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Politieke theorie en geschiedenis (1987)

Politieke theorie en geschiedenis

(1987)–E.H. Kossmann–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Dutch republicanism*

In his Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment, that learned and illuminating book on the problem of the republic, Franco Venturi wrote a passage which may serve as a motto for this paper. He compares the situation of Genoa and the Dutch Republic in the middle of the eighteenth century and finds that, of course, there were great differences, but, he goes on,

the problems of the two states were not really so dissimilar. First of all, were they to be neutral or belligerent? The argument was lively and manifold, but the conclusion was unanimous. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the old republics could survive only if they withdrew from the conflicts of the great powers. There were to be no alliances and no wars. Both Holland and Genoa ended by admitting that Venice was right. In the middle of the eighteenth century the commercial state had to be neutral. The example of the classical republics was fatal to them, the worst the modern ones could follow.1

In an eloquent passage some pages earlier Venturi described the policies by which Austria, in the eighteenth century, sought to isolate Venice, to rob it of its commercial power and to absorb it in its own sphere of influence. Venice, he states, reacted to this ‘with the typically republican reflex of immobility. It followed a policy of programmatic conservatism. It tried to withdraw from the daily course of events to contemplate itself in its perpetuity’.2

With statements like these Venturi leads us into a discussion of major proportions and of major importance. Thanks to its information and its analytic precision Utopia and Reform is an interesting contribution to it. More sharply than in many larger books does this small one show how fundamental the problem of the republic was in the eighteenth century, how it was constantly discussed and in what extraordinarily complicated variations it turned up in the middle of arguments about much wider issues than merely constitutional arrangements. Perfectly aware of the fact that the surviving republics in eighteenth-century Europe were on the whole ‘antique and decaying ruins’ many observers still felt sympathy

with their spirit; their admiration was not so much for republics as a form of government but for the republican morale. In the middle of the eighteenth century, Venturi tells us, ‘the word “republic” found an echo in the minds of many people, but as a form of life, not as a political force’.3

One of the difficulties for the student of the republic was, in the eighteenth century as well as now, the problem of definition. It was, and is, not easy to make as clear a distinction between monarchy and republic as one would have liked and it is most interesting to see how for some eighteenth-century writers the word republic came to stand for moderate government generally even if it was led by a hereditary royal dynasty. In 1763 Stanislaus Leszczynski, the titular king of Poland who ruled Lorraine and who was the French king's father-in-law, divided Europe's states into two categories, the monarchies (France, Spain, Portugal, Naples, Sardinia, Denmark, Prussia and Russia) and the republics (Britain, Holland, Sweden, Poland, Venice, the Swiss cantons and Genoa). His own preference went undoubtedly to the republic. In his view republics were not moved by the ‘esprit de conquête’ which permeated monarchies; they felt no envy and wanted only to preserve what they possessed, including their form of government and their liberty.4 It is obvious what had happened here. Leszczynski equated the republic with moderate or mixed government. He was not the first nor was he the last to do so.5 What, however, makes his statement so interesting is that he equips the regnum mixtum with the characteristics often reserved for states where the absence of all royal or semi-royal power leaves the citizens free to pursue their individual interests peacefully, quietly, not disturbed by monarchical ambition.

In recent years J.G.A. Pocock has in a large number of fascinating books and articles propounded a view of the Atlantic republican tradition and of the ideology of the regnum mixtum which is, on the face of it, the very opposite of Leszczynski's interpretation and which does not seem to fit into the model sketched by Venturi. It is as if we, the readers of Venturi's and Pocock's publications, are put in the presence of two entirely different, incompatible, even hostile republican traditions, both described with great scholarship and eloquence. Venturi's republican tradition is the tradition of the peaceful commercial commonwealth, politically conservative, inclined to insist on the rights rather than the duties of its citizens whereas Pocock offers us in great and impressive detail a tradi-

tion of anti-commercial republicanism, agrarian, combative, stressing the duty of the citizens to participate in government and, above all, in warfare. In other words, Venturi's republic stands for what Benjamin Constant in 1819 called the ‘liberté des modernes’, that is, civil or negative liberty; Pocock's republic stands for the ‘liberté des anciens’, that is, political or positive liberty.

The intention of this paper is not to arbitrate between these interpretations but only, much more modestly, to consider the content of one particular republican tradition, the Dutch one, and to see if these models help to understand it. But before trying to sketch the development of Dutch republicanism it may be useful to summarize Pocock's views in some more detail. However, Pocock's methods and interpretations are so complicated and his argumentation is so flexible that summarizing his work risks distorting it. The following cannot be more than a perhaps unwarranted simplification. It deals, moreover, with only two points, deliberately leaving out a number of aspects that need not concern us at the moment. We consider, first, his thesis concerning the connection between republicanism and the rise of modern historiography and secondly, his location of English and American republicanism - or ideas about mixed government - in what he calls the Machiavellian paradigm.6

As far as the first point is concerned, Pocock analyses with great care the far-reaching discussion, started in late fifteenth-century Florence, about some closely connected issues of major importance. There was the question if and how the independence of a republic like Florence could be maintained. The question implied, of course, that the continuity of a republican state was by no means granted and this in turn inspired some supremely intelligent minds in fifteenth-century Florence to study in depth the history of states and forms of government, the changes which they underwent, their corruption, the means by which they might be restored thanks to bold innovation. History thus became an independent object of study which the student should try to make transparent. History is about changes with causes and effects. Knowledge of these may help us to make the republic healthy. This, Pocock says, is an attitude sharply different from the medieval paradigm in which the temporal, that is, history, could never obtain such a central significance. The civic humanists in Italy studied the changes in human affairs, the historical element, and thanks to this unmedieval preoccupation they discovered or rediscovered history as a separate, independent element to be studied without reference to God. The civic humanists, aware of the vulnerability of the republican form of government, realized that human affairs were un-

stable and constantly changing and that historical knowledge might be of help if one wished to preserve a republic constantly threatened with corruption and decay.

