The Birth of Territory by Stuart Elden

Author:Stuart Elden [Elden, Stuart]
Language: ita
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Geografia, Filosofia
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2013-05-09T14:10:07+00:00

BOTERO AND RAGIONE DI STATO

In his Essais, Michel de Montaigne describes how he met a man:

a gentleman of good appearance who was of the opposing party to ours, but I knew nothing of it, for he feigned otherwise. The worst of these wars is that the cards are so shuffled [les cartes sont si meslées], with your enemy distinguished from yourself by no apparent mark either of language or of deportment, being brought up in the same laws, manners and customs, so that it is hard to avoid confusion and disorder.226

As Hodges notes, cartes should be taken to mean both cards and maps: “Rather than delineate territorial confines, the ‘maps’ in this passage obfuscate identity. . . . Although the ‘cartes’ may be mixed up, their appearances deceitful, like that of the gentleman Montaigne describes in this passage, the term also signifies a map and may be read as a treatment of precisely what such a signifier points to, its referent, the territory, which may well offer an alternative form of stability in uncertain times.”227

Skinner has argued that Montaigne endorses reason of state. This has been comprehensively and compellingly challenged by Collins.228 The individual case is less interesting than the issue itself. This phrase is a shorthand for a whole form of statecraft, sometimes better known by its French equivalent of Raison d’État. One of the German representatives to the Westphalia peace negotiations declared that “Reason of state is a wonderful beast, for it chases away all other reasons.”229 As Meinecke puts it, “Raison d’État is the fundamental principle of national conduct, the State’s first Law of Motion. It tells the statesman what he must do to preserve the health and strength of the State.”230 The phrase had been used by Guicciardini, possibly for the first time, but the sense is not quite the same: “When I talked of murdering or keeping the Pisans imprisoned, I didn’t perhaps talk as a Christian: I talked according to the reason and practice of states [la ragione ed uso degli stati].”231 It is worth noting, with Hexter, that “reason of state” or Staatsraison are poor translations of raison d’état or ragione di stato, because they omit the idea of “right”—the right of the state.232 Indeed, the idea of acting in the “national interest” might be closer to the sense, even if anachronistic. Yet as Skinner and others have noted, it is Machiavelli’s elevation of the conception of prudent action over other virtues that is perhaps the key influence.

The Italian writer Giovanni Botero (1544–1617) is perhaps today the best-known example of this position, in the work Ragione di stato, although it is only one of the many works that utilized this term and idea.233 The first edition of Bodin’s work was published in 1589, though he continued to modify the work for the next decade. The opening lines are important in many respects:

State is a stable dominion [dominio fermo / strong, firm rule] over people; Reason of State [Ragione di Stato] is the knowledge

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