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De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005 (2005)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005

(2005)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Wyger Velema
Wijnand W. Mijnhardt on the Historiography of Republicanism: A Reply

Wyger R.E. Velema is lecturer in early modern history at the University of Amsterdam. He has published widely on the history of eighteenth-century Dutch political thought and is currently working on a volume of essays entitled Republicans. Studies on Eighteenth-Century Dutch Political Thought, to be published by AUP/University of Chicago Press

At the beginning of Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte the currently underrated political thinker Karl Marx famously observes that when history repeats itself, it almost invariably takes the form of a farce. The same could be said, as Wijnand W. Mijnhardt's article ‘The Limits of Present-day Historiography of Republicanism’ amply demonstrates, of historiographical debate.1 It is exactly twenty years ago that Ernst Kossmann, the founding father of the study of the history of Dutch political thought, published his erudite and seminal essay ‘Dutch Republicanism’.2 Kossmann outlined two rival modern theories concerning the early modern republic. On the one hand, there was the view of the Italian historian Franco Venturi, who saw the early modern republics as commercial, averse to expansion, obsessed with acquired rights and deeply conservative. Particularly in the eighteenth century, so Venturi argued, these republics increasingly became ossified relics of the past, unable to reform and adapt themselves to the modern world and therefore doomed to disappear. Yet despite their growing political insignificance, the surviving republics still served as a source of inspiration for many enlightened political theorists, because they were capable of arousing ‘a resolute desire for independence and virtue which (...) the monarchical states were not able to satisfy’.3 It was out of this vague admiration for the virtues of the republican way of life, so Venturi suggested, that the new republicanism of the late eighteenth-century revolutions would ultimately emerge.

Quite a different vision of the early modern republic was to be found in the magnum opus of the New Zealand historian John Pocock. In his stunningly learned The Machiavellian Moment, published in 1975, Pocock studied republicanism not as an institutional phenomenon, as Venturi had partly done, but as a political language. This language of early modern republicanism, so Pocock claimed, had its roots in classical antiquity, more particularly in the Aristotelian notion of man as a zoon politikon or homo politicus, and was revived during the Italian Renaissance by a succession of Florentine humanists, from Leonardo Bruni to Niccolò Machiavelli. It was not primarily concerned with rights, but with virtues or virtue, that

is to say with those capacities that enabled man to transcend his narrow self interest, allowed him to realize himself to the fullest in the vita activa civilis and helped him to withstand the ceaseless onslaughts of capricious fortuna. If virtue, as best expressed in political participation, was the ultimate human goal, it is evident that the participatory republic of classical inspiration and dominated by independent citizens was the most desirable form of government. It was Pocock's greatest merit to demonstrate convincingly that this language of classical republicanism or civic humanism, of which many historians thought that it had been displaced after the Renaissance by the rights language of natural jurisprudence or the interest language of the reason of state, survived for a remarkably long time - albeit with many adaptations and transformations - in at least Anglophone political thought and surfaced in many discussions of republics until the beginning of the nineteenth century.4

Having discussed both these visions of the early modern republic, Kossmann posed his key question, namely: how did Dutch republicanism fit into all of this? His answer was of a refteshing simplicity: it did not. Taking the writings of P.C. Hooft, the brothers De la Court, Spinoza, and the Patriot and Orangist political thinkers of the eighteenth century as his main examples, Kossmann argued that although elements of both republican strands described by Venturi and Pocock were present in Dutch republican discourse, ultimately the differences were more important than the similarities. Dutch political thought was too dynamic and reformist to fit into the conservative republican world of Venturi. It was also too preoccupied with human characteristics other than political virtue to be labelled civic humanist or republican in the classical sense. Dutch republican thought was, in Kossmann's view, deeply eclectic and contained elements from many seemingly mutually exclusive traditions. This was an insight that has been shared ever since by the majority of scholars working on the history of Dutch political thought in the early modern period.

Now, twenty years after the publication of Kossmann's subtle and stimulating discussion of Venturi's and Pocock's views on the early modern republic and his incisive analysis of their relevance for the study of Dutch republicanism, Wijnand W. Mijnhardt has decided to go over exactly the same ground. Precisely as Kossmann did twenty years ago (when the works he discussed were still relatively recent), Mijnhardt once again opposes the visions of Franco Venturi and John Pocock. Yet there all similarity between Kossmann and Mijnhardt ends and repetition indeed turns into farce. Where Kossmann's contribution was analytical, Mijnhardt's treatment of the study of republicanism is essentially programmatic. This in itself is surprising, coming from a scholar who has persistently written politics and political thought out of the history of the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic and who has attempted, in the felicitous phrase of his most acute critic, to turn the Dutch republican citizen into a eunuch.5 Yet what matters in the end is not so much this remarkable change of mind, but the way in which Mijnhardt expounds his newly espoused views on the importance of republicanism.

