israel - the intellectual origins of modern democratic republicanism (1660–1720)

8/19/2019 Israel - The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660–1720)

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The Intellectual Origins of ModernDemocratic Republicanism(1660–1720)

Jonathan Israel Princeton University, USA

abstract: Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in

the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de laCourt, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role inthe development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end

with Spinoza but continued to develop in the United Provinces and – in the work of Bernard Mandeville, who seemingly belongs more to the Dutch than the Britishrepublican tradition – in London, down to the early 18th century. The failure in most histories of republicanism to appreciate how strikingly different intellectually, and asan ideology, the Dutch tradition was from the Anglo-American republican tradition,has had the effect of obscuring its central importance in the development of radicalrepublicanism in mid- and late 18th-century France.

key words: democratic republicanism, Dutch Republic, freedom of the individual, radical enlightenment, Spinozism, toleration

The western academic world has, of course, long taken a keen interest in thetheoretical origins of what is everywhere regarded as probably the most important single component in the make-up of ‘modernity’, namely the concept of thedemocratic republic based on equality, toleration and freedom of the individual.

Not unnaturally, the search has focused in particular on the intellectual contextsof the English, American and French revolutions. Indeed, in terms of politicaltheory, the discussion has revolved almost entirely around English, American and– albeit perhaps to a lesser extent – French themes and ideas.

Yet it is possible to question whether all the major elements of the picturehave yet been taken into consideration. Certainly, there are relevant intellectualtraditions which have been noticeably played down. In the years since the many affinities linking the political ideas of the Brothers de la Court with those of Spinoza – and Spinoza’s extensive use of the writings of the de la Courts in

article

7Contact address: Jonathan Israel, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.Email: [email protected]

EJPT European Journal

of Political Theory© SAGE Publications Ltd,

London, Thousand Oaksand New Delhi

issn 1474-8851, 3(1) 7–36[DOI: 10.1177/1474885104038988 ]

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formulating his own political philosophy 1 – first began to be emphasized, in the1960s and 1970s, especially by Ernst Kossmann and Eco Haitsma Mulier, the works of these three late 17th-century writers have been seen as forming the coreof what is significant and original from a wider western and global perspective in

Dutch Golden Age republican political thought.2

It is, furthermore, as Kossmannremarks, a corpus of theory which contrasts in notable respects with what J.G.A.Pocock has so influentially dubbed the ‘Atlantic republican tradition’, a body of thought which, however, is in reality not ‘Atlantic’ at all but, rather, specifically the Anglo-American classical republican tradition.

Pocock broadly characterized the latter as the republicanism of an opposition-minded gentry – agrarian, anti-commercial, asserting the special status of freeproperty-holders and the duty of the citizenry to participate in government; it wasgrounded, he held, ‘on the Machiavellian theory of the possession of arms as

necessary to political personality’.3 In this tradition of Harringtonian republican-ism, also termed by Pocock ‘English Machiavellianism’, the ties between land,republican freedom and the bearing of arms are perceived as crucial. ‘As in Machiavelli’, he observed:

. . . the bearing of arms is the primary medium through which the individual asserts both hissocial power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being: but the possessionof land in nondependent tenure is now the material basis for the bearing of arms.4

This was the creed of one wing of the land-based, parliamentary gentry which

dominated 18th-century England, and English political ideas, a creed which, seenfrom this Pocockian perspective, displays few real affinities with the neighbouringDutch republican context. This is true especially with regard to the agrariandimension and the strong post-1688 British ‘republican’ (as well as more conservative) preference for ‘mixed government’ – the view that if absolute monarchy istyrannical, ‘absolute democracy’, as Bolingbroke put it, ‘is tyranny and anarchy both’.5 However, the character of Dutch republicanism also seems distinctly remote from other typical traits of the English republican tradition which Pocock and fellow commentators may perhaps be said to have understated, such as the

aristocratic, anti-democratic drift inherent in a republicanism of the gentry andproclivity towards empire, and cultivating a martial spirit among the citizenry,basic to the Cromwellian, and also anti-Cromwellian, ‘Commonwealth’ revolu-tionary legacy, the latter especially pronounced in the outlook of AlgernonSidney.6

Dutch 17th-century republicanism, by contrast, with its different social baseand strong emphasis (from Johan de Witt onwards) on the peacefulness of republics as compared with monarchies,7 developed in a strikingly different direc-tion, even while drawing on some of the same sources as the English variety, andbeing no less steeped in Machiavelli. In view of the existing historiography, onemight not think this particularly important in the wider western and global intel-lectual context since hitherto very few, if any, general discussions of 17th- and

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early 18th-century political thought in English, French, Italian or German assignmuch weight to Dutch influences in the wider picture. In fact, most of the histo-riography, in all these languages, simply assumes that the so-called ‘Atlantic’republicanism of the English gentry is by far the predominant, generally presid-

ing tradition in post-Renaissance Atlantic republicanism as a whole, much asLocke and Early Enlightenment English liberalism are seen, in Europe as in America, as the foundation of the western liberal tradition in general. It all fitsadmirably with the notion rapidly gaining currency in recent years that theEuropean Enlightenment as a whole drew its primary inspiration and momentumfrom British ideas and example.8

Yet there are grounds for casting doubt on this widely favoured approach andarguing, in opposition to it, that the tendency to focus heavily on the Anglo- American republican tradition screening out, or marginalizing, the de la Courts

and Spinoza as well as van den Enden, Koerbagh, Walten, van Leenhof, Jean-Fréderic Bernard and other Dutch and Dutch Huguenot political writers of theEarly Enlightenment period, is not just a grave mistake but actually fatal to any proper understanding of the emergence of modern democratic republicanism. Tobegin with, while English republicanism was that of a landed gentry, and rarely emphatically democratic in tendency, Dutch republicanism was plainly not theideology of a rural elite, aspiring to dominate a national parliament, but rather of city burghers whose interests were overwhelmingly civic, commercial and non-agrarian. Thus the Dutch 17th-century experience was distinctively ‘modern’ in a

sense in which no other European republicanism of the 17th century, includingBritain’s, can claim to have been.

Then, secondly, since agrarian interests in Dutch political thought remained wholly subordinate to urban trade and industry, the implicit basis of socialhierarchy inherent in much English classical republicanism (unlike Locke – from whence Jefferson seemingly derived his principle of the self-evident ‘equality’ of all men)9 is replaced, arguably with wide-ranging implications for the laterEnlightenment, with theories of equality which firmly classify all those not dependent on others – that is who are not women, children and servants – as a

single category of ‘citizen’. Indeed, in one of the most militantly democratic textsdiscussed in this article, the Vrije Politieke Stellingen (Free Political Institutions) of 1665, by the atheistic schoolmaster Franciscus van den Enden (1602–74), we findone of the first general affirmations of the universal rationality and fundamentalequality of all men – of whatever race, colour or creed – in modern westernthought.10 At bottom, Dutch democratic republicanism was a republicanism which pivoted on the idea of the ‘common good’ as the pre-eminent principle of society, envisioning merchants and wage-earners as the backbone of the citizenry.

Third, and no less vital than the stress on equality and the civic context, Dutchrepublicanism was philosophically altogether more radical, and more coherently radical, than English republicanism, or to express the point more precisely, from van den Enden onwards its ‘Spinozist’ wing tended to be more systematic and

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more obviously anchored in general philosophy than the English republicantradition. This vitally important difference has nothing to do with innatenational tastes or aptitudes but rather with circumstances. Being at once moreemphatically anti-monarchical, anti-hierarchical and more concerned with equal-

ity than English republicanism, the Dutch tradition simply needed more andbetter arguments for rejecting the prevailing hierarchical vision of society gener-ally prevalent in baroque Europe with its built-in stress on princely authority,aristocratic values and ecclesiastical authority. The fact that the United Provinces was a republic created by a long and bloody revolt against a legitimate monarch,an originally de facto republic which, in the 1580s, had gradually abjuredmonarchy in principle as well as fact, and which had no real state church on themodel of the Church of England, while post-1688 England was a parliamentary monarchy, managed by a landed aristocracy with an established church which

revered the monarch as its head, and tended to adulate ‘mixed government’and respect the principle of aristocracy, meant that the institutional frameworks within which these distinct (and by the later 18th century ultimately rival) tradi-tions of republicanism diverged fundamentally from the outset.

