History's Fools by David Martin Jones

Author:David Martin Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

Prudent Counsel

Between 1550 and 1648, early modern Europe suffered divisive internal as well as external war. The period saw the often brutal severing of traditional political and religious allegiances from Prague to Edinburgh. Religious, dynastic and civil war destroyed European Christendom. In particular, the Thirty Years War (1618–48) affected all Europe ‘and the course of the continent’s history’.68 Although the war’s impact varied across time and space, the most informed recent assessment notes that its impact was ‘overwhelmingly negative’.69 As a result of war and pestilence, the population of Bavaria, for example, fell between twenty-three and sixty-nine per cent depending on the district, whilst the pre-1618 Nuremburg birth rate was not matched again before 1850.70 1621, moreover, marked the beginning of ‘the Western world’s first financial crisis’71 as economic and financial collapse accompanied population decline.

The modern state form emerged ambiguously from the religious fundamentalism and internecine strife that eviscerated European Christendom. A sceptical view of morality that doubted sources of authority outside the territorial state, and came to be defined as raison d’état, accompanied it. The early modern philosophers, lawyers, dramatists, rhetoricians and historians who defined this perspective, termed ‘realists’ by today’s idealists, offered a neglected, pragmatic political perspective. Beginning with diplomats and statesmen like Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini in Florence in the first decades of the sixteenth century, to French jurists like Jean Bodin and Northern Humanists like Joost Lips (Justus Lipsius) in the last, this politique style dismissed ethical and theological abstractions when it came to addressing difficult political decisions in particular and contingent circumstances. Rather than universal religious moral standards, they offered instead advice grounded in practical reason (phronesis or prudentia) informed by historical example and experience when faced with hard cases and difficult moral and political choices.

What then was the character of this practical reasoning, and what implications does it have for statecraft and strategy? To recover this viewpoint, and what it means for contemporary political thought, requires that we first establish how a distinctive approach to difficult cases of obligation emerged in the sixteenth century, as a response to confessional fragmentation and the disintegration of a unitary, communitarian Christendom.72 Faced with the dissolution of Christendom and the rise of the Ottoman Empire, humanist philosophers and statesmen looked to their classical past, to Aristotle’s Rhetorica and Nicomachean Ethics, Cicero’s De Officiis, and the histories of Tacitus, Polybius and Livy, to recover a practical case ethics and maxims or sententiae to address questions of politics, economy, moral conduct, war and peace. In the process of interrogating the classical world for advice on political conduct, they walked backwards into a new understanding of statecraft.

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