Mijnhardt's article, in which it remains unclear whether he is discussing early modern republicanism in general or giving us advice on the proper study of the Dutch variety, opens

with severe strictures on what the author labels the ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ in the study of republicanism. It proceeds to place this ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ in the wider framework of what the author mysteriously terms ‘the myopia of post-national history’. It then briefly discusses Venturi's 1971 volume on Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment and finally comes to what is presumably intended as the central part of the article: an overview of recent scholarship on Dutch republicanism, followed by guidelines for the further study of this topic. In what follows, I shall attempt to argue that, in the first place, Mijnhardt's account of the existing historiography of early modern republicanism in general is deeply flawed and therefore untenable. I will then proceed to discuss his views on the proper way to study early modern Dutch republicanism and try to establish that these, too, are entirely inadequate.

Mijnhardt on the historiography of early modern republicanism

It is Mijnhardt's view that since the publication of Pocock's Machiavellian Moment and shortly thereafter of Quentin Skinner's Foundations of Modern Political Thought, there has arisen a monolithic orthodoxy in the historiography of early modern republicanism, to which he variously and confusingly refers as the ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ (p.75), ‘the Cambridge historians’(p. 76), ‘the Atlantic republican tradition’(p. 76) and ‘the Anglo-American tradition’(p.79).6 This supposed orthodoxy is said to claim universal validity for its findings and to have at the same time unacceptably narrowed our perspective on the history of early modern republicanism, both substantively (by concentrating on the history of classical republicanism) and geographically (by limiting research largely to Renaissance Italy, early modern Britain, and eighteenth-century America). Mijnhardt's prize exhibit in this context, his ultimate (and, one must add, also only) proof of the demonic plot hatched by the adherents of ‘contemporary orthodoxy’, consists of two recently published volumes of essays on early modern European republicanism that constitute part of the outcome of a major European Science Foundation project.7 It is in these volumes, Mijnhardt asserts, that Dutch republican thought is ‘officially declared irrelevant’(p. 76). For anyone daring to doubt this apodictic statement, the tragic fate of Jonathan Israel's contribution to the project (in which he committed the mortal sin of criticizing ‘the Atlantic concept’ (p. 76)) should be proof sufficient: it was not incorporated in the volumes. But it is not only Dutch republicanism that suffers a horrible fate in these tomes, for they are equally successful in marginalizing ‘a great variety of other remarkable European republican experiments and traditions’(p. 76).

Let me start with the obvious and easy part: the factual inaccuracy of Mijnhardt's account. It is ironic that he has chosen two volumes universally praised by reviewers (whatever other criticisms they may have had) for broadening our perspective on early modern European republicanism by including territories such as Poland, the German free cities, and the Swiss cantons, to demonstrate the geographical narrowness of the views of the ‘contemporary or-

thodoxy’.8 It is, moreover, plainly wrong to accuse the editors of two books containing no fewer than five essays on Dutch republicanism of officially (whatever that paranoid phrase may mean) declaring Dutch republicanism irrelevant.9 It is, finally, quite embarrassing that Mijnhardt is apparently unaware that the reason for the scandalous ‘exclusion’ of Jonathan Israel's article from these volumes is that this distinguished scholar acted as one of the readers. Israel's own contribution will shortly be published in a further book to come out of the same project.

Much more important and ominous than Mijnhardt's factual inaccuracy, however, is the conceptual confusion evident in his attempts to identify a monolithic ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ on early modern republicanism. No doubt his troubles have something to do with the fact that such an orthodoxy simply does not exist and is a figment of his imagination. As already pointed out above, there seem to be three candidates for the role of constituting the ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ on early modern republicanism in Mijnhardt's article. First of all, there are the ‘Cambridge historians’ (p. 76). Now it is perfectly true that the so-called Cambridge School, with John Pocock, John Dunn and Quentin Skinner as its leading theorists, has been of immense importance to the historiography of political thought over the past decades, as is particularly evident from the dozens of highly influential books published in the series Ideas in Context. Yet what binds the adherents of the Cambridge School together is not so much some imagined ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ on republicanism (most of its practitioners work in entirely different fields) as a shared methodology.10 Turning against both historically disembodied Geistesgeschichte and socio-economic determinism, the adherents of the Cambridge School have, ever since its inception, successfully attempted to write ‘a history of political theory with a genuinely historical character’.11 By this they mean that the primary task of the historian of political theory is to locate the texts he or she is studying in their relevant contemporary political and linguistic contexts. Mijnhardt may find this approach ‘much too narrow’ because it exclusively focuses on ‘philosophical treatises and tracts’(p. 78), but there too, once again, he is wrong. For the Cambridge School interprets texts in the broadest possible way, as evidenced by Quentin Skinner's recent definition:’(...) when I say ‘texts’, I have in mind the widest possible sense of that term, so that buildings, pieces of music and paintings, as much as works of literature and philosophy, are all texts to be read.’12 It is finally worth noting that the Cambridge School, however influ-