Furthermore, the impact of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–91 – of crucialsignificance for Britain and the United Provinces alike – tended to sharpen thedivergence between the two rival traditions by softening and in significant meas-ure deradicalizing English republicanism.11 Hence, where English compromiseproduced an increasingly stable balance between king and Parliament which

encouraged a stress in 18th-century British culture on the uniqueness and singu-larity of the British model, the elimination of monarchy, aristocracy and a statechurch in the Dutch model continued to encourage a more philosophical,generalized approach which by the 1750s had been taken over – as a result of acomplex transition process in which Dutch-based Huguenots played a vital part –by French republican and quasi-republican theorists such as Boulanger, Mably,Diderot and, in some respects, Rousseau. It was this Dutch–French trajectory,arguably, and not the English tradition which – despite having been largelysubmerged andignored in histories of western political thought – constitutes the

main line in the emergence of modern western democratic republicanism. Whereas 18th-century British, and some pre-1789 anglophile continental,

political thought, notably Montesquieu, did conceive of limited monarchy on theBritish model as the highest ideal in politics, limited monarchy exerted compara-tively little attraction on either Dutch republicans or the French RadicalEnlightenment after Montesquieu. By 1770, Mably was warning the Poles, as a vital point of principle, that if they wished to save their country from the Russiansand reconstitute Poland and the Polish constitution on a strengthened and viablebasis, they should make sure:

. . . qu’ils n’imitent pas les Anglais, qui se plaignent continuellement des entreprises de lacour et de la corruption du Parlement, et qui aiment mieux être dans des alarmescontinuelles, que de convenir des vices de leur gouvernement, et de les corriger.12


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This rejection of the British model was in fact inherent in the ‘main line’ develop-ment of the early modern republican tradition. As Kossmann remarks, the de laCourts deemed ‘Harrington’s ideal state of a regnum mixtum with a monarchdeprived of absolute power’ but left with some influence thoroughly undesirable

and inherently ‘unstable as well as continually in danger of degenerating intodespotic monarchy’.13 van den Enden was even more disdainful.14

Spinoza, for his part, considered the English revolution of the 1640s not just defective but a total failure in which – while attempting to get rid of theirtyrannical king – the English had merely substituted, in the person of Cromwell,another and worse ‘monarch’, under another name.15 Admittedly, in his latetreatise, the Tractatus Politicus, which lay unfinished at the time of his death in1677, Spinoza allows that monarchy is redeemable up to a point. But this is only where and when it can be so drastically degraded as to approximate to democracy

– and hence to share in democracy’s strengths and advantages. In indicating how this should be done, he so utterly emasculates government by kings that whatsurvives is no more than a caricature. The perfect monarchy, he suggests (doubt-less tongue in cheek), is constitutional monarchy on the model of the old kingdomof Aragon before it was subverted by the despot Philip II, a kingdom so saturated with legal procedures and restrictions that the king scarcely has the authority evento arrest an ordinary mortal merely on the strength of royal prerogative!16

Nor were the Dutch radical writers who came after Spinoza any less negativeor sarcastic about kings, princely power and the monarchical principle. Ericus

Walten (1663–97), a friend of the engraver Romeyn de Hooghe and participant as a propagandist on the side of William III in the Glorious Revolution, whoexhibited increasingly radical tendencies in the early 1690s,17 dismisses monarchy in his Orangist tracts written during the years 1688–91 as always, universally, andinherently, inferior to republics: ‘so that not only has all absolute power (absolutemacht) which any monarch has ever exercised’, he declared in 1689, in support of William III’s and the States General’s invasion of England:

. . . been usurped, in violation of the fundamental laws of the state, but monarchicalgovernment itself is against God’s intention, especially when exercised in the form of asovereign power in one person alone, since God and Nature lodged the sovereign power ina full gathering of men.

so dat niet alleen alle Absolute Macht, die oit eenig Monarch geoeffend heeft,ge-usurpeerd en tegen de fondamentale wetten van hare regeringe strydig is, maar de

Monarchiale regeringe ook tegen Gods oogmerk is, voornamelijk alse sig vertoond in degedaante van een souveraine magt in een mensch alleen, als God en de Natuur desouveraine magt in een hele vergaderinge van menschen geplaatst hebben.18

As was long ago observed by a Dutch scholar researching Walten’s life and writ-ings, he and Romeyn de Hooghe seem to have derived their political theory fromstudying Spinoza, the de la Courts whom Walten repeatedly cites, Machiavelliand Hobbes.19

Similarly, Fredrik van Leenhof (1647–1713) – an ardent and systematic Spinoz-


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ist as recent research has shown20 – was convinced republics are always better thanmonarchies and that, if one must be saddled with a king, monarchy is rational and justifiable only where he is placed under the law, just like everyone else, and canonly change a given law ‘met gemeene of genoegzaame toestemminge’ (with

general or sufficient consent).21

Mandeville, a Dutch radical Cartesian medicalman resident in London, likewise deemed parliamentary monarchies unreliablesince ‘mix’d government leads to doubts about where sovereignty lies’.22 Yet, heldKossmann, despite the impressive vitality and originality of late 17th-century Dutch republican political ideas, from the perspective of the later Enlightenment,‘Dutch republican theory did not, so it seems, draw inspiration from its own intel-lectual past’ so that the earlier corpus of theory ‘never developed, as far as I cansee, into a peculiarly Dutch intellectual tradition which it would be correct todefine as the Dutch paradigm’.23

Doubtless Kossmann’s stricture here is right regarding the mainstream,moderate Dutch Enlightenment with its increasingly anti-democratic, conserva-tive and (by 1813) monarchical tendencies. But this arguably misses the point regarding the Dutch democratic and wider European context. For it is precisely the radical character of Spinoza’s and the de la Courts’ ideas – as well as those of van den Enden, Koerbagh, Walten, van der Muelen and van Leenhof – whichseparates what is most original and significant in late 17th-century and early 18th-century Dutch political thought from the more mainstream, respectable Dutch,and wider western, moderate Enlightenment. In other words, unless one first

clearly differentiates the Radical Enlightenment from the conservative oligarchicrepublican and Calvinist–Orangist mainstream, and looks at the philosophicalunderpinning of Dutch democratic republicanism which Kossmann to an extent failed to do, it makes scant sense searching for a distinctive ‘Dutch republican’tradition based on the de la Courts and Spinoza.

If, then, rather than concentrating on the conservative and moderate main-stream, whether Dutch, British or French, one focuses instead on the radicalfringe, one encounters a wholly different syndrome from that recounted by Kossmann and other recent commentators on Dutch republicanism. For the more

democratic elements of the pre-revolutionary Patriottenbeweging of the 1780smade no secret of their admiration for the theories of the de la Courts while atthe same time seeing themselves (and being regarded by their opponents) asadherents of a broad European philosophical radicalism.24 Similarly, the hard-hitting critique of democratic republicanism offered by the conservative Orangist,Elie Luzac (1721–96), as part of his campaign against the anti-Orangist Patriotsin the 1780s, selected the Brothers de la Court as one of his chief theoreticaltargets.25 Meanwhile, the ‘Spinozist’ tradition, which to a greater or lesser extent gained ground everywhere in the late 17th century, was renewed in the early 18thby a variety of radical writers in Italy, Germany and England as well as France andHolland, among them Mandeville who played a prominent part in the Rotterdamriots of 1690 and whose thought is indeed much better interpreted as Dutch and


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Spinozist (and to an extent also Baylean) than as Hobbesian and a product of hisadopted country.26