As a result of this fundamental change in attitude a new paradigm developed with a new vocabulary. The pivotal terms were republic and virtù. Machiavelli examined the method thanks to which it would be possible to give a republic some stability. This could be achieved by making men behave as citizens who experienced their citizenship as the true fulfilment of their human capacity. Life in the state, a civic existence, was to give men their ultimate purpose in life. Such a civic existence implied that men participated actively in state affairs. The continuity of a republic, therefore, was dependent on the involvement of the citizen, on his virtù, his strength, his energy, his willingness to lead a vita activa and to serve as a soldier to defend and to aggrandize the state.

It is Pocock's thesis that this paradigm survived the collapse of the North Italian city states. In the middle of the seventeenth century it was taken up by James Harrington in his Oceana (1656)7 and then became a major issue in the British debates of the early eighteenth century. Finally it was adopted by the American Founding Fathers; these, according to Pocock, derived important elements of their thought and their ideals from the more or less republican ideology formulated about 1700 by the so-called Country Party rather than from some form of Lockean liberalism. The Machiavellian tradition was not liberal. Machiavellians want men to be virtuous and to live a full life as citizens participating in the political and military affairs of their state. Lockean liberalism makes no such claims. It does not require the subjects to take up such responsibilities; it merely wants to organize the state in such a way that the citizen can fully enjoy his right to live his own individual life. In a liberal system the citizen may well leave government and defence in the hands of experts appointed and controlled by him, the professional administrators and soldiers. He himself devotes the best of his time and his efforts to the cultivation of his own interests and his own development.

Although some more detail about these matters will be provided later, enough has been said to put the question which must be considered in this paper: where do we place the Dutch Republic if the Atlantic republican tradition possesses this character? This is a legitimate question, because in Pocock's history the Dutch Republic does not play a role. This is perhaps somewhat surprising. Pocock's starting point is the system of Italian republics which in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had become minor powers. His analysis then moves to England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and England of course was, apart from a small number of years, not a republic at all. But (and this is by no means intend-

ed as a criticism of Pocock's learned and stimulating book) the greatest republic of the seventeenth and part of the eighteenth century, the Dutch Republic, is totally absent. Did it not belong to the Atlantic tradition, did it not conform to the Machiavellian paradigm? If so, what is the reason? These questions are extremely complex and it is difficult, perhaps even impossible, to answer them adequately. We must nevertheless at least try to clarify matters by considering a number of episodes in the history of Dutch republicanism chosen with the purpose of testing the relevance of Pocock's model in the Dutch case. In order to keep the argument under control it will be confined to an early seventeenth-century writer, P.C. Hooft, to the work of De la Court and Spinoza published some decades later and finally to the discussions between Patriots and Orangists in the second half of the eighteenth century. In all these cases either Machiavellianism or English political philosophy exercised such a decisive influence on the Dutch political debates that the intellectual situation seems exceptionally favourable for being interpreted in the ways proposed by Pocock. In other words, the examples are selected with the express purpose to provide Pocock's paradigms with the greatest possible credibility.

 

Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft (1581-1647) was a celebrated writer, the author of tragedies, fine lyrical poetry and a great historical work which formed the centre of his interests from the 1620s to his death. The best and largest part of the book was published in 1642: Neederlandsche Histoorien, the history of the Revolt of the Netherlands up to the assassination of William of Orange on 10 July 1584. This is a magnificent book, written in a style of singular beauty, solidly constructed on the basis of all documents then available. The theme is dramatic. But although Hooft allowed a large measure of patriotism to flow into his narrative the book was certainly not intended as a eulogy of the Netherlands and as a heroic epic glorifying the struggle for liberty and national greatness. The book was rather intended as a dispassionate study in politics to provide lessons for ‘the instruction of princes and peoples’. Now politics according to Hooft is a hard, cynical and sad affair. He was very well informed about the Italian literature on this theme. He translated parts of the famous, even notorious book by Troianus Boccalini, the Ragguagli di Parnaso (Venice 1612-13) which constituted one of the favourite sources of the English Machiavellian Harrington, a key-figure in Pocock's argument.8 Hooft wrote political aphorism in the style used since the sixteenth century to make politics into a science not unlike medical science and thus employing the literary device of Hippocrates who, four hundred years

before Christ, wrote aphorismoi.9 Tacitus was the great example both for Boccalini and for Hooft. Hooft translated all his works and in his Neederlandsche Histoorien he tried to imitate Tacitean brevitas. The passage endlessly quoted in Dutch anthologies with which Hooft began his narrative is in fact a translation of Tacitus's most famous sentences - Historiae (1, II): ‘Opus adgredior, opimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa tamen pace saevom’ - which Machiavelli used to base his condemnation of the Roman Empire upon.10 When Hooft's book was published in 1642 his friend Govert Brasser thanked him for sending it: ‘If (which God may prevent) Tacitus's Histories would get lost, then all his lessons could be assembled again out of your History’.11

At first sight, it seems, one would be entitled to expect that Hooft, the author of the first original historiographical work in Dutch with literary and scientific pretensions dealing with the beginning of a new and powerful republic, would conform to what Pocock called the Machiavellian paradigm. This becomes all the more probable when one compares the Histoorien of his maturity with his exercises in drama written in the 1610s and particularly with his tragedy Baeto or the origin of the Hollanders (1617). Baeto stands in the tradition of the Batavian myth, that is, the idea that the Hollanders or Batavians formed an old people, destined to live forever, ‘excelling in peace, in war, in everything’, immensely respectable thanks to the antiquity and stability of their state.12 Baeto was written seven years after the publication of Grotius's De antiquitate reipublicae batavicae (1610) of which the first draft dates probably from c. 1601 when the author was eighteen years old. In this work early seventeenth-century Holland was represented as the direct descendant of the Batavians who defeated the Romans and even at that time already possessed a fully developed and stable system of government. It is obvious that Pocock's interpretation of Machiavellian republicanism as an attempt to overcome or mitigate the tendency of states to become corrupted and to halt the process of decay by innovation cannot have had any meaning in the context of the sort of optimism about the perpetuity of the Batavian or Dutch Republic propagated by Grotius and Hooft. The interesting point, however, is that both authors seem to have abandoned this view later in life. In a letter to his brother of 24 January 1643 Grotius recognized that his thesis concerning the antiquity of Holland was pushed too far.13 In Hooft's Histoorien published one year before there are passages which indicate that he too had changed his point of view. There is, at any rate, in this scholarly work no trace of Baeto and the Batavians left. This is a book about contingencies,

