Civil Religion

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London, 1651). Philip Robinson Library, Newcastle University Special Collections (Bainbrigg, Bai 1651 HOB). Reproduced with permission.

This month I've been teaching my British Revolution students about the political thought of the period - including that of Thomas Hobbes. I use the frontispiece to Hobbes's Leviathan as a means of allowing the students to work out the key arguments of that text for themselves. The figure rising out of the sea always generates interesting discussion. Is it Charles I? Oliver Cromwell? They always seem disappointed when I explain that it is the embodiment of the state. The fact that the scales on the figure's body are little people also prompts debate. The significance of the objects the figure is holding, and their relationship to the two columns on either side of the bottom half of the image, are usually easier for the students to decipher. The sword in the figure's right hand represents civil power and corresponds to the five images on the left: a castle or fortification, a crown, a cannon, a battle, and a battlefield. The crozier in the figure's left hand symbolises ecclesiastical or religious power and beneath it are images reflecting the religious equivalents of those on the left: a cathedral, a bishop's mitre, divine judgement, theological disputation, and convocation. Hobbes's point, as my students quickly discern, is that the state should command both civil and religious power within the realm, and therefore should dictate the laws and the form of religious worship. For Hobbes this imposition of clear rules from above was the only way to prevent the chaos and destruction of civil war.

In this way, the frontispiece offers a visual depiction of the idea of civil religion. This is the topic of a collection of essays entitled Civil Religion in the Early Modern Anglophone World, 1550-1700, due out later this month, which I have edited together with my colleague Adam Morton. The book, and a special issue of the journal Intellectual History Review edited by Katie East and Delphine Doucet, are the main outputs of a project that dates back to 2016. In September of that year we established a small reading group involving staff and postgraduate students. We met regularly for about two years discussing texts ranging from Strabo's Geography to Ethan Shagan's The Rule of Moderation, with the aim of coming to a deeper understanding of the slippery concept of civil religion - particularly in an early modern context. We held a workshop with various invited speakers in September 2017 and hosted several guest speakers at our reading group. Finally, in October 2019 we held a conference 'Civil Religion From Antiquity to the Enlightenment' which we coupled with a public facing event at Newcastle's Literary and Philosophical Society on the theme of 'Politics and Religion: Past and Present'. It is papers from the conference which have been revised for publication in our book and the journal special issue.

The book focuses on the English-speaking world in the period between the mid-sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century. It argues that this period - and more specifically issues raised then by the Reformation and the British Revolutions about the place of religion in society - played an important role in developing the idea of civil religion. This challenges the conventional understanding of civil religion as an Enlightenment concept. It also contests the view that it was a cynical ploy to undermine religion. Instead, it is demonstrated that, for many who advocated these ideas, the issue was priestcraft not religion itself; and the aim was to purify the church rather than to undermine religion.

Taking this last point first, Mark Goldie's opening chapter in the book presents the idea of a 'Christian civil religion' which was indebted to the magisterial reformation of the sixteenth century but also to late medieval Catholic conciliarism. These debts have been neglected because of the tendency to see Christianity as constructed in opposition to civil religion, but Goldie's account shows what can be gained from looking at the early modern period from this perspective. That picture is deepened and complicated in other chapters, not least those by Charlotte McCallum and Jacqueline Rose. McCallum's chapter focuses on 'Nicholas Machiavel's Letter to Zanobius Buondelmontius in Vindication of Himself and His Writings', which appeared in John Starkey's 1675 edition of Machiavelli's works, but was probably written by Henry Neville. It presents a powerful example of a form of civil religion that was anti-clerical but was aimed at the eradication of priestcraft not religion itself. This was Neville's own position, but the letter also raises interesting questions about Machiavelli's views and his place within the conventional narrative of civil religion. Rose's chapter complicates the story presented here. She notes that Anglo-Saxon history offered an obvious model of a church free from Popish and priestly corruptions. Yet, as she explains, it was never taken up as a model of civil religion by early modern thinkers. Despite the similarities between Reformation languages of godly rule and Royal Supremacy and the ideas associated with civil religion, there were also important differences that restricted its value as an appropriate model.

Other chapters explore the debates concerning the relationship between religion and politics, church and state, that occurred between the 1590s and the late seventeenth century. Polly Ha's chapter focuses on the debates sparked by the Admonition controversy in the 1590s and the ways in which this led to a reconfiguring of the relationship between church and state, with figures like Richard Hooker advocating an extension of the state's right to determine the religion of its subjects. Esther Counsell examines the reaction to the rise of Laudianism within the Anglican Church in the 1620s and 1630s, showing how Alexander Leighton saw the revival of an ancient form of civil religion as the best means of protecting the Reformed church by securing the civil supremacy of parliament over the church. The chapters by John Coffey and Connor Robinson consider the contested period of the 1650s, when the rise of Independents challenged any notion of public or formal religion, further reshaping the relationship between church and state. Where Coffey focuses on republicans and independents, Robinson considers the debate between Henry Stubbe and Richard Baxter over the nature of a godly commonwealth, challenging the conventional interpretation of Stubbe that presents him as an advocate of a novel form of Enlightenment civil religion. Finally, Andrew Murphy and Christy Maloyed's chapter, along with that by John Marshall, take the story on to the later seventeenth century, and beyond England to the American colonies. Murphy and Maloyed argue that William Penn attempted to enact a form of civil religion - combining civil interests with general religious beliefs - in Pennsylvania. Marshall presents John Locke as working out the appropriate relationship between church and state and highlights the complications brought to these debates when thinking about the colonial context and how toleration and liberty were conceived there.

Overall, then, the volume reflects on the complexity of early modern debates over the relationship between church and state. It also demonstrates the flexibility of the ideas involved, with arguments for state control over religion being deployed by individuals and groups with a range of different views and sometimes even on both sides of an argument.

For Hobbes, civil religion offered a means of securing peace and stability in a world in which individuals hold divergent opinions, preferences and beliefs. We may baulk at his authoritarian solution, but the problem of how to live peacefully despite our differences continues to confound us today.