Seen in this light, the political thought of the de la Courts and Spinoza appearsnot, after all, to have been a dead-end, or abortive endeavour, but, rather, as I have

said, to have constituted what in the broader European context can be construedas the main strand of early modern western republican political theory, the strand which developed ultimately into Jacobinism, and attempted, after 1789, to eradi-cate monarchy, social hierarchy and church power by revolution. Furthermore, while historians of modern political thought generally take it for granted that,after 1650, the English republican tradition predominated and led the way, thecomparative rarity of most of the works of the English republicans (with thepartial exception of Milton and Sidney) in late 17th-century and early 18th-century continental libraries, and relative paucity of French and German editions,

afford further grounds for querying the established view. It is true there were not any French or English translations of Koerbagh, Walten or van Leenhof either, while the French version of van den Enden’s Vrije Politieke Stellingen extant inmanuscript at the time of his death failed to survive. But, as against this, there islittle doubt as to the relative frequency with which works by the de la Courts andSpinoza crop up first in German and later, in numerous 18th-century libraries, inFrench, German and English editions. Already before 1672, three different majorpolitical treatises of the de la Courts appeared in German, the first in 1665, so it is by no means surprising that Leibniz should have gone out of his way to meet

Pieter de la Court, in Leiden, when visiting Holland in 1676.27 During the early 18th century, following publication under the supposed authorship of ‘Johan de Witt’ of Pieter de la Court’s True Interest , French and English editions of the dela Courts’ books were both frequent and influential.28

At the same time, one of the few English political works frequently encounteredin European libraries, Temple’s Observations , had the effect of spreading aware-ness in some degree of what might be termed the ‘radical Dutch’ rather than the‘English’ republican paradigm while simultaneously subtly cushioning Englishsentiment against the former. The Observations upon the United Provinces of the Netherlands (1672) was a work rooted in Temple’s own deism, advocacy of asweeping toleration, dislike of ecclesiastical authority, antipathy to Louis XIV andpersonal admiration for de Witt and Dutch institutions, which worked in the wider European context in a way which was both republican and seditious. Temple unstintingly praised features of the Dutch Republic, yet needing, underthe Stuart monarchy, not to appear defiant of the English court, did so in apeculiarly discreet and ambiguous fashion decried by Sidney.29 Temple, the diplo-matic servant of Charles II, distinctly played down, for English consumption,precisely the republican political and institutional framework which underpinnedthe free thinking, toleration and anti-French diplomacy he privately favoured,presumably so as all the more surreptitiously to smuggle them in.

Meanwhile, Spinoza – like Temple with whom he very likely held discussions


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at the time – resided in The Hague during the mid- and later 1660s and, in 1670,published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus amid a highly charged political andintellectual atmosphere. This lent his text added intensity and urgency andhelped, together with its revolutionary Bible criticism, give the work a much

wider European notoriety – but also impact, especially in Germany (whereLeibniz filled his copy with handwritten notes which survive today) and France –than would probably have resulted from a work of pure political theory alone.30

Indeed, the highly competent French translation, clandestinely produced underthree different ‘false’ titles, in 1678, had an unparalleled impact for such a subversive work not just in France but also the German courts where the mother of George I of England, the future Electress Sophia of Hanover, was one of Spinoza’s first and most enthusiastic readers among court ladies.

The kind of democratic republicanism first expounded by Johan de la Court

(1622–60) in his Consideratien van staat of 1660, then, was totally at odds with, andinherently unlikely to influence, any generally approved and received moderatemainstream tradition of political thought anywhere in early modern Europe,including Britain and the Netherlands. Despite the wide circulation and un-doubted impact of the books of the Brothers de la Court in the United Provinces,as well as abroad, practically no pamphleteers or propagandists of the 1660s,1670s or later (Orangist or anti-Orangist), and virtually none of those who aligned with either main bloc of the Dutch Reformed Church, praised or emulated thepolitical theoretical works of these two remarkable writers or even mentioned

them in anything other than a thoroughly hostile and dismissive fashion. Those who did not frown on their writings and arguments, such as van den Enden,Koerbagh, Spinoza, Walten and Mandeville, were themselves far too radical, andbeyond the pale, owing to their general philosophical stance, hostility to ecclesi-astical authority, and promotion of individual freedom, to be esteemed, quotedpositively or recommended by anyone with the slightest pretension to standingand respectability.

Hence, Dutch democratic republicanism was from its very inception, around1660, a universal outcast and renegade both inside and outside the Netherlands.

Partly this was due to its egalitarianism, advocacy of personal freedom andhostility to ecclesiastical authority – as well as (beyond the Netherlands) its anti-monarchism – and partly to its close links with radical, that is Spinozist, philo-sophy more generally. For the reality is that this kind of republicanism, asmanifested in van den Enden, Adriaen Koerbagh (1632–69),31 Lodewijk Meyer(1629–81) – probable author of the anonymously published De Jure Ecclesiasti-corum (1665),32 a vehement attack on ecclesiastical status and power – andSpinoza, stemmed directly from, and intellectually was closely tied to, a philo-sophical underpinning rejecting miracles, and therefore divine revelation, and wasfundamentally incompatible with Christianity and all forms of revealed religion.Hence, the chief characteristics of Dutch radical republicanism – its egalitarian-ism and stress on individual freedom and democracy – were and, indeed, were


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seen to be, inextricably connected to a philosophical framework which before theadvent of the French Revolution was almost universally deemed subversive,destructive and wicked.

To view the emergence of modern democratic republicanism in its proper light,

therefore, one needs to appreciate the close causal connection in radical mindsbetween ‘philosophy’ as they understood the term – that is, something like what the French philosophers were soon to call ‘l’esprit philosophique’ – and theprogress of individual freedom, equality and the principle of democracy.33 They believed, in effect, that realization of their political ideals depended on the priorre-education of the public. Particularly emphatic (and optimistic) in this regard, was van den Enden for whom popular enlightenment is not just a desirable but, incontrast to the de la Courts,34 also a feasible and imminent reality, so that con-sciousness of the ‘common good’ as a political, social and cultural imperative in

his writing carries already much of the weight it acquired later in Diderot,Boulanger, Mably and Rousseau.35 Indeed, in van den Enden harmony betweenprivate interest and the ‘common good’ is thought to ensue almost automatically from the establishment of the democratic republic.36

But whether militant and impatient, as in van den Enden, or more measuredand cautious, as in Spinoza, the discrediting and delegitimizing of social hierar-chy, and elimination of monarchy, hereditary status and ecclesiastical authority, which their systems involve, and replacement of hierarchy with the postulatedequality of the ‘state of nature’, derives from a common espousal of the doctrine

of one substance, and consequent denial of revelation and divine commandments.Hence, their redefining of Man as an exclusively natural phenomenon determinedin the same way, and as completely, as other natural phenomena seems, at any ratein this early formative stage of modern democratic republicanism, to have been asine qua non for its formulation as a coherent and systematic theory of politics andsociety.

Democratic republicanism in early modern Europe, then, stems from a par-ticular philosophical movement itself the product of a highly fraught philosophi-cal milieu marked by an acute sense of violent intellectual confrontation with its

intellectual adversaries.37 This wider philosophical ferment in the Netherlandsbegan in the late 1640s and 1650s as a conflict between Cartesianism and Aristotelian scholasticism and this remained part of the general background forover half a century until after 1700: ‘I have observ’d as much hatred and animosity between the Aristotelians and Cartesians when I was at Leiden’, commented Mandeville, referring to his student days in the late 1680s, ‘as there is now inLondon between High Church and Low-Church’.38 But out of this long andacrimonious confrontation between Cartesianism and ‘Aristotelianism’ arose aradical philosophical response to Cartesianism which in the sphere of politicaltheory generated perspectives which undoubtedly were – and which the Dutchradicals themselves conceived to be – dramatically new in the history of Europeanand wider western thought.