ential it may be, does not even reign supreme (or constitute a ‘contemporary orthodoxy’) in the methodological field, for it has a by no means insignificant contemporary methodological competitor in German Begriffsgeschichte.13

Mijnhardt's second candidate for the role of ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ in the study of early modern republicanism is something he alternately calls ‘the Atlantic republican tradition’ (p. 76) and ‘the Atlantic concept’ (p. 76). Since John Pocock was the inventor and subsequent main user of the term ‘Atlantic republican tradition’, what Mijnhardt must be trying to suggest here is that the views expounded by Pocock in his Machiavellian Moment of 1975 still function as the dominant paradigm for the study of early modern republicanism. Yet this suggestion is patently false, for virtually every aspect of Pocock's now thirty-year-old analysis has been challenged in subsequent scholarship on early modern republicanism. Thus, to give only a few examples, Pocock's derivation of classical republicanism from Aristotelian sources has implicitly and explicitly been criticized by, among others, Quentin Skinner (as Mijnhardt himself can't help acknowledging on p. 76); his emphasis on the tensions between virtue and commerce in republican discourse has been revised by Jonathan Israel and Jonathan Scott; his rather limited view of the geographical reach of republican ideas has, as we have seen, been criticized by Ernst Kossmann and, pace Mijnhardt, the contributors to the European Science Foundation project on European republicanism and, finally, his notion of an almost absolute divide between the language of classical republicanism and that of natural jurisprudence has been questioned by almost every subsequent commentator, starting with J.H. Hexter.14 It is therefore abundantly clear that whatever may be left of Pocock's Atlantic republican tradition, it certainly is not a ‘contemporary orthodoxy’.

Which brings us to Mijnhardt's third, final and perhaps most baffling candidate for the role of‘contemporary orthodoxy’ in the study of early modern republicanism: ‘the Anglo-American tradition’ (p. 79). To speak of a tradition implies the existence of at least some common ground between those said to represent it. But it is precisely this common ground that is missing between the scholars engaged in the study of early modern republicanism in contemporary Britain and America. A substantial group of Anglophone historians, ranging from Joyce Appleby and Isaac Kramnick to Michael Zuckert, emphasizes that much of what is termed classical republicanism by historians taking their lead from Pocock's models for the study of early modern political thought, is in fact rights-based proto-liberalism, that is:

republicanism of a different kind.15 Others, Paul A. Rahe most prominently among them, have made it their life's work to demonstrate that there was such a decisive break between the ancients and the moderns that one has to be very circumspect in speaking about early modern classical republicanism at all, even in the work of Pocock's heroes Niccolò Machiavelli and James Harrington.16 There is, in short, not even a beginning of consensus about how to view early modern republicanism among British and American historians. There simply is no ‘Anglo-American tradition’. And it certainly is impossible for something that does not exist to form a ‘contemporary orthodoxy’.

Once Mijnhardt's straw man, the ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ in the historiography of early modern republicanism, has been disposed of, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand the rest of his argument. For this - as we have seen non-existent - contemporary orthodoxy in the historiography of republicanism is now said to be a prime example of a ‘standard fallacy’ called ‘the myopia of post-national history’ (since it is impossible for history to be myopic, what is presumably meant here is historiography). Historians suffering from this dreadful ‘myopia of post-national history’ commit two unpardonable sins: they retain the nation as an important organizing principle in the writing of history and they keep using ‘various historical axioms dating back to the high tide of national history’, although cleverly disguising these as ‘universal principles’. The ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ functions as precisely such a pernicious axiom, for its adherents, without exception architects of despicable Anglo-American master narratives, claim that modernity can only be reached by states and nations that have ‘accomplished (sic) the Atlantic republican trajectory’(p.77). The reader who turns to the footnote accompanying this incomprehensible passage will notice that not a shred of evidence is presented for the bold accusations and blatant misrepresentations contained therein. That, however, is only to be expected, for Mijnhardt has clearly switched here to a postmodernist mode of analysis for which, as we all know, no conventional proof is required.