The Materiality of Early Modern Political Texts

Advances in digital technology have distanced twenty-first century scholars from the materiality of texts and the practical realities of printing and book production. I now access most of the texts I study via a screen. There are obvious benefits to this, virtually all the early modern printed texts I need are available via resources like EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth-Century Collections Online), so I no longer have to travel to specialist libraries to read them. Yet, being of an age that I can remember life before EEBO, I am also conscious of what is lost as a result of the shift to digital consumption. The orange dust on my clothes from carrying a pile of old books to my desk at the British Library is something I can live without, but the wealth of information that could be gleaned from handling the book as a physical object - its size, weight, quality, appearance - is much harder to intuit through a screen.

Our second Experiencing Political Texts workshop was designed to explore these issues by focusing on the materiality of early modern texts. Practicalities meant that we were also confronted with the pros and cons of the digital in our own experience of the workshop. Owing to the threatened UCU strikes, Part 1 took place in person in York on 24 February, while Part 2 (which I will discuss in my next blogpost) was broadcast via Zoom on 28 March. While there are definite advantages to being able to hold a workshop digitally, the engagement with participants - just like that with texts - is richer and more satisfying in person.

I left York buzzing with ideas, but will restrict myself here to just three: the experience of texts by non-readers; ephemerality versus durability and the role of text in securing longevity; and the notion of hidden texts - and more especially hidden political messages within texts.

The title page of John Lilburne’s pamphlet Regall Tyrannie Discovered (EEBO).

It was Sophie Smith who raised the point that texts are experienced by those who do not read them as well as by those who do. This idea was especially resonant because Sophie's paper followed Rachel Foxley's on Leveller and Republican texts, which had already led me to reflect on the information conveyed on title pages - which would have been accessible in booksellers shops or on barrows to people who did not buy or read the full work. Rachel focused on John Lilburne's Regall Tyrannie Discovered, the title page of which is particularly striking. It consists of dense, closely printed, type which sets out the argument and structure of the work. In this regard, it reminded me of the frontispieces to works like Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan and the Eikon Basilike, which convey the argument of the text in visual form. On the surface, these images are more engaging and might seem more appealing than dense type, and yet they require careful reading and interpretation. Lilburne also offered a textual equivalent of the author portrait that prefaced many early modern texts, listing his other works and offering a summary of the key events of his life.

An example of the Hugo Grotius medal from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, the reputation of an author - and an understanding of their main arguments - was often accessible to those who had never read that author's works. Niccolò Machiavelli was a case in point for the early modern period. Sophie showed that John Case's Sphaera civitatis was partly inspired by his concern that early modern citizens might derive their understanding of politics from Machiavelli (whether or not they had read him). By updating Aristotle's account of politics, Case's aim was to convince them to abandon Machiavelli as their guide. Charlotte McCallum's close reading of 'Nicholas Machiavel's Letter to Zanobius Bundelmontius' which appeared in the 1675 edition of his works, explored how Machiavelli could be drawn upon to advance arguments specific to English politics in the 1670s. Machiavelli was not the only figure whose reputation extended to audiences far beyond those who actually read his works. Ed Jones Corredera reminded us that the same is true of Hugo Grotius whose image was used to advertise air travel in the twentieth century and to celebrate individuals committed to advancing peace - via the Grotius medals, one of which was awarded to Winston Churchill in 1949.

Holy Trinity Church, York. As well as these surviving examples of early modern box pews, this church also has many tombstone inscriptions, not all of which are still visible. Image Rachel Hammersley.

The second theme I drew from the papers concerned the ephemerality versus the longevity of texts. This idea was brought into focus by Katherine Hunt's paper which began with the line from George Herbert that writing in brass is more weighty, durable, and permanent than writing with pen and ink. As Katherine's paper demonstrated, the reality is that writing in brass could be just as ephemeral as print. As anyone who has wandered around a church will know, inscriptions on tomb stones can become worn over time. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of supposedly ephemeral texts (broadsheets, chapbooks, pamphlets) that have survived since the early modern era. Sometimes this occurs as a result of them appearing in a Sammelband collection (a group of pamphlets bound together because they all relate to a particular issue or affair). Jason McElligott discussed a couple of Sammelband volumes held at the Marsh Library in Dublin. He demonstrated why such collections are so valuable to scholars, owing to their ability to reveal how particular works were read and understood at the time.

Rachel Foxley and Marcus Nevitt also touched on the contrast between ephemeral and more durable texts. In analysing Regall Tyrannie Discovered, Rachel was forced to confront the distinction between pamphlets and books. Lilburne usually produced pamphlets, but with Regall Tyrannie Discovered he was clearly aiming (not entirely successfully) to produce something more akin to a book. As Rachel noted, ephemerality versus longevity is one of several scales on which we can contrast these two formats. Though there are of course plenty of examples of pamphlets that have transcended their supposedly ephemeral status. Marcus noted the contrast between the ephemerality of a play performance and the more durable form of a printed play text - including its dedication - which could extend the life of plays and enhance the reputation of their authors.

The contents page of the 1675 edition of Machiavelli’s works - with the letter at the bottom. (EEBO).

Closely related to the theme of longevity versus durability is that of visibility versus obscurity, and a number of papers also touched on the idea of hidden texts. This was again brought into focus by Katherine's paper on brass inscriptions. I was intrigued by the pro-monarchy sentiments that were inscribed inside bells produced in 1641 and 1650. Was this a case of communities expressing their sympathy and support for Charles I in a way that was safe, precisely because the words could not easily be read? Other papers explored the notion of hidden texts - or hidden ideas within texts - in different ways. This might be a matter of the positioning of a particular text within a volume. Charlotte McCallum noted that in the 1675 edition of Machiavelli's works the spoof letter from 'Machiavel' was placed at the end of the volume (a fact that was reflected on the contents page). In some later editions it appeared earlier in the volume, and in some a manuscript note was added drawing attention to the controversial nature of the ideas contained in the letter. The letter, then, was made more or less obscure through the materiality of the volume - its positioning within it and the addition or removal of other paratextual material. This reminded me of the practice within the Encyclopédie of hiding controversial topics in obscure places. The life and thought of the English republican James Harrington, for example, is discussed in the entry for Rutland; the English county with which the Harrington family was associated.