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Van den Enden twice makes a point of the sweeping novelty, as well as universalsignificance, of the democratic republicanism he so powerfully advocates. Thefirst time he does so is where he remarks, early in the Vrije Politieke Stellingen, that in upholding the cause of the just commonwealth based on equality he had, to his

own knowledge, been preceded (albeit only recently) by two other writers inDutch. Unfortunately, he then fails to specify whom he had in mind,39 thoughpresumably he was alluding either to both Brothers de la Court or, alternatively, just Johan (whose democratic proclivities were stronger than those of his olderbrother)40 together with the radical Collegiant Zeelander, Pieter CornelisPlockhoy (dates unknown) who was an associate of van den Enden’s in the early 1660s. Plockhoy was already in the late 1650s a fervent republican and egalitarian– albeit from an essentially biblical perspective, like the Levellers – who in no way minced his words when discussing kings, aristocrats and priests, as we see from his

English-language pamphlet A Way propounded to make the Poor in these and other Nations happy (London, 1659) written while revolutionary democratic fervour wasstill alive in England, and he resided there, hoping his utopian vision could berealized in that country.41

The second occasion van den Enden characterized democratic republicanismas a fundamentally new idea in the history of political theory occurred a decadelater, in 1674, following his arrest by the Paris police in connection with theconspiracy of the Chevalier de Rohan. Under interrogation at the Bastille by thelieutenant-general of police, the Marquis d’Argenson in person, van den Enden

was asked to explain the political theory he had been expounding in his writingsand as a private tutor. This time, he claimed to have invented the new concept himself and to be its chief publicist. Over the centuries, he told d’Argenson, threedifferent kinds of republic had figured in the published literature. These heclassified as first, the ‘Platonic’, second, that of ‘Grotius’ – meaning the oligarchicor regent republic – and third, the ‘utopian’, meaning the republican ideal of Sir Thomas More. Latterly, though, he recounted, not without a note of pride, hadarisen, through his own writings, a wholly novel political construct – the ‘freerepublic’ based on equality, freedom of expression and the ‘common good’.42 The

expression ‘common good’ – ’t gemenebest , in Dutch – was also the term which vanden Enden used to designate a free republic of the kind he advocated.43 This wasthe ideal, he added, to which he had converted his former pupil and principalFrench associate and ally, the Norman noble Gilles du Hamel, sieur de la Tréaumont.

La Tréaumont had been not only van den Enden’s prime French disciple but was de Rohan’s chief co-conspirator and right-hand-man in Normandy where theplanned revolution was scheduled to begin. However, he had been shot whileresisting capture by the royal police, in his lodgings in Rouen, and mortally wounded, just before van den Enden’s own arrest. The plotters, d’Argenson learnt from van den Enden, had hoped to establish in Normandy precisely such a ‘freecommonwealth’ as the latter proclaims and eulogizes in his Vrije Politieke


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Stellingen and as he and Plockhoy had attempted to create in the Dutch colony at Swanendael (1663–4) on the Delaware Estuary, in New Netherland, in America.44

Whether la Tréaumont was really as enthusiastic about van den Enden’s new democratic republicanism as the latter implied we shall never know. But it is at any

rate certain that the nobleman’s rooms, on being searched by the police, werefound to contain French translations not just of the published part of van denEnden’s Vrije Politieke Stellingen but also of the unpublished second part and otherrelevant material, including republican placards, all subsequently burnt by theauthorities and now lost.45

Of van den Enden’s two incompatible statements regarding the origin in politi-cal theory of the modern ‘democratic republic’, the earlier seems much the moreplausible. For in afterwards appropriating the prestige of the invention for him-self, he was quite unjustifiably setting aside Johan de la Court’s Consideratien van

staat , of 1660, a pivotal work which was unquestionably the founding document of 17th-century Dutch democratic republicanism. For Johan de la Court did not merely consider the democratic republic a better, or more effective, type of statethan monarchy or aristocracy but expressly grounds its superiority on the princi-ples of equality and reason, deeming it the ‘most natural form of government’(natuirlijkste) and the most rational (‘redelijkste’).46 It is that which best serves theinterests of the community as a whole.47 Spinoza was following him when hesays, in the sixteenth chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus , that he putsdemocracy first among the various political systems:

. . . because it seemed to him the most natural form of state, approaching most closely tothat freedom which nature grants to every man.

. . . quia maxime naturale videbatur, et maxime ad libertatem, quam natura unicuiqueconcedit, accedere.48

According to Spinoza, democracy’s superiority over other types of government stems from its guaranteeing the individual more autonomy than the rest, leavingman closer to the state of nature than other forms of constitution and ensuringmaximum approximation to equality among individuals.49

This heavy emphasis on what is most ‘natural’ and what is ‘most rational’ runslike a thread right through the whole gamut of the more characteristic Dutchdemocratic republican doctrines. A typical feature of the tradition from the de laCourts and van den Enden onwards, for example, was their invariable insistenceon a much wider toleration, and freedom of expression, than was then anywhereacceptable to mainstream opinion, or advocated by any English republicanthinker apart from Milton. Logically, as well as socially and culturally, such anall-inclusive toleration entailed a drastic reduction, if not complete demolition, of ecclesiastical power and authority. Inevitably, at that time, this meant that theirsweeping toleration was, even in the Netherlands, condemned as dangerously impious. So much so, indeed, that even the concept could not be freely advocated. The chief reason why the States of Holland banned Pieter de la Court’s Aenwysing


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der heilsame Politieke Gronden (1669), a hard-hitting rehash of his earlier Interest van Holland (1662), shortly after its publication, was precisely because of itsuncompromising advocacy of a ‘free practice of all religions and sects’.50

This new, theoretically grounded Dutch republican toleration culminated in

the writings of Spinoza and Bayle. It was a toleration arguably far broader, as wellas more ‘modern’, than that of Locke, even though, traditionally, it is Lockeantoleration which historians of political thought tend to focus on when searchingfor the origins of modern liberalism. From its very inception, it had been one of the chief aims of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to convince readers of thelegitimacy, and advantages, of permitting individual freedom of thought, expres-sion and publication, about man, God, the universe, religion and morality. Thisunrestricted independence of the individual to express views about fundamentalissues Spinoza called – imparting a special twist to the term – libertas philosophandi .

In his system, as in Bayle’s, freedom of thought and expression is a form of liberty accorded as of right to everyone without any of the restrictions stipulated by Locke.

This comprehensive toleration was not, then, permitted in society anywhere at the time. But it was a common feature of the thought of the de la Courts, vanden Enden, Koerbagh, Spinoza, Temple, Bayle, Walten, van Leenhof, Tolandand Mandeville, as well as Radicati, Edelmann and other early 18th-centuryradicals Dutch, French, German, British and Italian. Philosophically, thissecularized, near unrestricted, toleration remained throughout the 18th century

something wholly distinct from the theologically anchored toleration (which wasalso originally developed in the Netherlands) expounded by Locke and his Arminian allies, Philippus van Limborch and Jean le Clerc.51 One key difference was the principle, fundamental to the radicals, but rejected by the moderatemainstream, that a stable, enduring toleration is impossible without the assimila-tion of ecclesiastical power and resources into the state; for if left with theirautonomy, the clergy will always, for their own purposes, exploit their positionand prestige, as well as the people’s addiction to ‘superstitious’ and intolerant notions, to mobilize the masses against any political decision or opponent of

which they disapprove.52 The Counter-Remonstrants had done exactly that when, stirring up popular passion with their hard-line Calvinist theology, they succeeded in 1618 in overthrowing the States of Holland’s ‘Advocate’,Oldenbarnevelt. Accordingly, Lodewijk Meyer, in his De Jure Ecclesiasticorum,and Spinozist radicals more generally, insisted on completely eliminating theindependent authority, autonomy, privileges, censorship functions, property andgrip on education of the clergy. In this spirit, Pieter de la Court, especially in his Aanwijsing of 1669, combines his plea for a comprehensive religious and intel-lectual toleration with a passionate critique of ecclesiastical privilege and author-ity which antagonized many Dutch contemporaries and for which he was sternly rebuked by the Leiden Reformed Church consistory.53

Ericus Walten (1663–97), another ardent advocate of freedom of thought and


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expression, denounced by at least one opponent as a crypto-Spinozist,54 besideslikewise being a fierce critic of the Reformed Church preachers, held there areclear links between the principle of democracy, comprehensive toleration, and theelimination of ecclesiastical autonomy and authority: ‘the ecclesiastical’, in his

view, being. . . under the political government, for if the ecclesiastical government were not subordinate to the political, neither would the latter derive from the people.

