other. He stipulates that while ‘every city of this dominion has as much right within its walls, or the limits of its jurisdiction, as it has power’, nevertheless ‘all the cities are mutually associated and united, not as under a treaty, but as forming one dominion’ (TP 371). As a commentary on contemporary politics, this is a daring departure from the deliberately ambiguous constitutional relationship of constructive tension between provinces and the United Provinces as a whole. In general in his political works, most of Spinoza’s discussion of the question of relations with other countries is devoted to specifying conduct in connection with warlike states, and this situation he identiﬁes with the interests of monarchs. The interests of commonwealths are quite distinct, according to Spinoza, since in his view they are always furthered by peace (TP 330, 360). Spinoza’s identiﬁcation of war with monarchy and peace with commonwealths again relates closely to his Dutch perspective. Foreign relations were traditionally seen as the prerogative of an overlord and were not of interest to the Dutch so long as they were not physically threatened. Moreover, as an independent polity, the United Provinces, and in particular Holland, was concerned with international relations only in so far as they might enhance or impede its commerce and trade. Holland traditionally desired peace, as against the House of Orange who traditionally championed war as an instrument to further political ambitions. Not only

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did peace beneﬁt trading conditions, but peace also accorded with the United Provinces’ lack of European territorial ambitions. Indeed more than once during this period the United Provinces took on the role of as negotiator between warring neighbours (Smit 1968, 29–30). Spinoza’s attitude to foreigners residing in the state also uncritically reﬂects conditions obtaining in the United Provinces, and he speciﬁcally discusses how foreigners come to transact business (TP 351). Spinoza’s commitment to this Dutch view is quite clear when he recommends that the legal arrangements concerning the Senate should ensure ‘that the Senators will always have more proﬁt from peace than from war, and will, therefore, never advise war, except the utmost need of the dominion compels them’ (TP 359). Taking the two political treatises together, the wealth of evidence that Spinoza shared the Holland-centric perspective and Dutch mentality of his United Provinces contemporaries strongly suggests that Spinoza’s philosophical perspective did not rule out but went hand in hand with an engagement with Dutch politics. The distinctive slippage from conceptual point to local historical example is also in line with the Dutch elevation of practice over theory. Furthermore, we have seen that the TTP is much more than a philosophical claim that the political domain is properly governed by natural reason rather than theological authority, although it is also notoriously that.

Spinoza’s Marrano status It might be assumed that Spinoza’s Holland-centric perspective, which he shared with most Hollanders, and his understanding of politics as a balance between traditional practices and sovereign powers, which he shared with most citizens of the United Provinces, follow naturally from his circumstances. Spinoza was born in Amsterdam and lived all his life in Holland. In contrast with the extensive travelling undertaken by contemporaries and near-contemporaries such as Hobbes, Descartes, Grotius, Locke and Leibniz, Spinoza astonishingly never left the territory of the province of Holland, let alone the United Provinces, throughout his life. However, Spinoza’s status as a Marrano Jew, and his chosen vocation as a philosopher, both give cause to reﬂect on that initial assumption. Spinoza’s family arrived in Amsterdam in 1622 and he was born there ten years later. His family had lived in Portugal as Catholics, and had given up their Judaism (at least in public) some time previously. Feldman notes that both of Spinoza’s parents ‘had been born and

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raised as Catholics’ (Feldman 1998, viii). The savage campaign of the Inquisition to coerce conversion to Catholicism had been operating in Spain and Portugal since the late ﬁfteenth century. Thus it is likely that Spinoza’s family, like other Jewish families, had had to comply with outward conduct appropriate to practising Catholics for more than a generation before reconverting to Judaism in 1622. Throughout the long war with Spain, Marrano Jews, or Conversos, in Holland were regarded with suspicion by both the native Dutch and Dutch Jews, ﬁrst because they had come from the Iberian peninsula, home of the United Provinces’ enemy Spain, and secondly because they were seen as tainted with Catholicism. Some Marrano Jews found it difﬁcult to settle adjacent to longstanding Ashkenazim communities with more sophisticated Talmudic traditions (Kedourie 1992). Through their forced conversion Marranos had paid at least some sort of allegiance to Catholic worship which, especially in the eyes of Dutch Jews, rendered their subsequent profession of the Jewish faith slightly suspect. Moreover, Marrano Jews were felt to have in all probability maintained an imperfect grasp of Jewish theology and practices throughout their experience in Spain and Portugal, in marked contrast with the simpler ingrained habits of the settled Ashkenazim Jewish communities. In addition, the legal position of Jews in Holland was precarious, with residence rights only introduced in 1657, and then on condition that the Jewish community would undertake the internal control of heresy (Feldman 1982, 3). On the other hand, refugees and immigrants from all corners of Europe were accepted and recognised as valuable contributors to Amsterdam’s ﬂourishing economic life. Furthermore, Braudel draws attention to the manner in which, among the stream of refugees into Holland – including southern Netherlander Protestants, Antwerp merchants, Jews from Spain and Portugal, French Protestants – and immigrants from Germany, the ‘Sephardic Jews in particular, contributed to Holland’s fortune’. As well as participating energetically in commercial enterprises, they were also proﬁcient, says Braudel, ‘in the sphere of currency exchange for instance and even more in stock exchange transactions. In these domains they were masters, indeed pioneers.’ Braudel also notes that these Jews from Spain and Portugal ‘were also good advisers, and were instrumental in setting up commercial links between Holland, the New World and the Mediterranean’ (Braudel 1979b, 187). According to Israel, the Sephardic Jews played a central role in Amsterdam’s economy. The ‘Portuguese Jewish community of Amsterdam…accounted for a considerable slice of Dutch trade with the

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Portuguese-speaking lands’. These Jews actively supported the Dutch West India Company, and the collapse of Dutch Brazil in 1660 ‘had undoubtedly been a calamity for Amsterdam Jewry’ (Israel 1983, 180). Spinoza grew up in the close-knit community of Sephardic Jews in Amsterdam. The group were vulnerable both as Jews in Holland, and as members of a Marrano community constantly vigilant against the contaminating inﬂuence of its own Catholic past and the inauthenticity of the Jewish practices that had been performed secretly in Portugal and Spain. Spinoza’s education, undertaken entirely within the Sephardic community, meant that in his early years he was effectively isolated from Dutch life and civilisation and did not even speak Dutch. Spinoza did not, as anticipated, enter the third of the three cycles of schooling in his community, of Talmudic instruction to become a rabbi. Smith notes that Spinoza had a profound philosophical interest in his religious background and became a great and ‘learned biblical philologist and interpreter’. Indeed Smith argues that Spinoza was ‘the ﬁrst thinker of European standing to make the question of Jews and Judaism central to his theologico-political inquiries’ (Smith 1997, xii). Instead, in 1649 Spinoza ‘entered his father’s business of importing fancy vegetables together with his brother Gabriel’ (Wienpahl 1979, 6). Five years later, in 1654, when Spinoza was twenty-two, his father died (Yovel 1989, 4), leaving Spinoza and his brother in charge of the business. However, from 1650 the business faced a series of setbacks and by 1655 ‘the business was ruined, and Spinoza saddled with sizeable debts’ (Israel 2001, 167). The year 1656, just one year later, witnessed not only the extremely serious occurrence of Spinoza’s exclusion from the Sephardic community for heresy, but also his rejection of the career in business his father had planned for him. Smith recounts that the herem (ban or edict of excommunication) issued by his community, rendering him ‘no longer one of the people of Israel’ not only included Spinoza, but warned that ‘anyone who seeks to contact him either orally or in print, do him any favour, or “read anything composed or written by him” will suffer the same fate’ (Smith 1997, 7). Israel argues that, given the severity of the proscription against him for his ‘evil opinions’, and that ‘nothing could have been easier for Spinoza, had he so wished, than to avoid excommunication’ (Israel 2001, 172), that Spinoza had courted the ban from the Sephardic community. According to Nadler, Spinoza’s change of ﬁrst name, from the Jewish Baruch to the Latin Benedictus, may have accompanied his (probably informal) attendance at the university of Leiden in the late 1650s, where ‘all instruction and learned discourse

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was in Latin’ (Nadler 1999, 163). Spinoza had a long-standing interest in philosophy and the new Cartesian philosophy was taught at Leiden. In 1660 the momentous step was taken by the Sephardic community, acting with the authority of the Amsterdam law, to physically expel Spinoza from Amsterdam for persistent heresy. Spinoza never married, and from the age of twenty-eight and for the remaining seventeen years of his life, Spinoza lived in other towns in Holland. It would be wrong to draw the conclusion from this brief outline of Spinoza’s biography that he led an entirely sheltered upbringing within a ghetto-like Sephardi community until his exclusion in 1656. In working for his father, Spinoza was closely involved in the commercial life of the busiest and most stimulating commercial centre in the western world at the time. From this experience it would have been difﬁcult not to develop a worldly appreciation of economic and political life in Amsterdam. In addition, Spinoza’s father, as well as being ‘a member of the governing board of elders (parnasim) of the synagogue’ (Israel 2001, 165), had participated in Amsterdam politics. Yovel relates that he had been ‘a highly respected merchant active in civil affairs’ in Amsterdam (Yovel 1989, 4), and Spinoza’s teacher, Menasseh ben Israel, had been chosen to undertake an extremely important mission to England in 1656 to lobby Cromwell to allow Jews (expelled in the thirteenth century) to resettle in England (Yovel 1989, 11). Both of these associations place Spinoza squarely within a politically sophisticated milieu of Amsterdam life with the perspective of ‘an outsider inside’. It is therefore entirely consonant with Spinoza’s background to adduce that his introduction to an interest in political affairs was speciﬁcally derived through his complex experience of life in Holland. There had been a long tradition of political support by Amsterdam Sephardi Jews for the House of Orange throughout the seventeenth century (den Boer and Israel 1991). Israel (1991b, 39) also details the close involvement of these Jews in helping to organise William III’s expedition to overthrow James II in England in 1688. Spinoza’s singularity within the Sephardi community is reinforced by his very strong support for the anti-Orange republicanism of De Witt. Spinoza’s status as a Marrano Jew in Holland can also convincingly be considered as closely linked to his vocation as a philosopher through his Jewish identity. Although Spinoza abandoned his belief in the orthodox Jewish religion, he retained his Marrano status in Holland and could never become or be regarded by others as a full Dutch citizen. Boxer notes (1965, 145) that it was not until 1796 that Dutch Jews received full citizenship rights. Gullan-Whur registers that

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‘Jews were forbidden to marry Dutch citizens, and the granting of Dutch citizenship to them in 1657 for the purposes of free passage while trading or travelling did not alter this ruling’ (Gullan-Whur 1998, 73). These pieces of evidence indicate the limits of religious toleration policies in the United Provinces. Moreover, although Spinoza renounced the traditional Jewish interpretation of Scripture, he did not give up a sense of religious faith, did not take up membership of any other church or religious sect, and was not an atheist. His repudiation was made in favour of a serious and analytical reinterpretation. Spinoza’s philosophically inspired theology, evident particularly in the TTP, contained a modern, reforming intellectual approach which did not seek to reject Judaism altogether (Yovel 1989). Moreover, Spinoza’s identity as an observer (ﬁrst through his exclusion from Dutch citizenship as a Marrano Jew, and second as a philosopher selfconsciously making his investigations in a detached manner) is increased by another factor. Although passionately interested in politics and holding strong political views, Spinoza, like the De la Court brothers, could never enter politics. While there is evidence that the De la Court brothers were acquainted with De Witt, and Spinoza may also have been, these republican writers did not have the requisite aristocratic background to enter political life directly. The received picture we have of Spinoza, from commentators on analytical philosophy, is of a Rationalist philosopher, primarily interested in metaphysics, and inspired to write by Descartes’ revolutionary restatement of that branch of philosophy. In assessing Spinoza’s philosophical contribution, his interest in politics is often seen as less important, as derivative from his reading of Hobbes’s De Cive and as contingent rather than signiﬁcant. Spinoza has also been portrayed as a solitary ﬁgure, unsociable and unworldly, pursuing a saintly abnegation of the world, severely eschewing the temptations of the material world, supporting his meagre lifestyle devoted almost entirely to the development of metaphysics, by the humble labour of grinding lenses. This picture also presents Spinoza as embracing the secular religion of Enlightenment science, and as being best described, as a result, as either an atheist or a kind of mystical pantheist. But this depiction of Spinoza is in need of revision and ampliﬁcation in almost every particular. The claim that Spinoza’s philosophical interest rests primarily with metaphysics is based on a focus upon and an interpretation of his Ethics. However, it needs to be remembered that two of Spinoza’s three major works, the TTP and the TP, which Spinoza esteemed very highly, are devoted to political theory and practice. Spinoza pursued much

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more than a contingent interest in the subject. There is also a serious and common concern, which links his three major works, with practice and with the different levels of ‘freedom’. Deleuze (1990, 16) develops the theme of the importance of practice in Spinoza’s philosophy as a whole, and contends that in ‘Spinoza’s thought, life is not an idea, a matter of theory. It is a way of being.’ These points suggest the fruitfulness of an integrated reading of his major works. The alleged derivation of Spinoza’s political theory from Hobbes has already been challenged here by drawing out the importance of Spinoza’s Holland-centric perspective and by establishing his commitment to traditional practice as a source of explanation and guidance in political theory. Other aspects of a comparison between the two thinkers’ work will be considered in the following chapter. The picture of Spinoza as solitary, unsociable and unworldly is also inaccurate. Israel estimates that, while self-sufﬁcient and independent (Israel 2001, 248), ‘Spinoza undoubtedly considered himself both worldly and shrewd’, and although he ‘displayed a lofty lack of interest in money and property, one can scarcely say the same regarding position and reputation’ (Israel 2001, 174). Spinoza achieved a considerable reputation as a philosopher during his lifetime and was surrounded by an informal group of like-minded friends who met regularly to discuss Cartesian philosophy, and Spinoza carried on an extensive intellectual correspondence. Descartes lived and published in Holland between 1628 and 1649 (Feldman 1982, 3). Spinoza’s circle of friends tended not to be typical Calvinist Hollanders, but were mostly ‘marginal’ Christians, on the way to becoming outcasts like Spinoza himself. Spinoza’s ideas were as anathema to orthodox Christians as they were to orthodox Jews, but this did not prevent Spinoza from also having friends and associates in the mainstream of life in Holland. The group included Vermeer’s executor, Leeuwenhoek the scientist, Huygens and de Vries, the patron of Rembrandt. In 1673 Spinoza received a prestigious invitation (which he declined) from the liberal Elector Karl Ludwig of the Palatinate, an important German Calvinist prince, to take up a chair at Heidelberg, following the Elector’s reforms of the university statutes, abolishing the ‘requirement for professors to belong to the Reformed Church’. The Elector admired Spinoza as a commentator on the new Cartesian philosophy, but did not at the time realise Spinoza’s reputation as ‘Europe’s most reviled philosopher’ following the publication of the TTP (Israel 2001, 31–2). The portrayal of Spinoza living the life of a poor lens grinder, poorly paid, with low status, living in conditions which exacerbated

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his poor health because of the dust from the lenses, leading to his lung disease and early death, is also inaccurate. Spinoza earned money as a tutor in philosophy, and was ﬁnancially supported by friends. Wienpahl proposes that Spinoza ground lenses, not to support himself, but for other more positive reasons. The scientiﬁc investigation of lenses was literally at the cutting edge of modern technology, as well as having an enormous practical signiﬁcance in Holland, in the development of navigational equipment. The activity was popular in Holland and indeed achieved a kind of vogue. Spinoza was attracted to lens grinding at least in part because of his mathematical turn of mind, and all his life Spinoza enjoyed engaging in experiments which involved instruments, often of his own making (Wienpahl 1979, 39). Feldman agrees that Spinoza’s ‘optical activities were scientiﬁcally motivated’ (Feldman, 1982, 4), and Israel describes Spinoza as an ‘accomplished practititioner of science…a leading contributor to the development of the microscope’ (Israel 2001, 242). Vlekke notes the illustrious contemporaries of Spinoza’s who also ground lenses: ‘Like Spinoza and Huyghens [an important ﬁgure in Dutch science and society], Leeuwenhoek [the famous Dutch microscope builder and scientist] devoted much of his time to grinding lenses’ (Vlekke 1951, 244). It follows that to be a lens grinder in Holland at this time had a deﬁnite status attached to it, associated with being at the forefront of technological innovation. Elwes says of Spinoza that ‘skill in polishing lenses gave him sufﬁcient money for his scanty needs, and he acquired a reputation as an optician before he became known as a philosopher’. Indeed, ‘it was in this capacity that he was consulted by Leibnitz’. Elwes adds that Spinoza’s ‘only contribution to the science was a short treatise on the rainbow, printed posthumously in 1687’ (Elwes 1951, xiii). Feldman argues, in contrast, that Spinoza’s letters ‘clearly suggest that he was highly regarded as an expert in optics’ and that ‘this proﬁciency was theoretical as well as practical’. According to Feldman, Spinoza’s ‘correspondents seem to have been quite interested in Spinoza’s solution to certain physical and mathematical problems involved in optical research’ (Feldman 1998, xi). On the question of Spinoza’s ill-health, Feldman suggests (1982, 4) that his lung disease was, rather, due to an inherited weakness. Both his mother and his sister had died of the same condition. Nadler remarks that ‘Spinoza was never in robust health’ and ‘suffered from a respiratory ailment for most of his life’ (Nadler 1999, 135). If this is the case then his lung disease should not be attributed to his lens-grinding activities.

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In sum then, there is a strong case that Spinoza’s political thought, inﬂected by a Dutch perspective, forms an important part of his philosophical concerns considered as a whole. In this context, the discussion of his Marrano status has been important for three reasons. First it shows how that status disbarred Spinoza from entry into the political elite and the centre of political inﬂuence. Second, being a Marrano gave Spinoza an extra ground to embrace toleration, a key part of De Witt’s republicanism and a vital element of Spinoza’s understanding of liberty and political debate in a free state. The other grounds for valuing toleration were his rationalist philosophical approach, and his observation of its merits in Dutch practice. Third, the discussion of Spinoza’s Marrano status indicates its double-edged quality – his parents and so Spinoza had beneﬁted from the Dutch culture of toleration towards Marranos, but he was forever an outsider within. Furthermore, this chapter has shown that Spinoza’s reﬂections on politics demonstrate a central interest with laying down the foundations of good government, regarded as compatible with several forms. His political writings evidence very little attention to conceptual analysis in the manner of Hobbes. Again, while Spinoza’s political thought emphasises the role of law and the moral value of the citizen’s ‘free judgment’ within the state, it does not consider individuals as central to political relations in the manner of modern liberal political theory. For Spinoza, commonwealths are good or bad according to the ability of the design of their institutional arrangements to promote and protect the liberty of citizens, not according to their abstract constitutional arrangements. In contrast, for Hobbes states are either properly or improperly constructed according to whether the authority of the sovereign and the obligation of the subject have been correctly constituted. Spinoza’s approach is in line with a Holland-centric perspective and a peculiarly Dutch mentality. The unacknowledged slippage in both the political treatises from general argument to practical, local example, is evidence of both those qualities in his work. Spinoza, like contemporary Dutch political writers, assumes a city-state structure for politics and stresses the moral function of the dominion’s institutions in protecting privileges. Like them, Spinoza does not primarily seek to attend to the formal constitutional aspects of the dominion, such as the actual location of sovereignty, the source of the dominion’s legitimacy as a republic, and the relationship between the dominion’s authority and the subject’s obligation. These aspects consequently strike the modern

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reader as remaining ambiguous and lacking in detailed clariﬁcation. In so far as Spinoza locates the reason for De Witt’s downfall in De Witt’s failure to reform Holland’s and the United Provinces’ institutions in the Stadholderless period (TP 376), Spinoza is addressing this problem. However, the traditional and practical features of Spinoza’s thought predominate. His statement is typical of his approach to political theory and practice, that (TTP 242) we see how disastrous it is for a people unaccustomed to kings, and possessing a complete code of laws, to set up a monarchy. Neither can the subjects brook such a sway, nor the royal authority submit to laws and popular rights set up by anyone inferior to itself. Still less can a king be expected to defend such laws, for they were not framed to support his dominion, but the dominion of the people, or some council which formerly ruled… It is clear that in this passage Spinoza reafﬁrms his commitment to the conception that traditional rights and settled codes of law take priority over formal constitutional arrangements. According to Spinoza there is an onus on all instances of each of the three forms of government to ensure that their rule is in keeping with the pre-existing customary network of rights and freedoms established in law. It is Spinoza’s conviction that vigilance by rulers in securing that correspondence is fundamentally important to the continuity of good government, stable rule, and a vibrant politics.