Papers by Marie-Louise Coulahan and Lizzie Scott-Baumann offered a gender dimension to this idea of hidden texts. Marie-Louise presented her RECIRC project to us. One of the findings of this project is that while women rarely wrote overtly political texts, that does not mean that they did not engage in politics. Rather they had to find suitable vehicles for doing so. Petitions (such as that of the Mariners' Wives and the Gentlewomen's Petition) and prophetic writings were often used to make political statements. Similarly, both Lucy Hutchinson and Margaret Cavendish wrote about their husbands as a way of expressing their own political views. It was noted too that correspondence by women is often undervalued as a political text. Where the correspondence of men is seen as important, that by women is often dismissed as mere 'gossip'. Lizzie took this notion of hidden ideas to a deeper level, exploring how the language used by Lucy Hutchinson and Anne Wharton in their poems addressed to Edmund Waller, served to subtly critique his behaviour and actions.

Image by Rachel Hammersley. Taken during the workshop with the Thin Ice Press.

Our workshop ended with us addressing the materiality of texts from a different direction. Helen Smith led a workshop with the Thin Ice Press. We were given the opportunity to type set a short sentence (which proved to be a very fiddly process) and then to print a poster of our own. This gave us all a new appreciation for the work done by early modern printers. It became apparent just what a monumental task printing a text was at that time, and it made the typographical errors that are common in early modern texts much more understandable. While I will continue to use resources such as EEBO and ECCO to read early modern texts, I left York knowing that the distance between my understanding and the practical realities of the production and consumption of early modern political texts had narrowed perceptibly as a result of the workshop.

Image by Rachel Hammersley. Taken during the workshop with the Thin Ice Press.

Radical Republicanism

As I acknowledged in my recent book, the term 'republicanism' means different things to different people. Adding the adjective 'radical' to the term only complicates matters further, especially when the focus is the early modern period. The term 'radicalism' was not in use until the early nineteenth century, leading some scholars to argue that it should not be applied before that time. Yet 'Radical Republicanism in Early Modern Europe' was the title of an excellent conference organised by Anna Becker, Nicolai von Eggers, and Alessandro Mulieri in late June 2021. The conference organisers did not shy away from the difficulties with the terminology, indeed Nicolai von Eggers opened the proceedings by asking whether it is valuable to speak of 'radical republicanism'. What followed was a rich and lively discussion about what we mean by that label, what role the people should play within a republic, and why radical republicans are so often neglected within the historiography.

Niccolò Machiavelli by Santi di Tito. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

The constitution of the citizen body and the role its members should play have been key questions for those discussing republican rule ever since ancient times. As Alessandro Mulieri noted in his paper, Aristotle argued for the wisdom of the many over that of the few, insisting that as a collective body the many (understood as the middle orders rather than the poor) would have greater expertise, prudence, and virtue when it came to the selection of magistrates and the judgement of their actions. Niccolò Machiavelli famously expanded Aristotle's assessment to incorporate the plebs and to include lawmaking as well as the selection of magistrates. John McCormick has drawn attention to this aspect of Machiavelli's thought in his published work on the Florentine's democratic credentials. He developed this idea further in his paper at the conference, by exploring in greater detail the aristocratic republicanism of Francesco Guicciardini, which was in large part a response to Machiavelli's democratic republicanism. McCormick convincingly demonstrated that Machiavelli had got under Guicciardini's skin, leading him to adopt awkward positions (such as justifying genocide).

Plans that appeared in the Revolutions de Paris for platforms designed to make it possible for orators to be heard in a large assembly that was part of the wider proposals made by radical republicans during the early years of the French Revolution discussed by Nicolai von Eggers. Source gallica.bnf.fr/BnF.

One feature of the more aristocratic form of republicanism advanced by Guicciardini is the mixed constitution. Both Markku Peltonen and Annelien de Dijn questioned its dominance within the republican tradition, showing that many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republicans explicitly rejected that model, opting instead for a purer form of democratic rule. One of the key claims of Peltonen's excellent paper was that not only were republican arguments boldly made by a large number of English commentators during the period of the Commonwealth and Free State (1649-53), but that many described the government under which they were living positively as a democracy. De Dijn cited another seventeenth-century radical republican, Pieter De la Court who insisted that freedom would only be secure in a true democracy where decision-making power lay firmly with the people. Moreover, De Dijn argued that De la Court (along with his contemporary Baruch Spinoza and, later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) took Aristotle's argument to its logical conclusion, insisting that the people were more likely to rule in the common good than the elite and arguing, therefore, that there should be no restraint on popular power but only a strict form of majoritarian rule.

In the discussion, Camilla Vergara articulated the distinction being explored very clearly: one form of republicanism involves the sharing of power between the elites and the plebs; whereas the other (democratic or plebeian republicanism) involves giving power to the people. Of course this raises further questions about how popular power can and should be exercised (especially in large modern states). This issue was broached in the two papers on the French Revolution. Ariane Fichtl explored the influence on the French revolutionaries of ancient institutions such as the popular tribunes. Nicolai von Eggers focused on those radicals who adopted an intermediate position between representative and direct democracy by calling for the use of imperative mandates that would bind deputies or delegates to act only on the instructions of those who had elected them.