human drama, human triumphs and human cruelty. Hooft did not conceal the fact that not only the Spaniards but also the rebels were responsible for outrageous misdeeds. One of those who perpetrated such inexcusable horrors was Lumey, the leader of the rebel Sea Beggars. Hooft tells us how, in 1573, Prince William of Orange wanted to have him tried for his crimes. However, it turned out to be impossible to condemn him. ‘The state - Hooft writes - was at that time not yet firmly enough established to allow strict discipline to be exercised’ in relation to such a popular personality.14 This is characteristic. Hooft's object of study in 1642 was by no means an ancient and unchanging structure but an unstable state, a state not yet completed, a state only just beginning to adopt some sort of form. If ever there was a Machiavellian Moment in Dutch intellectual development one might suppose it was the day when Hooft started to describe the Dutch Revolt in Tacitean style.

Yet Hooft was not a republican in the manner described by Pocock. The Dutch Republic was for him not the closely-knit militant community which makes the citizens devote the best of their activities to the common good and makes them participate in governing as well as in defending and expanding the state. Hooft's position was much more ambiguous. He came from the Amsterdam mercantile patriciate but his job as judge and administrator of Gooiland, Muiden, Naarden and Weesp, though not a sinecure,15 was not a function of political importance. He avoided involvement in the bitter quarrels between Gomarists and Arminians during the 1610s. He may have been a sincere Christian but, totally uninterested in dogmatic disputations, he did in any case not side with the orthodox Calvinists; politically however he tended to opt for the stadholdership, then exercised by Maurice of Nassau, rather than the grand-pensionaryship, then exercised by Oldenbarnevelt, although the former supported the Gomarists and the latter's most learned disciple and adviser was Hooft's friend Hugo Grotius. On 29 August 1618 Oldenbarnevelt and Grotius were put into prison by Maurice. A few months earlier, on 19 May 1618, Hooft sent a letter in Latin to Grotius - ‘vir mihi omnium maxime’ - in which he told him that not being of great practical use to the fatherland in serious affairs, he had decided to start writing a book from which the Netherlands might draw some profit: a biography of the French King Henri IV.16 The obvious purpose of the book was to show the stadholder, Maurice in the first place but specifically his brother Frederick Henry who was to succeed him in 1625, how a noble prince must govern his state. Hooft deeply admired Henri IV for

rising above the political factions and for tolerating different forms of religion in his realm. Later in life Hooft revered Frederick Henry in much the same way. It would be incorrect to call Hooft a monarchist. He never expressed a clear preference for a specific form of government. If forced to choose he might in his pragmatic and eclectic way have opted for the regnum mixtum without bothering too much about legalistic technicalities. One should, however, not interpret his political ideas as reflecting the ideal of a constitutional monarchy based on the bourgeoisie, as has recently been done by one of the most learned Hooft scholars of this century.17 Such a form of government was surely unimaginable in a seventeenth-century intellectual and political context. For Hooft the Prince was not a constitutional monarch but a semi-divine Hero who, highly elevated above petty self-interest and vanity, reconciled both in war and in peace the horrible ambiguities of politics in a life of total devotion to his state and his people. In a very complicated poem Hooft once (1629) glorified Frederick Henry as such a ‘perfect Hero’ and later, in his Histoorien, he cast William of Orange into the heroic role that transferred Hooft himself, the sad and compassionate observer and reporter of all the evils in politics and society, to a realm of beauty and purity.

The Hero's task was not merely to triumph in battle; his mission was rather to end the war by winning it or, if that was unlikely, by persuading his enemies that they would not be able to win it either. The real purpose of his politics was to reach and maintain peace. Politics must serve peace. When Hooft writes about the value of peace - which in his country he did not experience, for the Republic was at war during his whole life - he does of course not follow Machiavelli but Erasmus. This point, too, shows how extremely difficult it is to place Hooft's republicanism in the model provided by Machiavelli and described by Pocock.

In 1660, eighteen years after the publication of Hooft's Histories, a volume appeared in Amsterdam entitled Political Considerations and Examples concerning the Foundations of various Forms of Government. The author who half concealed his identity behind initials - V.H. - explained in his conclusion why he had written the work. It was not, he stated, to stir revolution. It was only

to stimulate the thinking of those who in my fatherland have some part in government and who may draw conclusions from it for the benefit of the common subjects.

I wrote it in such a way, he went on, that the ‘most excellent and experienced inhabitants’ will be able to understand it whereas to the ‘rabble and common subjects’ it must seem ‘obscure and forbidding’.18 Yet precisely, he lower orders of society - ‘the humble subjects who, too, possess a rational soul’19 - should profit from these reflections if their rulers, the Dutch patricians and regents, heed the warning and prevent their system from degenerating into despotic oligarchy. Perhaps this was indeed, apart from the polemics against the stadholderate and the Orange dynasty, the main practical purpose of the book, just as it was the only conceivable practical purpose of Spinoza's political philosophy - which was in many important respects derived from suggestions and questions put forward by V.H. - to persuade his readers that an aristocracy should not become too narrow. However, this work was not primarily intended to serve short term objectives. It had the ambition to renew the study of politics and in a general, scientific, objective way to restate the case of republicanism in its purest form. The literature of this group of writers pursued therefore three aims: to found a science of politics, to demonstrate that scientific research leads to the conclusion that the republic, that is, the undiluted republic, not the regnum mixtum, is the best form of government, and that, thirdly, to be viable, this should be nearer to a democracy than to an oligarchy.