7 Liberty and Sovereignty in the Political Works

This chapter examines the meaning of the terms liberty and sovereignty for a political reading of Spinoza, and again draws upon the full resources of both political treatises. There are many terms in Spinoza’s political thought which deserve a thorough analysis, including reason, right, power and virtue. But the treatment of liberty and sovereignty are particularly pertinent to the argument propounded here: liberty because it is crucial in identifying the character of Spinoza’s republicanism, and sovereignty because in analysing this term we come to the heart of Spinoza’s debt to the Dutch perspective. We have already noted in Chapters 2 and 3 the particular understanding of liberty in the Dutch claim about the privileges and under De Witt, and in Chapter 1 the complex notion of sovereignty which developed during the Revolt. Comparisons with Hobbes’s work are especially illuminating in this chapter. Spinoza’s acknowledged debt to Hobbes’s theorising, together with the very signiﬁcant differences between them as political philosophers, make the basis of fruitful comparison. Such comparison also usefully highlights distinctive aspects of Spinoza’s work for an English-speaking audience. However, the presumption of many commentators that Spinoza’s political theory, for the most part, follows that of Hobbes (Allison 1987, 177; Curley 1988, x; Delahunty 1985, 226; Scruton 1986, 27; Strauss 1952, 184; Wolfson 1934, 245; Yovel 1989, 196; Duff 1903, 9; Hampshire 1951, 180–1; Harris 1995, 104; De Jouvenal 1957, 231; Martineau 1882, 304), underestimates the important dimension of social practice in Spinoza’s conception of governing. However den Uyl (1983), Lloyd and Gatens (1999), Montag (1999), Bödeker (2002), Blom (1995), McShea (1968, 137–55), and Wernham (1958, 35–6), all outline a much more richly textured picture of Spinoza’s theory. 200

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Liberty In an important collection of studies on liberty in 1991, Miller, Arendt, Berlin, Taylor, Skinner and others develop different interpretations of the meaning of liberty. A brief discussion of these ideas on liberty summing up the current state of the modern debate, provides a useful starting point in clarifying for a modern audience with unavoidably modern preconceptions, the meanings that liberty had for Spinoza. Miller begins by identifying three broadly different meanings – republican, liberal and idealist – and also notes an empowerment notion, a positive liberal liberty as opposed to the classic negative liberal liberty ascribed to Hobbes. He comments that the republican notion of liberty is the oldest, and is the ‘most directly political conception of freedom, since it deﬁnes freedom by reference to a certain set of political arrangements’. According to this conception, to ‘be a free person is to be a citizen of a free political community…one that is self-governing…not subject to rule by foreigners…in which the citizens play an active role in government, so that the laws that are enacted in some sense reﬂect the wishes of the people’. Miller adds that this notion ‘does not imply strict democracy’ (Miller 1991, 2–3). In Miller’s scheme, republican liberty is thus understood to imply both self-government and civic virtue. Machiavelli is taken to be the classic exponent of this form of liberty. While Miller contends that Machiavelli ‘did not invoke a positive view of freedom if that connotes what I have called an idealist view’ (Miller 1991, 6), Arendt perceives in Machiavelli the fulﬁlment of a personal as well as a public need for liberty (Arendt 1991, 64). Machiavelli is also regarded as a key source for the idea of negative liberty, a notion that is the essence of the modern liberal view of freedom. As Miller deﬁnes it, liberal freedom is ‘a property of individuals and consists in the absence of constraint or interference by others…government secures freedom by protecting each person from the interference of others’ (Miller 1991, 3). But the classic liberal deﬁnition of negative liberty, drawn from the work of Locke and Mill, has been enriched by four further conceptions, by Plant, MacCallum, Taylor and Skinner. The modern analysis of liberty takes its bearings from Berlin’s inﬂuential formulation, that types of liberty can be cohered around two forms. Berlin identiﬁes the merits and beneﬁts of the liberal negative form of liberty as an absence of interference, based on the conviction that ‘there ought to exist a certain minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated’ (Berlin 1991, 36). Berlin argues

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that the positive form, based on the notion of ‘self-mastery’ and ‘rational self-direction’, combined with the view that ‘the ends of all rational beings must of necessity ﬁt into a single universal, harmonious pattern’ (Berlin 1991, 56–7), leads to despotism and totalitarianism. The idealist notion, the civic virtue or public service aspect of republican liberty, and the empowerment idea that Miller outlines would all be placed on the positive liberty side of Berlin’s dichotomous construction. The empowerment view of liberal freedom claims that freedom from interference and coercion can result, as an unintended consequence, in social injustices. Such injustices cannot be remedied simply by the granting of further negative freedom, but require the implementation of positive freedoms, possibly either of means or ends, by way of legislation. This is a view developed by Plant, in his concern ‘with freedom as a capacity concept, with the types of capacities and resources which are necessary to achieve the opportunities which negative liberty secures’ (Plant 1991, 247). Taylor argues that as well as negative liberal freedom, an idealist notion of ‘individual self-realisation’ (Taylor 1991, 162), is also required to meet the needs of a personal striving for freedom. Hegel is taken to be a philosopher who emphasises this meaning of liberty. Skinner argues cogently that social and political freedoms are part of what it means to be human, capable of human ﬂourishing, with ‘characteristically human purposes’ (Skinner 1991, 188). Skinner develops a notion of positive freedom as an ‘exerciseconcept’ rather than as a ‘pure opportunity-concept’, in which it is a ‘necessary condition of an agent’s being fully or truly at liberty that he or she should actually engage in the pursuit of certain determinate ends’ that ‘realise my most distinctively human purposes’ (Skinner 1991, 189). He regards this notion as closely related to the idea of a self-governing republican form of government, as the ‘only type of regime…guaranteeing its citizens their individual liberty’ (Skinner 1991, 197). MacCallum makes a strong case that ‘freedom is always both freedom from something and freedom to do or become something’ (MacCallum 1991, 107), and so negative and positive liberty are not dichotomously related, but require each other for their operation. The distinction, he says, is based ‘upon a serious confusion’ (MacCallum 1991, 100), and should be replaced by a ‘triadic relation’, because freedom is ‘always of something (an agent or agents), from something, to do, not do, become, or not become something’ (MacCallum 1991, 102). The immediate relevance of this discussion of the modern notion of liberty is that Berlin places Hobbes in the ‘good’ camp and Spinoza in

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the ‘bad’. Spinoza’s understanding of liberty is, however, a good deal more complex than Berlin’s binary schema would allow. In Berlin’s terms, Spinoza overcomes the dichotomy and holds positive and negative meanings of liberty together. Indeed, according to the forms of liberty outlined in Miller’s book, Spinoza advocates each of the forms, with the exception of the civic virtue aspect of republican freedom. Spinoza upholds both the freedom from interference and empowerment aspects of liberal freedom, but also supports an idealist notion of liberty as living out one’s love of God, as well as advocating a political liberty in terms of self-government and independence. However, Spinoza’s theorisation of liberty does not correspond to the terms developed by modern scholars and it is important now to turn to his own understanding of liberty (TTP 10). Its complex meaning comprehends four closely related elements. These are personal freedom to explore the love of God, religious toleration, the self-government or liberty of the commonwealth to govern itself, and recognition of claims made on the basis of the traditional privileges of speciﬁc cities. Spinoza’s argument for the individual’s development of personal freedom is the subject of the Ethics. It is a freedom that derives from the importance of understanding man’s place in nature as always already socialised. To consider oneself apart from the rest of nature is to ignore one’s potential and powers in relation to one’s society and polity. In the TTP Spinoza argues speciﬁcally that ‘this same liberty can and should be accorded with safety to the state and the magisterial authority – in fact, that it cannot be withheld without great danger to peace and detriment to the community’ (TTP 60). According to Spinoza, ‘our highest good and our highest blessedness’, that is, happiness or human ﬂourishing, ‘aim…to the knowledge and love of God’. But the ‘nature of the means, and the plan of life which this aim demands, how the foundations of the best states follow its lines, and how men’s life is conducted, are questions pertaining to general ethics’ (TTP 60). Spinoza demonstrates in this passage that his deep interest in politics and political arrangements follows directly from his philosophical position outlined in the Ethics, and that political life has an irreducibly ethical and social dimension. Spinoza makes a further important connection when he stipulates, ‘we have shown that the Divine law, which renders men truly blessed, and teaches them the true life, is universal to all men’. Indeed, he says, ‘we have so intimately deduced it from human nature that it must be esteemed innate, and, as it were, ingrained in the human mind’ (TTP 69). The connection he draws between divine law and human nature is

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ampliﬁed in his chapter on the ‘Simplicity of Scripture’, where Spinoza seeks to demonstrate how closely are related the purpose of loving God and the life of man in civil society. Spinoza argues that ‘obedience to God consists solely in love to our neighbour – for whosoever loveth his neighbour, as a means of obeying God, hath, as St. Paul said, fulﬁlled the law’. In consequence, for Spinoza, ‘no knowledge is commended in the Bible save that which is necessary for enabling all men to obey God…and without which they would become rebellious, or without the discipline of obedience’ (TTP 176). The resonance of Spinoza’s argument concerning personal freedom is thus clearly present when he goes on to argue that ‘the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security’. The ultimate aim of government is, ‘in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others….In fact, the true aim of government is liberty’ (TTP 258–9). Spinoza concludes that, in the best and most natural form of government (which, in the TTP, Spinoza equates with democracy), ‘everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason’ (TTP 263). It is clear that, for Spinoza, the same connection as holds between political liberty and the state also holds between religious liberty and the individual. Or rather, Spinoza argues that just as personal freedom requires religious liberty and toleration, so political freedom requires self-government, in order to ensure the continuity, persistence and stability of the commonwealth. The Dutch tradition of identifying the privileges and ancient liberties of cities and provinces, as set out in law, as the means of ensuring the political liberty of self-government, is endorsed here by Spinoza and linked to his own argument about personal freedom. The key to a free dominion being able to weather the condition of conﬂict and discord that inevitably characterises political life, and to being able to endure over time, does not lie in only one form of government. Spinoza is committed to a detailed correspondence between the two levels of personal freedom and self-government. But Spinoza does not claim that the development of personal freedom corresponds to the individual’s political liberty, through participation, for instance. The political liberty upon which Spinoza focuses characterises the commonwealth, the public domain, not the political individual. The liberty of subjects in civil society is guaranteed by the state, by its being self-governing, which ensures peace, and by having ‘proper foundations’ which protect the state against corruption.

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This correspondence is extended by Spinoza in two further interesting ways – through the notion of fear, and through natural rights. Just as superstition prevents men from recognising true religion, and is engendered by fear, so slavery is generated by fear of despotic rulers and prevents men from recognising liberty. Furthermore, according to Spinoza, the two are linked in the case of a despot using religion to preserve his own dominion (TTP 5): in despotic statecraft, the supreme and essential mystery be to hoodwink the subjects, and to mask the fear, which keeps them down, with the specious garb of religion, so that men may ﬁght as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant; yet in a free state no more mischievous expedient could be planned or attempted. Wholly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling men’s minds with prejudice, forcing their judgment, or employing any of the weapons of quasi-religious sedition. In addition, Spinoza argues in the Preface to the TTP that just as ‘the natural rights of the individual…are co-extensive with his desires and power’, and that every individual ‘is the guardian of his own liberty’, so rulers of a state ‘possess rights only limited by their power’ and ‘that they are the sole guardians of justice and liberty’ at that level (TTP 10). Spinoza is, of course, quick to add two qualiﬁcations against an authoritarian reading of this correspondence. He contends that the relationship between rulers and ruled is voluntary, in that the ruled ‘depute’ whom they wish to defend them, and that the individual always retains a ‘certain number’ of his natural rights, either by tacit agreement or by social contract. The role of reason for man and in commonwealths also employs the correspondence between personal freedom and political liberty. In his chapter on natural right in the TP, Spinoza outlines a relationship between necessitated nature, freedom and reason, which deﬁnes man’s natural rights. Reason is a complex subject in Spinoza’s political theory. It is solely responsible for leading to ‘truth and wisdom’ (TTP 134), but ‘we cannot perceive by the natural light of reason that simple obedience is the path of salvation’ (TTP 198): this is ‘taught by revelation only that it is so by the special grace of God, which our reason cannot attain’ (TTP 198). Reason, rather than the will, as maintained by the Stoics and Descartes, leads to personal freedom or ‘freedom of

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mind’ which is equated with blessedness (Ethics 203), which is described as ‘not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself!’ (Ethics 22). However, reason for Spinoza is also a procedural reason, or reasoning, as in Hobbes, when he says ‘it is reason’s own law, to choose the less of two evils; and accordingly we may conclude, that no one is acting against the dictate of his own reason, so far as he does what by the law of the commonwealth is to be done’ (TP 303). But Spinoza explicitly acknowledges his difference from Hobbes’s view when he notes, ‘a man is free, in so far as he is led by reason. Now reason (though Hobbes thinks otherwise) is always on the side of peace, which cannot be attained unless the general laws of the state be respected’ (TTP 276). Forrester comments upon the similarity of Spinoza’s and Hooker’s understandings of reason. Both thinkers, he observes, were writing against the dogmatic Calvinists of their day, who believed in ‘a thoroughgoing disparagement of the validity of human reason even in the spheres which Calvin had recognised as proper to it, together with the assertion of the exclusive authority and total adequacy of Holy Scripture as the guide in all things’. The statements of the Calvinists (Forrester 1987, 356–7), remove all limits to the scope of scriptural authority and leave the autonomous reason without place or function. As a result of this innovation, the understanding of what Scripture is undergoes a change. It is no longer simply the record of God’s mighty acts to which faith clings, the raw material of dogma, the guide to the imitation of Christ….Now it is looked upon as a totally infallible and adequate compendium of moral and political guidance, a textbook in which the statesman discovers how to rule and the philosopher how to escape the delusions of corrupted reason. A crucial part of Spinoza’s reasoning is that man is determined by having a nature according to which he must operate. He does not have the free will to operate other than by his nature. Man, like God, ‘operates according to the necessity of his own nature’. For Spinoza it is vitally important not to ‘confound liberty with contingency’ (TP 294). Man is not free ‘not to exist or not to use his reason, but only in so far as he preserves the power of existing and operating according to the laws of human nature’. The more free a man is, the more he will use reason and choose good over evil. Spinoza emphasises that, ‘liberty is a virtue, or excellence’ (TP 294). Human rights are therefore fundamental, for they are given by human nature which is necessitated. The

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heart of Spinoza’s argument is the notion that a man is free, inasmuch as he is led by reason. Liberty ‘does not take away the necessity of acting, but supposes it’ (TP 294). Moreover, the explanation for why a man is most free when he is most led by reason, is because reason is consonant with his nature, and freedom is identiﬁed, by Spinoza here, with what is most necessitated. It is this point that leads to Blom’s assessment of the ‘ambiguous foundation of Spinoza’s republicanism: it is about freedom, but mostly about determinism’ (Blom 1995, 233). Spinoza maintains that (TP 295, see also TTP 200), the mind is so far independent, as it uses reason aright. Nay, inasmuch as human power is to be reckoned less by physical vigour than by mental strength, it follows that those men are most independent whose reason is strongest, and who are most guided thereby. And so I am altogether for calling a man so far free, as he is led by reason; because so far he is determined to action by such causes, as can be adequately understood by his unassisted nature, although by these causes he be necessarily determined to action. This, then, is Spinoza’s line of argument that leads to the tight connection he draws between natural right and power. For the relationship between natural right and power is very closely involved, in Spinoza, with his understanding of free will and determinism. When Spinoza argues, therefore, that reason ought also to be the guiding inﬂuence for commonwealths as well as for individuals, he again equates reason and liberty. He contends ‘that state is the freest whose laws are founded on sound reason, so that every member of it may, if he will, be free; that is, live with full consent under the entire guidance of reason’ (TTP 206). This is a link that strongly allies Spinoza with republican thinkers, as outlined by Skinner’s ‘liberty before liberalism’, for whom legal constraints are not interferences, but who ‘take liberty and legal constraints to be mutually supportive’ (Shaw 2003, 50). Spinoza also maintains that ‘the basis and aim of a democracy is to avoid the desires as irrational, and to bring men as far as possible under the control of reason, so that they may live in peace and harmony’ (TTP 206). Furthermore, Spinoza’s analysis here trades on the understanding of traditional practice as upheld by the Dutch. For a commonwealth guided by reason will be one which recognises and acts upon its own nature – its own customs and laws – and which ‘lays the foundations’ (TP 379) that will preserve its nature and its liberty. As Spinoza remarks, ‘he who studies to avoid the inconveniences, to

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which a dominion is liable, must apply remedies that suit its nature, and can be derived from its own foundations’ (TP 379). Spinoza’s understanding of reason is therefore dramatically different from Hobbes’s and from other political thinkers for whom reason is opposed to custom and tradition. Having outlined the character of the correspondence which Spinoza deﬁnes between personal freedom and political liberty, the discussion turns to his views on political equality and inequality, and on the role of the individual in the state – issues important to the further understanding of the meaning of liberty for Spinoza. Understanding Spinoza’s views on these matters is complicated by his use of the term ‘people’ sometimes to mean the ‘orders of society’ and sometimes to refer to the multitude (Blom 1995, 61). Spinoza changed his theory of equality and inequality between the TTP and the TP, and the development of his argument in the TP in particular differs from modern notions of what follows from a championing of liberty. These changes may be related to the catastrophic political upheavals of 1672. The French invasion of the United Provinces, the downfall and assassination of De Witt, and the re-emergence of the political power of the House of Orange, all signiﬁed the end of the republican experiment. Elwes graphically describes the personal impact on Spinoza of the violence of the mob that killed De Witt. The ‘shameful massacre of the brothers De Witt by an infatuated mob brought Spinoza into close and painful contact with the passions seething round him’. Elwes continues that ‘[f]or once his philosophic calm was broken’ and ‘he was only by force prevented from rushing forth into the streets at the peril of his life, and proclaiming his abhorrence of the crime’ (Elwes 1951, xvii). In the TTP, published in 1670, Spinoza outlines a theory of democracy which attempts to marry a Hobbesian view of sovereign right with a conﬁdent belief that political equality results in the maximum political liberty of the individual to pursue his personal freedom. Spinoza regards democracy here as ‘of all forms of government the most natural, and the most consonant with individual liberty’ (TTP 207), for ‘in a democracy…men with one consent agree to live according to the dictates of reason’ (TTP 247). In a democracy, ‘all men remain, as they were in the state of nature, equals’ (TTP 207) and because they are, as equals, most fully bound, by consent, as part of the sovereign, they are most free. Spinoza considers (TTP 206) that in a state or kingdom where the weal of the whole people, and not that of the ruler, is the supreme law, obedience to the sovereign

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power does not make a man a slave, of no use to himself, but a subject. Therefore, that state is the freest whose laws are founded on sound reason, so that every member of it may, if he will, be free, that is, live with full consent under the entire guidance of reason. Spinoza’s argument that men are most free when they are equally and most bound in a common sovereignty, strongly resembles that of Rousseau in The Social Contract rather than Hobbes, since for Hobbes the transfer of natural right is a necessary compromise for the sake of security. For Spinoza however (TTP 205), In this manner a society can be formed without any violation of natural right, and the covenant can always be strictly kept – that is, if each individual hands over the whole of his power to the body politic, the latter will then possess sovereign natural right over all things; that is, it will have sole and unquestioned dominion, and everyone will be bound to obey, under pain of the severest punishment. A body politic of this kind is called a Democracy, which may be deﬁned as a society which wields all its power as a whole. But according to Spinoza the purpose of this individual political liberty is not to participate in civic life, but to develop ‘the intellectual knowledge of God’ (TTP 60). This aim is best fulﬁlled in a democracy, precisely because, according to Spinoza, ‘the possessors of sovereign power’, that is, all men, have complete right over both temporal and spiritual matters within the state (TTP 245). It is not entirely convincing that, in practice, the individual’s liberty would be maximised in a state where the sovereign’s right and power are almost absolute (TTP 207, 211, 260), limited only by a residual right of self-preservation (TTP 207), and by the remote possibility of resisting a tyrant if ‘they have received from God through undoubted revelation a promise of aid against him’ (TTP 251). In the TP, published posthumously in 1677, Spinoza proposes a very different view of political equality and inequality and of the role of the individual in the state. The signiﬁcance of the idea that political liberty refers to the state and not to individuals in the state, is made clear by Spinoza in his sanctioning of inequalities. For instance, when discussing monarchy and aristocracy, Spinoza does not deem that all men are equal in a sense that ought to be recognised by the political arrangements of a dominion. That all men are equal – and enemies – in the state of nature, and retain enough liberty in a dominion to ‘retain

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their nature’, is clear. As Spinoza reasons, ‘however they be associated, and bound together by laws’ (TP 351), the passionate and corrupting side of man’s nature remains a threat to the dominion. Much of Spinoza’s argument is found in the chapters on aristocracy which, in the TP, is the form of government he on mature reﬂection prefers and on which he concentrates his attention. The political liberty of the state needs to be protected from the corrupting inﬂuence which any individual can exert (TP 313). But now the individuals who make up the dominion are categorised as either patricians, subjects or foreigners. Remarkably Spinoza discerns nothing unfair about regarding subjects who are not patricians in the same class as foreigners. He contends that ‘all but the patricians are foreigners’ (TP 350). In discussing the relationship between private subjects and their city, and the relationship between cities within a dominion, Spinoza notes that ‘he who seeks equality between unequals, seeks an absurdity’ (TP 371). Instead of a notion of abstract equality, Spinoza determines that these relationships are based on the connection between right and power. Thus ‘every city has so much more right than a private man, as it excels him in power’. In consequence, ‘every city of this dominion has as much right within its walls, or the limits of its jurisdiction, as it has power’ (TP 371). Indeed, Spinoza turns the notion of equality as we understand it on its head, when he adds that ‘[c]itizens, indeed, are rightly esteemed equal, because the power of each, compared with that of the whole dominion, is of no account’ (TP 371). Moreover, within a dominion, Spinoza argues, ‘every city has so much more right as against the dominion than the others, as it exceeds the others in power…each city’s power constitutes a large part of the power of the dominion itself, and so much the larger, as the city itself is greater’. He reasons that ‘therefore, the cities cannot all be held equal. But, as the power of each, so also its right should be estimated by its greatness’ (TP 371). Furthermore, the right of the city over the individual is vested in the patricians alone, who have ‘supreme right’ and ‘supreme authority’, to ‘do everything which they judge necessary to their city’s preservation and increase’ (TP 371). A further inequality arises from the difference between patricians and private citizens, since patricians ought to be equal with each other, whereas the commons or multitude have no necessarily equal footing, even with each other. Spinoza makes it clear (TP 354, 357) that the reason patricians must be equal is in order to ‘have equal authority in making decrees and electing the ministers of the dominion’. For the supreme authority of the dominion ‘rests with this council as a whole, not with every individual member of it’ (TP 353).