Samuel Hayat's paper on the recent 'gilets jaunes' protests in France, opened up a further question of whether 'the people' speak with a single voice. This is certainly the impression the 'gilets jaunes' seek to present, but to do so they must downplay differences of opinion based on race, sex, or class. A further issue raised by Hayet's paper is the thorny relationship between the terms 'popular' and 'radical'. The importance of distinguishing the 'popular' from the 'radical' has long been acknowledged by historians of the British civil wars - not least John Morrill. Moreover, not only in that Revolution but also in France in 1793 and again in 1848, the revolutionary authorities were presented with a dilemma. Should free and fair elections be suspended if the outcome of such elections was likely to be a rejection of the revolutionary regime? 

Portrait of Pieter de la Court by Abraham van den Tempel, 1667. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Regardless of the different ways in which it has been defined, radical republicanism has long been obscured or even neglected. Throughout the conference we heard papers calling for the rehabilitation of important figures as diverse as Ptolemy of Lucca, Pier Filippo Pandolfini, and Pieter De la Court, as well as for recognition of the republican implications of the works of figures such as Étienne de La Boétie (examined in an interesting paper by Saul Newman). Selective borrowing has been in operation throughout history. In papers by Miguel Vatter and Alessandro Mulieri, Machiavelli was shown to have rejected Platonism and Aristotelianism while simultaneously taking on board certain ideas from them. In my own paper I showed that selectivity was also in operation in the use of James Harrington's ideas by eighteenth-century British thinkers.

This selectivity has continued in later scholarship. Jérémie Barthas noted that Rudolf von Albertini was crucial in downplaying the significance of radical republicans like Pandolfini, because of the perceived connection between his ideas and those of the Jacobins. Following John McCormick's account of the brutal side of Guicciardini's thought, Anna Becker posed the leading question of where the more positive reading of him had originated. Similarly, Markku Peltonen argued that radical republican writings of the early 1650s have largely been ignored by recent republican scholars.

Gaby Mahlberg and Anna Becker both wondered whether part of the reason for the dominance of a more elitist reading of the republican tradition arises from the source material that tends to be used - in particular the focus on a range of printed canonical texts. Gaby's exploration of translations, reviews and networks - along with Anna's work on women and republicanism - have the potential to offer an alternative view. While source material may be part of the problem, political attitudes and priorities no doubt also play their part. For this reason, radical republicanism not only offers a rich vein for future historical research, but also a potential source of valuable material to help us to understand the nature of the political system we have inherited and the means by which it might be improved in the future.

Experiencing Political Texts 3: The Power of the Paratext

The end of Yango Varo’s Foreword to Another Now, which gives the date.

As readers we often skip over or neglect the additional material that precedes and follows a text - such as the preface, dedication and acknowledgements. Yet this material can serve an important function in both literally and metaphorically framing a text. For this reason literary theorists have started to take it more seriously, inventing the term 'paratext' to describe it and investigating the ways in which it directs the reader's attention and shapes their reading. In last month's blogpost I focused on the blending of fact and fiction in political texts, setting Yanis Varoufakis's recent work of 'political science fiction', Another Now, alongside James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana of 1656. In texts that blend fact and fiction, paratextual material serves a particularly important function and this is certainly true of Varoufakis's book.

The Foreword to Another Now is signed by the narrator of the work Yango Varo (clearly a fictionalisation of Varoufakis's own name) and is dated 10:05 a.m. Saturday 28 July 2036. This immediately draws attention to the fictional nature of the work and, more specifically, to the fact that it is set in an imagined future. The content of Varo's Foreword introduces the three main characters of the novel: Iris, who we are told in the opening sentence died a year ago; her friend Eva, who we learn was not at Iris's funeral; and Costa, who was present but chose to observe from a distance. Yango, a friend of all three, plays the role of communicator, being the purported author of what follows. He is directed by Iris and Costa to tell the story contained in Iris's diary, which she bequeathed to him before her death. Yet he is also instructed not to reveal any of the 'technical details' it contains. This makes little sense initially, but as the narrative unfolds the meaning of both the 'directive' and the 'injunction' become clear. The Foreword, then, sets up the work both by introducing the characters and plot, but also by posing puzzles or raising questions in the mind of the reader that will be resolved in the main body of the work.

Title page to Oceana including the dedication and epigram. James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana in The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Copy author’s own.

Harrington too framed his text with paratextual material. The main body of Oceana is preceded by an epigram from Horace, a dedication to Oliver Cromwell, an 'Epistle to the Reader', and 'The Introduction or Order of the Work' - which presents Oceana (England) and its neighbours Marpesia (Scotland) and Panopea (Ireland). However, since I have written extensivesly about Harrington's ideas - including his use of literary strategies - I will focus here, instead, on another early modern political text: the 1675 English edition of Niccolò Machiavelli's political works produced by Harrington's friend Henry Neville (The Works of the Famous Nicholas Machiavel, Citizen and Secretary of Florence, London, 1675).

Harrington and Neville had been close friends since before the publication of Oceana in 1656, and they worked together to promote Harrington's constitutional model, particularly during 1659 when implementation seemed most likely. According to a contemporary and friend, John Aubrey, Neville supported Harrington 'to his dyeing day', continuing to visit him even when Harrington's mind was affected by illness (Aubrey, Brief Lives, ed. K. Bennett, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, I, p. 322).

The third edition of Neville’s translation of Machiavelli’s works. Taken from Wikimedia Commons.

Neville appears to have shared - and even extended - his friend's playfulness. Neville added to his edition of Machiavelli's political works a letter supposedly written by Machiavelli to his friend Zanobius Buondelmontius in which he offered a vindication of himself and his writings. On the surface this was a conventional addition to a scholarly text - it was not unusual at the time to include additional material relating to the author. A more careful reading, however, reveals the letter to be a fraud or joke. In fact, as in Varoufakis's Foreword, even the date on the letter (1 April 1537) is suggestive. April 1st is, of course, April Fool's Day. Moreover, since Machiavelli had died on 21 June 1527, the letter was supposedly written almost ten years after his demise. The letter also refers to John Calvin's flight from Picardy to Geneva which, since it occurred in the 1530s, was something of which the real Machiavelli could not have been aware.

Machiavel’s Letter to Buondelmontius. Taken from the third edition - as previous image.