The ‘prudentissimus Belga V.H.’ whom Spinoza quoted in his Tractatus Politicus (VIII, 31) was called Van Hove but is more commonly known under the original French name of this family from the Southern Netherlands which settled in Holland: De la Court. There were in fact two writers of that name, Pieter de la Court (1618-1685) and his brother Johan (1662-1660). It is generally assumed that the political work, all of it edited by Pieter after Johan's death, was based on texts and notes prepared by the younger brother but thoroughly revised and substantially expanded by the editor. Specifically the Considerations met with success. The book was reprinted various times in rapid succession and each new edition was bulkier than the preceding one: the first edition of 1660 had 369 pages, the fourth of 1662 no less than 670. The title had meanwhile been changed into Political Considerations or Political Balance. In 1662 appeared a second work, Political Discourses, in two volumes, which, Pieter tells us, also derived from unfinished essays and studies jotted down by Johan.20 Is has long been recognized that specifically the Political Balance provided Spinoza with information about states, forms of government, electoral systems and other concrete matters which he needed as a basis

for his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, on which he worked in the mid-sixties, and for the Tractatus Politicus which he started in the mid-seventies but could not complete before his death in 1677. More recently various historians have tried to determine Spinoza's dependence not only on De la Court's factual material but also on De la Court's theoretical argumentation.21 It is unnecessary here to summarize the results of these researches apart from the general conclusion that if we try to determine the place of the republicanism of these authors in the history of political thought we may study this body of work as a whole.

The authors whom De la Court and Spinoza thought most useful for their purposes were Tacitus, Machiavelli and Hobbes. De la Court, who was convinced that political theory should be firmly rooted in scientific psychology, also carefully studied Descartes's Les passions de l'âme (1649) and in fact followed his master's views obediently, much more obediently than Spinoza, whose psychological hypotheses differed from those of Descartes. Did De la Court also know works by Harrington? He certainly knew enough English to read them in the original. This was indeed a precondition. C.W. Schoneveld, whose recent Intertraffic of the Mind (a delightful work) contains a checklist of books translated from English into Dutch during the seventeenth century, did not find any Dutch translation of James Harrington's publications. Hobbes was undoubtedly much better known.22 His Latin De Cive (Paris 1642) was reprinted in 1647 in Amsterdam and published in a French translation in the same city in 1649. In 1652 a French version of De corpore politico (which Hobbes wrote in English) appeared in Leiden. In 1667 Leviathan was published in Dutch. Schoneveld supposes that Spinoza, who knew no English, may have been shown the Dutch version a few years before publication, round about 1665 when he was writing his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, by the translator Abraham van Berkel.23 Hobbes's own Latin translation of Leviathan came out in 1668, also in Amsterdam. In 1675 finally De Cive was published in Dutch. Dutch intellectuals unfamiliar with English had ample opportunity to study Hobbes in another language.

The very fact that Hobbes's work was made available to Dutch readers and Harrington's was not, suggests that the latter's influence in the Netherlands was much smaller if it existed at all. This itself is remarkable. Why should fervent Dutch republicans, radically opposed to all forms of monarchical or semi-monarchical power, have been impressed by some of Hobbes's monarchical views and even have appreciated Leviathan (1651) as an important contribution to political science while largely ignoring the republican ideas of Harrington's Oceana (1656)? The reason is of course that Hobbes provided the Dutch authors with a conception of indivisible sovereignty which they could use against the stadholder. In the Netherlands the idea of constitutionalism arising out of an initial social contract between people and ruler had led to a form of government which was often rather vaguely interpreted as a regnum mixtum. Such a system required a stadholder as the representative of the monarchical element. From 1650 to 1672, however, when the brothers De la Court wrote their books and Spinoza published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, most of the United Provinces did not have a stadholder and specifically the province of Holland and its Grand Pensionary John de Witt wished to prevent the Orangists from preparing the appointment of a new one in the future. In their view the Dutch form of government could not be a regnum mixtum. One should on the other hand not exaggerate Hobbes's influence on these writers. The De la Courts were far less systematic than Hobbes and their use of his work was highly selective. What they liked in him was his radicalism. They obviously delighted in studying so uncompromising an author who dared say unpleasant truths and draw bitter conclusions. Man was indeed a creature whose main purpose in life was self-preservation and who needed stable government to realize his objectives as best he could. Stability was indeed only to be found in a state equipped with absolute and indivisible power. Yet when Hobbes opted for the monarchy his Dutch disciples parted company with him without - this is a remarkable fact - ever emphasizing that they were doing so. The stablest and most absolute state, according to them, was the more or less democratic republic. In that state alone man is able to strive after freedom, freedom however not being defined in Hobbesian terms as the absence of external impediments to do what one likes but as the victory of reason over the human passions that try to make man a slave of his irrational impulses.

One may well ask oneself if Hobbes and the Dutch republicans were really thinking of the same phenomenon when they wrote about commonwealths, states or reipublicae. They probably were not. The Dutch thought in terms of the city state. The city state, or a league of city states, represented for them normality and tradition. The huge absolute monarchies were a fairly recent departure from a situation which, in Europe at any rate, had prevailed for centuries. The more or less democratic re-

public which they envisaged as the best form of government in this sad and imperfect world was a city, large certainly, with tens of thousands of inhabitants, open to foreigners and drawing its prosperity from trade and industry, but not a country seen as a ‘national’ unity counting its inhabitants by the million. The problem now arises if this predominantly urban republicanism which was obviously totally alien to Hobbes can be reconciled with the civic humanism as interpreted by Harrington in his Oceana and other works. In his The Myth of Venice the Dutch historian Haitsma Mulier, inspired by recent British studies on the impact of civic humanism in England and specifically by Pocock's publications, asked himself several times whether we may suppose De la Court (and through him Spinoza) to have been influenced by the English theorist. The question is as yet unanswerable. We simply do not know if De la Court studied Oceana. He may have been in touch with its author before 1671, when we have proof of such a connection,24 but what the nature and the extent of these contacts were remains obscure. Two things however are clear. There is, in the first place, undeniably much in the positions of Harrington and the Dutch authors which is similar: their admiration of Tacitus, Machiavelli and Boccalini, their distrust of monarchical absolutism and of mercenary armies, their option for rotation of office allowing more people to participate in political discussion and decision than was customary at the time.