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that there still is such a thing as the ‘Atlantic republican tradition’ and let us, again for the sake of argument, suppose that its content roughly coincides with the mode of thought analysed in Pocock's classic work, The Machiavellian Moment. It will then become immediately clear that this tradition does not derive its categories from the history of the nation, for the story of classical republicanism as told by Pocock is the story of a supra-national political way of thinking or language and its trajectories from the ancient world, through the Italian Renaissance and early modern Britain to revolutionary America. The analysis of this tradition is also quite evidently not intended to reinforce or create some ‘universal master narrative’ (p. 77). If anything, the rediscovery of classical republicanism has helped to undermine the only available British and American master narrative, that of rights and progress. It is unsurprising that this should be so, for the methodology employed by the Cambridge School, of which Pocock is one of the leading practitioners, is ill-suited for the construction or support of such narratives. Indeed, by habitually emphasizing the analysis of the synchronic linguistic and political context of texts at

the expense of the description of diachronic development, it is eminently suited to debunk every facile attempt at master narratives. So little comprehension of even the most elementary implications of the methodology of the Cambridge School bodes ill, one fears, for Mijnhardt's capacity to shed a useful light on the study of early modern Dutch republicanism.

Mijnhardt on early modern Dutch republicanism

As we have seen, Mijnhardt's analysis of the current state of the historiography of early modern republicanism is marred by factual inaccuracy and conceptual confusion. Having dealt with the adherents of an imagined ‘contemporary orthodoxy’ on republicanism and having summarily dismissed the non-existent victims of ‘the myopia of post-national history’s, he is now prepared to offer his readers advice on the proper way to study early modern Dutch republicanism. Given the high ground he has taken so far and given the harshness of his judgment on many current practitioners of the historiography of republicanism, one is more than entitled to expect great originality, scintillating insights and cutting edge methodological suggestions.

Yet we get none of these. Instead we are treated to, first of all, richly exaggerated praise for the role of Franco Venturi's Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment in the development of the historiography of republicanism. Indeed, Venturi's ‘methods and interpretations’, which are to be read as a series ‘of implicit criticisms’ of the approach of Pocock and Skinner (although never intended as such), should be our beacon in the study of early modern Dutch republicanism (p. 78-79). Now it is certainly true that Franco Venturi was a great and inspiring scholar, whose work contains a wealth of information on the history of early modern, and particularly eighteenth-century, European politics and political thought. Yet he never pretended to have developed a coherent methodology comparable to, say, that of the Cambridge School. Even more important is the fact that there exist remarkable similarities between the work of Venturi and that of the practitioners of the ‘new history of political thought’, both in method and in content.17 For where Venturi in his Utopia and Reform on the one hand studies the slow descent of the eighteenth-century European republics into political insignificance (it is this element that is emphasized in Kossmann's account of his work as discussed above), the more important part of his story concerns the remarkable vitality and transformation of the language or discourse of republicanism in that same century. It is the story of how the great republican political ideal of the eighteenth century, virtue, gradually becomes divorced from the context of the existing republics and takes on a central role in reformist enlightenment thought. It is, in the words of Keith Baker, the story of the transformation of the republic ‘from political reality to enlightened utopia’.18 In the light of this, the stark contrast between the methods of Venturi and those of ‘the Anglo-American tradition’ insisted on by Mijnhardt seems to be entirely implausible.

Having to no avail tried to create a methodological rift between the approaches to re-

publicanism of Venturi and of the ‘Anglo-American tradition’, Mijnhardt turns to early modern Dutch republicanism, a phenomenon which, given the chronological limits he has chosen for his overview of recent scholarship on the topic, seems to have come to an abrupt end at the close of the seventeenth century. Unfortunately for the expectant reader, the ‘new perspectives’ he promises to discuss in this section of his article (p. 79-82) have, for the largest part, surprisingly little to do with the analysis of Dutch republicanism. For contrary to Kossmann, Venturi and Pocock, Mijnhardt seems to think - and this, one has to admit, is undeniably an entirely new perspective - that republicanism is best studied by leaving its content largely out of consideration. Thus we hear a great deal about doubtlessly highly interesting developments in such varied fields as urbanization, public opinion and prostitution, yet nothing new about republican political thought.