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The functions of the senate of the dominion as a whole, which Spinoza clearly identiﬁes with the States General of the United Provinces, are to be severely limited. The senate should only need to pass or repeal laws governing the whole very occasionally, and can only do so ‘if the majority of the cities follow that opinion’ (TP 372). The same restriction applies to this senate’s other functions, namely the choosing of generals of the army, and of ambassadors to be sent to other realms, the making of decrees about making war or accepting peace. But in the choice of other public ofﬁcials, the cities are to decide. For, as a general rule in the dominion, Spinoza asserts, ‘every city, as far as can be, ought to remain independent, and to have as much more right than the others in the dominion, as it exceeds them in power’ (TP 372). The way in which Spinoza can argue that individuals all have natural right but are unequal, and that cities are independent and unequal, such that their inequality does not modify their independence, would be seen as problematic in the framework of other political theories, such as Hobbes’s. But it makes perfect sense for Spinoza precisely because it mirrors the political practice of the United Provinces, of which he approved. Israel highlights the important role that the idea of mathematical proportion plays in the Ethics (Israel 2001, 234–5). Spinoza also introduces the notion of ‘proportion’ in the TP, to express the way in which the relationship between right and power in a dominion follows from the natural inequalities that exist, as it does in the state of nature between men, where right is co-extensive with power (TTP 200). For Spinoza the political right of a city in relation to other cities, or of a council within a city, for example, ought to reﬂect its power, and this relationship follows from the ‘proportion’ involved. Between cities the proportion is a given, whereas between a council and its city the proportion is deliberately calculated and implemented, according to Spinoza (TP 372). The notion of proportion is thus a crucial category in Spinoza’s political theory. It is deployed by him to express inequality, but is at the same time the key to harmony in a dominion, because it reﬂects the correct amount of right a city or council should be assigned. And at the same time the cities, for instance, are autonomous and independent of each other between themselves, for inequality does not imply loss of liberty for Spinoza. As well as the inequalities already referred to in Spinoza’s understanding of liberty, there are two further forms of inequality which can be brieﬂy mentioned. First, in discussing the status of cities captured ‘by right of war’, Spinoza allows for two alternatives. Such cities are

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either ‘to be esteemed associates in the dominion, and though conquered put under an obligation by that beneﬁt’ (TP 375), or they are to be colonised by citizens, ‘and the natives removed elsewhere or utterly destroyed’ (TP 375). Spinoza here demonstrates his unthinking support for the Dutch double standard of toleration at home and cruelty abroad. Second Spinoza poses the question of the grounds upon which women are excluded from government. Spinoza is in no doubt that women do not qualify for political participation but asks whether this prohibition is due to their nature or to the particular laws of the country, and so classed as exclusion ‘by institution’. He concludes that ‘experience’ shows that women’s exclusion from government is due to ‘their weakness’. He goes on to reason that the lack of historical evidence of women ruling or sharing power with men provides a decisive demonstration ‘that women have not by nature equal right with men: but that they necessarily give way to men’ (TP 387). It is signiﬁcant to note here that, in line with the argument developed earlier about the traditionalist attitude that Spinoza shares with the Netherlanders, Spinoza is quite happy to accept as true an explanation drawn solely from historical evidence. History (or rather the silences of history) is regarded as providing sufﬁcient proof about the nature of something, whereas Hobbes, for example, held crucially that history demonstrates nothing universally. Here Hobbes’s rationalism differs radically from Spinoza’s. Spinoza’s concern, developed in the TP, to minimise as far as possible the impact of the individual on political institutions and arrangements, has very important implications. His concern arises from his view that men’s natures are such that in the political context of wielding power they are easily corrupted. Men are therefore easily led to compromise the political liberty of the state for their own advantage. Spinoza is quick to use this notion of men’s fraility here as the basis of his objection to rule by a Prince of Orange, and against monarchy in general. In this respect Spinoza’s attitude conforms completely with the reasons underlying the traditional Dutch mistrust of the House of Orange. In order to safeguard the political liberty of the state, according to Spinoza, the power of individuals and factions to interpret the state’s interests to their own beneﬁt must be suppressed. Spinoza proposes various detailed measures to safeguard this crucial political liberty of the commonwealth. No factions or parties are to be allowed to develop (TP 345), but Spinoza does see great value and merit in political debate (TP 376). The patricians who form the ruling class should accept public ofﬁce on fear of punishment and not from

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ambition (TP 382), and Spinoza thinks it important to take the trouble to outline the kinds of ﬁnes to be administered to patricians who fail to attend the council (TP 355). Given the strong resemblances between the commonwealth he outlines and the United Provinces, and his contempt for past philosophers who ‘have never conceived a theory of politics, which could be turned to use’ (TP 287), the detail of Spinoza’s attention to such ﬁnes suggests that he hoped that his recommendations would be taken up and practised in the United Provinces. Furthermore, developing a signiﬁcant constraint not imposed on the Hobbesian ruler in the TTP, patricians, syndics and senators in the TP are all bound by the law. Spinoza is concerned to emphasise that no one is above the law in this dominion (TP 364), and judges and senators remain accountable (TP 366, 360). Patricians exhibiting avarice, lust or idleness or not meeting age conditions, should be excluded from public ofﬁce (TP 382). Moreover, and diverging radically from some other writers who have developed republican theories, Spinoza opposes the cultivation of virtue among patricians and the honouring of virtue by the state, on the grounds that such a strategy would lead patricians to regard their public duty instrumentally in terms of personal reward, and lead to a wish for preferment (TP 382). Further measures are advanced by Spinoza to protect the liberty of the dominion. He is in general against the use of fear as an instrument to safeguard the liberty of the state (TP 372), and considers that ‘a dominion that looks no further than to lead men by fear, will be rather free from vices, than possessed of virtue’ (TP 372). However, he does advance the argument that if a dictator could be introduced, whose job it is to ‘bring back the dominion to its ﬁrst principle’, that is, restore its true foundations, who inspired terror only in the wicked, then this course of action would be beneﬁcial. This remarkable argument would be very hard to square for those commentators committed to regarding Spinoza unproblematically as a democrat. Spinoza’s argument here gives weight to the view that his political preferences are complex. The assessment of Spinoza’s preferred form of government needs to be made on the basis of both political treatises and not just by highlighting the view in the TTP of democracy as the most ‘absolute’ form of government. However, Spinoza goes on to reason, because the eventuality of a benign dictator would be very hard to accomplish, the answer is to have ‘a council of syndics subordinate to the supreme council’. In this way, he argues, ‘the sword of the dictator should be permanent in the hands not of any natural person, but of a civil person, whose members are too numerous to divide the dominion amongst themselves, or to combine

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in any wickedness’ (TP 380). Another measure that Spinoza recommends to defend the liberty of the commonwealth is a strictlyobserved rotation of public ofﬁces and voting procedures within the councils (TP 360–2). Spinoza has three major instruments in the TP to safeguard political liberty, namely ‘foundations’, law, and ‘proportions’ and balances. Condren (1990) provides an important discussion of the notion of foundational rhetoric. The laying of sound foundations requires, according to Spinoza, the implementation of a set of institutional arrangements which include a supreme council, a senate, a council of syndics, a court of justice and public ofﬁcials to serve the elected or appointed patricians. Law is enacted and implemented by these bodies, and applies to all persons in the dominion, whether patricians or commons. The importance of the rule of law for Spinoza’s notion of political liberty is demonstrated in his demand that patrician councillors, before they take their seats, must take an oath. Patricians must ‘swear by the safety of that supreme council and by the public liberty, that they will strive with the utmost zeal to preserve unbroken the ancient laws, and to consult the general good’ (TP 357). For Spinoza it is crucial that law be ‘unbroken’, ‘ancient’, and unchanging rather than evolving. The desire that the law should be ‘everlasting’ (TP 356), accords closely with the fundamental Dutch notion of law as privileges, and is expressed clearly by Spinoza in his comment that ‘it is exceedingly difﬁcult to revoke liberties once granted’ (TTP 74). The calculation of the correct proportions of patricians (to the multitude) to serve on the various councils, and the establishment of the correct balance between institutions, are crucial elements of institutional design for Spinoza. They are also vital to Spinoza’s argument for the protection of political liberty. Spinoza has great faith in the notion that there is an optimal number (often cited as ﬁfty to one) governing stable political life between proportions of different groups of people. Spinoza is committed to the view that ﬁnding the appropriate size of the group of patricians minimises the corrupting inﬂuence that any single patrician or faction could have. For instance, he stipulates that if a council is sufﬁciently large, its will ‘cannot be so much determined by lust as by reason’ (TP 348, 373). Likewise the number of judges should be such that it ‘sufﬁces that they be too numerous to be corrupted by a private man’ (TP 364). In considering the rotation of ofﬁces in the senate Spinoza holds again that the patricians ‘must be too numerous to be easily susceptible of corruption’ (TP 362). Spinoza also makes the general point that, in order to secure the stability of the

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dominion, ‘it is necessary to consider the proportionate size of the actual dominion, in order to determine the minimum number of patricians’ (TP 345). These chapters are littered with Spinoza’s references to proportions, and the notion is so important to him that he provides that it is enacted in law. Spinoza refers to ‘that law of the dominion, whereby it is ordained that the same uniform proportion be maintained between the number of the patricians and the multitude’ (TP 365). Indeed Spinoza holds that the ‘primary law of this dominion [aristocracy] ought to be that which determines the proportionate number of patricians and multitude’ (TP 351–2). Moreover, Spinoza considers that such proportions will safeguard not only the political liberty of the state but also the liberty of the commons or multitude (TP 348). However, in the TP Spinoza is not much interested in the commons, either in their liberty or in a need to persuade or consult them (TP 347). The change in his views on this matter from the TTP to the TP shows a sharp decline in his conﬁdence in the mass of the population to govern or to exercise reason. But alongside this attitude, Spinoza does not anticipate any serious problems arising from the mass of the population, and all his measures are concerned with addressing the problem of adequately controlling the patricians. Neither does Spinoza consider that the conﬂicting interests of different cities in the dominion should suggest an absolutist resolution in the manner of Hobbes. Furthermore, while political liberty has for Spinoza an ethical value that it does not have in Hobbes, Spinoza argues ﬁrmly that virtue cannot be relied upon to preserve the constitution of the dominion (TP 381). When Spinoza uses the term ‘virtue’ it is clear that it refers, as it does in the Ethics, to the personal moral quality associated with the use of reason to attain freedom, and does not refer to civic virtue in the Machiavellian sense. Spinoza is committed to an understanding of political liberty based on the polycentric pluralism provided by the cities, an institutional view of the constitution, a ‘foundational’ and static view of the political liberty of the state, and an anti-individualistic understanding of political life. This understanding coincides at every point with that promoted by the Dutch in the 1650s and 1660s. The force of Spinoza’s whole argument throughout the TP is designed to demonstrate arrangements for political liberty that will be strong enough to withstand the strength of men’s nature when not led by reason to freedom (TTP 74, TP 313). Thus when Spinoza refers, for instance, to a ruler or prince such as the Venetians or Genoese had

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(TP 353), or syndics (TP 354), the senate (TP 358), and the term patricians itself, he is not simply advocating republican government according to the ancient Roman model or the Renaissance Italian city-state model. While Spinoza does admire both the Roman example and elements of the Venetian and Genoese examples, his primary aim here is to lay down political arrangements which are successful. The criterion of success is not that they are republican, but that they will withstand the strength of men’s nature and safeguard the liberty, stability and continuity of the dominion as a whole. While Spinoza undoubtedly expresses admiration for ancient Roman and ﬁfteenth-century Italian examples of a ‘free state’, his primary illustration is found much closer to home in the Dutch Republic under De Witt. Several commentators have seen Spinoza’s proposals for electoral rotation in the TP as deriving from Italian models. But as van Dillon (1964, 140–1) has indicated, complex electoral procedures were already followed in Amsterdam, ensuring that no one person could become a dictator. Spinoza’s advocacy of an extension of the system in place in Amsterdam is, given Spinoza’s undoubted admiration for the Dutch arrangements, more likely to have supplied the principal ground of his account. For Italian republicanism, the notion of the ‘vita activa’ was an important part of the honour and glory of living in a republic. But for Spinoza participation in public life is a necessary duty. Councillors, according to Spinoza, as we have seen, should be subject to heavy ﬁnes for non-attendance, to impel them to attend the council. The imposition of such ﬁnes is necessary, he maintains, since it would be in the councillors’ own self-interest to give a ﬁrst priority to their own private, probably merchant and trading interests. Moreover, while Spinoza does sometimes in the TP use the term ‘republic’ (TP 376), he certainly does not identify a republic with his deﬁnition of the best form of dominion, his ‘free state’. Whether or not a commonwealth is a republic is incidental to whether it is a ‘free state’. Spinoza puts forward a distinctive understanding of a republic. Pocock (1975, 40–1) distinguishes two political languages in early modern Europe: the republican and the language of law. According to Pocock, the republican language articulated a positive conception of liberty, and contended that man as a political animal was constituted such that his nature was completed only in a ‘vita activa’ practised in a ‘vivere civile’. The language of law by contrast, in Pocock’s outline, contained a juristic presentation of liberty, where liberty was basically negative, distinguishing between ‘libertas’ and ‘imperium’, freedom and authority, individuality and sovereignty, private and public. In the

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juristic vocabulary, the essence of citizenship is the possession of rights, Pocock maintains, whereas in the republican vocabulary the essence of citizenship is participation. Following Pocock’s differentiation of republican and juristic languages, Hobbes would be subsumed under the second category, though he is an unconventional member of it. But Pocock’s otherwise illuminating distinction has only limited value for understanding Spinoza’s political theory. Spinoza does not fall easily into either category, having elements of both positive and negative liberty but also lacking features of both languages. For Spinoza, man is a political animal but public service is a duty rather than a form of self-realisation. Spinoza has a richly textured and multifaceted but largely positive conception of liberty in which the notion of rights (and certainly the modern liberal meaning) is largely absent. Scott also raises the issue of the appropriateness of Pocock’s categorisation of Spinoza as belonging to the juristic rather than the republican language. Scott argues plausibly that Pocock’s deﬁnition of republican writing is too narrow, and goes on to suggest that the deﬁnition of republicanism should be made according to the content of the text as well as its linguistic form (Scott 2002, 80). Turning now to the aspect of Spinoza’s conception of liberty concerned with toleration, Israel usefully explains Spinoza’s view of toleration in contrast with Locke’s position. Locke saw toleration in terms of ‘freedom of worship and the peaceful coexistence of dissenting Churches alongside each national, or public, Church’. Israel argues that ‘[p]recisely because it is a theological conception, Locke’s toleration is grudging, on doctrinal grounds, in according toleration to some groups’ (those who belong to ‘organised, permitted congregations’) and ‘emphatic in denying toleration to others’ (agnostics, deists, atheists). Moreover Locke equivocated over whether toleration should be extended to Catholics. Spinoza belonged to a more radical school of thought, which called for ‘freedom of thought and expression, including the expression of ideas incompatible with the core tenets of revealed religion upheld by the Churches’ (Israel 2001, 265–6). For Spinoza freedom of worship was a secondary matter. In Spinoza, ‘toleration has primarily to do with individual freedom, not a coexistence of Churches, and still less the freedom of ecclesiastical structure to increase their followings’ (Israel 2001, 266). Furthermore, as Israel observes, the ‘gulf separating Locke’s and Spinoza’s conceptions of toleration, originating in Locke’s concern for saving souls and Spinoza’s for ensuring individual freedom’, is ‘widened further by Spinoza’s anxiety to whittle down ecclesiastical power’ in government (Israel 2001, 267).

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Woltjer (1975, 22–4) makes an important point for understanding the meaning of liberty and toleration in the context of Spinoza’s political theory. In line with the idea developed earlier about the old/new claim about the privileges, he details that during the sixteenth-century Reformation in the Netherlands, the notion of privileges acquired special signiﬁcance. The meaning of the idea of ‘privileges’ was expanded for a political purpose. It was easier for local ofﬁcials, sympathetic to toleration, to word their toleration of religious dissidents in terms of the privileges than to oppose the persecution of heretics outright. The latter course of action might have aroused Spanish suspicion of infection with heresy and thus incurred Alva’s wrath. Rather than challenge central authority, the rhetoric of privileges was employed and extended. Moreover, Kossmann (1991, 282) testiﬁes to the way in which toleration and liberty are intertwined in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch history and understanding: What they [the Dutch] themselves provided was the idea that the Dutch formed a people which had always wanted to be free and independent as well as the practice of a toleration that allowed most inhabitants of the Republic a religious and intellectual freedom not granted anywhere else in the world at that time. This is precisely what Spinoza is celebrating, and an important part of his understanding of what ‘freedom’ means can be seen as a contribution to a local tradition and practice. Malcolm adds weight to this view when he comments that the ‘anti-clerical, tolerationist, republican writings of the 1660s form the main background to Spinoza’s political works’ (Malcolm 1991, 551). Woltjer’s historical work also supports the view that Spinoza’s conviction of the importance of religious toleration, such an important feature of his work, draws on a long history in the Netherlands. Spinoza’s views on religious toleration, from his philosophy in the Ethics and his Marrano background, were supplemented by his commitment to De Witt’s republican and tolerationist regime, distinguished by Kossmann earlier from a liberal notion of toleration. They were also supplemented by his argument for the strict separation between church and state. The public/private split thus established would, in Spinoza’s eyes, automatically lead to religious toleration in a free dominion. The civil rulers would have no reason to interfere in personal religious observance or belief, and church authorities would be powerless to intervene in the public realm. All four grounds together help to account for the presence in Spinoza’s understanding of liberty of Dutch notions of religious toleration.