Yet, and that too is obvious, the objectives which they pursued were altogether different. Harrington wanted a predominantly agrarian England, equipped with a strong militia of landowners whose civic humanism expressed itself in their willingness to expand the state. The Dutch republicans considered agrarian interests as subordinated to commerce, trade and industry, and the city militias which they preferred to the mercenary soldiery would serve only for strictly limited purposes, that is, to defend the cities against attacks. In their view the conquering spirit was one of the main and one of the most disastrous characteristics of monarchies. Moreover, whereas Harrington's ideal state was a regnum mixtum with a monarch deprived of absolute power, the Dutch authors rejected such a solution not only as a logical absurdity, as Bodin and Hobbes had done before them, but also as a system which was by definition unstable and constantly in danger of degenerating into despotic monarchy. Finally, and decisively, the Dutch authors, asked to answer the (for them certainly unexpected and probably amazing) question what for them mattered most, the ‘liberté des anciens’ to participate in civic affairs and warfare or the ‘liberté des modernes’ to withdraw into privacy, would have opted for the modern liberty, the ultimate purpose of the state

being to enable individuals to overcome their passions and to live a free and reasonable life. All things well considered, it would seem that the republican model described by Pocock cannot be easily applied to the theories of Harrington's Dutch contemporaries.

It is one of the serious lacunae in the historiography of Dutch political thought that no systematic research has been done about the reception of De la Court's and Spinoza's political work by their Dutch contemporaries and by the following generations of Dutch theorists. Yet even so it is not too bold to state that their success can have been but small. The De la Courts and Spinoza wrote their major books during a period when the main provinces of the Republic, the province of Holland in the first place, had left the office of stadholder vacant, or had even abolished it altogether, after the death of William II in 1650. In the dramatic year 1672 the situation changed abruptly. William II's son, the young William III, was appointed to the dignities held by his ancestors with the result that all of the seven provinces had once again a stadholder belonging to the Orange-Nassau dynasty - William III in Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Overijssel and Gelderland, a descendant of another branch in Friesland and Groningen. It might thus be said that from 1672 the Republic as a whole had returned to the system of mixed government which had prevailed since the inception of the state in the late sixteenth century. It was a commonplace in Dutch political literature to equate the stadholdership with the monarchical and the assemblies of the Provincial States, of the States General and of the town councils with the aristocratic or democratic elements with the result that the Republic could be interpreted as a perfect monarchia aristocratico-democratica. From the point of view of pure juridical theory there was enough to be said against this thesis: for did sovereignty not reside with the Provincial States and were the stadholders not appointed by those assemblies; and if this was true, how could anyone justify the term monarchia? But however that might be, the usage was wide-spread. With William III's death in 1702 the situation changed once again and republicanism was allowed to establish itself as firmly and as purely as in the period from 1650 to 1672, Holland, Zeeland and Gelderland deciding not to appoint a new stadholder. However, whereas during the so-called first stadholderless period the brothers De la Court and Spinoza had been inspired to write remarkable republican treatises, the second stadholderless period, lasting from William III's death to the elevation of William IV to the stadholdership in all the Dutch provinces in 1747, produced only one book of a more or less theoretical nature in which the republican ethos was defined and praised.

The book was called Verhandeling van de vrijheid in den burgerstaat (‘A treatise on liberty in a civil society’). It was written by Lieven de Beaufort (1675-1730), a patrician in a small town in Zeeland, and published anonymously by one of his sons in 1737. It was immediately attacked by two

Orangist writers and then defended by an anonymous author who may have been the famous jurist Cornelis van Bijnkershoek. Modern Dutch historians are very critical of the work, which justified the narrowly oligarchic system of the early eighteenth century by interpreting it as essentially a democracy allowing - in contrast with Venice and Genoa - civic virtue to produce a sober, moderate and eminently honest government.25 Yet this is exactly what makes it interesting in our discussion for here we have a book clearly belonging to the Machiavellian tradition, continuing in some respects the line of thought initiated by Pieter de la Court but at the same time managing to use this apparatus with the purpose of defending the political oligarchy of the urban rentiers, that is to say, trying to do the very opposite of what Harringtonian Machiavellians were doing in England.

In the second half of the eighteenth century political conflict and political discussion in the Netherlands grew enormously both in size and subject matter. The vocabulary used in these debates and the points raised were so similar to those of the British and American political treatises of that time that it is fascinating to examine whether and, if so, in what way the Machiavellian model, as interpreted by contemporary British commentators, might be of use for defining the Dutch situation. As has been said, the Dutch system of government returned in 1747 to its ancient form. William IV was stadholder in all provinces and at his death in 1751 his son William V, born in 1748, succeeded in all his offices without serious objections being raised by the anti-Orangist forces, which were however by no means definitively defeated. This became manifest in the 1770s and 1780s when the political equilibrium was shaken by vehement conflicts between on the one hand the Orangist party, which sided with Britain and was sceptical about the value of the American Revolution, and on the other hand an opposition which was anti-Orangist, anti-British, pro-American and pro-French and which developed fairly articulate, decidedly republican and more or less democratic political programmes. This opposition adopted the name of Patriots. It is against this background that one must study the nature of Dutch Orangism and Dutch Patriotism and ask oneself whether we can understand these phenomena better by comparing them with the early-eighteenth-century English Court Party and its opponent, the Country Party, also called the Party of the Patriots.

Before doing this we must provide a short summary of Pocock's interpretation of eighteenth-century developments. The British Country Party, as Pocock shows, employed the vocabulary of Machiavellian re-

publicanism. It declared against the system of King William III and his successors, against their standing army and the public debt which enabled them to maintain it, against the tendency of the eighteenth-century monarchs to use their patronage and to fill the House of Commons with their dependents and creatures, against the adventurers, speculators and foreigners who began to form a ‘monied interest’,

a class of creditors who invested their capital in the regime and saw their future as bound up with the expansion of its armies and patronage, its credits and its wars.26

The Country Party - to quote Pocock once again -

claimed to speak for the landed gentry whose taxes paid for the wars and guaranteed the loans; it presented them as the class who wore arms in the country militias and whose virtue was guaranteed by the independence oflanded property.