These features affects how we view the content of the letter, but that content in turn provides a clue to Neville's purpose. The topic of the letter is the corruption introduced into Christianity by the Catholic Church. Neville's 'Machiavel' points out that there is no evidence in the Bible for beliefs central to Catholic doctrine, such as purgatory, the worship of saints and idols, and the inquisition. These 'innovations', he suggests, were introduced by the Catholic clergy to increase their temporal power and to keep the people in ignorance. Using a term that had been coined by Harrington, he blames 'Priest-craft' for much of the current trouble, yet he remains hopeful that God will inspire Christian princes to bring about a return to 'the true Original Christian Faith', reminding them that in order to do so they will have to root out all traces 'of this Clergy or Priest-craft' or their efforts will be in vain.

In tricking his readers by including this fictional letter, Neville was deliberately echoing what he saw as the longstanding and calculated efforts of the clergy to deceive the laity. His aim in doing so was perhaps to draw the attention of his readers to their own foolish credulity, and to inoculate them against future deception. Having been stung by his prank, they would perhaps think more carefully in future about the ideas presented to them by others. Such trickery is less common as a literary technique today, and Varoufakis's Foreword is more deliberately part of his narrative. But, in an age when 'Fake News' has become a political weapon, and conspiracy theories are rife, I would hesitate to suggest that the credulity Neville identified has completely disappeared.

Myths Concerning Republicanism 2: Republican Government has always been Aristocratic

January's blogpost explored the myth that republican government is necessarily anti-monarchical. This month I want to consider another myth: that republican government is inherently aristocratic or élitist in character and therefore unsuited to the democratic nature of twenty-first-century states.

Print of Geneva in 1630. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

There is some justification for this characterisation. In the ancient world republican government was associated with slavery, the exclusion of women from the political sphere, and the restriction of political participation to certain groups. Indeed, the exercise of citizenship depended on the work carried out by non-citizens (including slaves, women, servants, and foreigners), which made it possible for citizens to devote their attention to political matters. Moreover, later republican governments were criticised for descending into oligarchy. Venice's Grand Council was initially composed of all male inhabitants but due to citizenship being restricted to the descendants of those original citizens, by 1581 it was accorded to just over 1% of the population. In the Genevan republic the cost of claiming citizenship became more expensive over time, restricting who could take it up. In addition, power was increasingly moved away from the General Council - comprising all citizens - and towards smaller bodies that were dominated by a few families.

Frontispiece to The Federalist Papers. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

The rise of the modern representative republic proved a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it undercut the need for citizens to be supported by non-citizens by making citizenship a less onerous activity. Yet, at the same time, it created a political élite distinct from the wider citizen body whose role it was to govern. For some thinkers this was a positive move. They saw representation not simply as a necessary evil in the large states of the modern world, but as a good in itself. In The Federalist Papers James Madison insisted that in a representative government 'public views' would be 'refined' and 'enlarge[d]' by being passed through 'the medium of a chosen body of citizens' who would be wiser than the rest and therefore better able to determine the true interest of the nation. He went on: 'Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose.' (Publius, The Federalist Papers, X).

Yet, as debates at the time make clear, this was not the only way of organising representative government. Anti-Federalists in America, and various individuals and groups in Europe, proposed representative systems that maintained a closer connection between elected delegates and those they represented. The mechanisms they advocated included short terms and regular rotation of office, powerful local assemblies, binding mandates, and even the popular ratification of laws. The way in which the modern representative republic was organised did serve to create a narrow political élite, but that was a deliberate choice rather than the only option available.

Where the Federalists chose to build on the aristocratic tendency within republican thought, an alternative more democratic strand also existed

Portrait of James Harrington from The Oceana and Other Works of James Harrington… ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Some republicans insisted that popular participation (rather than anti-monarchism) was the defining feature of republican government. William Walker argues that the ancient historian Sallust saw the establishment of the tribunate as more important to the Roman Republic than the displacement of the monarch by consuls (William Walker, 'Sallust and Skinner on Civil Liberty', European Journal of Political Theory, 5:3, 2006). Likewise, for James Harrington it was not the presence or absence of a single figurehead at the apex of the system that determined whether or not a regime was a commonwealth, but rather whether or not the people (via their popular assembly) had the final say over which legislation was passed and enacted (Rachel Hammersley, James Harrington: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 2019). Similarly, John P. McCormick has argued that Niccolò Machiavelli offered an anti-élitist critique of republican practice. In contrast to Francesco Guicciardini's "senatorial" model of politics, he favoured a "tribunate" model which embraced popular deliberation and employed extra-electoral methods to secure the accountability of those in power (John P. McCormick, 'Machiavelli Against Republicanism On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments", Political Theory, 31:5, 2003, 615-43).

Both Machiavelli and Harrington were also advocates of the idea that extremes of wealth and poverty would pose a direct threat to the survival of the republic. Machiavelli famously argued that if the system was well-constituted the public should be rich, but the citizens poor (Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, p. 475). This idea has a modern echo in the notion that we must choose between public luxury for all or private luxury for some. Other thinkers called for balance and moderation. Harrington claimed that: 'There is a mean in things: as exorbitant riches overthrow the balance of a commonwealth, so extreme poverty cannot hold it nor is by any means to be trusted with it.' (James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceana, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge, 1992, p. 77). A similar view was endorsed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau who insisted that in order to secure civil freedom: 'no citizen [can] be so very rich that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is compelled to sell himself.' (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Social Contract, ed. Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge, 1997, p. 78). The problem with wealth and luxury, Rousseau insisted, was that they exerted a corrupting influence, encouraging the citizens to put their own private interests above those of the republic.