. . . kerkelyke onder de politijke regeringe is, want indien de kerkelijke niet onder depolitijke regeringe was gesubordineerd, so soude sy ook niet van het volk afhangen.55

Thus, according to Walten, if the clergy are assigned a special autonomous statusand privileges then the common good and interests of the people cannot be thesole criterion of legitimacy in politics. Hence also the dictum of Mandeville –

who, rather curiously, agitated on the opposite side from Walten in the Rotter-dam riots of 169056 – that the ‘greatest argument for toleration is, that differencesof opinion can do no hurt, if all clergy-men are kept in awe and no moreindependent of the state than the laity’.57

While several scholars have commented recently on what has been called ‘thepowerful influence of the de la Courts on Mandeville’, especially with respect tohis theory of the passions and human motivation, there has also been a noticeabletendency to downplay, ignore and sometimes even deny, his radical deism.58 As aresult, his broad intellectual affinity to Spinozism and the Dutch radical republi-

can stream more generally, has been obscured by claims that he was not as radicalor deistic as he sounds and even that his ‘religious views are really much moreconventional and anodyne than Bayle’s’.59 Hence, while it is granted that throughout his works Mandeville ‘criticized the excessive pretensions of theclergy, accusing them of inciting disputes among the laity and interfering insecular affairs’,60 there is nevertheless a marked unwillingness to concede what Bishop Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson and many other critics claimed in his owntime, namely that he was an atheist or radical deist beyond the pale of respect-ability.61

In fact, there was much that was radical and subversive in Mandeville.Following the Brothers de la Court, van den Enden and Spinoza, his own writings show that he sought nothing less than the complete eradication of eccle-siastical authority and its theological premises from society and politics and moraland intellectual debate. Just as Spinoza, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus , holdstrue ‘faith’ to consist solely in obedience to the law, and in ‘justice and charity’, so‘once for all’, echoes Mandeville, ‘the Gospel teaches us obedience to superiorsand charity to all men’, implying this is, in essence, all it teaches.62 As a student, Mandeville had probably been taught by Bayle in his home town of Rotterdamand, as we know for certain from his published Leiden university thesis, Disputatio philosophica de brutorum operationibus (Leiden, 1689), presented ‘sub presidio B. de Volder’, became steeped in Dutch Cartesianism.63 One might object that this in


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itself need not prove any inclination towards radical thought or that he necessarily read Spinoza. But Mandeville’s principal Leiden teacher, Burchardus de Volder(1643–1709), we know not only introduced his pupils to the latest Dutch philo-sophical debates but was later rumoured by some of his colleagues to have been a

crypto-Spinozist himself and, in particular, as a Franeker anti-Cartesian put it, tohave misled ‘many a student who later became infected with Spinoza’s errors’.64

Thus, it is extremely improbable that Mandeville, whose father was a prominent Cartesian medical reformer in Rotterdam, and an associate of the radicalCartesian (and suspected Spinozist) Dr Cornelis Bontekoe, should not have hadfirst-hand knowledge of the work of Spinoza, especially given that he cites, or it isclear that he knows, the writings of the de la Courts, Bayle, van Dale, andBekker.65 Furthermore, it is inconceivable that he had not been part of debatesabout Spinoza.

In any case, Mandeville upheld the kind of toleration that required the elimi-nation of ecclesiastical authority. Another key difference between the two rival views of toleration, moderate and mainstream, Arminian–Lockean and Spinozist–Baylean, was the question of whether or not society should tolerate atheism andnon-providential deism. Locke, who had doubts about tolerating Catholics, andleaves deists and agnostics in a vague limbo, firmly rules out toleration of atheistssince by definition atheists are not concerned with saving their souls, a religiouspreoccupation which, for Locke, is every individual’s highest obligation and thegrounding on which he bases his justification of toleration; and because in his view

– in contrast to Bayle – atheism dissolves every form of obligation and hence themoral order.66 Most writers on toleration in the 18th century aligned with Locke,including, for instance, the Danzig republican, Michael Christopher Hanovius, who considered Christian Wolff’s philosophy the best available account of thecosmos aside from its lacking a detailed political dimension, an omission he hopedto make good with his four-volume treatise on civic republicanism published at Halle in the years 1756–9. Hanovius, as a Wolffian, had no special regardfor Locke. But, though a republican, he was against democracy, in favour of oli-garchy, respected ecclesiastical authority and totally opposed to the Spinozist–

Baylean concept of toleration. Using terms strongly reminiscent of Locke,Hanovius held that neither atheism ‘omnem tollens obligationem divinam etreligionem’, nor deism, could nor should be tolerated in a properly regulated,Christian republic.67

By contrast, the broader toleration of van den Enden, Koerbagh, Temple,Spinoza, van Leenhof and Mandeville, since it permits the expression of all views,accommodating all religious denominations and heresies besides atheism anddeism, implies the sovereign is indifferent to the saving of souls. It also suggeststhat belief in a providential God, as Bayle maintained, is not essential to theorderly functioning of civil society or upholding the moral order. Hence, con-temporaries were right to connect this kind of toleration with the sort of philo-sophy advocated by Spinoza, (the crypto-Stratonist late) Bayle and their disciples.


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It was clear that, according to Spinozists, philosophical ‘truth’ is the only genuinetheology and ‘theology’, as conventionally understood, something which has noindependent truth content of its own; and while Bayle ostensibly softened this by claiming, instead, that faith cannot support, or be supported by, reason, nor vice

versa, so that whatever is explicable to human reason can only be explained philo-sophically and not theologically, for most intents and purposes, including theissues of toleration and individual freedom, the two positions amounted tothe same thing. For the unremitting outcome of both strategies is that neither thestate nor ecclesiastical authority have any right at all to direct or restrain men’sbeliefs, the individual’s moral conscience or our opinions in general.

This grounding of theories of comprehensive toleration in Spinozistic orSpinozistic–Baylean philosophy linked to democratic republicanism, and the clearperception in early 18th-century intellectual culture that a comprehensive tolera-

tion necessarily entails eliminating ecclesiastical authority, is well illustrated by the ideas – and the attacks on the writings – of Frederik van Leenhof (1647–1712). Van Leenhof was a Zwolle Reformed preacher who in his two books about thebiblical King Solomon, published in 1700, and his highly controversial Den Hemel op Aarden (1703), expounds a moral and social theory rooted in an avowedly republican stance widely condemned in the Netherlands during the first decadeof the 18th century as a vehicle of popular Spinozism.68 Van Leenhof, a writersteeped in Spinoza since at least the 1680s, despised kings in general, albeit not Solomon whom he, like Spinoza, thought of as a symbolic exception to the usual

selfishness and mediocrity of royalty. Van Leenhof links his political theory to aplea for popular enlightenment and a comprehensive toleration of all beliefs as well as freedom of expression of all views. As one of his innumerable outragedcritics correctly observed, these works of van Leenhof ‘advocate a political reli-gion which consists of just a few basic doctrines designed to secure social peaceand love within civil society giving everyone complete freedom to think and speak about religion just as he pleases’.69

Van Leenhof’s writings also echo Johan de la Court’s claim that the democraticrepublic is ‘the most rational’ form of government and exhibit yet another

characteristic feature of radical republicanism, differentiating it philosophically and politically from other sorts of republicanism – and Lockean liberalism –namely the Spinozist insistence that ‘reason’ is the only legitimate criterion inevaluating types of state.70 For not only divine right monarchy and theocracy but also constitutional monarchy, and all forms of oligarchy, and aristocracy, retainthe dynastic principle and other hierarchical modes of legitimation derivingtheir prestige and authority from tradition, popular sentiment and ecclesiasticalsanction. Indeed, we can be quite certain of his radical credentials whenever any Early Enlightenment author follows Spinoza in claiming that in human affairs,including deliberations about the best types of constitution, ‘reason’ is the only valid criterion of what is good or bad:


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sicuti in statu naturali ille homo maxime potens maximeque sui juris est qui rationeducitur, sic etiam illa civitas maxime erit potens et maxime sui juris quae ratione fundaturet dirigitur.

just as in the state of nature that man has most power and is most autonomous who isguided by reason, thus also that state will be most powerful and most autonomous which isbased on and guided by reason.71

Van Leenhof fervently reaffirms that reason, and not tradition, or the hereditary principle, must be the basis of political legitimacy and that ‘everything is goodinsofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everythingelse being slavery under the appearance of government’.72 Consequently, held thisauthor, ‘knowledge of matters’ is the sole light by which we can proceed in debateabout politics and which helps us to conform to the ‘nature of God’s order andguidance’, a typical Spinozist phrase of the time, meaning the fixed and rational

structure of reality; conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, aseverything else, ‘the root of all evil’.73