This party adhered to a belief system which stressed a man's virtues as a citizen; it was called Patriotism. The Court Party on the other hand stressed the beneficial consequences of the professionalization that had been taking place in the spheres of government and defence. Thanks to the high standards thus achieved and only conceivable in a developed commercial society, it had become possible for the citizen to devote himself to refining his own culture, his ‘politeness’, his ‘taste’. It is for this reason that Pocock calls the belief system which stresses man's sociability ‘politeness’. Thus the eighteenth-century antithesis was one of Patriotism against politeness, or, in political terms, of a Country Party which wanted the people, that is to say the British freeholders, actively to participate in politics and therefore tended to regard the old monarchy as a mixed government in which the so-called democratic sector must be expanded, against a Court Party which was content to leave political and military matters to experts as long as the individual subjects were free to live their own life in their own fashion and to improve their social and cultural capability. Pocock analyses Andrew Fletcher's work as representative of the Patriot, republican, Machiavellian theses, whereas Defoe stands for the ideology of the Court Party.

All this is of relevance to the characterization of American political thought. It is Pocock's suggestion that the republican, Patriot ideal of the Country Party with its positive conception of freedom was adopted by the Founding Fathers and further developed although it did not long sur-

vive after the establishment of independence. The British Court Party's ideology however was eventually to grow into a political liberalism preoccupied with the rights of the citizen rather than with their virtue, that is, with the negative liberty of the citizens to live as independently as possible rather than with the civic duty fully to participate in government.

This suffices, I hope, to state the problem concerning the Netherlands. In the Netherlands we have on the one hand a true Republic and an active Patriot Party which was anti-Orangist and pro-American, which insisted on the forming of citizen militias and was led by a country gentleman, Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen, who in 1774 translated Fletcher's book of 1698 against standing armies and in a celebrated pamphlet of 1781 - I shall discuss it later - adapted Fletcher's interpretation of history to Dutch circumstances, stressing the fact that the medieval dukes, counts and lords were far from absolute, had no standing armies and had to concede much authority to the towns, the guilds, the peasants and the representative States, all inhabitants at that time being armed and more militant than people in the eighteenth century.27 On the other hand we have here the equivalent of a Court Party, the anglophile supporters of the House of Orange and of the stadholder who commanded a standing army. Is it not as if we can quite easily transfer the British discussion to the Dutch Republic and show in this way why the Dutch Patriots opted for American independence and the Orangist did not? Were the Dutch Patriots indeed, and in a sense more pointedly still than the British Country Party, the representatives of the Atlantic republican tradition described by Pocock with such precision and profundity? This is not an easy question to answer but I shall nevertheless try to do so by considering briefly the positions chosen by the leader of the Patriot Party, Van der Capellen, and by the best author of the Orangist Party, Elie Luzac. It would however undoubtedly be most useful to examine much more material coming from more persons in a systematic way so as better to test Pocock's proposals that I can do now.

In his recent The Dutch Republic and American Independence Schulte Nordholt sketches a lively portrait of Van der Capellen.28 Born in 1741 as a country-squire, dying in 1784 of an intestinal complaint which had been making him desperately tired for years, he succeeded in his relatively short life in causing an enormous amount of trouble. After some initial hesitations Van der Capellen, who had a seat in the chamber of the nobility of the States of Overijssel, opted for policies which Stadholder William V did not want to accept. Van der Capellen wished to improve the Dutch navy whereas William V rather wanted to augment the army.

It is obvious what this means. It means that Van der Capellen objected to William V's pro-British policies and hoped that by building up a great fleet the Dutch Republic would increase its independence in relation to the superior maritime power. His mistrust of William V's army was profound. It was a standing army with a large number of foreigners both in the lower and the higher ranks, an instrument, Van der Capellen argued, in the hands of the stadholder, who derived from it his ability to act as a tyrant. During the last ten years of his life Van der Capellen defined with clarity the nature of his patriotic, and indeed nationalist, opposition to the stadholder and his clients. Instead of pro-British policies he wanted to help the Americans in their struggle for independence; instead of an army of foreigners he wanted the Dutch themselves to take up arms and defend their country, and instead of the oligarchic States in the various provinces he wanted much broader sections of the population in the towns as well as in the countryside to take some part in government. To achieve all this he proposed the organization of urban and rural militias and of unofficial assemblies of properly elected representatives of the people who, however, would not initiate a real revolution by sweeping aside the stadholder's army and the oligarchies but would act, in a very curious manner, as a sort of additional authorities to advise the established powers and of course to put pressure to bear upon them any time the need to express the popular will would arise.

All this, it is clear, is very much in the spirit of the Atlantic republican tradition or the Machiavellian paradigm. It is, moreover, not far-fetched to suppose that Van der Capellen and his friends, just like the British Patriots, were alarmed by the luxuriousness and ostentation of some of their contemporaries and inclined to praise the simplicity of former times. Not without satisfaction did Van der Capellen, not a wealthy man himself, regularly declare in his correspondence that he did not at all deplore the simple life he had to live. Another Patriot, the moderate R.J. Schimmelpenninck, wrote in his Leiden doctor's thesis of 1784, De imperio rite temperato, that the republic was undoubtedly a viable form of government provided luxury was eliminated, equality of income maintained and the energy of the people more than was now the case directed towards agriculture, that old guarantee of equality and virtue.29 Finally, once or twice did Van der Capellen leave the impression that he did not expect the British system of the public debt to work properly in the future.30

But notwithstanding all this, it seems to me that ultimately Van der Capellen does not really conform to this model and given the political and social circumstances in the Netherlands could not be expected to con-

form. There are quite a number of points on which he deviated from the Patriotism described by Pocock. In the first place, he does not make the impression of opposing the ‘monied interest’; on the contrary, he associated himself with that section of the patricians in the large towns of Holland that, although not democratic at all, accepted his support because it strengthened their traditional opposition to the House of Orange. In the second place, I have not encountered in the work of Van der Capellen or other members of his party even an echo of that obsession with the ownership of land and that association of real property with republican citizenship which Pocock shows was the central issue in the minds of the British Patriots and some of the American rebels. Finally, Van der Capellen's conception of the nature of the state is, it seems to me, fundamentally different from that of the civic humanists and in some important respects much nearer to that of the liberals. In his most famous book, a vehement pamphlet anonymously published in 1781, he wrote the following passage:

O compatriots, take up arms, all of you, and take care of the affairs of the whole country, that is, of your own affairs. The country belongs to all of you and not to the prince with his highly placed clients who regard and treat you, all of us, the whole Dutch people, the descendants of the free Batavians, as if they were their heritable property, their oxen and sheep which they may shear or slaughter at will. The people living in a country, the inhabitants, the townsmen and peasants, the poor and the rich, the great and the small, all of them together are the real owners, the lords and masters of the country and they can say how they want things to be arranged, how and by whom they wish to be governed. A people is a big society, a ‘company’ and nothing else. The regents, the authorities and magistrates, the Prince, everyone who has a post in this society, all of them are no more than the directors, the administrators, the estate-stewards of this company or society and in this quality they are inferior to the members of that society, that is, the whole nation or the whole people. Let us take an example. The East India Company is a big society or partnership of merchants who have united to carry trade to the East Indies. Their number is much too large and the distances at which they live from each other are much too big to enable them to assemble each time that would be necessary, or to administer the affairs of the company personally. Moreover, this requires abilities which all the ‘participants’31 do certainly not possess. This is why the ‘participants’ act wisely when they appoint directors or administrators whom they pay for their work and whom they give exactly as much power, but nothing more, as is required for them to do what they are called, hired and appointed for. Of course, these directors have more control over the affairs of the company than one or other ‘participant’ separately, or even than a large

number of ‘participants’ together as long as these do not form the majority, but if all the ‘participants’ or the absolute majority of them want the administration of the company, that is, of their own affairs, to be changed, then it is the duty of the directors who in this respect are the servants of the ‘participants’, to obey and to do what the ‘participants’ want. Not the directors but the ‘participants’ are the real owners, lords and masters of the company. The same obtains in the case of the great society of a people.

A few sentences later Van der Capellen explains that the members or ‘participants’ unite to form a civil society, a people or a nation ‘with the purpose of promoting each other's happiness and protecting one another and enabling every one to enjoy his property and all his inherited and legally acquired rights without disturbance’.32 These quotations make it sufficiently clear, I think, that Van der Capellen's conception of the state was fundamentally different from that of Machiavelli and his eighteenth-century followers. The British and American Patriots did not, of course, regard the state as a joint-stock company.

If neither Hooft nor De la Court and Spinoza nor Van der Capellen can be easily fitted into the Machiavellian paradigm and the Atlantic republican tradition, is it then possible to detect in the Netherlands reflections of the ideology of the other group isolated by Pocock, the British Court Party? A possible Dutch candidate for honorary membership of this party is Elie Luzac. In a long career as a publisher and a publicist Luzac printed, edited and wrote such an enormous number of works that nobody has as yet succeeded in studying all this material with due care. He lived from 1721 to 1796. In his own time he was a well-known personality. In 1753 his essay on Le bonheur ou nouveau système de jurisprudence submitted as an entry to a competition by the Royal Prussian Academy won a prize and was subsequently published. In 1762 the same honour was bestowed upon him by the Stolpiaansch Legaat. The periodicals that he edited had a very long life; and the pamphlets that he wrote in the 1780s - at least sixteen volumes of them amounting in all to more than 5000 pages - appear to have had enough success for the publisher to make money out of them. But what happened to the book in which he wanted to summarize his whole philosophical and political system? In January 1796 he announced it himself in his capacity as publisher. It was called Du droit naturel, civil et politique, en forme d'entretiens, it would have six volumes and cost twelve Holland florins.33 But four months later, 11 May 1796, Luzac died, and his book was not printed before 1802 when only the first part in three volumes appeared, poorly printed by a compositor who did not know French. The rest never saw the light.34

The terms in which Pocock describes the ideology of the British Court Party can easily be used in the case of Luzac, too. According to Luzac the purpose of the individual is ‘se conserver et vivre agréablement’.35 The only way to achieve this is by organizing a harmonious state. One of the great dangers in society is ‘enthusiasm’, religious as well as political. In a typical passage written in the 1780s Luzac once castigated Van der Capellen for his tyrannical extremism, comparing him and his sort with the Anabaptists because, he says, zealotry is not only possible in relation to religion but also to politics.36 In Du droit naturel occurs a passage which one would not have expected in a book for which the author was allowed to make propaganda in January 1796, exactly one year after the French had set the revolutionary process in the Netherlands in motion, and which the publishers were allowed to print in 1802 when the Republic was totally dependent on the French authorities. Man, wrote Luzac, is inclined to

se livrer au mal par les impressions, que des maximes erronnées peuvent faire sur son esprit. A-t-on besoin d'en chercher d'autre preuve que cet enthousiasme, qui a menacé et menace encore de saisir et d'exalter l'esprit de tous les peuples de l'Europe et peut-être du monde entier: qui a changé en un peuple barbare la Nation qu'on regardoit comme la plus civilisée du genre humain, dont la marche actuelle est partout teinte de sang, et qui ne met point de bornes aux excès de sa persécution et de sa tyrannie? Mais à quoi attribuer cet enthousiasme, ou plutôt cette frénésie; à la jouissance de la liberté, et de l'égalité.37

Luzac's reader is often given glimpses of the agreeable life which the individual is thought to be seeking: it is the life of the sophisticated prosperous middle class gathered together in civilized companionship and conversation both elegant and profound. In these circles, says Luzac, patriotism is still the old-fashioned love of one's country and not that ‘patriotisme moderne’, that fevered nationalism which is ruining the world.38 It is not difficult to define Luzac's ideals in the vocabulary of the Court Party: politeness and marmers.

Luzac was pro-British. In 1749 he dedicated his anonymous Essai sur la liberté de produire ses sentiments (printed, as he put it on the title page, ‘au

pays libre’ by the publisher ‘Pour le Bien Public’ and ‘Avec Privilège de tous les véritables Philosophes’) to the ‘nation anglaise [...] peuple véritablement libre’. Only in England were people free to publish their thought without obstruction: ‘Peuple heureux! Qu'on vous admire: qu'on se contente de vous imiter’. The Essai was a somewhat exuberant defence of the total liberty of the printing press, a liberty which Luzac still thought highly valuable many years later when his political views had become openly conservative. His respect for Britain remained equally intact. It is remarkable that he took the trouble of stressing the positive economic consequences of the British system of the public debt in a period, the 1780s, when the Patriots were inclined to think that Britain was collapsing under the load of her indebtedness.39 But though sympathetic to Britain, Luzac was not hostile to the rebels in North America. He was - so his biographer summarizes Luzac's views as expressed in many learned studies in his Annales Belgiques published in fifteen volumes from 1772 to 177640 - far from

insensible à la beauté du spectacle qu'offre un peuple armé pour revendiquer ses droits; mais il insiste plus particulièrement sur les inconvéniens d'une pareille situation, sur la rareté des cas où les efforts de cette nature ont été couronnés par un heureux succès, et sur les dangers de toute espèce qui accompagnent l'exagération du patriotisme.