The Leaders of the Knights of Labour with Terence Powderly in the centre. Reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

It is also evident that even after the emergence of representative republics, the language of republicanism could be used by marginalised or excluded groups against their oppressors. As Alex Gourevitch has demonstrated, this tactic was deployed to great effect by 'The Noble and Holy Order of the Knights of Labor', the first labour organisation in the United States of America to admit both white and black workers (Alex Gourevitch, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth. Cambridge, 2015). Its leaders deliberately used republican arguments to criticise wage labour. George McNeill spoke of the 'inevitable and irresistible conflict' between the system of wage labour and republican governance (p. 100). The reason for this, as Terence Powderly explained, was that the wage labour system generated economic inequalities that were translated into political inequalities. Drawing directly on the understanding of liberty as non-dependence, and on arguments that had been used in the seventeenth century to insist that subjects were unfree even under a mild and gentle monarch, the Knights insisted that a worker would be a slave even if employed by 'the gentlest man in the world' 'if he must obey his commands and depend upon his will' (pp. 14-15). The solution, they argued, was to establish cooperatives so that workers could collectively own and manage the factories in which they worked. By applying the conception of liberty as non-dependence to the economic as well as the political sphere, these labour republicans succeeded in making republican arguments applicable not just to independent property owners, but to all workers - white and black, male and female.

While republicanism has taken an aristocratic form in both theory and practice in the past this was often a deliberate strategy rather than a necessity. The history of the republican tradition can provide arguments in favour of popular participation in government, warnings against excessive inequalities among citizens, and evidence of the importance of economic as well as political inequalities (and of the relationship between the two). Rather than dismissing republicanism as inherently aristocratic, then, it might be more profitable to draw on these resources to create a version of republicanism suited to the democratic states of the twenty-first century.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 5. Petrus Cunaeus

In previous blogposts I have explored the ways in which James Harrington drew on the ideas of earlier thinkers. So far my focus has been on figures who remain well known today: Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Francis Bacon. But Harrington was also inspired by thinkers whose names have not survived so well in popular memory. 

Petrus Cunaeus, reproduced from Wikimedia Commons.

One of these is the Dutch author Peter Cunaeus whose book De Republica Hebraeorum appeared in 1617 as part of a series of works produced by the Dutch printer Elsevier on past and present republics. It was translated into English by Clement Barksdale in 1653, not long after the English had established their own 'Commonwealth or Free State'. 

Harrington was particularly interested in two aspects of Cunaeus's account of the Hebrew Commonwealth. The first of these was the law of jubilee. This stated that every fifty years land that had been bought or alienated in the intervening period would be returned to its original owner. Cunaeus referred to this practice as the 'lex Agrarian Hebraeorum', which was translated by Barksdale as the 'Agrarian Law' (Petrus Cunaeus, Of the Common-Wealth of the Hebrews, translated by C. B., London, 1653, p. 13). Cunaeus did this in order to encourage comparison with other ancient practices, and especially the Roman agrarian law. Since Harrington explicitly advocated the establishment of an agrarian law for Oceana, this terminology - and Cunaeus's endorsement of the practice - was useful to him. The terms of Harrington's agrarian law were not identical to the Jewish idea of jubilee; he did not call for land to be returned to its original owner after a set period, but rather restricted the amount of land that could be passed on to one heir, effectively undermining the principle of primogeniture. Yet, both systems were designed to limit inequality without threatening social stability. 

The idea of an agrarian law was not popular at the time, even most seventeenth-century republicans followed Machiavelli in rejecting the practice. It is, therefore, all the more striking that Harrington followed Cunaeus in explicitly challenging Machiavelli's account of the fall of the Roman republic. Against Machiavelli, Cunaeus and Harrington insisted that it was the mismatch between the distribution of land and the holding of political power - essentially the failure to properly implement an agrarian law - that had caused the Roman republic to fall. Given the controversy surrounding agrarian laws, even among those who favoured republican government, Cunaeus's account was also useful to Harrington in its insistence that the law of jubilee was instituted by Moses at God's behest. Here, as elsewhere in his use of the Hebrew Commonwealth, Harrington was able to claim divine support for a controversial idea.

Image of Moses as taken from the frontispiece to The Oceana and other works of James Harrington, ed. John Toland (London, 1737). Private copy. Image by Rachel Hammersley.

Religion also lay at the heart of the second aspect of Cunaeus's De Republica Hebraeorum that was important to Harrington. According to Cunaeus, God had given authority in both civil and religious matters to the civil magistrate. Instead of being viewed as separate jurisdictions, civil and religious affairs were both under the authority of the Jewish Sanhedrin. Once again this prefigured Harrington's own insistence in The Commonwealth of Oceana that a national church be preserved; and that it, and its clergy, were to remain under the authority of the state, although he also insisted that liberty of conscience should be granted to members of other Protestant sects. On this point, too, Harrington's use of Cunaeus set him apart from other English republicans at the time, most of whom advocated the complete separation of church and state.

Paying attention to Harrington's use of Cunaeus serves to correct the understanding of English republicanism that has tended, at least until the early twenty-first century, to ignore its religious dimension. Being able to draw a parallel with the Hebrew Republic provided a religious justification for some of the more innovative elements of Harrington's programme. At the same time, we can see that the question of how to organise religion was itself central to his concerns. Thanks to Cunaeus, Harrington was able to view the Hebrew Commonwealth as an ancient example that could usefully be deployed in early-modern constitution building.

These observations also have resonance today. Separating church and state has not always worked as an effective means of ensuring toleration for religious groups, not least because it tends to set up a contrast between religious organisations and the secularism of the state. Harrington certainly believed that toleration could be better secured under a system in which the civil magistrate oversaw the state religion, but also allowed freedom of conscience to separatist groups. The question of what the relationship should be between politics and religion remains a live issue today and one on which the sometimes simplistic solutions of the present might be complicated and enriched by attention to past discussions.