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It is now possible to see the range and signiﬁcance of Spinoza’s preoccupation with the conception of liberty across his major works. Spinoza’s account of liberty can be seen as demonstrating a continuum. The account of liberty focuses in turn on the possibility of human freedom in the Ethics, through the relationship between God and man; on this possibility in a political setting in the TTP; and on the possibility of the political liberty of the state in the TP. Whereas Pieter De la Court argued, in the Indication of 1669, that ‘where there is liberty, there will be Riches and People’, Spinoza argued that where there is the liberty of the free state, there is the opportunity for personal freedom. Spinoza’s understanding of liberty crucially links closely together the freedom to love God with the notion of the political liberty of the free state, characterising the liberty that belongs to the state in a manner quite foreign to Hobbes, for instance. The meaning of both parts of what Spinoza is linking here is greatly enriched in terms of the Dutch tradition of religious toleration and what was understood by political independence. They also make a great deal of sense when viewed as a selfconscious contribution to that tradition. Thus Spinoza does not start with the, say, liberal individualist view of man, whereby man is ﬁrst encountered as a purely pre-political individual, with natural rights, and for whom negative liberty is then required to make the quality of his life in a social organisation tolerable. Spinoza’s man is born into a moral and social world, and one that is inﬂected with a particular history and customs. Although Spinoza does posit a state of nature along Hobbesian lines in the TTP (201–5), this device does not play a major role in his argument. Moreover Spinoza seeks to relieve the stringency of Hobbes’s formulation by promising democracy as the outcome of the ‘compact’ to form the state and the ‘transferring’ of power and ceding of right by the individual (TTP 204). Personal religious freedom, and political self-government, are the strongest meanings of liberty in Spinoza. Negative liberty and empowerment are assumed but are not much discussed. Spinoza’s treatment of natural rights, such that the individual is the ‘guardian of his own liberty’ (TTP 10), does imply a form of negative liberty, and empowerment can be identiﬁed in the sovereign’s preservation of the individual’s liberty (TTP 207). But liberty is primarily for Spinoza a moral quality exercised by spiritual and rational persons and by dominions, a freedom and necessity to pursue the love of God, and a freedom of the commonwealth to govern itself.

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When Spinoza registers that in ‘proportion as the power of free judgment is withheld we depart from the natural condition of mankind, and consequently the government becomes more tyrannical’ (TP 263–4), it is plain that his view of liberty has consequences for his conception of sovereignty. The distinctive meaning of Spinoza’s view of political liberty is best understood, it has been argued, when taking the context of Dutch tradition and Dutch practice into account. Spinoza’s understanding of sovereignty is similarly singular, and we turn now to examine what it means for him.

Sovereignty Kossmann highlights that what Hobbes provided the Dutch republican authors with was ‘a conception of indivisible sovereignty which they could use against the Stadholder’ (Kossmann 1987c, 221). It is not known whether Spinoza had read Leviathan: Hobbes was certainly familiar with Spinoza’s work. Leviathan was translated from English into Dutch by the Zeeland-born medical doctor van Berkel, taking advantage of the more liberal climate in the United Provinces and in order to ‘mock ministers’ of the Reformed Church, and published in Dutch in 1667 as Leviathan: of van de Stoffe, Gedaente, ende Magt van de Kerchelycke ende Wereltlycke Regeeringe (van Bunge 1999a, 13). Hobbes’s own Latin version appeared in 1668, also in Amsterdam (Kossmann 1987c, 220). In 1667–68 Spinoza had already been working on the TTP for a couple of years. He may have incorporated a reading of Leviathan into the TTP before its publication in 1670. Alternatively his use of Hobbes at that time may have been based largely on De Cive, introduced to the Dutch by van Velthuysen in 1651 (van Bunge 1999a, 10), and which Spinoza had in his library (Hampshire 1951, 179). Spinoza may well have read Leviathan in the course of writing the TP. This provides one reason why it is important to redress the relative neglect of the TP and the view that the TP is the less important of the two treatises on political theory (Hampshire 1962, 191, 197; Gildin 1979, 378). There is a strong argument that it is precisely in the TP that Spinoza develops the insights of the Ethics (explicitly invoked TP 289n, 291n, 300), and that the TTP primarily represents Spinoza’s response to the problem of the relation between church and state and, as Deleuze suggests (1990, 10), the problem of religion. Insight could usefully be gained into Spinoza’s theory of sovereignty through a contextualisation drawing upon comparisons with a number of other authors, including Grotius and other Dutch writers. However, the comparison

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with Hobbes is especially relevant, not only because of the dominance of the model of sovereignty drawn from Hobbes in the modern period, but also because the comparison highlights particularly pertinent problems with both theories, namely Hobbes’s abstraction and Spinoza’s analytically unﬁnished justiﬁcation of a naturalised social practice. Spinoza’s discussion obviously draws heavily on Hobbes, both in the TTP, chapter 16, on the foundations of the state, and in the TP on the generation of the commonwealth through human nature and natural right, and the right of the supreme authorities. However, considered in this light Spinoza’s discussions read like imperfectly remembered versions of Hobbes by a pragmatist. For instance, Spinoza follows Hobbes in analysing the rights of sovereign power as universal. But Spinoza then qualiﬁes this theory with the proviso that, ‘though it corresponds in many respects with actual practice, and though practice may be so arranged as to conform to it more and more, [it] must nevertheless always remain in many respects purely ideal’ (TTP 214). Again, while Spinoza argues for the universal rights of the sovereign power, this notion does not, on the face of it, accord with his preferred form of dominion in the two political treatises. In the TTP Spinoza’s preference is for a democracy, in which sovereignty would seem to be most dissipated. In the TP Spinoza’s preferred form of dominion is an aristocracy in the hands of more than one city (TP 383, 384). In this case sovereignty would seem to be shared or distributed between the cities as autonomous units, and also to a limited extent between the cities and a loose confederal body whose authority and powers are nevertheless weak and minimal. How can we account for the discrepancy between Spinoza’s adherence to Hobbes’s theory in describing sovereign power, and the views of actual sovereignty that Spinoza advanced, which are radically at variance with Hobbes? Spinoza’s view of sovereignty, like his ideas on equality and inequality, the role of the individual in the state, and on democracy, change between the TTP and the TP. In the TTP Spinoza puts forward a modern, Hobbesian explanation of the generation of the state, in terms of a state of nature, natural rights, passions and reason, compact and sovereign authority. However, the Hobbesian character of the narrative is modiﬁed in two important ways. First, Spinoza introduces this narrative over half-way through the work, after ﬁfteen chapters of discussion largely concerned with a critical reading of Hebrew scripture designed to support his philosophical naturalism, and immediately after a chapter explicitly arguing that scripture and reason, revelation and philosophy, are independent of

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each other. The effect of this positioning is that the generation of a commonwealth must be placed, for Spinoza here, in the wider context of man’s whole relationship with God, and his aim of obedience to God in singleness of mind (TTP 9). Second, the severity of Spinoza’s Hobbesian doctrine is immediately modiﬁed in the text by his using it as the grounds for advocating democracy. Hobbes’s indivisible sovereign as the apex of the political system is turned on his head. But while Spinoza thus seems to be advocating a kind of popular sovereignty, he also says contradictory things about how many persons are included in the exercise of power. Sometimes Spinoza follows Hobbes’s notion of absolute sovereignty unequivocally, albeit identifying it with democracy in an abstract sense, as when he argues (TTP 205), if each individual hands over the whole of his power to the body politic, the latter will then possess sovereign natural right over all things. That is, it will have sole and unquestioned dominion, and everyone will be bound to obey, under pain of the severest punishment. A body politic of this kind is called a Democracy, which may be deﬁned as a society which wields all its power as a whole. The sovereign power is not restrained by any laws, but everyone is bound to obey it in all things… At other times Spinoza seems to suggest that this type of government leads to a real exercise of power by the people, in a manner which is the precise opposite of what Hobbes proposed. Thus, for instance, ‘in a state or kingdom where the weal of the whole people, and not that of the ruler, is the supreme law, obedience to the sovereign power does not make a man a slave…but a subject’ (TTP 206). In other places in the text again, Spinoza shows a ﬂexibility or even indifference, which would be astonishingly inappropriate in a Hobbesian theory, as to whether all or most of the people hold power. For example Spinoza speaks of ‘a democracy, where the whole or a great part of the people wield authority collectively’ (TTP 258). In further locations again Spinoza seems to endorse a majoritarian democracy. In a ‘democracy…everyone submits to the control of authority over his actions, but not over his judgment and reason’. Thus, ‘seeing that all cannot think alike, the voice of the majority has the force of law, subject to repeal if circumstances bring about a change of opinion’ (TTP 263).

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It is clear from Spinoza’s disparaging remarks about the multitude (TTP 9, 11, 288), from the universalising approach to man engendered by the theological framework of argument, and from the inconsistency in his description of how many people are included in the exercise of power, that Spinoza’s advocacy of democracy here is not motivated by a political concern for the equality of men, but by other considerations. For Spinoza’s imperatives in the TTP are twofold. They are, ﬁrst, to argue that all civil commonwealths are either democracies, aristocracies or monarchies, leaving no room for an amalgamation or mixed polity. Second, Spinoza is keen to follow the consequences he sees as ﬂowing from the separation of scripture and reason. The consequences are that the dominion which allows man to pursue a life devoted to the love of God and personal virtue in blessedness – man’s highest goal – is a state which has a sophisticated understanding of religious toleration, and so necessarily has sovereign power and authority in both civil and religious affairs. The sovereign’s laws in both areas override any other law, and so dictate the terms of civil religious pluralism, though not, of course, of faith. The force of Spinoza’s use of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty in the TTP, then, is to support two arguments. First, by combining the traditional threefold division of government (of the many, the few, or the one) with the notion of indivisible sovereignty, Spinoza is arguing directly against the regnum mixtum conception of government advocated by the conservative political thought of the universities in the United Provinces. For the regnum mixtum doctrine assigned the monarchical element of mixed government to the Prince of Orange, whose exclusion De Witt – and Spinoza – sought to maintain. And it is important to note that Spinoza seeks to promote this end by combining the traditional threefold division of governments with Hobbes’s notion of sovereignty, and not by arguing directly for a republic. Second, the force of Spinoza’s use of Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty here is to support his argument that sovereignty should be indivisible, in the sense that civil sovereign power in matters secular should not be divided from civil sovereign power in matters spiritual. As Spinoza emphasises (TTP 245), When I said that the possessors of sovereign power have rights over everything, and that all rights are dependent on their decree, I did not mean temporal rights, but also spiritual rights; of the latter, no less than the former, they ought to be the interpreters and the champions.

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But where Hobbes drew the conclusion that the sovereign dictates the outward form of religious observance for all, Spinoza concludes that the sovereign sanctions individual worship according to conscience, as well as having ‘the right of deciding religious questions’ (TTP 245). Like Hooker rather than perhaps like Hobbes in England, Spinoza sought to promote a real alternative to religious conﬂict (through toleration), to the dogmatic view that the Calvinists in both countries held, that scripture provides all the answers and reason none. Spinoza’s purpose here in using Hobbes’s concept of undivided sovereignty, is fulﬁlled when he can argue that freedom to worship God as the individual’s conscience dictates, within a state where the sovereign has power to make civil law over both secular and religious matters, can ‘be granted without prejudice to the public peace, but also, that without such freedom, piety cannot ﬂourish nor the public peace be secure’ (TTP 6). But while sovereign control over religious observance and religious dispute was certainly one part of what Hobbes wanted to convey in his theory of sovereignty, he is also concerned to develop a conceptual analysis of political sovereignty. For him, sovereignty not only fulﬁls a series of concrete tasks, such as providing the locus of political authority and political obligation of citizens, and entailing the sovereign’s right and power to make and implement law. For Hobbes, as for Bodin, sovereignty fulﬁls another, characteristically abstract function in expressing the political identity and unity of a commonwealth. For Hobbes the supreme power of the sovereign is, to borrow a phrase from Cox, ‘that power whose actions are not subject to the legal control of another and cannot therefore be rendered void by the operation of another human will’, subject, in the case of Hobbes, only little ‘to the limitations set by the law of nature’ (Cox 1987, 391) and to positive law. For Hobbes ‘that obligation which arises from consent’ is in practice all on the side of the subjects, and only in conscience on the sovereign. Every member of Hobbes’s commonwealth ‘authorises’ the sovereign’s actions as their ‘representative’, and is thereby obliged by those actions and has a duty to obey them, and this relationship is the source of the sovereign’s legitimacy. However, while Spinoza wishes to endorse the functional side of Hobbes’s sovereign – and indeed in the TTP to extend it into a democracy – he does not attend or subscribe to the abstract political identity aspect of Hobbes’s theory. Spinoza’s treatment of political sovereignty is thus altogether less clearly deﬁned. He nowhere analyses the notion of political sovereignty in the TTP. Just as he speaks of ‘the authorities’ (TTP 260) rather

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than about authority as a concept, and is much more likely to refer to the ruler’s right and power rather than to his authority, Spinoza habitually employs the language of ‘sovereign power’ (TTP 204, 212, 214, 244, 250, 264), ‘the rights of sovereign power’ (TTP 244), ‘sovereign right’ (TTP 201, 205, 214), the ‘holders of sovereign power’ (TTP 10), ‘the possessors of sovereign power’ (TTP 245), and he refers to ‘the sovereign interpreter of the Divine laws’ (TTP 222). Spinoza also reasons in terms that, for example, the ‘sovereign power is not restrained by any laws’ (TTP 205), that ‘the sovereign rulers are the proper interpreters of religion and piety’ (TTP 249), and that the body politic will ‘possess sovereign natural right over all things’ (TTP 205). Furthermore while Spinoza does sometimes talk about ‘the sovereign’ (TTP 205, 211, 216, 249), it is apparent in the context that he is using a general term for ruler, rather than referring speciﬁcally to a concept of sovereignty. Thus in the TTP, Spinoza either uses phrases like ‘sovereign power or right’, etc., by which he seems to mean instrumental power or right, or he refers to the sovereign as ruler. But then, to complicate the matter even further, the term is used interchangeably with other terms like ‘the supreme power’ (TTP 258, 260), ‘the rights of rulers’ (TTP 265), ‘the civil authority’ (TTP 6), the ‘legitimate rulers’ (TTP 6), or ‘the state and the magisterial authority’ (TTP 10). In sum it is clear that Spinoza did employ the term ‘sovereign’, but does not address the question of the sovereignty of the commonwealth as such. Spinoza’s avowed aim in both of his political works is to provide the groundwork for a free state in which peace and security will ﬂourish. As discussed earlier, he contends in the TTP (258–9), the ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others. No, the object of government is not to change men from rational beings into beasts or puppets, but to enable them to develop their minds and bodies in security, and to employ their reason unshackled; neither showing hatred, anger, or deceit, nor watched with the eyes of jealousy and injustice. Spinoza makes a similar point in the TP (313) when he argues that, ‘the quality of the state of any dominion is easily perceived from the end of the civil state, which end is nothing else but peace and security of life’. It follows that ‘that dominion is the best, where men pass their lives in

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unity, and the laws are kept unbroken’. But in the TP two interesting things happen. First, Spinoza does not discuss sovereignty at all, and secondly, while the introductory chapters outline a political theory similar to the one in the TTP, the bulk of the work is quite different. In the TP Spinoza does not discuss sovereignty, but he does examine the notion of dominion and the supreme authorities. Wienpahl’s linguistic explanation may provide the reason for Spinoza’s more concrete language. Wienpahl notes that in Hebrew all words were originally verbs, and still contain a verbal idea. The effect of this is to imbue Spinoza’s language with a sense of movement. Reality for him is active, not static or unchanging (Wienpahl 1979, 49, 38). This argument may go some way toward accounting for Spinoza’s use of non-abstract meanings, even when writing in Latin, and may be related to the interchangeability of ‘God’ and ‘nature’ as an active force in the Ethics. As Wienpahl comments, ‘Jehova’ is a tenseless form of the Hebrew verb ‘to be’, as well as the proper name of God, unspoken by Jews except in special cases (Wienpahl 1979, 6). At the beginning of the third chapter, itself entitled ‘Of the Right of Supreme Authorities’, Spinoza states (TP 301), Under every dominion the state is said to be Civil; but the entire body subject to a dominion is called a Commonwealth, and the general business of the dominion, subject to the direction of him that holds it, has the name of Affairs of State. Next we call men Citizens, as far as they enjoy by the civil law all the advantages of the commonwealth, and Subjects, as far as they are bound to obey its ordinances or laws. Lastly…of the civil state, there are three kinds – democracy, aristocracy and monarchy. Spinoza’s distinction between ‘dominion’ and ‘commonwealth’ clearly endorses the imperial heritage of the United Provinces. Throughout the TP Spinoza refers to the state in the narrower sense as a dominion, although he does also sometimes seem to use dominion and commonwealth interchangeably (TP 310). In the early, more general, chapters he refers to the ruler as ‘he who holds dominion’ (TP 312). Phrases such as ‘he holds dominion’ (TP 297, 312), ‘the person or persons that hold dominion’ (TP 311), and ‘to exercise dominion’ (TP 313), are however also used interchangeably with terms such as the ‘supreme authorities’ (TP 310–11), and ‘him…who holds supreme dominion’ (TP 309). The ambiguity in Spinoza’s use of language here, whereby the ‘dominion’ held by the ruler could refer simply to the

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physical tract of land over which he rules, without saying anything about the character of his rule, or to the sovereignty held by the ruler in relation to his subjects, highlights the problems in Spinoza’s theory of sovereignty. The ambiguity, also present in the TTP, is increased by Spinoza’s habit of referring to dominion, authority and power without properly distinguishing between them. While Spinoza nowhere analyses the notion of political sovereignty in the TTP, he does attempt to address the question raised by sovereignty in the TP. He argues (TP 301–2), for example, that If the commonwealth grant to any man the right, and therewith the authority…to live after his own mind, by that very act it abandons its own right, and transfers the same to him, to whom it has given such authority. But if it has given this authority to two or more, I mean authority to live each after his own mind, by that very act it has divided the dominion, and if, lastly, it has given this same authority to every citizen, it has thereby destroyed itself, and there remains no more a commonwealth, but everything returns to the state of nature… . Spinoza seems to imply here that the establishment of the dominion and the ruler are two separate processes. Later he remarks in the context of a discussion about monarchical succession that the ‘dominion must be indivisible’. If it happens, says Spinoza in a characteristically concrete rather than abstract argument, that ‘the king leaves more than one child, let the eldest one succeed’. But, Spinoza insists, ‘by no means be it allowed to divide the dominion between them, or to give it undivided to all or several of them, much less to give a part of it as a daughter’s dowry’ (TP 326). But this recognition of the importance of undivided sovereignty is subverted by other remarks which Spinoza makes in the TP. For instance, he maintains that ‘in fact they are much mistaken, who suppose that one man can by himself hold the supreme right of a commonwealth’. Spinoza’s practical reasoning is that while ‘the only limit of right…is power…the power of one man is very inadequate to support so great a load’ (TP 317). Spinoza here seems to be endorsing the view that absolute sovereignty is impossible because sovereignty is based on power, and no one man’s power is great enough to support such right. But this formulation leaves out of the equation altogether the role played by authority, not power, as the primary source of sovereignty.