In other words, Luzac was not at all committed to the cause of the Americans and although he acknowledged that they fought for reasons roughly similar to those which had prompted the sixteenth-century Netherlanders to rise in rebellion - no taxation without representation -, and were perfectly entitled to do so, he refused to equate the Dutch with the American Revolt and the English with the Spaniards for at no time had the British government organized in America such an abominable terror as the Spaniards had in the Netherlands.41

But not in all respects did Luzac's attitude conform with the paradigm of the British Court Party. He was an Orangist and in many of his works he laid stress on the necessity to uphold a strong stadholdership. He did not wish to transform the stadholder into a sort of monarch. He was a republican. The stadholder fitted beautifully, he thought, in the admirable system of the mixed government which since antiquity had been recognized to be the most laudable form of state and which recently had been described in totally acceptable terms by Montesquieu himself. Regimen mixtum, separation of powers, republican moderation formed the foundation of the good state. The difficulty here is that in the British

monarchy regimen mixtum was a favourite conception not of the Court Party but of its adversary, the Country Party. In the Netherlands Luzac and others used the idea of mixed government to support the ideology of the stadholder and his court.

I must try to reach some sort of conclusion. I have attempted to show that the Atlantic republican tradition as described by Pocock is not easily applicable in the only major republic which was formed and which survived in early modern Europe, a mercantile and maritime republic, turned towards the sea and fully aware - if I may express myself in this way - of its non-continental nature. The Dutch political writers of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century thought that it was this maritime and mercantile character of the nation that gave it its republican form. In their eyes a monarchy was a form of government perhaps suitable for a big state with its basis in landed property; for a commercial state the republic was the only adequate form of government. This is the very opposite of Pocock's paradigm. I do not want to suggest that Pocock's interpretation is thus wrong, far from it. His work seems to me exceptionally stimulating and enlightening. However, I wonder whether his decision to jump from the Italian city-states to late-seventeenth-century England and from there to America without taking account of the Dutch Republic has not led to too rigid a simplification of a historical development which was perhaps considerably more complex.

Is this, however, all there can be said about the problem? If so, the conclusion would be unsatisfactory for two reasons. The first is that it amounts to a truism. All of us ought to be so keenly aware of the inextricable complexity of history that we should not criticize a historian for simplifying matters. Of course he does. If he did not he would not be able to say anything meaningful. The second is that if indeed the Atlantic republican tradition does not fit the Dutch Republic, the other republican model as described by Venturi does not either. It is perfectly clear that the story of the foreign policy conducted by the Dutch from 1713 onwards is one of passivity and withdrawal into complacent neutrality comparable to Venturi's analysis of the Venetian position. Dutch republican theory in the eighteenth century, however, does not leave that impression. Elie Luzac was in may respects undoubtedly a conservative inclined to look back rather than forward and deeply suspicious of attempts at revolution. Yet even he realized there was much in the Republic which called for reform. One of his main works - Hollands Rijkdom - contained both a eulogy of Dutch economic greatness in the past and an exploration of the means to maintain or to restore or even to increase it. Moreover, the immemorial antiquity of the Dutch state, a favourite topic among humanist scholars and artists in the late sixteenth and the early seventeenth century, was at the end of the eighteenth century no longer an object of discussion which held much appeal for the writers and the readers. People

knew all too well that history represented change. If the Dutch sought for a common theme to comment upon it was that of national decline and the way to stop it. Dutch political theory in the eighteenth century, both of the Patriots and of the Orangists, contained not only praise of the past but also proposals for reform. The Dutch eighteenth-century writers who thought deeply about their state and its future did not merely enumerate the virtues of their ancient constitution. They were much too keenly aware of symptoms of decline and they complained too loudly about this.

Should we then conclude that the Dutch republican case was unique? This, it seems to me, will not do at all. Up to a point the Dutch case was undoubtedly unique but so was Florence's or Venice's or England's. What is more important however is that the theoretical explanation and justification of Dutch republicanism was in fact firmly based on conceptions developed outside the Netherlands and deeply influenced by foreign intellectual innovation. How could it have been otherwise in a republic where so many foreign books on history and politics were printed in Latin and French? It is quite remarkable that the Dutch political theorists drew their inspiration often from foreign rather than native authorities. Apart from Grotius no Dutch authors were regularly referred to. Tacitus, Machiavelli, Bodin, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Pufendorf, Montesquieu, Wolf, Hume (but not Rousseau's political work) were apparently thought to have more relevance than Hooft, De la Court, Lieven de Beaufort.

As a result of this it is difficult to interpret the history of Dutch republican theory as constituting a tradition of its own, that is to say, as possessing a particular identity that we can see developing over the centuries. Dutch republican theory did not, so it seems, draw inspiration from its own intellectual past. If, because of serious political tensions or conflicts, it was felt to be necessary to provide the various standpoints that were taken up with a theoretical justification, the Dutch used vocabularies developed abroad and considered to be modern and appropriate. Of course, their use of foreign vocabularies was highly selective; they took what suited them but may in the original context have seemed to be contradictory. In other words, it was possible for them to use the two republican traditions which were available - the Venetian and the Machiavellian - simultaneously without intending to draw radical conclusions from them and thus without needing to worry about their contradictoriness. Thanks to efforts of major writers like Spinoza and Luzac the result was sometimes most interesting and rewarding. But it was never developed, as far as I can see, into a peculiarly Dutch intellectual tradition which it would be correct to define as the Dutch paradigm.


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