The relationship between property and political power has also proved to be a hot political topic in recent months. Research by Guy Shrubsole suggests that 1% of the people now own half of the land in England (https://www.theguardian.com/money/2019/apr/17/who-owns-england-thousand-secret-landowners-author). Moreover, without government intervention even greater disparity is likely in the future, since landowners can use the income they gain from rent and capital appreciation to buy yet more property. This was why Harrington argued for government intervention to reduce future inequality. In the light of Shrubsole's research Peter Hetherington has pointed in a similar direction, suggesting that the solution is to end 'the inheritance and capital gains tax breaks which make trading land so attractive to the few at the expense of the many' (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/england-private-landowners-uk-reform-inheritance-tax). Yet many of those in positions of power remain unwilling to address the issue. At a time when the frontrunner in the Tory leadership campaign, Boris Johnson, has pledged to raise the higher-rate income tax threshold from £50,000 to £80,000, thereby cutting the tax bills of 3 million higher-income earners by approximately £3,000 (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/10/tory-leadership-race-what-are-candidates-promises-on-tax), we might wish to reconsider the mechanisms for redistributing wealth in the modern world and whether they are fit for purpose.

An Interlude: Thinkers as Readers

Programme for the workshop ‘David Hume as Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume’, 03.05.19.

In my last few blogposts I have been examining some of the thinkers whose works influenced James Harrington's The Commonwealth of Oceana. There are more figures I want to explore in future posts, but this month I want briefly to digress, by looking at someone who was influenced by him: David Hume. This is prompted by the fact that on 3rd May I attended a stimulating workshop at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Edinburgh entitled 'David Hume as a Reader: The Authors who Provoked Hume'. The workshop was organised by Max Skjönesberg and Robin Mills and included excellent papers by various scholars each of whom examined the ways in which the works of a particular thinker or genre influenced - or, in the words of the workshop’s subtitle, provoked - Hume. Working on my own paper for this workshop, at the same time as thinking about the various authors who inspired Harrington, led me to reflect more generally on this approach to the history of political thought, what it reveals, and how it could be used to enhance and enrich more conventional studies.

Of course, focusing on authors as readers of other authors immediately brings to the fore various problems. Several speakers at the workshop raised the question of what might constitute reliable evidence of one author having read another. The catalogue of a thinker's personal library, or one to which we know that thinker had access (as in the case of Hume and the Advocates Library), can be useful in this regard. The presence in such a catalogue of a particular book makes it possible, in some cases even probable, that the thinker had read that work, but on its own it cannot prove that (s)he did so. Even when it can be established that a thinker did read a particular work - for example where annotations in their own hand are found in a copy of the work, or where references are made in a commonplace book, diary or correspondence - it does not necessarily follow that that reading then influenced their own thought or writings. 

A more fruitful indication is evidence of one author borrowing (whether explicitly or implicitly) from another. In future, further advances may be made in this area as a result of improvements in digital technology, such as the development of sophisticated machine reading software. Yet it is also important to remember that a lack of critical engagement with a work does not necessarily constitute proof that the author has not been influenced or provoked by it. Furthermore, awareness of the ideas of a particular thinker may develop by reading abridgements or reviews rather than the work itself, or via discussions in settings such as debating societies or political clubs.

Statue of David Hume on the Royal Mile in Edinburgh.

A second observation to be made is that influence itself does not always take a simple form. This is something that I was particularly aware of in exploring Hume's reading of Harrington. Occasionally it is possible to identify an example of one thinker directly appropriating an idea from another. Hume, for example, adopts Harrington's preference for the rule of laws rather than men, though we might query whether he derived this directly from Harrington's works or via an intermediary and, indeed, whether Oceana was the true origin of that idea. Elsewhere we can find examples of thinkers embarking from a similar starting point, but moving in different directions, or of them using different methods to achieve similar ends. Alexandra Chadwick offered an example of the former in her paper on Hobbes and Hume, where she showed that they started from similar foundations in terms of their views of human nature and psychology, but diverged with regard to the vision of mankind and society that they sought to paint. Working the other way around, I noted that Hume shared Harrington's concern with accountability, but rejected his mechanism of rotation of office, and instead sought alternative measures to achieve that end. 

Joseph Collyer, portrait of David Hume, Scottish National Portrait Gallery SP IV 7711.

This idea shades into another way of thinking about influence, which was explicitly articulated by Tim Stuart-Buttle, whereby one thinker generates problems or questions that are then addressed by later generations. This astute observation raises further questions and complexities. It might equally be the case that two contemporary thinkers engage with similar problems or adopt similar approaches not because one has influenced the other, but simply because they are operating within a common political and cultural context. Tim Hochstrasser suggested that this perhaps explains at least some of the affinities between Voltaire and Hume. Richard Whatmore complicated the idea in a different way, suggesting that it sometimes appears as though an author is only influential when (s)he is totally misunderstood by the next generation. Among the papers at the workshop there were certainly several examples of reading against the grain. For instance, Danielle Charette suggested that Hume did not read Machiavelli in the traditional way, but instead sought to move beyond the moralism of many eighteenth-century accounts, modelling instead how Machiavelli might be read fruitfully in the modern world.

While undoubtedly complex, there can be no doubt that juxtaposing authors in this way and examining in detail the connections - and the divergences - between their ideas, can enrich our understanding of the thought of both thinkers. On the basis of this, I was led to wonder whether focusing on reading might provide us with a new dimension to the exploration of intellectual history. Reading offers a middle way between the traditional 'great thinkers' approach to the history of political thought and the contextual methodology pioneered by members of the Cambridge School. Cambridge School historians quite rightly challenged the assumption that the great thinkers of the past were simply conversing with each other and were unaffected by the historical events and more trivial and quotidian intellectual debates going on around them. They have shown, for example, that Hobbes was deeply affected by the experience of living through the English Civil War and was responding to contemporary debates, such as that surrounding the swearing of the Engagement Oath - an oath of loyalty to the new regime in the aftermath of the regicide. Yet this emphasis on historical and intellectual context can sometimes lead us to forget that these people also read and responded to the writings of prominent thinkers who had gone before them. By adding some consideration of who and what thinkers of the past were reading, alongside what they were experiencing and which intellectual debates they were engaging with, we can perhaps produce a richer and more nuanced understanding of the genesis of their ideas.