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Again, there appears to be a fatal limitation upon the ruler’s sovereignty in Spinoza’s argument that ‘whatever he is ordered by the general consent, he is bound to execute, or may rightfully be compelled thereto’. He reasons that this ‘right, which is determined by the power of a multitude, is generally called Dominion’. Spinoza maintains that ‘speaking generally, he holds dominion, to whom are entrusted by common consent affairs of state’, for instance ‘the laying down, interpretation, and abrogation of laws, the fortiﬁcation of cities, deciding on war and peace, etc.’ (TP 297). Spinoza’s reference to ‘the dominion created by a free multitude’ (TP 315), is doubly confusing. First, it is not clear whether the dominion thus created is an actual state or an abstract sovereignty. And second, Spinoza could be taken here as reiterating a Hobbesian notion of the generation of the commonwealth by covenant, but the phrase could also be taken as meaning the creation of a truly popular sovereignty, whereby government is directly accountable to this multitude through their consent. It is not clear, in addition, how this tallies with Spinoza’s more Hobbesian statements. Furthermore, Spinoza’s discussion of the sense in which a commonwealth can ‘do wrong’ highlights another difference from Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty. He makes the case (TP 310) that A commonwealth then does wrong, when it does, or suffers to be done, things which may be the cause of its own ruin; and we can say that it then does wrong, in the sense in which philosophers or doctors say that nature does wrong, and in this sense we can say, that a commonwealth does wrong, when it acts against the dictates of reason. For a commonwealth is most independent when it acts according to the dictate of reason; so far, then, as it acts against reason, it fails itself, or does wrong. Spinoza’s commonwealth can thus do wrong, whereas Hobbes’s cannot – not even in this sense. This passage also indicates what an important part reason plays for Spinoza in contributing to the independence of the commonwealth. For reason contributes to the unity and integrity as well as to the strength of the commonwealth. Reason therefore contributes to its sovereignty in a way that is entirely absent in Hobbes. After the introductory chapters of the TP, Spinoza goes on to discuss in detail the three types of government. The picture of sovereignty that emerges from this discussion in the body of the work is markedly at odds with Hobbes’s account. For not only does Spinoza not follow Hobbes’s lead in regarding monarchy as best encapsulating

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the protection and expression of the sovereignty of the state, but he advocates as his preferred form of government an aristocratic dominion where sovereignty appears to be shared between a number of cities. In comparing monarchy, unfavourably, with aristocracy, Spinoza claims (TP 346) that before we can determine the foundations on which this aristocratic dominion ought to rest, we must observe a very great difference, which exists between the dominion which is conferred on one man and that which is conferred on a sufﬁciently large council. For…the power of one man is…very inadequate to support the entire dominion; but this no one, without manifest absurdity, can afﬁrm of a sufﬁciently large council. For, in declaring the council to be sufﬁciently large, one at the same time denies, that it is inadequate to support the dominion. A king, therefore, is altogether in need of counsellors, but a council like this is not so in the least. What counts as a ‘sufﬁciently’ large council, for Spinoza, is determined by the correct ‘proportion’ of councillors to multitude. The purpose of this proportion, which establishes the correct balance, is that the dominion it confers on the council is ‘absolute’. As Spinoza argues, ‘the dominion conferred upon a large enough council is absolute, or approaches nearest to the absolute. For if there be any absolute dominion, it is, in fact, that which is held by an entire multitude’ (TP 347), though he does not deﬁne what he means by ‘absolute’. As den Uyl and Warner comment, ‘Spinoza’s advocacy of democracy is designed to enhance the absolute character of the sovereign’ (den Uyl and Warner 1987, 292). Spinoza was not alone in holding that democracy is the ‘perfectly absolute dominion’ (TP 385). Kossmann notes that in the ‘1660s and 1670s several Dutch theorists argued that the absolute character of democracy was its greatest asset’ (Kossmann 1987e, 24). Yet, Spinoza contends (TP 347) in so far as this aristocratic dominion never…reverts to the multitude, and there is under it no consultation with the multitude, but, without qualiﬁcation, every will of the council is law, it must be considered as quite absolute, and therefore its foundations ought to rest only on the will and judgment of the said council, and not on the watchfulness of the multitude, since the latter is excluded from giving its advice or its vote.

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‘Absolute dominion’ then, the object of Spinoza’s greatest admiration and a vitally important category in his political thinking, means both independent to rule (that is, independent of the multitude), and establishing a balance which is both dynamic and everlasting. Just as the calculation of the correct proportions of patricians to multitude in the various political institutions is crucial to Spinoza’s argument for the protection of political liberty, so balance is crucial in sovereignty. According to Spinoza ‘balance’ does not refer to balance between extremes, such that balance leads to a principle of tolerance. Neither does balance establish for Spinoza a mean or middle point, for as we have seen from his understanding of equality and inequality, Spinoza is not a radical egalitarian, and unequal power relations for instance between the provinces of the United Provinces do not strike Spinoza as unfair. For Spinoza, the metaphor of ‘balance’ is used to refer to equilibrium, to movement suspended, poised between partners in a relationship. Balance as equilibrium is provided by proportion, according to Spinoza, such that an institution is balanced with respect to a group of people or competing interests. For Spinoza a balanced institution of government or politics represents a group of people, not necessarily in an electoral sense, but as a constituency nevertheless. The critical point for Spinoza is that when a ﬁtting proportion creates balance, things are held in dynamic tension, in balance rather than equal with one another. For Spinoza this dynamic tension of balance is a principle of anti-corruption, not of tolerance. For example, a balanced council is one which is too small to fall into factions or parties, and yet small enough to prevent it reverting to the multitude. There is no sense in Spinoza of the central way being the best. For him democracy or aristocracy is best, and he does not perceive of them on a political spectrum. For him they are best because they are institutionally best-founded, conﬁrm the central place of the council as the highest organ of government, and are constitutionally best-balanced. Neither does Spinoza advocate limited government in the manner of Locke. He argues for strong government by the towns and provinces but extremely constrained government for the confederal whole. In practice, according to Spinoza, the ‘absolute’ character of most aristocracies is modiﬁed by the rulers’ fear of the multitude, which enables the multitude to therefore retain some liberty. But Spinoza maintains (TP 347) that aristocratic dominion will be in the best possible condition, if its institutions are such that it most nearly approaches the absolute – that is, that the multitude

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is as little as possible a cause of fear, and retains no liberty, but such as must necessarily be assigned it by the law of the dominion itself, and is therefore not so much a right of the multitude as of the whole dominion asserted and maintained by the aristocrats only as their own. For thus practice agrees best with theory. Note that ‘absolute’ refers here to a balance containing a large degree of control over the multitude. Spinoza hastens to add that ‘the commons need not apprehend any danger of a hateful slavery from this form of dominion, merely because it is conferred on the council absolutely’, because the ‘will of so large a council cannot be so much determined by lust as by reason’ (TP 348). Furthermore, Spinoza argues that aristocratic dominion is less subject to seditions than monarchical, ‘and of so much better a condition, as, without danger to peace and liberty, it approaches nearer than monarchy to the absolute’. Spinoza reasons that ‘the greater the right of the supreme authority, the more the form of dominion agrees with the dictate of reason, and, therefore, the ﬁtter it is to maintain peace and liberty’ (TP 348). In an article comparing Spinoza and Harrington, Pocock holds that in the TP, ‘[a]ll of Spinoza’s moral intensity has gone into his erection of a theory of sovereignty’. According to Pocock, ‘if he is morally detached in considering the practice which follows from locating it with this or that group, it is because the exercise of sovereignty is detached from its essence’. Pocock continues, ‘[l]ike Harrington, he constructs models aimed at showing how each of the three forms may be protected against its own weaknesses’ (Pocock 1987, 446). Pocock is right to ﬁnd signiﬁcant Spinoza’s advocacy of different forms of government, though what Spinoza supports is the retention of traditional practice. Spinoza’s discussion of democracy, aristocracy and monarchy is not unbiased, and one of his aims is to cut the ground from under the regnum mixtum idea. But Pocock’s view of the role that sovereignty plays in the TP can be challenged. For it is clear that the outcome of the discussion in the TP is the advocacy of an ‘absolute’ aristocratic dominion in which sovereignty is shared between independent cities and with a weak confederal institution. Moreover, in his chapter on ‘The Best State of a Dominion’ it is notable that Spinoza does not mention sovereignty as a criterion. Rather, he is concerned, in that chapter, to argue several other propositions. Spinoza maintains that the dominion is ‘best, where men pass their lives in unity’ (TP 314). He propounds the view that ‘the quality of the state of any dominion is easily perceived from

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the end of the civil state, which end is nothing else but peace and security of life’ (TP 313). He afﬁrms that ‘seditions, wars, and contempt or breach of the laws are not so much to be imputed to the wickedness of the subjects, as to the bad state of a dominion’, on the grounds that ‘men are not born ﬁt for citizenship, but must be made so’ (TP 313). Finally Spinoza reasons that just as ‘man is then most independent, when he is most led by reason,…in consequence…that commonwealth is most powerful and most independent, which is founded and guided by reason’ (TP 313). Where Hobbes argued for an absolute sovereign, best expressed in one man, Spinoza and other Dutch writers agreed on the need for absolute dominion and power, but vested it in a number of men, to overcome the corrupting effect of power on particular men. And while Spinoza’s notion of democracy as the ‘perfectly absolute dominion’ may be taken to refer to a theory of popular sovereignty, his notion of aristocracy as an absolute dominion certainly can not. The precise relationship between ‘absolute dominion’ and sovereignty is not made clear by Spinoza, but the shared or distributed sovereignty resulting from Spinoza’s preferred form of aristocracy is certainly a direct candidate for Hobbes’ strictures against shared or mixed sovereignty. Spinoza’s enthusiasm for Hobbes’s conception of sovereignty does not, therefore, accord with the shared or distributed sovereignty for which Spinoza argues. Nor is Hobbes’s notion reﬂected unequivocally in the various and conﬂicting arguments which Spinoza puts forward in the two political treatises about ‘sovereign power’, ‘supreme authorities’, ‘dominion’, ‘absolute dominion’, and the ‘independent’, free and peaceful character of the ‘best state’. Commentators on Spinoza’s political thought routinely refer to his conception of sovereignty in an unproblematic manner (Wernham 1958; den Uyl 1983, 28–35; Blom 1995, 235; McShea 1968, 149, 152). But it is clear that Spinoza’s idea of sovereignty requires explanation. We can, however, make sense of these discrepancies and ambiguities, if we understand Spinoza as drawing on the history, political practice and contemporary political debate in the United Provinces. It is possible then to perceive that ‘sovereignty’ is primarily important to Spinoza in so far as it enables him to argue effectively against the regnum mixtum theory and the political aspirations of the House of Orange, and against Calvinist claims to authority beyond the civil law (TP 368). What is important to defend in a positive manner in the political works, for Spinoza, is a kind of de facto constitutionalism, which in fact expresses the values of Dutch practice. Through his

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speciﬁcation of the institutional basis of the three types of government, Spinoza wishes to reafﬁrm the power of the city councils and provincial States in a pattern of distributed sovereignty, without setting up an explicit constitution above them in which ultimate sovereignty would be vested. Spinoza’s contribution to Dutch political debate here is that he seeks to articulate these principles. This de facto constitutionalist approach emphasises the importance of its institutional ‘foundations’ and of law, and the notions of ‘proportion’ and ‘balance’ encapsulate the accurate expression of the relationship between right and power at two crucial levels, namely between the ruling council and the multitude, and between cities. The attention to constitutional principles provides the vital key, for Spinoza, to ensuring that the commonwealth as a whole, and the cities, remain ‘independent’ (TP 303–4), and thus free and peaceful. Spinoza’s de facto constitutionalism accurately reﬂects the Dutch situation, whereby the powers of the States General are very limited, and real power is held by the cities and provinces, and accurately reﬂects the Dutch lack of attention to sovereignty in the Hobbesian sense. But what is different from the Netherlanders in Spinoza is his attempt to conceptualise constitutional principles. At the same time, Spinoza’s argument for a balance of central and decentralised powers proposes a very different relationship between citizens and sovereign than that which is found in Hobbes. Major civil or military disturbances afﬂicted England and the Netherlands in the seventeenth century. Building on the chapter comparing English and Dutch republicanism, the different local attitudes to these upheavals, and the way in which they are reﬂected in Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s political works, are important and can be usefully contrasted. In England Hobbes was one of many who saw the breakdown of royal authority and the usurpation of power by Parliament and the Army as a terrible rupture in the desirable and traditional continuity of sovereign power, tangibly located in the monarch. This continuity was regarded by him as being crucial to the wellbeing of civil society. Hobbes wrote in 1640 (Malcolm 1991, 530) that power and rights were inseparably annexed to the sovereignty. He held that as Parliament did not dispute that sovereignty lay with Charles I, they should not maintain any rights or power against him. The Dutch, however, did not perceive their struggle in the Netherlands against the Spanish as a civil war but as opposing foreign intervention. Moreover they were familiar with and habituated to an overlord power being both distant and discontinuous. The outcome of

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this familiar situation was that it could be regarded as unremarkable that this ultimate overlord power changed hands at some remote dynastic location. It could be accepted as unsurprising that the overlord might be either occupied elsewhere, an infant or even mentally incapable. In addition and very importantly, the traditional rights granted by the ‘privileges’, which acted as a buffer between local and overlord power, meant that habitually the provinces effectively governed themselves. Thus the issue of the continuity of sovereign power had not been so crucial to the perceived wellbeing of civil society. During the Revolt, the Netherlands fought to defend the liberties they had acquired (and in the course of the Revolt extended the claims made about the privileges), and even the Spanish did not deny that there did exist local privileges and liberties of this kind. The Revolt occurred precisely because the Spanish were seen to be infringing those charters while at the same time not going so far as to deny that in principle the privileges did exist. It follows that we can best understand Spinoza’s use of Hobbes’s notion of sovereignty, not as designed in order to conjoin sovereignty with rights and power as such, in the sense Hobbes meant. The Revolt had been won by the United Provinces in order to reafﬁrm this separation. And after the end of the Revolt the two principles were not fully merged. Spinoza used Hobbes’s sovereignty to support his views on a local dispute and tension in the United Provinces. Spinoza wanted to add weight to the side against the monarchical aspirations of the Prince of Orange, and against the intolerance of the dominant part of the Reformed Church. Hobbes’s notion of sovereignty rests on the view that the only possible form of sovereignty, if it is to be stable and trouble-free, is absolute sovereignty. Hobbes is therefore against democracy, whereas Spinoza can use the same argument to arrive at an opposite, pro-democracy, conclusion in the TTP. It is, in Hobbes’s terms, in practice though not in theory, inconsistent with the sovereignty he advocates, because it is extremely unlikely that a democratic assembly, or even an aristocratic council, could act as one ‘person’ without dissolving into factions. Spinoza is also disturbed by the possibility of factions, again on the grounds that they might dissolve the council’s ability to act as one. But Spinoza identiﬁes the solution to this problem in the calculation of proportions and the creation of balance. Hobbes and Spinoza thus hold very different views on sovereignty. Hobbes seeks to present a construction in which the sovereign’s rights and powers are watertight and unassailable, such that once people

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have contracted together, the sovereign has control over the unlimited character of natural rights and powers. The one exception Hobbes makes is the recovery of the right to self-defence in the case of the sovereign’s inability to protect the subject, in the face of the country’s invasion. Otherwise, effectively the subjects’ political rights are transferred to the sovereign, who then exercises a more or less free rein. The most important practical conclusion to be drawn from the notion of sovereignty, for Hobbes, is that subjects have no right of resistance. They have obliged themselves to conduct themselves in the public realm according to whatever the sovereign lays down in civil law. It follows that, central to Hobbes’s notion of sovereignty is the view that power must not be shared. Shared sovereignty is certainly Hobbes’s primary example of things that tend to the dissolution of commonwealths. It is interesting to note Hobbes’s reference to the United Provinces among his other headings. Hobbes lists the imitation of neighbouring nations as one of the things that lead to the dissolution of government, and he says disparagingly, ‘And I doubt not, but many men have been contented to see the late troubles in England, but of an imitation of the Low Countries; supposing there needed no more to grow rich, than to change, as they had done, the form of their government’ (Hobbes 1946, 213). For Hobbes, if sovereignty is shared, it is necessarily divided. Some powers can be delegated, but it must be clear that authority remains with the sovereign, not with the delegate. As a result, sovereignty, in Hobbes’s system, works most happily when held by one man. For Spinoza, on the other hand, the contract by which the state is formed may be explicit or tacit. The ruler does not hold all of the citizens’ rights. There is no sense of the tight bind between authority and obligation that is found in Hobbes, and citizens may resist if the ruler does not act in their interests. In addition, Spinoza’s sovereign is accountable to the citizens, in the sense that he is bound to make laws which accord with reason. Otherwise sedition will be rife in his dominion and he will be overthrown. Spinoza’s argument does not have the same relentless sense of inevitable logical progression that Hobbes develops in his theorising. Spinoza accepts, in Chapter 17 of the TTP, that in practice the sovereign’s power and the citizen’s relinquishing of rights are never as universal as the ideal account of the formation of the commonwealth suggests. His willingness to accept the pragmatic dictates of practice against the ideal is a very striking understanding of politics and very Dutch. See, for instance, Spinoza’s argument that ‘statesmen have

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written about politics far more happily than philosophers’, since with ‘experience for their mistress, they taught nothing that was inconsistent with practice’ (TP 288). Hobbes would never have accepted this; what he lays down as an ideal is what he expects to happen in practice. Indeed, Spinoza’s understanding of sovereignty recalls Althusius rather than Hobbes or Machiavelli. For Spinoza it is the defence of traditional practice, as embodied in the legal and administrative arrangements of the constitution, that is vital. He lays great emphasis on practical arrangements which will ‘see that the constitution of the whole dominion is preserved unbroken’ (TP 374) and later argues that ‘if any dominion can be everlasting, that will necessarily be so, whose constitution being once rightly instituted remains unbroken. For the constitution is the soul of a dominion. Therefore, if it is preserved, so is the dominion’ (TP 383). Spinoza’s imprecision over sovereignty, from a Hobbesian standpoint, is an example of the practical and concrete, and of the rule of practice over theory, at work, which is in line with Spinoza’s sympathy with the features of the Dutch understanding of politics. Furthermore, as noted earlier, Spinoza nowhere argues directly for a republic, or for republican government as such. In this way Spinoza is also allied with the deeply ingrained Dutch view of political practice and arrangements in the United Provinces. For him, as for them, government is justiﬁed by its maintenance of the traditional balance, as established in the de facto constitutional arrangements, between the provinces and within Holland. Politics is the activity of dealing with the issues and problems that arise to disturb that balance, in order to ensure the perpetuation of the balance. Spinoza, in his mature work in the TP, advocates aristocratic dominion in the hands of more than one city, on the grounds that power resting in more than one place results in a better balance being achieved and is better able to defend liberty, the self-governing free state. This argument makes sense when it is recognised as the theoretical vindication of the political system and the understanding of sovereignty obtaining in Holland and the United Provinces.

8 Spinoza’s Republicanism

Chapter 7 identiﬁed the meanings for Spinoza of the two key concepts of liberty and sovereignty, and included a discussion of the role of the notions of reason and ‘absolute dominion’ in underpinning the understanding of practice in his political works. On this basis the current chapter develops an assessment of the overall character of Spinoza’s republicanism. In order to make this assessment, consideration will ﬁrst be given to the kind of reception that Spinoza’s political works received from contemporaries. Comparisons again with the reception of Leviathan are helpful in delineating distinctive features of Spinoza’s work.