Reason and ‘wisdom’, affirmed van Leenhof, again in typical Spinozist phrase-ology, is not just the key in politics but also being ‘waar door we Gods naturedeelagtig zijn ’t hoogste menschelyke goed en geluk is’ (whereby we become part of God’s nature is the highest human good and happiness). Hence an unreservedly rationalistic philosophy is, for van Leenhof, not just the only admissible andeffective grounding for the new doctrine of democratic republicanism butnothing less than the path to true happiness and salvation. ‘Reason’ alone can

justify equality and show that the ‘common good’ is the true standard for legisla-tion; and since reason teaches that the ‘common interest’ is the only authenticmeasure, the inevitable corollary is that serving princes, and cultivating theirinterests, and devoting oneself to the pomp and circumstance of court life, is, as van Leenhof (following the de la Courts) avers, inherently reprehensible,corrupt and morally base.74 The ‘honour’ most men derive from proximity tokings and their courts is, for him, merely deceitful, counterfeit and opposed to the‘common good’. For as he, like the other Dutch radicals, saw it, there can be nokingship, aristocracy, hierarchy, subordination, submission or slavery where

power rightfully belongs to all and where laws should be passed by commonconsent. Contrary to conventional notions, he insists that the genuine form, or at any rate the highest honour ‘is God en reden, en ’t gemeen te dienen’ (is to serveGod and reason, and the community).75

A further distinctive feature of democratic republicanism, the wider EuropeanRadical Enlightenment, and indeed also of the age of Revolution (1780–1848), which again undeniably originated in a particular type of philosophy is theargument, based on the Spinozistic doctrine that there is no absolute ‘good’ or‘evil’, that what is good is what is ‘good’ for men in society. From this, it followsthat the republic’s laws, as the only publicly agreed and designated guide as to what is ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in human conduct, are if not the foundation (which isreason) at any rate the chief mirror and support of morality.76 In this way, the


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republic’s legislation becomes the grounding of moral obligation, allegiance andduty, indeed the only valid object of public reverence and obedience, while, conversely, morality in Spinoza’s particular sense and, therefore, the ‘common good’,become the yardstick by which to evaluate and judge proposed and actual laws as

well as suggested amendments. Since there are no divine commandments, accord-ing to the Spinozists, and no reward or punishment in the hereafter, heaven andhell being – as van Leenhof dared to affirm with disastrous consequences forhimself 77 – purely worldly states of mind, there exists in their view no other meansof maintaining order, repressing crime and instilling discipline than by meansof worldly rewards and penalties proclaimed and enforced by the state and itslegislature.78

According to van Leenhof, the magistrate who understands what is ‘good’ and‘bad’ for society ‘meer kan doen tot weringe der Godlooze als alle de predikanten

zamen’ (can do more to curb the Godless than all the preachers together): ‘for thesovereign power has long arms and a thousand eyes through its officials and loyalsubjects’.79 Crime and criminals flourish, held van Leenhof, where government is weak and the law inadequately enforced: for even in a well-regulated republic only a very few people are truly ‘free’ and virtuous, that is, exercise their own reasonadequately, most people obeying the law, as Mandeville later emphasized, not through love of virtue but merely through fear of punishment.80 But whethergovernment is strong or weak, it is the law-abiding and those who revere the law who are the most ‘rational’ and, whatever priests may say, also the most ‘pious’,

and this has always been so. What Mandeville added to the radical republican tradition was his insight that,

in the process of inculcating obedience to the law, it is not just fear of penalties,and hope of reward, which count but also, indeed still more, the mechanics of ‘pride’ and ‘shame’. For he considered these emotional and psychological im-pulses, together with the resulting preoccupations with ‘honour’ and ‘dishonour’,particularly potent aids to disciplining men and rendering society’s notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ socially and politically effective.81 Thus, he assures readers that:

. . . it was not any heathen religion or other idolatrous superstition that first put man uponcrossing his appetites and subduing his dearest inclinations, but the skilful management of

wary politicians; and the nearer we search into human nature, the more we shall beconvinc’d that the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot uponpride.82

Morality, then, according to the Spinozists and Mandeville, is ‘relativistic’ in thesense that there is no God-ordained ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and that the sole criterion for judging ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is what rational men judge beneficial, or not, to man and what society agrees, preferably democratically, tends to the ‘common interest’. Yet this purely secular, quasi-utilitarian morality is at the same time universal, andalways the same, since it is as reason dictates and reason, held Spinozists, is one,all-embracing and eternal. Hence, the ethical ‘relativism’ of Spinozist republican-ism yields a single moral code invariable and universal, based on reciprocity,


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equality and personal freedom, totally unlike the moral relativism of the late 20th-century postmodernist cult of ‘difference’.

An unrestricted individual freedom under the law, including full freedom of speech and expression, is of course fundamental in the radical tradition. In

Spinoza, and the democratic republicans, very differently from in Hobbes, man’snatural right is retained in its entirety under the state ‘quod ego naturale Jus sem-per sartum tectum conservo’ (because I always conserve the natural right safe andsound), as Spinoza explains,83 so that, as Ericus Walten recycles Spinoza’s idea:

. . . not only are all men naturally born free, but also this natural freedom always remainsintact until restricted through ordinances, enactments, contracts or laws.

. . . so dat niet alleen alle menschen van natuur vrijgeborene zijn, maar ook die natuurlijke vrijheid altijd in ’t geheel blijft, tot datse door voorweerden, provisien, contracten of wetten bepaald wordt.84

Consequently, moral obligation and obedience extend no further than the capac-ity of the state and society to enforce compliance, a capacity which, according toSpinoza and van Leenhof, shrinks proportionately the further one departs fromdemocracy.85

The gap between the Hobbesian conception of the state and Spinoza’s is a wideone, as has been pointed out by Alexandre Matheron and other scholars,86 but needs special emphasis here owing to the long and entrenched tradition, especial-ly in the English-speaking political thought literature,87 of classifying Spinoza’s

political theory as close to, or virtually the same as, that of Hobbes. In one recent reaffirmation of this error we are told that ‘Spinoza recommended a Hobbesian“state” that provides “peace and security” by mixing power with knowledge’.88 Inreality, neither Spinoza, nor his disciples, among whom I again include Mande- ville, recommend anything remotely like the Hobbesian state; and while one canreduce the essential difference between Hobbes’s political theory and Spinoza’s –as the latter himself states, in a letter to Jarig Jelles of June 167489 – to the singlepoint that in Spinoza man’s natural right always remains intact, in civil society just as it was under the state of nature, whereas in Hobbes this natural right is

surrendered when the state comes into being under the terms of the supposedcontract which forges the state, this crucial difference then opens up in variousdirections with numerous implications for toleration, censorship, participationand political ambition as well as personal liberty.

A one-off countervailing of human nature which is ultimately the least persua-sive and realistic part of Hobbes’s theory, the sudden definitive loss of ‘naturalright’ under the state was never going to be easy for subsequent naturalisticminded political thinkers to swallow.90 In any case, the de la Courts and Spinoza were clearly diverging dramatically from Hobbes in claiming that the individual’snatural right unalterably corresponds to his desires and power, what Mandevillecalled that ‘natural instinct of sovereignty, which teaches Man to look upon every thing as centering in himself’.91 Consequently, as Matheron and Negri rightly


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stressed, where Hobbes’s concern, with his surrender of the individual’s naturalright, is to reinforce monarchical sovereignty by restricting liberty, Spinoza’spolitical thought enhances liberty by dispersing and redefining sovereignty,banishing it from monarchy.92 The gulf between the Hobbesian state and the

Spinozan then becomes even more starkly apparent when we see that, for Hobbes,securing civil peace and harmony is the state’s overriding function whereasSpinoza, while granting history teaches that democracies are more prone to dis-unity, factionalism and civil strife than monarchy or aristocracy, neverthelessinsists the risk must be borne for the sake of advantages the democratic republicaffords.