The Inspiration Behind Oceana: 1. Machiavelli: History, Democracy & Human Nature

In January I submitted the final version of my intellectual biography of James Harrington to Oxford University Press. With any luck it will appear before the end of 2019. Consequently, at the start of this new year I have been reflecting on my pursuit of this project and what I have learned from it. One of the particular pleasures of the research has been re-reading not just Harrington's own writings, but also the works of those thinkers who influenced him. This is, then, the first of a series of posts on some of the thinkers who inspired Oceana. Where better to begin than with the great, though controversial, Italian Renaissance political theorist, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Galgano Cipriani, Niccolo Machiavelli, 1469-1527 Statesman and historiographer, National Galleries Scotland, Accession Number FP I 81.1 https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/34757/niccolo-machiavelli-1469-1527-statesman-and-historiographer

Various things struck me as I re-read The Discourses after an interval of more than a decade. One of the first was how beautifully Machiavelli wrote. From the dedication I was immediately drawn into the text and looked forward to reading it. Part of the beauty lies in the fact that he is clear about his arguments, stating them openly even when they are controversial. But there is much in the substance, as well as the style, of Machiavelli's works that I found appealing. I want to highlight three aspects of his work here that certainly influenced Harrington and which, I believe, still have relevance today.

In the first place, Machiavelli - like Harrington - is explicit about the benefits of reading history to better understand present politics and make proposals for the future. Machiavelli laments the fact that in his own time people take pleasure in reading about historical events, but do not seem to learn from or imitate them (Niccolò Machiavelli, The Discourses, ed. Bernard Crick, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1970, p. 98). One purpose of his book is to encourage a new attitude to history, he aims to compare ancient and modern events so as to better understand them 'so that those who read what I have to say may the more easily draw those practical lessons which one should seek to obtain from the study of history' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 99). Machiavelli's historical methodology is vulnerable to criticism on account of his sense that the past and the present are fundamentally the same. It is obviously not appropriate to maintain this view today, and Harrington already went some way beyond Machiavelli in appreciating the nature and importance of change over time. But it would, I think, be wrong to dismiss too quickly Machiavelli's assertion that human nature remains much the same in all times and places: 

If the present be compared with the remote past, it is easily seen that in all cities and in all peoples there are the same desires and the same passions as there always were. So that, if one examines with diligence the past, it is easy to foresee the future of any commonwealth, and to apply those remedies which were used of old; or if one does not find that remedies were used, to devise new ones owing to the similarity between events. (Machiavelli, The Discourses, pp. 207-8). 

It is, Machiavelli concludes, because people do not properly know or understand history that the same problems keep arising.

The author’s copy of the penguin edition of Machiavelli’s Discourses.

One aspect of Machiavelli's understanding of his own past and present which might be of particular interest to us today is what he has to say about popular or democratic politics. As I have pointed out elsewhere, modern democracy is often assumed to be a twentieth-century phenomenon, or at least one that had its origins no earlier than the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Yet, important discussions on the nature and limitations of democracy took place in seventeenth-century England. Reading Machiavelli reminded me that even seventeenth-century thinkers were by no means the first after the fall of Rome to be interested in the advantages and disadvantages of democratic government. While Machiavelli makes little use of the term 'democracy' he is a strong advocate not just of republican, but of popular, government. As well as claiming that 'it is only in republics that the common good is looked to properly in that all that promotes it is carried out' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 275) he also goes so far as to suggest that 'government by the populace is better than government by princes' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 256). Of course, one has to be careful in interpreting this. The suggestion, put forward by John P. McCormick, that Machiavelli is better described as a democrat than a republican has been challenged on the grounds that he was pessimistic about the capacity of ordinary citizens to govern themselves and consequently insisted on the need for continuous elite intervention in politics (John P. McCormick, 'Machiavelli Against Republicanism On the Cambridge School's "Guicciardinian Moments", Political Theory, 31:5, 2003, pp. 615-43 and Ryan Balot and Stephen Trochimchuk, 'The Many and the Few: On Machiavelli's "Democratic Moment"', The Review of Politics, 74 (2012), pp. 559-88). But, I would argue, what is of most importance is that he engaged with the issues surrounding popular government. Indeed, part of the reason for Machiavelli's preference for popular government was his insistence that the populace can more easily be constrained by laws than a prince, and at the same time if they depart from the law they are less dangerous. Moreover, Machiavelli goes so far as to defend what he admits is an unpopular position. Where most writers at the time dismissed the masses as futile and inconstant, Machiavelli was more cautious: 'The nature of the masses, then, is not more reprehensible than is the nature of princes, for all do wrong and to the same extent when there is nothing to prevent them doing wrong.' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 254).

As this quotation suggests, while Machiavelli was less dismissive of the masses than some of his contemporaries this was based less on an elevated sense of their virtue than on his belief that all human beings are susceptible to corruption and that this must be recognised. He suggested that men cannot restrain their passions for very long and insisted that when constituting a commonwealth it is essential to assume that all men are wicked (Machiavelli, The Discourses, pp. 429 and 111). On this issue Harrington was in agreement with Machiavelli and his political model was grounded in Machiavelli's observation that: 'All legislators, whether in a republic or a kingdom' must be 'ready to restrain human appetites and to deprive them of all hope of doing wrong with impunity' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 217). For both thinkers this included rulers and politicians as much as ordinary citizens. Indeed, Machiavelli had some particularly useful suggestions as to how to treat politicians, and others in positions of authority, emphasising the need to assess them on account of their actions rather than simply their positions: 'For, to judge aright, one should esteem men because they are generous, not because they have the power to be generous; and, in like manner, should admire those who know how to govern a kingdom, not those who, without knowing how, actually govern one.' (Machiavelli, The Discourses, p. 94). Reading statements like this in the midst of the current political chaos over Brexit one cannot help thinking that both understanding historical events and learning from past thinkers could still teach us much about politics that would be of practical value today.