The reception of Spinoza’s political works Spinoza took the precaution of publishing the TTP in 1670 anonymously, in Latin, and under the name of a ﬁctitious publisher, but his authorship was soon recognised. The TTP was an ‘immediate bestseller’ but only made him ‘more notorious than he had been before’ (Feldman 1998, xiii). The major proportion of the criticism consisted in ‘the wrath of the theologians’ (Blom 2002, 112). Feldman notes that the publication of the TTP was greeted with epithets such as ‘harmful and vile’, ‘most pernicious’, ‘intolerably unrestrained’, ‘subversive’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘diabolical’, and ‘atheistic’ (Feldman 1998, vii). Elwes also describes the adverse initial reception of the TTP (Elwes 1951, xvi). In 1670, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus was published anonymously, with the name of a ﬁctitious printer at Hamburg. It naturally produced a storm of angry controversy. It was, in 1674, formally prohibited by the States-General, and, as a matter of course, was 237

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placed on the Index by the Romish Church. Perhaps few books have been more often ‘refuted’, or less seriously damaged by the ordeal. Its author displayed his disinclination to disturb the faith of the unlearned by preventing during his lifetime the appearance of the book in the vernacular. There are several reasons which help to account for the ‘angry’ local reception of the TTP in 1670. This rejection and condemnation of Spinoza’s work also accounts in part for the reception given to the Ethics and the TP later, when they were published posthumously in 1677. During the 1660s Spinoza’s reputation was that he was a modest and respectable, if unconventional, philosopher. Wienpahl observes that the late 1660s were a fearful period in the Dutch Republic, when all who were suspected of liberal thinking were watched. He argues that the onset of this atmosphere of suspicion may have been one of the things that prompted Spinoza to write the TTP (Wienpahl 1979, 45). The ﬁrst draft of the Ethics and the TTP were both composed during the late 1660s. But Spinoza broke off from the revisions of the Ethics in order to complete and publish the TTP ﬁrst, probably because of a perceived urgency about the political situation in the United Provinces. The relationship between Spinoza’s political works on the one hand and the Ethics on the other has been discussed by philosophers largely in terms of the TTP as an extension of principles established in the Ethics, driven simply by a philosophical impetus to illustrate concepts in lived everyday practice. Wienpahl usefully addresses the connection from the another perspective, arguing that local practical politics helped to prompt Spinoza to write his political works. Thus he accounts for Spinoza’s composition of the TTP and the Ethics at the same time by noting that the TTP is not only a ‘livre d’occasion’, but was also written ‘sub specie aeternitatis’. He argues that the ‘two works complement each other other. Each without the other is incomplete’. Wienpahl remarks of the TTP that in ‘terms of Spinoza’s all-important distinction between imagination and understanding, it is the account of religion lived according to imagination’, while the ‘Ethics is the account of the religious life when it is lived with understanding’ (Wienpahl 1979, 46). Elwes signals that while Spinoza worked on the Ethics and the TTP concurrently from around 1665, before ‘the appearance of the TTP he had published nothing which could shock the susceptibilities of Christians, and he was known to be a complete master of Cartesianism,

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then regarded as the consummation and crown of learning’ (Elwes 1951, xiv). Several features of the TTP could be held responsible for outraging the local audience of the work. First there were at least ﬁve kinds of religious objection to the TTP. Spinoza’s development of a radically new historical method of interpreting scripture – begun in an attempt to solve problems he identiﬁed in orthodox Jewish theology, arising from the interpretation of biblical texts – deeply offended the vociferous and powerful Calvinist establishment in the United Provinces. While precedents can be found for aspects of Spinoza’s new method, his public dissemination and bold and uncompromisingly philosophically detached style of writing was deeply antagonistic to the Reformed Church. His promise in the Preface to ‘examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it’ (TTP 8), was not reassuring to Calvinists. Dutch Jews also perceived Spinoza’s open criticisms of their beliefs and practices to be anti-Semitic. Calvinism, like Lutheranism, put great reliance on the scriptures as a source of guidance on matters of faith, while holding that salvation came from faith alone. Spinoza’s argument for the historical character of the Bible directly questioned both the scriptural authority and the episcopal authority crucial to Protestant and Catholic readers in turn. As well as being scandalised by the content of Spinoza’s new method of scriptural interpretation, the deeply conservative temperament of the Dutch found his espousal of innovation profoundly repugnant. Coming on top of his audacious critical reading of Hebrew scripture, Spinoza’s argument for toleration outraged both groups, since the Calvinists were as strict as the Catholics in deﬁning heresy. Spinoza, like Grotius and Leibniz, sought to overcome the ﬁerce and mutual religious antagonisms of his age between Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists, but all three faiths continued to denounce each other. Their coexistence in the United Provinces did not imply acceptance on any side, and while Grotius and Leibniz both supported the reunion of the different faiths as a solution, Spinoza advocated making the issue a matter of the pursuit of private faith in a publicly tolerant society. The place accorded by Spinoza to human reason was also interpreted by both Calvinists and Catholics as deeply suspicious. His philosophical naturalism was regarded as, at worst, atheistic, and at best as belittling God’s omniscience. Furthermore, Spinoza’s advocacy of a purely civil state affronted Catholic sensibilities, while his proposal that the civil ruler should be the highest arbiter in the state over religious disputes was seen by Calvinists as extremely provocative. But, above all

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else, Spinoza’s explicit attacks on the Reformed Church in the TTP (TTP 264; see also the Preface, TTP 80, 81, 98, 99, 182–4, 190, 241, 254, 256, 262) guaranteed a hostile reception for the work in many quarters in the United Provinces. His slurs on Calvinist beliefs as superstition, and on the clergy, and his argument for the utter separation of church and state, were taken as personal affronts. Statements given prominence in the Preface such as, ‘[w]holly repugnant to the general freedom are such devices as enthralling men’s minds with prejudices, forcing their judgment, or employing any of the weapons of quasireligious sedition’ (TTP 5) were deliberately aggressive. The irony and condescension contained in, ‘I have often wondered, that persons who make a boast of profession the Christian religion, namely, love, joy, peace, temperance, and charity to all men, should quarrel with such rancorous animosity, and display daily towards one another such bitter hatred’ (TTP 6), were deeply insulting. Furthermore Spinoza’s attacks on the Calvinist establishment immediately resonated with his audience as a political intervention in the continuing Remonstrant/ Counter-Remonstant conﬂict. His argument (TTP 194–5), after asserting that reason and theology belong to separate spheres, that theology ‘tells us nothing else, enjoins on us no command save obedience, and has neither the will nor the power to oppose reason’, and that ‘reason is the light of the mind’, were inﬂammatory. While Spinoza’s argument represents an attempt by him to overcome the spillover into politics of the bitter divisions between Remonstrants and CounterRemonstrants, it did not win many adherents. The TTP was denounced as atheistic, ‘vile and blasphemous’, and ‘abominable’ (Israel 2001, 276) on all sides. Klever considers that the publication of the TTP had the effect of ‘unchaining a series of devastating refutations and defamations’ (Klever 1996, 39). The Reformed Church in Holland called strenuously for a ban on the book and De Witt as Pensionary was ‘involved in high-level deliberations’. Israel makes a convincing case that De Witt’s decision not to go forward with an ofﬁcial ban must not be read as approval for Spinoza’s treatise, and that town councils effectively suppressed the sale of the book (Israel 2001, 275). Subsequently, being linked with Spinoza was understood to amount to a slur on one’s reputation. Leibniz, for instance, was one of many who was careful to distance his views on religion, politics and philosophy from Spinoza’s, and asked a ‘learned theologian friend to write a counter treatise refuting Spinoza’s “monstrous” heresies’ (Feldman 1998, xiii). Colie notes that Locke, who lived in Amsterdam for ﬁve years in the 1680s, was defended by the Dutch against bracket-

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ing with the ‘Impious’ Spinoza (Colie 1960, 126). Locke himself disliked Spinoza’s work. Wilson notes that Locke wrote in 1698, ‘I am not so well read in Hobbes or Spinoza’ and added remarks about ‘those justly decried names’ (Wilson 1968, 169). The reasons outlined so far for the hostile reception of the TTP bear strong similarities with those associated with the reception of Hobbes’s Leviathan in 1651. Accusations of atheism also followed Hobbes’s reinterpretation of scripture, although his was a materialist rather than a historical exposition. Hobbes’s proclamation of the sovereign as the ultimate authority in matters both civil and theological had been found equally offensive, although Hobbes also rejected the religious toleration which Spinoza allowed. The distinction Hobbes made between inner belief and faith on the one hand, and outward religious observance on the other, had been poorly received in England. Equally Spinoza’s distinction between freedom of conscience in worship and the citizen’s duty to obey the ruling of the secular ruler in matters of religious dispute was condemned in the United Provinces. Hobbes had distinguished between public conformity and private faith, and Spinoza made an argument for religious toleration, such that Hobbes wants to unite Church and state while Spinoza wants to split them. Both seemed to Calvinists and Catholics alike to compromise the vital integrity of the Church’s realm. It is interesting that the evident and overtly spiritual goal which Spinoza outlines in the TTP, which is not found in Leviathan, did not shield him from the charges of atheism. Both were simply regarded as deposing revelation, deifying reason and subjecting the scriptures to unsympathetic scrutiny. Another factor in the hostility of the reception accorded to the TTP, which Spinoza again shares with Hobbes, is the hidden intention suspected by critics to lie behind the philosophical stance adopted by both writers (and the basis of an interpretation of Spinoza by Strauss (1952)). Spinoza wrote the TTP in Latin in an attempt to rule out two groups of potential readers, the masses and the Jewish community (Feldman 1998, xvii), and argued strongly against the imminent publication of a Dutch translation. Spinoza, like Hobbes, had sought to account for political upheaval philosophically, by describing the terms of civil society and civil engagement, rather than simply justifying a particular cause by polemical argument, and both were exceptional in their own local political contexts for doing so. But because they were both identiﬁed as supporting one side of a bitter political controversy, their arguments were received as partial and biased. Thus one effect of their philosophical treatments was that a crudely pragmatic and

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dogmatic doctrine was deduced from their works. Another effect was that, ironically, their philosophical stance helped in each case to fuel mistrust and alienate them from political inﬂuence. The timing of the publication of both Leviathan and the TTP, it should be added, was also very unfortunate, as both writers were effectively too late to be able to contribute to enhancing the standing of the political leader they supported. Charles I had already been executed when Hobbes completed and published Leviathan and his argument, at one level designed to endorse any leader strong enough to bring the political insecurity and instability to an end, did not unequivocally vindicate either the Protectorate’s nor Charles II’s claim to rule. By 1670 when the TTP was published, after ﬁve years in the writing, De Witt’s legitimacy was being seriously undermined and challenged by gathering pro-Orangist and other forces. The comparison between Spinoza and Hobbes can be extended, by considering brieﬂy how their political works were received in the United Provinces. Hobbes was best known to the Dutch at this time through the Latin De Cive. While Spinoza’s TTP had little impact upon the academic discourse of political theory, and was taken up primarily in heated religious debates in the Republic, Hobbes’s work was discussed and refuted endlessly. Even given Blom’s endorsement of a cautious reassessment that it ‘appears that Spinoza’s philosophy was much more widespread and much more read in his day than previous scholars thought’ (Blom 1985, 211), it is evident that Spinoza’s political theory did not receive extensive academic consideration, either positive or negative. Blom also notes, elsewhere (Blom 1988), that in intellectual circles, Lambert van Velthuysen was both the most uncritical exponent of Hobbes’s ideas in Holland, and the most important Dutch critic of the TTP. Blom argues that, among contemporaries, Spinoza was regarded primarily as a philosopher and that the TTP was received poorly because of its metaphysical and theological premises, rather than for its support of De Witt. It is for this reason, according to Blom, that ‘Spinoza does not ﬁgure traditionally in the history of republicanism and the growth of republican institutions’ (Blom 1988, 196). Spinoza’s positive references to Machiavelli in the TP also ensured, from 1677, that he would be regarded as suspect. The De la Court brothers were also well-known local political writers who used Machiavelli, who was disliked both because he was foreign and secondly because he was regarded as immoral by the Calvinist establishment.

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Spinoza’s relation to the intellectual life, and to the practical world of political controversy more generally, of the United Provinces, needs to be explored more fully than can be done here. But it is worth asking, when Spinoza wrote the political works and published the TTP, what kind of contribution he intended to make. The work was certainly not meant to be a contribution to contemporary political debate simply in the way that the De la Courts saw their work. However, a connection of some kind between Spinoza and the De la Court brothers can be defended, on the grounds that Spinoza is known to have had in his library some of the works of the De la Courts (Haitsma Mulier 1980, 171), and referred approvingly to their work in the TP. Kossmann makes the link that the tribute to the ‘prudentissimus Belga V.H.’ in the TP (VIII, 31) is a reference to ‘Van Hove but is more commonly known under the original French name of this family from the Southern Netherlands which settled in Holland: De la Court’ (Kossmann 1985, 219). Kossmann and others indeed estimate that Spinoza’s political works can simply be considered as more coherent versions of those written by the De la Court brothers. Haitsma Mulier follows the convention that Spinoza ‘incorporated the work of the De la Courts into a superior philosophical system’ (Haitsma Mulier 1990, 256). Spinoza’s involvement in political circles is attested to by Elwes, who comments that by 1670 Spinoza ‘was well known in Holland, and counted among his friends, John de Witt, who is said to have consulted him on affairs of state’ (Elwes 1951, xvi). Spinoza sought to put forward an argument for a well-founded but realistic commonwealth, in which men would have the opportunity to develop personal freedom devoted to the love of God. But the volatility of the political agenda that was current when the TTP was published prevented a more reasoned assessment of the book being possible. The chances of a favourable reception were not improved, perhaps, by Spinoza’s claim to speak from a lofty philosophical height above the fray, even though his argument endorsed the Holland-centric orthodoxy and acknowledged the moral value and the centrality of traditional practice as the key to Dutch political life. The Dutch reliance on practice and mistrust of theory goes back at least as far as Stevin’s essay, ‘On the Combination of Theory and Practice’ of around 1600 (van Bunge 1999b, 3). Nevertheless, Kossmann evaluates Spinoza’s contribution to political debate as very radical. He considers that the combined effect of the political works of the De la Courts and Spinoza was to transform De Witt’s republicanism. It had been paciﬁc, self-satisﬁed, conservative

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and unsophisticated according to Kossmann, and the De la Court brothers and Spinoza converted it ‘into a coherent philosophy which was neither conservative nor backward looking but astonishingly advanced’ (Kossmann 1987f, 173). This assessment, however, is achieved with the judgment of the historian, and the positive estimation it contains was not widespread enough at the time to make Spinoza’s views acceptable after 1670. But Spinoza’s reputation after 1670 was not wholly destroyed. He continued to carry on his academic correspondence, and in 1673 he was offered a professorship of philosophy at Heidelberg, by the Elector Palatine, Charles Lewis. But as Elwes describes, Spinoza ‘declined it, on the plea that teaching would interfere with his original work, and that doctrinal restrictions, however slight, would prove irksome’ (Elwes 1951, xvii–xviii). In 1674, according to Elwes, when ‘the Ethics were ﬁnished and circulated in MS. among their author’s friends’, Spinoza ‘made a journey to Amsterdam for the purpose of publishing them, but changed his intention on learning that they would probably meet with a stormy reception’ (Elwes 1951, xviii). This episode indicates that Spinoza had not been led to anticipate an unduly vehement negative response to publication of the Ethics prior to the trip to Amsterdam. But another incident from these years suggests that Spinoza had a more sinister reputation. In 1672 Spinoza was summoned to meet the Prince de Condé, when the French army had invaded the United Provinces and had established its headquarters at Utrecht. Although the meeting did not in the end take place, there was subsequent gossip of Spinoza being offered a pension from Louis XIV if a book were dedicated to him. This connection draws some plausibility from Gullan-Whur’s comment that the ‘French probably gave the TheologicoPolitical Treatise its most sympathetic response either in or beyond Spinoza’s lifetime’. She relates that in 1678 ‘a French translation of the Treatise, called The Key of the Sanctuary, by a Wise Man of our Century, would be printed in Leiden’ (Gullan-Whur 1998, 229). On his return to The Hague after the abortive meeting with the Prince de Condé, Elwes notes, Spinoza ‘was exposed to considerable danger from the excited populace, who suspected him of being a spy’ (Elwes 1951, xvii). This affair not only shows the physical danger to which Spinoza’s political views exposed him. It also suggests that the leaders of France, the arch-enemy of the United Provinces, interpreted Spinoza’s political views as in some way potentially favourable to themselves. Perhaps the most important feature of the hostile reception given to the TTP, which is discussed by van Bunge, links the reception of the

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TTP with that of the Ethics, which was not published until 1677, with the rest of Spinoza’s posthumous works. As Elwes relates, after Spinoza’s death in February 1677, the ‘MSS., which were found in Spinoza’s desk, were, in accordance with his wishes, forwarded to John Rieuwertz, a publisher in Amsterdam’. The manuscripts ‘were that same year brought out by Lewis Meyer, and another of the philosopher’s friends, under the title, “B.D.S. Opera Posthuma”’. The papers ‘consisted of the Ethics, a selection of letters, a compendium of Hebrew grammar, and two uncompleted treatises, one on politics, the other…on logical method…begun several years previously’ (Elwes 1951, xvii). The Spinoza commentators Siebrand (1988) and Popkin (1979) see the Ethics as the ﬁrst work of importance to which the Dutch responded. But van Bunge argues convincingly that Spinoza himself confused the ‘horizon of expectations’ of Dutch readers by publishing the TTP before the Ethics. The TTP refers several times to the Ethics, but because it was unavailable, it seemed to provide evidence for the suspicion of a ‘hidden’ philosophy (van Bunge 1989). According to van Bunge, this unintended effect not only cast doubt upon the good faith and philosophical credibility of the author of the TTP. It also undermined the chance of a favourable reception for the Ethics when it was ultimately published. As van Bunge says, the charges of materialism and atheism levelled against Spinoza were plausible when we see that he did not fully explain in the TTP how the power of nature is related to the power of God. As a consequence, the well-known Dutch Cartesian, van Mansvelt for instance, was also keen to distance Descartes’s work from Spinoza’s TTP. The reception of the TP, which represents the last major piece of work on which Spinoza was engaged before his death, was overshadowed by the attention given to the Ethics. The attitude toward the TP was also inﬂuenced by the low esteem in which the TTP was already generally held. Thus we can see that the unsympathetic reception to which Spinoza’s political works were subject is attributable to several sources. First, there is Spinoza’s character as a philosopher with a Jewish intellectual background, ejected from the Sephardic community for persistent heresy, and willing to challenge both Calvinist and Catholic orthodoxies. Such outspoken behaviour jeopardised his chances of having a positive impact on conservatively minded Dutch political thought and political life. Second, there is Dutch society, with a strong and vocal strain of intolerant Calvinism, which regarded Spinoza’s understanding as atheistic and

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alien. Third, the invasion by the French, the re-establishment of the Prince of Orange as Stadholder, and the untimely death of De Witt, all subverted the relevance of Spinoza’s recommendations. Finally Spinoza’s own, unwitting, confounding of his readers’ ‘horizon of expectations’, given the presence of the other factors, ensured the adverse reception of his political views.