For Spinoza, the kind of ‘peace’ imposed by the despotic sovereign whodisdains the ‘common good’, and suppresses freedom of expression, is a wretchedthing altogether abhorrent to reason. Civil ‘peace’ wrought by tyranny and curb-

ing individual freedom he condemns as the ‘peace of the desert’, not true ‘peace’but a state of oppression and slavery: ‘nam pax, ut jam diximus, non in belli priva-tione, sed in animorum unione, sive concordia consistit’.93 Thus, where Hobbesrecommends, to reinforce monarchical sovereignty, strong censorship and apowerful ecclesiastical arm albeit subordinate to the sovereign, Spinoza, like Walten and van Leenhof after him, spurns these Hobbesian accoutrements.94 Thetrue purpose of the state, counters Spinoza, is to afford men ‘freedom’: ‘finis ergorepublicae revera libertas est’ (the true end of the state therefore is freedom),meaning security plus the maximum of independence compatible with the

general interest.95 Whenever a state no longer upholds a liberty which safeguardsthe individual from the irrationality, selfishness, greed, unruliness and passions of others, including the sovereign, its citizens ipso facto have the right as well as themotivation to change it.

For Spinoza, Walten and Mandeville, then, government has no more ‘right’over its subjects than power over them, whereas Hobbes separates right – ofthe sovereign no less than the individual – fundamentally from power with hishypothetical contract.96 Where Hobbes sees no way of ensuring safety and socialpeace other than by repressing man’s impulses with the might of the sovereign,97

Spinoza and Mandeville envisage the state as the outcome of an evolutionary process constituting a single continuum with the state of nature.98 Where Hobbescounteracts the chaos and brutality of the ‘state of nature’ by assigning thesovereign a decisive and overriding power over society and the individual,Spinoza, once again following the Brothers de la Court, not only as far as possi-ble preserves individual freedom but, where he limits it, absorbs and merges theindividual’s ‘right’ (and power) and autonomy not into the executive but into thesovereign redefined as ‘the majority of the whole community of which he is part’,that is into any state conceived as the collective body of society.99

This crucial divergence in turn generates further major differences. Where forHobbes power can and should be concentrated effectively in a sovereign monarch,for Spinoza true monarchy is literally impossible.100 Power is always widely dis-


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persed so that even the most despotic monarchy is really nothing but a concealed,unregulated form of aristocracy or unsatisfactory mixture of aristocracy anddemocracy. The aggressive and selfish instincts of each individual which Hobbes’ssovereign seeks to curb, in Spinoza, van Leenhof and Mandeville – following on

from the de la Courts – are instead pitted against each other in society and, ratherthan being repelled, transmuted according to Spinoza’s mechanics of the passionsinto positive and beneficial equivalents. The main difference at this point betweenSpinoza and Mandeville is that, where the former sees these as ‘bad’ impulsestransformed into ‘good’, the latter envisages men as behaving at the behest of society in ways perceived as ‘good’, ‘virtuous’ or ‘chaste’ which, however, do not represent genuine virtue but rather an elaborate system of hypocrisy. Men do therights things, according to Mandeville, not by and large out of virtue, but ratherfor ‘honour’ and influence and to avoid ‘shame’.101 But here too the difference

is probably more apparent than real since Mandeville speaks of ‘virtue’ in theconventional sense while Spinoza, as so often, is redefining the term to denotesomething different.

Hence, where, for Hobbes, man in civil society is essentially a subject, Spinozarenders him an active citizen who, whatever his desires and degree of rationality,participates and contributes through sociability to the civilizing, law-enforcing,morality-generating process. In society, according to the Dutch radicals, individual interests clash and largely neutralize each other, thereby restricting men’sdesires. But at the same time, men being useful to each other, they afford

innumerable possibilities for satisfying individual desires in complex ways which Man’s ‘natural right’ left to itself, in the state of nature, would not provide. Inother words, the state and society in Spinozism and Mandeville not only guaran-tees security and peace but also opportunities and scope for participation andexpression, politically and economically, of a kind the Hobbesian debars.102 In this way the Spinozist state, unlike the Hobbesian, makes room for promotion, politi-cal ambition and faction as well as the desire for honour and to achieve glory.However selfish in themselves, such impulses acquire a positive potential andpurpose in civil society so that they cease to be purely negative, aggressive or

disruptive but – as both Spinoza and Mandeville famously held – further the‘common good’ while simultaneously serving individual greed and desire.103

Respect for, and compliance with, the laws conceived for the ‘common good’,being elevated by Spinozists above all other forms of obedience, and infinitely above deference for kings, aristocracy, ecclesiastical authority, tradition or belief,Dutch radical writers typically follow Spinoza in redefining ‘piety’ and ‘religion’to denote reverence for the law and the common interest, while simultaneously redefining ‘atheism’ and ‘godlessness’ to mean wilful defiance of society’s laws and well-being. Using these terms in this way, Spinoza argues, rather remarkably, that it is disastrous for ‘religion’, as well as the state, to permit the clergy to issuedecrees or concern themselves with legislation or political decisions and, stillmore remarkably, that it is essential not just for society but also for ‘religion’ that


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‘the sovereign powers should be assigned the right to determine what is rightand what is wrong’ (quam necesse sit, tam reipublicae, quam religioni, summispotestatibus jus, de eo, quod fas, nefasque sit, discernendi, concedere).104 Such anapproach, despite their divergent vocabularies, is typical also of van Leenhof and

Mandeville. For them, too, true sovereignty resides less in the executive powerthan the legislation produced by the governing body in accordance with society’sneeds, legislation to which everyone, office-holders and ordinary citizens alike, issubject.105 Nothing could be more ‘atheistic’, as van Leenhof typically describesit, than ‘men koningen boven de wetten stelt’ (that kings are placed above thelaws).106

Accordingly, in Spinoza, Walten and van Leenhof, again totally unlike Hobbes,the primacy of the rule of law, as distinct from the executive, should always be clearand unchallenged. Power, on the other hand, being despite appearances always

highly dispersed even in the most absolute of absolute monarchies, is best shownto be divided in an open, formalized and balanced fashion, so that factions andambitious men are boxed into a stable equilibrium by committees, constitutionalprocedures, checks and balances.107 Hence the only way rule of law can be upheldin monarchies, and ‘a people can preserve a considerable measure of freedomunder a king’, concludes Spinoza, is if every possible precaution is taken to ensurethat royal authority is checked by the people’s power and by the people’s armedmight.108 Weapons in the hands of the citizenry are as vital in Spinoza, as in vanden Enden and the de la Courts, for defending the people’s interest not only

against external enemies but also one’s own king (where one is unfortunateenough to have one), as well as oligarchs and usurpers of whatever sort.109

Another consequence of the radical argument that only laws rooted in a moral-ity devised by society for the ‘common good’ are truly sovereign is the claim that human rewards and penalties in the here and now are more effective in civilizingand disciplining men, and repressing aggression and crime, than revealed religion with its allegedly divine commandments and the promise of heaven and threat of hell. Van Leenhof, in a striking passage of Den Hemel op Aarden, affirms that rulershave learnt from experience that theological doctrines instilling dread of divine

chastizement, and the terror of hell, in practice exert no effect on hardened crimi-nals and reprobates. Such men mock ‘divine’ admonitions and entirely set themaside when embarking on a life of pillage, murder and other ‘mad and bestialpassion’. They can be effectively restrained, he says, only by vigorous policing andcredible legal deterrents.110

Mandeville, as Spinozists, rules out freedom of the will, contending that man isa being determined with respect to both motives and actions.111 Yet it is precisely this principle that he, like Spinoza and van Leenhof, utilizes to support his doc-trine that rewards and penalties enacted by the state are the only realistic meansto correct men’s moral and social conduct. Self-interest is what leads the crimi-nally inclined to behave in a well-ordered state. ‘There is nothing’, asserts Mandeville:


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. . . so universally sincere upon earth, as the love which all creatures that are capable of any, bear to themselves: and as there is no love but what implies a care to preserve thething beloved, so there is nothing more sincere in any creature than his will, wishes andendeavours to preserve himself.112

This, he explains, is ‘the law of nature, by which no creature is endowed with any appetite or passion but that which either directly or indirectly tends to thepreservation either of himself or his species’.113 Hence, in Mandeville no less thanSpinoza, the fact that man is bound to conserve his being, and satisfy his desires,means that he can be systematically deflected and deterred from antisocialconduct, with the threat of prompt punishment and exposure.

