De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 2005

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Kritiek-Antikritiek

Wijnand W. Mijnhardt
A Reply to Wyger Velema

It was a pleasant surprise to find that my essay on the intellectual history of the Dutch Republic and its international echoes had elicited some comment. The agitated character of the remarks, however, was rather astonishing. One tends to suspect that the vehemence of Velema's reply is induced by his fear that his beloved Cambridge School paradigm is in serious danger of collapsing. Only such anxiety might explain why my position has been so wildly caricatured and why Velema has shown such a lack of willingness to understand what I have been trying to argue. Allow me therefore to put a few things straight.

First of all, I am not interested in attacking the Cambridge School paradigm as such. However, what we need to recognize is that its approach has its limits and that there are other legitimate ways of looking at the development of European and Dutch Republicanism. Nor do I feel any need to raise doubts about the importance of the work of Quentin Skinner and John Pocock as founding fathers. On the contrary, their contributions to the field have been without parallel, and Skinner's Foundations and Pocock's Machiavellian Moment have led to an enormous amount of brilliant research, even to the extent of seriously modifying their original theses.

Pocock's and Skinner's methods too have been extremely influential. They have set a new standard for the analysis of texts. However, their methods are not comprehensive, nor do they make other methods and approaches superfluous. For instance, and contrary to what Velema seems to argue, the analysis of images and non-philosophical texts at first hardly figured in their methodology. It is still quite rare, and in the two volumes of Republicanism. A shared European Heritage, images and their analysis are conspicuously absent. More importantly, republican text analysis Cambridge-style, as Kossmann had already noted, has failed to account for the Dutch case: a real republic, powerful, wealthy, and culturally and intellectually prominent. The fact that for Pocock the American Revolution and for Skinner British politics of the 17^th century were the natural terminus ad quem of their narratives makes one suspect that their perspectives were not European after all but simply inspired by considerations of national history.

Finally, I have no quarrel with the Dutch contributions to the history of political thought. On the contrary, I am very much indebted to the work of Ernst Kossmann, Eco Haitsma Mulier and Hans Blom amongst others. One feels, though, that they were too preoccupied in fitting the ideas of Dutch thinkers into the mainstream of Cambridge-style-oriented European republican thought or into the political theory debates as represented by Dutch pamphlet literature that centre on issues such as the problem of the stadholderate, the freedom of religion and the relationship between church and state. As a result they are too little disposed, in my view, to interpret the ideas of, for example, the De la Court brothers and of François van den Enden as answers to the radically modern Dutch challenge, produced by an extraordinary process of urbanization, the creation of a world dominated by commerce and industry, and the unintended and unexpected foundation of a republic.

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The importance of a modern classic such as Franco Venturi's Utopia and Reform lies in its power to force the historian to rethink his problems. The reading of classical texts often has that effect, and they serve as a reminder that the present-day almost exclusive concentration on new views and contemporary contributions and the almost systematic neglect of the historiographical perspective represent a serious impoverishment of the historical debate. Many issues have a much longer past than most historians are prepared to accept. In the case of Venturi it is his emphasis on a truly international or cosmopolitan approach to the history of republicanism that is extremely valuable.

One of the fortunate consequences of the waning of nationalism in the Western writing of history since the 1960s and 70s has been the rapidly growing concern for an international and sometimes even comparative perspective. Unfortunately, the interest in the international approach has also produced a new kind of distortion: the tacit acceptance of an international standard or model of historical development, focusing on the importance of major historical events such as the French and Industrial Revolutions as indispensable stages in the evolution of history. At closer inspection, though, these international standards which pervade all types of history - ftom the history of science to the history of the Enlightenment - are not international at all but simply result from the former dominance of specific national history narratives (i.e.. Skinner's and Pocock's terminus ad quem). As a result, they tend to impede rather than to promote a truly cosmopolitan perspective that leaves room for other options and trajectories. Quite naturally it would be foolish to interpret this assertion in the sense that the British and French revolutions were unimportant; it is just a plea not to try to adapt all European developments to the patterns presented by British, French, or American history.

There are signs that a renationalization process of even this variety of international narratives is under way. Gertrude Himmelfarb's recent contribution to the historiography of the international Enlightenment is a case in point. Her vision of the Enlightenment as the source of present-day American social and international policies reduces a cosmopolitan movement to its Anglo-American and especially American manifestations. Noel Malcolm's brilliant recent study of Thomas Hobbes, to give another example, though infinitely more learned and balanced than Himmelfarb's essay, seems to prove my point as well. In his view, the Dutch Radical Enlightenment exemplified by Spinoza and the De la Court brothers was just a continuation of Hobbesian premises and influences, and Hobbes's ideas in turn originated solely in the English political crisis of the 1640s.¹

The 17^th century Republic was the most modern state on earth, and as result had its own sort of problems. Its Western seaboard in the middle of the 17^th century had gone through a dramatic urbanization process, unequalled in a Europe in which cities mostly were on the decline. Moreover, the Dutch economy had reached a high level of industrial and commercial sophistication, acquiring its basic food stuffs on the European market and thus enabling Dutch cities, for the first time in European history, to shed the bonds of the surrounding countryside. On top of that, the Republic after 1650 experienced an impasse in which the political future of the country was under serious debate. It is only in this context

1 Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Roads to Modernity. The British, French, and American Enlightenments (New York 2004); Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford 2002) esp. Chap 14.

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that the work of, for instance, Pieter de la Court and François van den Enden make sense.

They both tried to find, albeit in completely different directions, solutions to the political, economie and social problems of the Republic. De la Court's plea for a reduction of the territory of the Republic to the region west of the Eem-Lek line and for an abandonment of the agricultural East is perfectly in line with the modern food policies of the Holland and Zeeland towns. De la Court's True Interest should be interpreted as an attempt to propose a theory of republicanism on the basis of the new economie principles pervading the Republic. By defining common interest as commercial interest he invented an economie version of the virtuous citizen. It enabled him to arrive at a theory in which the government was subject to the commercial interests of its citizens. Van den Enden had a different diagnosis of the problems of the Republic and a different solution too. For him the future of the Republic was dependent on the introduction of full equality and full democracy in the Dutch towns. These views, as well as the conjectures about their international resonance, still require much research, if only because historians up to now have never asked these questions. But, as I have tried to show, there is good reason to intensify research in these directions.

Velema thus not only seems to be struck by fear of a collapsing paradigm; he is also the victim of an extremely limited vision of how history should be pursued, narrowing it down to political events and preferably even to political theory. When a fewyears back my colleague Joost Kloek and I published a book in which we analyzed the 18^th- and early 19^th-century basis of the Dutch mental and cultural universe in the 1770-1970 period, he reproached us for not having put the Batavian Revolution centre stage. It simply did not occur to him that people might be interested in other issues and asking different questions. Maybe, if he would be prepared to broaden his intellectual horizon, we might be able to find common ground in the future. Maybe then we will find an opportunity to practise the noble art of debate.