The character of Spinoza’s republicanism The question of the character of Spinoza’s republicanism can be addressed in several ways. First there is Blom’s useful interrogation of the links between the entity of the ‘Dutch Republic’, the concept of ‘republicanism’, and the particular conception of ‘Spinoza’s republicanism’. Blom engages with this interrogation both through weighing up the merits of three answers given in the literature, and by discussing competing interpretations by modern commentators. Another means of addressing the links between the three terms is to assess a key feature of Pettit’s model of republicanism against Spinoza’s and Dutch republicanism. A further way of coming to a conclusion is by collecting together insights into Spinoza’s political theory, set against the backdrop of Dutch experience during and subsequent to the Revolt, in order to come to a conclusion about the character of his republicanism. We will explore these in turn. Blom asks (1995, 223) in what sense the Dutch Republic was republican in character. He is interested in the connection between republicanism and the Dutch Republic, and what role (or lack of role) Spinoza had in deﬁning it. His aim is to investigate through this question what republicanism meant for Spinoza, and whether it coincided with the Dutch Republic. To begin with he puts forward three interesting answers to his initial question. The ﬁrst is that the Dutch Republic was republican ‘because it was not a monarchy’. But, he reﬂects, if this means that the Dutch Republic was a ‘state that originated by deposing a tyrannical monarch without replacing him’, then what is described is a state lacking ‘a positive doctrine of its own actual principles’ (Blom 1995, 223). Blom regards this negative identiﬁcation as an inadequate deﬁnition. The second answer to the question of the republican character of the Dutch Republic is through ‘republican political writers’ convinced ‘that the Dutch Republic is inextricably linked to a rule by and sovereignty of the States, to the exclusion of any independent role for the princes of the House of Orange’ (Blom 1995, 223). According to this view,

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then, the heart of the Dutch Republic’s republicanism lies in its being ‘a basically aristocratic regime’. This celebration of the regenten is found in the ideological view put forward by De Witt and his supporters, and expressed by Pieter De la Court. Blom considers that this narrow and partisan interpretation of republicanism is also unsatisfactory, and argues that Spinoza does not belong to it (Blom 1995, 223). The third answer proceeds by ‘seeing the Dutch Republic through the eyes of its political actors’ (Blom 1995, 223). This answer concentrates on how the historical experience was developed over time through political conﬂict and compromise, change and continuity. But the problem with this approach, says Blom, is that it is teleological and as a result ‘it sees the Dutch Republic as the arena for the rise of modern liberal democracy, seeing the republican faction as the heroes’. It is the ‘Dutch version of Whig historiography’ (Blom 1995, 223). Having found all three answers defective, Blom then goes on to discuss competing interpretations of republican writings in the United Provinces by modern commentators of Dutch republican writers. Three of these interpretations are represented by Mout, van Gelderen, and Haitsma Mulier. Mout seeks to account, says Blom, for the popularity of the theme of the Batavian myth at the beginning of the seventeenth century. She argues that the reason this myth, ‘justifying the state by reference to its venerable historical origins’ (Blom 1995, 224), was enunciated during the Revolt was because any more innovative or radical republican ideas could not be absorbed into the ‘delicate political situation’ during the struggle against Spain. She makes the interesting argument that only after the ‘secure establishment’ of the Republic in 1648, once the Revolt was over, could there open up a political space for more radical forms of republican idea (Blom 1995, 224). Blom then focuses on van Gelderen’s concern with the republican credentials of the privileges. Van Gelderen’s position is that republican claims based on the privileges were republican because they ‘expressed basic convictions of the classical republicanism of the Italian city-states’. It was Dutch because it was the ‘offspring of the Dutch Renaissance’ and elaborated ‘an indigenous tradition of constitutionalism’. Van Gelderen regards the Batavian myth as ‘a humanist articulation of this republicanism’ (Blom 1995, 225). Haitsma Mulier, the third modern commentator, considers Dutch republican writings, says Blom, notwithstanding that they had their own agenda, to be indebted to classical republicanism as expressed in other European countries, especially Venice. He regards ‘republicanism as an international movement to which some Dutch political thinkers reacted to

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some degree’ (Blom 1995, 227), but sees 1672 as putting ‘an end to the aspirations it embodied’ (Blom 1995, 225). Blom’s discussion of these debates about how to conceive of the Dutch republic, republicanism and Spinoza’s republicanism, is very helpful, not only for the suggestive insights the modern historiography affords but also in that it shows that the meaning of the entity, the concept and the conception, and the links between them are not ﬁxed and closed but are still fruitfully open and contested. A second way of analysing Spinoza’s republicanism is by comparing it with a key feature of Pettit’s model. What emerges from the argument of the current work adds weight from the Dutch case to Springborg’s comment that Pettit, ‘by dispensing with the historiography has also dispensed with the institutional richness of classical republican theory’ (Springborg 2001, 852). For instance, Pettit’s argument that ‘republicans were anti-monarchists only so far as they considered that a monarch would inevitably seek absolute power and would offend against the sort of liberty they prized’ (Pettit 1997, 20, emphasis added), does not ﬁt well with the Dutch example. De Witt’s republican political settlement and Spinoza’s political theory were both profoundly anti-monarchical. The jeopardy to liberty posed by a monarch was certainly important (though understood in its particular Dutch sense as the liberty of an independent, tolerant, isolationist, traditionalist, self-governing, confederal, particularist, trading republic that practised persuasie) but was not on its own the only objection to monarchy. Spinoza’s defence of liberty and toleration, and arguments against governing by fear, take on new force in the light of the sharp increase in government censorship in the mid-1670s under William III’s ‘Orangist offensive’. The bans included Spinoza’s own TTP and the works of other Dutch authors as well as Hobbes’s Leviathan. The bans also extended to the removal of a liberal academic from his chair in Leiden (van Bunge 1999a, 26), as part of the climate in which William III also banned the teaching of the radical Cartesian doctrine in an attempt to stem the intellectual revolution that was taking place (Israel 2001, 29). Moreover, Pettit’s generalised deﬁnition of republican freedom as ‘[individual] immunity to arbitrary control’ (Pettit 1997, 10), is in marked contrast to the primary Dutch concern with political liberty in terms of the claims that can be made about the ‘privileges’ of cities and provinces, and as referring ﬁrst of all to collective self-government rather than individual freedoms. Anti-monarchical sentiment in the middle of the seventeenth century in the United Provinces arose

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primarily from the need to defend the independence of the separate provinces and individual towns, and from concern for the corrupting nature of unaccountable government. Anti-monarchical feeling was not simply a guise under which a fervour for liberty lurked. Dutch republicanism involves, at its heart, an understanding of the value given to a bundle of meanings of liberty. Traditional practice, a distinctive way of doing politics, an implicit constitutionalism as a set of claims about privileges, a practical approach to political issues which sidelines the role of theory, and a pragmatic selectivity in the use of ideas, as well as toleration and freedom of worship, are all involved. Spinoza’s republicanism contains all these features and is, moreover, selfconsciously allied to the local Dutch example. Spinoza’s particular form of republicanism also includes the view that the components of the republic are not autonomous and pre-political liberal individuals, but persons whose understanding and potential are individuated but occur within common social practices. As West notes, in ‘Spinoza’s system rationality or understanding is not merely a symptom of freedom, but also a means of attaining it. The improvement of the understanding is a form of emancipation’ (West 1993, 293). Coming now to the third way to evaluate Spinoza’s republicanism, several crucial links with the De Witt regime can be seen as central to its composition – Spinoza’s defence of the De Witt regime, his deeply engaged criticisms of that regime, and the ways in which he was out of step with mainstream Dutch republicanism. The importance of these links is part of what is meant by presenting a ‘political’ reading of Spinoza’s political works. Whatever his criticisms of the De Witt regime, Spinoza admired De Witt’s approach to politics, in the context of both an intense fragmentation of loyalties and shared assumptions about how politics is conducted. His defence of the regime includes his celebration of Dutch history and practice, his attempt to articulate his political preferences by underpinning Dutch practice with reasoned arguments, and his attempt to express the basis of constitutional legitimacy and propose constitutional reform and institutional design. Spinoza’s defence of the De Witt republican settlement also includes the fact that while Spinoza occasionally referred to a ‘republic’ he did not argue for one in a positive sense. For Spinoza a republic was not a form of government (those were monarchies, aristocracies, democracies or mixed forms) but a commonwealth that in principle could take any of these forms. Spinoza was conforming to Dutch practice in this respect. As Bödeker puts it, ‘Spinoza never speaks in terms of the “optimal state”. He always talks about “the best form of each government”…there

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cannot be a variety of forms of state, merely a variety of forms of government’ (Bödeker 2002, 227). As Kossmann makes clear (Kossmann 1991, 289), the term ‘res publica’ meant commonwealth rather than republic for most of this period, and the Dutch shunned the republican implications of their ‘United Provinces’ for seventy years before the De Witt period. That the Oldenbarnvelt and especially De Witt periods were exceptions, and not the rule is well drawn out by Kossmann (1960) where he shows that in the main Dutch political theory was antirepublican, Calvinist, Aristotelian and monarchist. Blom comments that the ‘fact that the Revolt against Spain ended in a republic…was deﬁnitely springing against the conﬁnes of tradition’ (Blom 1995, 45). But innovation could only be accepted if integrated into the existing tradition in terms of claims about the privileges. Van Gelderen shows that the political theory and practice of the northern Netherlanders throughout the Revolt was based upon the determination to preserve ‘the old freedom and the old political order’ (van Gelderen 1990, 218). One of the things that Spinoza did in his political works was to try and articulate positively the implications of those ‘new’ claims. The privileges were symbolic but the claims made about them were not. The privileges were about ‘real’ issues of self-government, and Spinoza endeavoured to justify those claims. This book has sought to examine one important context contributing to the enrichment of the meanings of Spinoza’s republicanism. In assessing its character it is clear from earlier chapters that one can argue very strongly that Spinoza’s republicanism must be placed, if it is not to be misinterpreted, squarely within the context of the Dutch understanding of political life and a speciﬁcally Dutch expression of republicanism. At the same time, Blom is right to note that in the TTP Spinoza ‘placed himself ﬁrmly within the republican tradition’ in a more general sense than just the Dutch case. Blom argues that the ‘central distinction he put forward’ in the Preface, ‘to set the scene of this innovative work on religion and politics was that between despotism and freedom, between that political regime whose “supreme mystery” is “to keep men in a state of deception” on the one hand, and a commonwealth “where nothing is esteemed dearer and more precious than freedom” on the other’ (Blom 1995, 222). However, it is clear that Spinoza’s interest in republicanism more broadly arises from his philosophical approach of rational enquiry rather than from an active interest in classical republicanism. Most strongly, Spinoza’s republicanism attests to the diversity of republican practice and theorising.

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It has been shown that Dutch republicanism, which found its ﬁrst full assertion in the De Witt period, expressed a vibrantly successful practice underpinned by an extreme insularity, particularism and parochialism. Institutionally it meant self-government focused on the States, within an equilibrated political structure of regional complementarity with a Holland-centric focus, comprising a set of independent provinces, dominated by the regent oligarchies of the individual towns throughout the United Provinces. Blom identiﬁes a central problem for seventeenth-century Dutch writers as to who ‘is’ the state, and whose state it is. As a continuing anomaly from the developing norm of powerful centralising, unitary and at times absolutist territorial states like France and England, this question was an important one. Blom’s view that Spinoza ‘attempted his version of republicanism as a solution to the matter’ (Blom 1995, 226), expresses well Spinoza’s evident concern with articulating the role of the council in constitutional and institutional design and reform within the Dutch context. The second of the links between Spinoza’s republicanism and the De Witt government consists of his criticisms of the De Witt regime. De Witt’s policy was to attempt to assuage the claims of the Reformed Church without granting their demands, and to balance religious claims against others in Holland and the United Provinces. This policy meant that De Witt’s political practice fell far short of Spinoza’s vision of the place of religion and its separation from politics and government in the TTP. For Spinoza, De Witt’s strategy was far too conservative. It is clear that Spinoza’s attention to religion in the TTP is as much inﬂuenced by his admiration for the long culture of religious toleration in the United Provinces, as by his metaphysics, theological knowledge, Jewish religious expertise, or Marrano status. Spinoza’s more direct criticisms of De Witt’s regime centred on the increasingly closed composition of the regenten, and their growing aristocratisation. He was also critical of the way De Witt, or his supporters, elevated De Witt’s leadership position above the States and States General into an almost too-powerful role. The deeply felt perception of the danger of this tendency was that the De Witt regime would no longer truly be an aristocracy of more than one city but would become transformed into a kind of monarchy, with the fear of it tilting towards despotism. Spinoza was critical of the increasingly closed membership of the ruling regent oligarchy, its self-satisﬁed, backward-looking air and its declining ability to represent the political interests of the whole dominion. As van Deursen notes of Spinoza’s critique of the point at which the regents’ tolerant pragmatism became sloppiness and lack of

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judgement, it was he who ‘most sharply challenged the principles of this tolerant tradition’ (van Deursen 1999, 189). The speciﬁc reforms that Spinoza proposed amount to a set of decentralising measures, in line with the ethos of the ‘Republics of the Seven Provinces’. They included the abolition of the ofﬁces of both Stadholder and Grand Pensionary, the opening up of the regent oligarchy, the prohibition on the formation of parties, the election procedures and the strict rotation of ofﬁces, and replacing the system of unanimous agreement in the council by majority votes. The impetus for these reforms can be fully understood in the Dutch context of political life. While some of the titles employed may have been lifted from Italian republican examples, this does not evidence a strong notion of ‘inﬂuence’ from classical republican models. The third key link between Spinoza’s and De Witt’s republican experiment highlights the ways in which his approach to politics was out of step with the mainstream. Blom argues that Spinoza’s republicanism was a ‘devastating critique of the political culture of the Dutch Republic, couched in the cautious language of a political interventionist who tried to build consensus’ (Blom 1995, 238). While this is certainly a fair assessment in certain respects, there is also a strong case that the radicalism of some of Spinoza’s proposals had the effect of ruling out his inﬂuence on politics to any great extent. Perhaps Spinoza was more concerned to put his ideas into the public realm than with taking steps to ensure their positive impact. Another way of accounting for the radicalism might be to conjecture that, like the De la Court brothers, Spinoza was out of touch with the depth of the conservatism of Dutch political culture. It may be that Spinoza’s intervention into local religious controversy, for instance through his discussion of ancient Israel in the TTP, had the opposite effect to the one he intended. Feldman argues that Spinoza’s treatment of ancient Israel was designed ‘to show his ideological opponents its shortcomings and irrelevance to the present’ (Feldman 1998, xlv). Whatever the answer, Spinoza certainly made a strategic mistake in antagonising the Counter-Remonstrants to the degree that he did. Thus within the context of his selfconscious support for the Dutch example, Spinoza proposed some reforms of the De Witt regime that he admired. However, the possibility of reasoned consideration of his reforms was also overshadowed by other factors and by events. Along with the enormously contentious interpretation of Biblical theology and the attacks on the Reformed Church in the TTP, there was great fear associated with Spinoza’s reputation as a naturalist

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and a rationalist, and suspicion of him as an outsider. The downfall of De Witt also contributed to the poor reception his political works received. Spinoza’s republicanism was also for several reasons an anomaly in Dutch seventeenth-century political culture. It was too philosophical, and philosophically radical, despite its evident understanding of the value of traditional practice, in attempting to place the discussion of politics within a wider metaphysical (but not conventional and Calvinist) and rationalist (but not conventional and humanist) project. Spinoza’s marginal position, outside the aristocratic and commercial circles which dominated Dutch political life, outside the mainstream of Dutch political theory and Dutch university teaching of politics, and outside Calvinist, Catholic and Jewish theological orthodoxy and acceptance, did nothing to allay the suspicion aroused by his style of argument. Having summed up the key elements of Spinoza’s republicanism in relation to the De Witt regime, we come back to the question Blom formed about the meaning of Dutch republicanism, the concept of republicanism, and Spinoza’s republicanism. There is certainly a case for arguing that the Dutch Republic was both ﬁercely anti-monarchical and actively concerned to promote the regenten form of aristocratic and Stadholderless, independent and self-governing, rule. However, the meaning of Dutch republicanism is considerably more extensive than that. It was also crucially about maintaining a way of doing politics. In part this meant retaining a Holland-centric, decentralised balance of regional complementarity among strong municipal self-governing polities in the loosest of confederal alliances. The United Provinces was not a modern state, and the notions of exclusive territorial authority and the impersonal rule of a state bureaucracy do not apply. Instead political authority was shared between the States of the provinces, the towns, the States General and, at times, the House of Orange. The meaning of Dutch republicanism was also about politics as persuasie between legitimate interests in the public domain. It meant balancing provincial particularism with toleration and consensus-building. Further, it was about not theorising practice too closely and leaving the mismatch between theory and practice and the constitutional situation deliberately fruitfully ambiguous. The personalised rule of De Witt as Pensionary is also a critical feature of the Republic. It was also about De Witt’s ‘true liberty’ ideology and set of policies. Of these, seeking to remain at peace with warlike neighbours in the international politics of Europe was very important, not least because of the direct link with Holland-centricity. Favouring Holland’s commercial and trading interests required peace to

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ﬂourish. Maintaining a tolerationist stance (towards the ongoing Remonstrant/Counter-Remonstrant confrontation, and towards refugees and minority religious belief more widely), and promoting economic prosperity more generally were also prominent. There were at least two reasons why maintaining a way of doing politics was a crucial feature of Dutch republicanism. The ﬁrst is that the Dutch sought to defend a political tradition, a political practice and a Dutch mentality that they highly valued. The second is that the features of Dutch republicanism were a contingent and unruly mixture, the product of accident rather than design. Rather than streamline its unintended provisions in radical and innovative constitutional and institutional reform, the Dutch preferred to make the mixture work through concrete political bargaining in the forum of the council. Moreover, Kossmann convincingly reminds us that the ‘Dutch political writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries thought that it was this maritime and mercantile character of the nation that gave it its republican form.’ He continues that, ‘[i]n their eyes a monarchy was a form of government perhaps suitable for a big state with its basis in landed property; for a commercial state the republic was the only adequate form of government’. Kossmann concludes that on the basis of the historical evidence, Dutch republicanism was the only active European republic in the seventeenth century. It defended commercial interests, peace, the power of the urban regent oligarchies, liberty, and political ofﬁce based on an aristocracy operating under noblesse oblige rather than civic virtue (Kossmann 1987a, 222). Furthermore, when republican theory was advanced in the De Witt period, it was propounded not in order to remedy the mismatch that had existed, but as a weapon in a local political battle. On the question of the concept of ‘republicanism’, this book has taken the view that there are many elaborations of the concept, and that the diversity of those conceptions suggests that there is much to be gained from appreciating fully embedded historical examples such as the Dutch and English cases. The concept must of necessity remain thin and abstract, and what is more interesting in some senses is the richness and ambiguity of the examples. A model such as Pettit’s is rather too constraining to fully take into account the diversity of speciﬁc ‘lived’ conceptions of republicanism. Its importing of modern notions of democracy into its principles, and prioritising features of some conceptions (such as civic virtue) as elements of the concept also ultimately limit its appeal. Likewise, several scholars have recently questioned an all-embracing notion of classical republicanism, covering all instances

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in the early modern period (Nederman 2000, Hankins 2000, Fontana 1994, Nippel 1994). It is not clear that such a notion is able to incorporate the pecularity of a case like the Dutch and the ambiguity of the English case into its dominant narrative as currently structured. On the question of Spinoza’s republicanism and its relation to the Dutch republic and republicanism, the book has sought to show that Spinoza’s political works can be usefully located within the context of the Dutch understanding of politics, republicanism, and republican practice. Blom importantly observes that throughout the two centuries of the Dutch Republic, the terms liberty and republic ‘functioned as the foci of discussion rather than as a source of agreed principles’. The persistently ‘contested character’ (Blom 2002, 97) of these terms is part of the highly political context for interpreting Spinoza’s contribution. The importance of taking equal account of both Spinoza’s treatises on politics, is also part of what is meant by presenting here a ‘political’ interpretation of Spinoza. As Blom notes, ‘local attitudes are more important for the understanding of Dutch seventeenth century political thought than is normally assumed’ (Blom 1988, 204). Blom certainly conﬁrms the view that ‘the epitome of Dutch republicanism is to be found in Spinoza’s political thought’ (Blom 1995, 228). Spinoza’s interest in promoting the values of a ‘free state’ rather than ‘republicanism’, suggests that his commitment to the Dutch case is stronger than to the concept, either in terms of an abstract set of principles or in terms of his contribution to a selfconscious European republican tradition. Spinoza’s interest in promoting the ‘free state’ also indicates that he was not concerned with elucidating the conditions of the modern nation-state. Spinoza, like other Dutch writers, was deeply entrenched in the political culture of provincial and city-state practice and aspirations, and used humanist and republican texts in an entirely supporting role. As van Gelderen bluntly notes, ‘the Dutch republican view of the political order as built on the trinity of liberty, privileges and States was not developed out of the republican language of the Machiavellian moment’ (van Gelderen 1990, 218). In line with this view, Blom considers that Spinoza’s ‘republican programme is precisely intended to explain the core beliefs of the “minor” republicans’ (Blom 1995, 227). Blom identiﬁes an important insight into Spinoza’s republicanism when he registers that ‘[i]n the end, Spinoza’s republicanism is, for all its radicalism, ﬁrmly in accordance with the Dutch religiously coloured conception of community; for all its rationalism, it properly reﬂects the contingencies of political life’ (Blom 1988, 212).

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Exploring Spinoza’s republicanism highlights that his highly developed rationalistic temper, in his approach to natural knowledge, was combined with a strong sense that human understanding and potential occur within common social practices, and that the appropriate forms of politics and government in a speciﬁc polity depend upon its customs and traditions. Spinoza’s republicanism was ultimately about defending the public domain and seeking to update the Dutch way of doing politics.