Hence Mandeville’s notorious contention, detested by so many 18th-century commentators, including Hume, that virtue is not innate and natural in man andcannot be taught, is his equivalent of Spinoza’s equally ‘infamous’ doctrine that

‘virtue’ is really equivalent to power and is always selfish in motivation.114

Insteadof ‘virtue’ as something inculcated or learnt, Mandeville offers his Spinozisticprinciple that:

. . . whoever will civilize men, and establish them in a body politick, must be thoroughly acquainted with all the passions and appetites, strengths and weaknesses of their frame, andunderstand how to turn their greatest frailties to the advantage of the publick.115

Accordingly, respect for the law, integrity and conscientiousness among office-holders and state officials should never be attributed to what Mandeville calls

‘virtue and the honesty of ministers’, even in the case of the Dutch Republic whichhe considered a higher type of state than the monarchies of his day, one that afforded citizens more effective rule of law, order and justice than Europe’s kings. This praiseworthy republic was such, held Mandeville, only due:

. . . to their strict regulations concerning the management of the publick treasure, from which their admirable form of government will not suffer them to depart: and indeed onegood man may take another’s word, if they so agree, but a whole nation ought never totrust to any honesty, but what is built upon necessity; for unhappy is the people, and theirconstitution will ever be precarious, whose welfare must depend upon the virtues andconsciences of ministers and politicians.116

In Mandeville, accordingly, as in Spinoza, the degree of probity and respect forthe common good evinced by government officials in a given state has little to do with the personal inclinations of office-holders which, broadly speaking, remainalways the same, and invariably liable to corruption, but stems from the effective-ness or otherwise of regulations, checks and penalties designed to exact account-ability and respect for the law. Wrongdoing by ordinary citizens, similarly, isrestrained only by good government and well-made laws precisely as, conversely,it feeds on badly framed laws and neglect. ‘The first care therefore of all govern-

ments’, asserts Mandeville:. . . is by severe punishments to curb [man’s] anger when it does hurt, and so by encreasinghis fears prevent the mischief it might produce. When various laws to restrain him from


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using force are strictly executed, self-preservation must teach him to be peaceable; and as it is every body’s business to be as little disturb’d as is possible, his Fears will be continually augmented and enlarg’d as he advances in experience, understanding and foresight.117

The retaining of man’s natural right intact under the state in so many ways inte-

gral to the political radicalism of Spinoza, Walten and van Leenhof highlights yet another significant difference between the Dutch and English republican models– or rather between democratic republican theories of justified resistance tomonarchical despotism and those of theorists recommending limited mon-archy.118 In England, after the Glorious Revolution, because the new parliamen-tary monarchy met – at least in part – many of their old concerns, republicansmostly tended to soften, play down or go back on, their previous willingness to justify armed opposition to tyrants and absolutists who menace the liberty andlaws of the community. Fewer and fewer agreed with the Dutch radical republi-

cans in upholding a wide-ranging, generalized ‘right’ of resistance to tyranny validfor the future no less than the past.119

Where English apologists for justified resistance in and after 1688 maintainedthat sovereignty originates in the people but is wholly relegated, by contract, toParliament, writers such as Walten and van der Muelen held that peoples whoinstall kings or emperors not only never concede an ‘absolute of arbitraire macht’but also retain the ‘souveraine macht’ within themselves including an inalienableright of armed resistance.120 Walten argues that because kings are subject to thelaws, and not above them ‘not only may kings and regents be punished if they have

deserved it, but subjects may also always resist the latter, if they do somethingillegal, and attack them in their religion, freedoms or property’.121 In the work of the surprisingly radical Utrecht regent Willem van der Muelen (1659–1739), oneencounters, as Kossmann observed, a remarkably wide-ranging right of resistanceto monarchical oppression, or bad faith, in breach of that contract which seem-ingly (even if rather vaguely formulated) extends to every individual and again isinalienable.122 Mandeville is less explicit on the subject of resistance but it wassurely not for nothing that Bishop Berkeley denounced him not just as one of ‘those pretended advocates for private light and free thought’ but also as someone

excessive in his ‘Revolution-principles’, one of those ‘seditious men, who set themselves up against national laws and constitutions’.123

Meanwhile, the principle of equality fundamental to the new doctrine ofdemocratic republicanism was likewise inherent not only in the moral ideasunderpinning Spinozist conceptions of law and sovereignty but also in the radicalrepublicans’ view of the general goals and purposes of the state and its rationalstructure. Hence, yet another typical feature of democratic republicanism stand-ing in contrast to English classical republicanism – as well, observed Boulanger,as ancient Greek republicanism – was its denial that the state is the guardian orrepository of any divinely sanctioned tradition or institutions, or divinely revealedmysteries. Explicit assertion of human rather than divine origins was deemednecessary not just to harmonize with the ideas of those preferring philosophy to


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‘fables’ but also safely to regulate the decision-making machinery, legal termin-ology and legislation. In particular, it seemed advisable that all public declarationsshould affirm that the purpose of political institutions and legislation is to providesafety, protection, freedom, order and heightened opportunities for all, or as van

Leenhof expresses it ‘bring a thousand advantages and services to every individual’. For even where political institutions have, unavoidably, to be explained tothe masses in theological terms, it is still vital, held the radical republicans, that priests be prevented from staging religious ceremonies associated with the state’sinstitutions, or influencing the decision-making process, or interfering in legisla-tion. For the laws of the state have to be framed solely for the benefit of thegeneral good on a basis of equality for all, and must not, therefore, be publicly dedicated or inaugurated in the name of some purportedly ‘sacred’, priestly ormysterious purpose.124

Individual passions and interests, as the de la Courts, Spinoza and all theparticipants in the Dutch republican tradition stressed, will always pervade thegovernance of the state. Van Leenhof, for one, acknowledged that there is no way to ensure laws are ‘introduced purely for the common prosperity and well-being without any particular interest being involved’; nor can every eventuality be fore-seen.125 But if perfection is unattainable, and no republic immune to degenerationand corruption, republics still offer humanity better prospects for the commoninterest than other kinds of state. Ultimately, it is not the form of state as such which matters but efficacy in serving the ‘common good’, the purpose which

constitutes the state’s raison d’être. The Spinozist notion of the ‘common good’,defined in terms of safety, freedom and the rule of law, was in every sense a fullprecursor of the ‘general will’ of Diderot and Rousseau, providing a universalcriterion of good and bad by which states, of whatever kind, can be appraised.126

‘The best type of state is easily identified’, held Spinoza, ‘from the purpose of thepolitical order, which is simply peace and security of life’.127

Even the model democratic republic which has long respected the ‘commongood’ can nevertheless quickly degenerate, owing to malicious men, into some-thing quite different. No system or particular state is infallible; nothing is legiti-

mate that ceases to uphold the ‘common good’. In the end, the best kind of state,the Spinozist radicals maintained, is simply that which fulfils its basic functionsconsistently and durably: ‘that is the best constitution’, concluded Mandeville:

. . . which provides against the worst contingencies, that is armed against knavery,treachery, deceit and all the wicked wiles of human cunning, and preserves itself firm andremains unshaken, though most men should prove knaves. It is with a nationalconstitution, as it is with that of men’s bodies: that which can bear most fatigues without being disorder’d, and last the longest in health, is the best.128


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Notes

1. E.H. Kossmann (1987) Politieke theorie en geschiedenis, p. 220. Amsterdam. E.H.Kossmann (2000) Political Thought in the Dutch Republic , pp. 74–83, 178–9. Amsterdam.I.W. Wildenberg (1986) Johan en Pieter de la Court (1622–1660 en 1618–1685), p. 51.

Amsterdam. Further see Hans W. Blom (1993) ‘Politieke filosofie in het Nederland vande zeventiende eeuw’, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 4: 168. Hans W. Blom(2002) ‘The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe’, in A. Pagden (ed.) The Ideaof Europe, pp. 94, 99, 111–12. Cambridge.

2. Kossmann (1987, in n. 1), pp. 60, 85–6, 182, 193

israel - the intellectual origins of modern democratic republicanism (1660–1720)

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