At the few points where Mijnhardt does bother to discuss political thought, he entirely (sometimes even almost literally) follows the authoritative account of Kossmann.19 Unsurprisingly, the promised ‘new perspectives’ on republicanism therefore consist of little more than a repetition of points originally made by Kossmann and those inspired by his work. Thus the familiar, albeit dated, thesis about the absence of republicanism before 1650 is once again repeated.20 This is followed by the equally familiar assertion that debates on republicanism of a fundamental nature started to take place during the First Stadholderless Era. It was during these years that a clear divide emerged between those in favour of a regnum mixtum, those who saw the aristocratie republic as the best form of government and finally those, with the brothers De la Court and Spinoza as their leading spokesmen, who desired the introduction of a more democratie type of republic and who argued from the concept of self-interest instead of from a notion of classical virtue. Nothing new, in short, for anyone familiar with Kossmann's pioneering study of seventeenth-century Dutch political thought, first published almost half a century ago.

Yet much worse than this absence of ‘new perspectives’ is to come. For having hastily summarized the received wisdom on Dutch republicanism until the end of the seventeenth century (and having failed to explain why he refrains from discussing the eighteenth century), Mijnhardt proceeds, in the final part of his contribution, to indicate what the future historiography of Dutch republicanism should look like (p. 83-89). He does this in three steps. First of all, he transforms the varieties of republican thought to be found in the political thought of the First Stadholderless Era into ‘Dutch republican models’. This in itself is rather strange, because there was nothing particularly Dutch about at least two of these three ‘models’: aristocratie republicanism and theories about mixed government belonged to the commonplaces of seventeenth-century European republican political thought, as was pointed out many years ago by Eco Haitsma Mulier.21 What makes this move truly bizarre, however, is that it is the self-appointed scourge of ‘the myopia of post-national his-

tory’, a phenomenon that by his own definition largely consists of the undesirable persistence of thinking in terms of national history, who now takes it upon himself to construct specifically Dutch (i.e. national) republican political models. Consistency, it is evident, is considered an overrated quality in Mijnhardt's historical universe.

In the second step of his argument, the author offers us the suggestion that we need to analyse ‘the international trajectories’ of ‘these Dutch republican models’, or, as he puts it somewhat later, ‘the Dutch example’. Particularly needed is an investigation into the importance of the Dutch example for ‘the Anglo-American republican tradition’, for such research is until now virtually non-existent. Since his own discussion of the American case that immediately follows this observation makes it clear that this is certainly untrue for America, it is only necessary to point out here that it is equally incorrect for Britain. It has apparently escaped Mijnhardt's attention that the importance of Dutch republican political thought in the early modern period has recently been explored by the historian Jonathan Scott in a great many excellent publications.22

The inconsistency and inaccuracy we have so far encountered in Mijnhardt's prescriptions for the historiography of Dutch republicanism are, of course, both regrettable and startling. Yet they pale into insignificance compared to what we encounter when our author comes to his third step, the practical application of his own suggestions. It is at this point that his article truly descends into the grotesque, for he light-heartedly and without further explication casts aside everything he has previously argued for. After Mijnhardt's plea for the study of the international dissemination of the three ‘Dutch republican models’ from the third quarter of the seventeenth century, his readers are surely entitled to expect a demonstration of the potentially salutary and enlightening effects of such study. However, these ‘models’ suddenly and mysteriously disappear from the author's story. Instead, Mijnhardt now warmly recommends research into the influence of the 1581 Dutch Act of Abjuration on the political thought of the American Revolution. To put it differently: he is urging us to study the history of Dutch republicanism by tracing the international trajectory of a text that was, as he himself claimed a few pages earlier, composed during a period when there was no Dutch republicanism worth speaking of. It is at this point that even the most persevering reader has no other option but to give up.

Since Kossmann first explored the contours of early modern Dutch political thought several decades ago, the historiography of Dutch republicanism has made enormous progress. Through the work of such authors as Jonathan Israël and Hans Blom, we have gained a much better understanding of the republican political thought of the crucial third quarter of the seventeenth century.23 The presence of civic humanist elements in Dutch political thought ftom the Revolt to the Batavian Revolution has been established and explored by a

host of scholars from Martin van Gelderen to Stephan Klein.24 Research groups have made a start with the analysis of the historical development of such key republican concepts as liberty and citizenship.25 It is into this burgeoning world of republican research that Wijnand W. Mijnhardt has now decided to intervene with his presumptuous and regressive (who wants to return to the study of the influence of individual texts?) suggestions for its future course. Since his programmatic exhortations not only display an astonishing ignorance of much of the content of recent research on the history of early modern republicanism, but are also - as it has been the purpose of this reply to establish - factually inaccurate, conceptually confused and demonstrably inconsistent, we may hope and trust that they will remain unheeded.


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