Epilogue

Spinoza died in 1677. The century after Spinoza’s death, the second century of Dutch independence, witnessed three phases of political change. The reascendance of the House of Orange in 1672 was followed (with William III’s death in 1702) by the second Stadholderless period of 1702–47, and later by the ﬁrst properly nationalist movement, that of the ‘Patriots’. In the southern Netherlands, on the death in 1701 of the Spanish king, the childless Charles II, French troops peacefully occupied the southern Low Countries. But overshadowing all these changes was a trajectory of declining economic power and weakening military power on the international stage. The dominant character of this second century of independence was provided, as it was in the ﬁrst century, by the persistence of older political values of traditional practice, Holland-centricity, provincial independence and regional complementarity, and a willingness to tolerate a mismatch between theory and practice, within a balanced tension between independent provinces. This system only broke down when, towards the end of the eighteenth century, the United Provinces ceased to be a major European power and came increasingly under the shadow of the French. Forty years of intermittent war with France since 1672 had left the Dutch, at the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, with crippling war debts. However, one interesting outcome of the Peace of Utrecht was that the Austrian emperor accepted the United Provinces’ demand for the Southern Netherlands to act as an anti-French barrier. As a result the Southern Netherlands were now effectively, in terms of trade, as Bruneel says, ‘at the mercy of the Dutch Republic’ (Bruneel 1999, 245). The accession of William IV as Stadholder in 1747, in the face of further war with France, put an end to the second Stadholderless era. 257

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But the swings of the pendulum, as republican/Stadholderless periods alternated with periods of Orange ascendancy, were now accomplished with much less passion. As Kossmann comments, in ‘the eighteenth century the passage from a stadholderian to a non-stadholderian regime in 1702 and out again in 1747 was surprisingly smooth’ (Kossmann 1993, 24). William IV’s post differed from that of previous Stadholders in two important ways. He now held the Stadholderate over all seven provinces, and the position of Stadholder as constitutional head of state was made hereditary, effectively transforming the United Provinces into a monarchy. As van Deursen underlines, the States assemblies of the different provinces ‘had lost their freedom to have, or not to have, a stadholder’ (van Deursen 1999, 205). Later a nationalist ‘Patriot’ movement developed (1780–87), for the ﬁrst time identifying the interests of the northern Netherlanders with a geographical ‘nation’ as a whole. In 1795 the Batavian Republic, a French satellite state, replaced the old United Provinces republic, and in 1813 a constitutional monarchy was established under a reinstated Prince of Orange. The northern and southern Netherlands were temporarily reunited between 1815 and 1830, merged by the great European powers after the fall of Napoleon, to form the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. These developments were very important for the eighteenth-century history of the United Provinces. However, they are also very signiﬁcant for understanding the United Provinces in the seventeenth century. For they conﬁrm the perspective gained from the direct evidence from the seventeenth history itself, namely that the deﬁnition of ‘republicanism’ to which Spinoza contributed, whatever else it was, was not the proud championing of the integrity and unity of a territorial nationstate. Wansink makes a compelling case that the history of the Dutch Republic throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries does not evidence a progress towards unity. Each of the seven provinces continued to ﬁercely prize their independence within a loose, polycentric confederal alliance. Moreover, the tensions between the provinces, arising from different historical sets of interests, Holland’s pre-eminent wealth and power, and the role of the House of Orange, very effectively prevented any slide towards a single centralised form (Wansink 1971). The character of the republicanism that was possible in these conditions was thus circumscribed. It was not until the late eighteenth century that republican ideas were identiﬁed with a different, and uniﬁed, political structure, when the ‘patriots’ of the 1770s and 1780s,

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as Haitsma Mulier comments, ‘expressed themselves in a more or less democratic way and at last urged a republic without a stadholder’ (Haitsma Mulier 1990, 261). That the older political values persisted throughout the William III period and the second Stadholderless era can be seen through several pieces of evidence. First, while the reascendance of the House of Orange led to a purge of many of De Witt’s men in the States General and the Holland States, many ofﬁcials and councillors with republican views at municipal level throughout the province remained in place. In addition many elements of De Witt’s ‘true liberty’ ideology continued to be inﬂuential in the political life of the United Provinces, and as Kossmann indicates, ‘were in a mitigated form taken up by large sections of the elite’. For instance, the notion that ‘monarchy, whatever its shape, was inherently bellicose came to be a commonplace in Dutch opinion’, and ‘the view that the Republic was better equipped to further peace, trade, prosperity, and all the arts gracing Dutch civilisation was generally accepted’, Kossmann conﬁrms (Kossmann 1991, 291). Furthermore, Kossmann makes the important point that subsequently, the ‘idea that the Republic should not be transformed into a semi-monarchical state’, was ‘not again seriously challenged, even by the Princes of Orange themselves’. The broad consensus rejecting a regnum mixtum with the House of Orange fulﬁlling the monarchical component, was reached ‘irrespective of’ the different views held on the question of the Stadholderate. The possibility of semi-monarchical government was rejected on the grounds that it ‘would irreparably damage both liberty and the economy’. Republicanism ‘had become an integral part of the package of components held to constitute “Dutch freedom”’ (Kossmann 1991, 292). It is this aspect of Spinoza’s work, also found in the De la Court brothers – the argument for the corrupting nature of all one-headed government – that is taken up and incorporated into later seventeenthcentury Dutch thinking. Their conception of the best dominion as one where power is shared and balanced, and vested in a council, such that no one individual or faction can use it for personal rather than public gain, was enduring. Their notion that government is best protected against corruption by watertight institutional foundational arrangements, became a commonplace. After an initial ﬂirtation with the idea of proclaiming himself king, and being monarch in the United Provinces as well as in England, William III bowed to popular opinion and operated only as Stadholder, within the ambiguous relationships established by the older regnum mixtum doctrine.

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Moreover, as Kossmann notes, this period saw the publication, not of a theoretically coherent attempt to account for the political situation, but characteristically of a synthesis of previous regnum mixtum and republican threads, in the De jure civitatis libri tres (deﬁnitive edition, 1694) of Ulric Huber. Kossmann characterises seventeenth-century Dutch political theory as dialectical, in terms of a university-based Calvinist thesis in the ﬁrst half of the century, a republican antithesis in the second half of the century, and a synthesis expressed in the work of Huber. Huber’s work, he says, amounts to ‘a clear, convincing synthesis of the various tendencies which had marked the development of Dutch political thought since the sixteenth century’ (Kossmann 1960, 108). Neither did the second Stadholderless period produce a theoretically coherent justiﬁcation of the United Provinces’ republican character. Kossmann notes that even by the end of the seventeenth century the Republic was ‘impotent in politics’ in Europe and had also ‘lost its cultural originality’ (Kossmann, 1987a, 209). Tied to the older mentality and perspective, but now without having the status of a world-class commercial and trading power, the period 1702–47 ‘produced only one book’ of, as Kossmann generously allows, ‘a more or less theoretical nature in which the republican ethos was deﬁned and praised’ (Kossmann 1987a, 223). This was the Verhandeling van de vrijheid in den burgerstaat (A Treatise on Liberty in a Civil Society) of Lieven de Beaufort (1675–1730), published in 1737. It continued to extol the republican ideas that celebrated the rule of a political oligarchy of urban regents. According to Klashorst, Blom and Haitsma Mulier (1986, x), eighteenth-century Dutch political thought as a whole is characterised by a more juridical approach to politics, dominated by the theory of natural law. From this perspective Spinoza’s contribution to Dutch republicanism becomes even clearer. The two whole centuries of Dutch independence were characterised by the persistence of older values and older arrangements. Referring to the ﬁrst half of the seventeenth century, Kossmann describes how ‘the political situation developed in such a way that it became difﬁcult to deny the republican character of the governmental system then prevailing in the northern Netherlands’. But this ‘was not a moment of triumph for the republican idea but rather one of resigned acceptance of a no longer disputable fact’ (Kossmann 1991, 287). In making this important observation, Kossmann is identifying a cast of mind that continued throughout the Republic’s existence. Indeed the reliance of practice over theory is one of the elements that

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supplies a strong continuity into the post-Republic period. An example is found in the way in which the polarised struggle between the Orangist and regent republican factions ended. By the eighteenth century the passion of that struggle had been dissipated. Van Bunge provides a deeply practical insight into the profoundly practical Dutch cast of mind when he remarks that it is ‘as if the Dutch simply came to recognise that the dispute over who should hold the sovereignty over the Republic was indeed left unresolved – and left it at that’ (van Bunge 1999a, 35). Spinoza’s contribution is characterised by the same value given to traditional practice. In an important sense Spinoza’s contribution is not a statement of republicanism. Spinoza does not argue actively in favour of ‘republicanism’, but in favour of the Dutch manner of conducting politics and a justiﬁcation of an amended form of De Witt’s republican practice and ideology.

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Index Abjuration of Spanish rule 1581, 10, 33, 36, 55, 67, 76, 104, 116, 118 Allison, H.E., 200 Althusius, 50, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 236 Arendt, H., 210 Armitage, D., 4 Balibar, E., 169 Baron, H., 13 Berlin, I., 201–3 van der Bijl, M., 33, 70, 90, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 104, 105, 107, 108, 162 Black, J., 38, 66, 69, 70, 111 Blockmans, W. P., 16, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 32, 33, 34, 36, 52, 63, 68, 79, 164, 166, 167 Blom, H., 17, 18, 54, 60, 71, 98, 99, 104, 105–6, 137, 145, 146, 147, 200, 207, 208, 232, 237, 242, 246–8, 250–2, 253, 255, 260 Bödeker, H. E., 200 Bodin, 34, 56, 59, 224 den Boer, H., 194 Boone, M., 75, 76 Boralevi, L.C., 5 Boscherini, E.G., 181 Boxer, C.R., 104, 108, 194 Braudel, F., 39, 40, 67, 90, 104–5, 106, 109, 131–2, 156, 160, 167, 192 Browning, A., viii Browning, C., v Browning, E., v Browning, G., viii, 15 Browning, H., viii Bruneel, C., 257 van Bunge, W., 2, 22, 25, 40, 58, 106, 112, 113, 220, 243, 244, 245, 248, 261 Burgersdijk, F., 60 Burgess, G., 134, 149 Burke, P., 38, 165 Buys, P., 57, 59

Carver, T., viii Castiglione, D., 5, 7, 155 Colie, R., 240–1 Condren, C., viii, 214 Conti, V., 8 De la Court, P. and J., 12, 60, 70, 83, 94, 96–104, 107, 112–13, 115, 162, 169, 184, 195, 219, 242–4, 247, 252, 259 Cox, R., 224 Curley, E., 5, 6, 181, 200 Davids, K., ix Davis, J.C., 151 Delahunty, R.J., 200 Deleuze, G., 196, 220 van Deursen, A. T., 3, 31, 34, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 58, 68, 89, 90, 91, 95, 102, 107, 109, 123, 127, 130–1, 162, 164, 165, 178, 251–2, 258 van Dillon, J. G., 216 Duff, R., 200 Duke, A., 23, 24, 27, 34, 35, 36, 37, 45, 163 Dunn, J., 7 Dutch Republic, date of, 65–75, 257–61 Dzelzainis, M., 136, 142–3, 149 Elwes, R.H.M., 6, 19, 197, 208, 237, 238–9, 243, 244, 245 Erasmus, 50–2, 54, 61, 84 Feldman, S., 181, 191–2, 196, 197, 237, 240, 252 Feuer, L., 178 Fontana, B., 255 Foreman-Peck, L., viii Gatens, M., 2, 11, 155, 170, 173, 200 Gebhardt, 2 van Gelderen, M., 2, 18, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 33, 34, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49,

277

278 Index 50, 53, 55, 57, 58, 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 75, 83, 84, 85, 100, 112, 154, 157, 247, 250 Geyl, P., 29, 30, 67, 82, 116 Gildin, H., 181, 220 Golden Age, 1, 12, 14, 75 Grotius, 50, 57–9, 68, 75, 84, 85, 97, 113, 130, 162, 191, 220 Gullan-Whur, M., 194–5, 244 Haitsma Mulier, E., 2, 54, 60, 64, 65, 82, 100, 112, 175, 243, 247, 259, 260 Hampsher-Monk, I., 5, 7, 155, 157 Hampshire, S., 180, 200, 220 Hankins, J., 3, 255 Harline, C., 41, 52, 72, 86 Harrington, J., 33, 70, 71, 124, 134, 139–42, 144, 148, 150, 231 Harris, E., 180, 200 Harris, T., 150 Hibben, C.C., 43, 55, 154 Hoak, D., 129 Hobbes, T., 33, 60, 74, 97, 99, 103, 125, 136, 137, 139, 141, 149, 169, 172, 184, 186–7, 188–9, 190, 191, 195, 196, 198, 200, 201, 202, 206, 208, 212, 215, 217, 219, 220–4, 228, 232, 233, 234–6, 241–2, 248 Hooft, P., 61, 75, 84, 162 Horton, J., viii Israel, J.I., 2, 3, 39, 41, 42, 97, 108, 193, 194, 196, 197, 211, 217, 240, 248 Jones, J.R., 108–9, 117 Jordan, W.C., 4 de Jouvenal, B., 200 Kaiser, W., 66, 67 Kedourie, E., 192 Kelsey, S., 150 Kishlansky, M., 129 van de Klashorst, G.O., 54, 60, 260 Klever, W.N.A., 5, 240 Kossmann, E.H., 3, 7, 11, 21, 28, 30, 31, 32, 41, 47, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 71, 74, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 91, 92, 95,

97, 99, 100, 102, 103, 105, 112, 113, 142, 160, 165, 166, 218, 220, 229, 243, 244, 250, 254, 259, 260 Lipsius, 50, 53, 56, 60, 84 Lloyd, G., 2, 11, 155, 170, 173, 200 Locke, 147, 184, 186–7, 191, 201, 217, 230, 240–1 Lockyer, A., 69 Lockyer, R., 77, 78, 88, 108, 109, 118 Lucassen, J., ix MacCallum, G.C., 201, 202 McShea, R., 200, 232 Machiavelli, 13, 33, 50, 53, 61, 62, 97, 100, 101, 102, 135, 139, 201, 215, 236, 242 Mack Crew, P., 31 Malcolm, N., 98, 111, 218, 233 Martineau, J., 200 Mastellone, S., 112 Mellink, A.F., 11, 28, 32, 47, 54, 63, 91 Miller, D., 201, 203 Milton, J., 118, 134, 137, 139, 142–4, 148, 151 Misrahi, R., 181 Monaldi, R., 129 Montag, W., 170, 200 Morrall, J.B., 78 Morrill, J., 132, 148 Nadler, S., 194, 197 Nederman, C.J., 255 Nedham, M, 134, 139 Negri, A., 180 Nenner, H., 126 van Nierop, H.F.K., 24, 80 Nippel, W., 255 Norbrook, D, 136 Oldenbarnevelt, 35, 38, 39, 40, 41, 57, 58, 59, 64, 75, 80, 88, 89, 106, 113, 114, 162, 163, 250, 258 Onuf, N., 120 O’Sullivan, N., viii O’Sullivan, L., viii Pagden, A., 4 Parker, G., 22, 71, 72, 76

Index 279 Pavord, A., 43 Peace of Utrecht 1713, 257 Peltonen, M., 136, 149 Petry, M.J., 169 Pettit, P., 13, 14, 246, 248, 254 Philp, M., viii Plant, R., 201, 202 Pocock, J. G. A., 2, 3, 4, 8, 13, 14, 71, 120, 121, 122, 124, 128, 135, 136, 138, 139, 140, 142, 148, 149, 216–17, 231 political theory, meaning of, 48–50 political thought in 1648, 74–87 Batavian myth, 83–5 protection of privileges, 75–82 sovereignty of provincial assemblies, 82–3 uninterrupted peace, continuity of independence of Holland, 85–7 Pontalis, A.F., 107 Popkin, R.H., 245 Prak, M., 75, 76 Price, J.L., 3, 17, 18, 37, 38, 39, 73, 89, 91, 105, 120–1, 122, 123, 160, 164 ‘privileges’, meaning of, 15, 45–6, 63, 75–82, 114, 155, 156, 187, 203, 218, 234, 250 Prokhovnik, R., 138 Prokhovnik, S., viii van Raalte, E., 70 Radcliffe, A., viii Reid, J., viii religion role of in the Revolt, 30–2, 39–41, 105, 218 in Dutch Republic, 105–6, 115 Remonstrant/Counter-Remonstrant conﬂict, 2, 30, 39, 42, 43, 75, 89, 106, 112, 240, 252 Renier, G.J., 30 republicanism English and Dutch, 117–33, 149–53, 254–5 English writings, 133–53 Dutch, 154–67, 260–1 Dutch mentality, 154–62 Holland-centricity, 162–7 Revolt of the Netherlands

history of, 21–46 political thought during, 46–64 Roorda, D.J., 71, 79, 80, 92, 104, 105, 114, 115, 163, 165 Rorty, R., 161 Roth, L., 181 Rowen, H.H., 38, 68, 76–7, 93, 98, 99, 100, 133, 159 Schama, S., 70 Schöffer, I., 25, 32, 52, 53, 54, 58, 75, 84 Scott, J., 3, 4, 21, 49, 65, 106, 117, 118–19, 120, 123, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 133, 137, 139–40, 141, 144, 145, 149, 217 Scruton, R., 200 Sharpe, K., 3, 8, 119, 121, 126, 127, 134, 137, 138, 144–5, 155, 157 Shaw, C., 207 Shetter, W., 35, 38, 155 Shirley, S., 19 Sidney, A., 118, 134, 135, 137, 144, 145–8, 151 Siebrand, H. J., 245 Skinner, Q., viii, 2, 3, 13, 50, 101, 136–7, 201, 202, 207 Smit, J.W., 30, 73, 82, 89, 90, 91, 95, 96, 108, 110, 111, 113, 130, 191 Smith, S., 170, 193 Sorti, G., 129 Speck, W., 19, 128–9, 135, 152–3 Spinoza, B. ‘absolute’ dominion, 229–32 aristocracy, 171–5, 177–181, 184–5, 229, 230–1, 249 challenge to university political theory, 60, 83 democracy, 171–5, 177–81, 207, 208–10, 213, 215, 221–3, 224, 249 Dutch perspective, 94, 154, 155, 156, 158, 168–99, 249–56; in the political works, 98, 103–4, 169–91 equality, 208–13, 223 Ethics, 2, 5, 6, 7, 9, 11, 170, 195, 203, 205, 211, 215, 218, 219, 220, 226, 238, 245

280 Index (Spinoza, B. continued) Letters, 6 liberty, 201–20 Marrano status, 2, 11, 191–9, 218, 251 reason, 205–8, 215, 228 reception, 237–46 religion, 105–6, 170–1, 172, 184, 203–6, 218–19, 220, 223–4, 232, 237–41, 245–6, 251–2 republicanism, 105–6, 216–17, 237, 246–56, 260–1 sovereignty, 220–36 toleration, 103, 175, 203, 217–19, 223, 230 Tractatus Politicus, 8, 9, 19, 169–99, 195, 205–36, 243, 245 Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, 5, 8, 9, 19, 169–99, 195, 196, 203–36, 237–45 Springborg, P., 248 Stoye, J., 10, 93, 101, 109, 110, 111, 116 Strauss, L., 200, 241 Stuart–Orange alliance, 117–18, 127–9, 176–7 Swart, K. W., 27 Taylor, C., 156, 201, 202 Temple, W., 70, 85, 107 Thompson, C., viii Tilmans, K., 51, 52, 84, 115 toleration, 102–3, 105, 106, 175, 217–18 transcendental argument, 15, 156 Treaty of Münster 1648, 16, 41, 69, 70, 90, 117, 133, 162 Treaty of Utrecht 1713, 4 Truce with Spain 1609, 11, 38, 40, 41, 58, 68 Tuck, R., 97, 142

Union of Arras 1579, 28, 29, 33 Union of Utrecht 1579, 10, 11, 15, 17, 28, 29, 32, 33, 44, 62, 67, 90, 159, 162 den Uyl, D., 170, 180, 200, 229, 232 Velema, W.R.E., 4, 5, 7, 18, 50, 83, 100, 104 van Velthuysen, L., 60, 99, 242 Vermeer, 1, 65–7, 196 Vlekke, B.H.M., 197 Vranck, 18, 47, 50, 55–6, 59, 67, 85, 104, 159 de Waele, M., 70 Wansink, H., 32, 40, 90, 94, 109–10, 114, 159, 162–3, 166, 167, 258 Warner, S., 181, 229 Welu, J., 65 Wernham, A.G., 180, 200 West, D., 249 West, T.G., 127, 145 Wienpahl, P., 193, 197, 226, 238 Wildenberg, I. W., 96 Wilson, C., 241 Wingate Foundation, viii De Witt, J. fall from power, 106–11 foreign policy, 90–4 republicanism, 112–16 True Liberty ideology, 94–106 Wolfson, H.A., 2, 200 Woltjer, J.O., 45, 46, 81, 109, 218 Wood, D., 66, 67 Worden, B., 3, 8, 120, 122, 124, 125, 133, 134, 136, 137–8, 139, 140–1, 143, 146–7, 148, 149, 150–1, 152 Yovel, Y., 170, 193, 194, 195, 200 Zac, S., 181 Zook, M., 127