Revolutionary Ideas, Transforming Politics
Of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries
The history of Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one of strife, internal conflict and total war. Beginning with the French Wars of Religion in the sixteenth century, revolutionary changes in European religion acted as a powerful catalyst for major conflicts like the Dutch War for Independence, the Thirty Years War, and the English Civil War. Out from the violence, instability and continent-wide anxiety came radical political ideas that transformed the face of human politics and permanently shaped development of human civilization for centuries to come. These changes, revolving around concepts of man’s relationship to nature, equality and liberty, and the legitimacy of the state, assisted in a strong break from the so-called “top-down” political traditions of the past and served as the basis for reforming many existing governments, as well as leading to the creation of entirely new nations.
As much as the politics of the early modern period had foundations in the violent religious and civil conflicts of the immediately preceding period, they also owed their formation to a particularly provocative trend in natural philosophy that attempted to understand man’s own nature and the disposition of his relationship to nature-at-large. One of the direct results of this trend was the development of a whole new concept of natural law and man’s existence in the so-called “state of nature.” One of the very first political theorists and state-crafters to engage this idea was English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes. Writing in the aftermath of the English Civil War, his Leviathan was one of the first comprehensive discussions on modern statecraft in European history. In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that the “laws of nature are immutable and eternal,” in effect elevating them to the status previously attributed to the divine, and further claimed that the science of the laws of nature are the only true moral philosophy in the world.[1] Hobbes’ claim represents a clear jump along a trend begun with previous European philosophers like Sir Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes, but it is a claim echoed not only by his political allies and students, but by his rivals as well. Baruch Spinoza, a contemporary rival of Hobbes, similarly claimed that in order to understand God, one must study the face of nature and the natural law.[2]
Despite the prominent place it is given as a basis for their respective political theories, natural law itself is not a political concept but comes, rather, from a series of scientific and philosophical observations about the orderly operation of the cosmos. Whereas these observations in the medieval period were dominated by Church-authorized cosmology and religious considerations, the evolution of divine law into natural law demonstrates a clear weakening of the clergy’s ability to influence philosophy in the early modern period. This claim is, perhaps, best demonstrated by the peculiar argument made by Jean-Jacques Rousseau that men, in the state of nature, behave amorally because morality is a convention that owes itself to human sociality. In essence he is arguing that outside of human society there are no true morals.[3] This is a clear break from the doctrines of institutional Christianity which claim that morality – including the inevitable ideas of right, wrong, good and evil – are eternal realities that are imported from God’s divine law. What’s more is that the ethical core of humanity, according to Spinoza’s Ethics, is not the aptly named “Sermon on the Mount” preached by Jesus but, rather, self-preservation alone.[4] Perhaps even more provocative was John Locke’s Newtonianistic claim that it is the laws of nature, not God himself, which binds men together, undermining the millennia-old tradition of the Divine Right of Kings.[5] Indeed because it is the laws of nature that act as a governing force over man – ostensibly at the expense of the existing religious and political institutions – it stands to reason that all men, in the state of nature, are both free and equal.[6]
The subject of human equality has, possibly, been the most challenging problem of human history and the debate stretches all the way from antiquity to modernity, with no clear resolutions. The attempts by early modern philosophers and political theorists to come to a functional understanding of human equality produced answers and positions that spanned the entire range of the debate. Hobbes, one of the earliest – and, perhaps, most politically conservative – philosophers to address the question concluded that men have a kind of natural equality to them insofar as there is no one man that is clearly superior to any other man in every way imaginable.[7] In a sense, all men are equal in their natural inequalities. Spinoza saw the equality of man in a predominately ethical sense: the equality of men comes from each man’s equal right to preserve their own life at all costs and, in this sense, the equality of man is reduced – or, perhaps, elevated – by Spinoza to a place of moral ascendancy.[8] Two of the latest political theorists of the early modern period, Locke and Rousseau, both acknowledged, in different ways however, that there is a natural inequality to man but argued similarly to Spinoza that there is a moral equality to him. Locke’s argument was that humans are equal via their internal nature, perhaps hearkening to Cartesian ideas of the “rational soul”, even if there are small inequalities to them by way of merit, virtue, wealth, mental prowess or physical attributes.[9] Rousseau, however, does not seem to be interested in making that kind of distinction and stipulates that men are not equal naturally or politically.[10] Unlike his predecessors, this aggressive position allows him the freedom to stab at what he views as the heart of human inequality: social convention. Where previous philosophers and theorists found it expedient – and popular in many ways – to argue for the inherent equality of man, this position also limited their criticisms to anemic or dissatisfactory political conditions. This was not good enough for Rousseau as he intended to demonstrate that it was human sociality and society that not only exasperated whatever minor natural inequalities existed in man, but also stood to create many more new ones of its own.[11] In fact, Rousseau argues as a kind of proto-Marxist that, it is the extreme inequalities of the predominant social conventions of the “civilized” world that are responsible for the conflicts and horrors of human history, including those ones most recent to his time.[12] His conclusion, however, is similar to that of Locke’s in saying that it is the responsibility of the political establishment of a nation to be so perfectly equal that it has the power equalize whatever natural inequalities exist between men and to keep unnecessary inequalities from being produced within society.[13] It is clear that equality has meant many things to many people at many times in history, with many of those meanings being mutually exclusive to one another. Within the framework of the early modern period one might successfully argue that equality, with regard to the political state of men, took on its many forms in relation to a particular thinker’s ideas on sovereignty and to what extent a country’s population should enjoy political franchise. These considerations, along with the various imprecise definitions of freedom and liberty provided by these thinkers, continue to make the subject of human equality a very difficult question to answer.
Whatever unresolved questions remained on the subject of human equality, the question of liberty and freedom within a state is no less ambiguous, if not also relatively predictable. Hobbes, writing in the aftermath of what some considered a free-for-all power grab by various factions within England, makes it clear that civil liberty is “absurd” because it requires that men be exempt from the laws of the commonwealth which, in turn, renders the commonwealth itself void.[14] This rule of law, embodied in his concept of a nearly all-powerful Sovereign of the commonwealth, is charged with the singular task of maintaining order at all costs, which seems to be Hobbes’ own definition of freedom: not an environment where one can exercise one’s own personal liberties but, rather, an environment that is free from the uncertainty and strife of the previous time period. It is in this light that Hobbes claims that a monarchy offers just as much freedom as a democracy.[15] Not surprisingly, Pufendorf takes Hobbes’ stance and builds slightly on the concept. In his work, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, Pufendorf claims that man does, indeed, have an inherent freedom or liberty to do as he pleases, but upon departure from the “state of nature” and entrance into a community, society or a state, that liberty is forfeit and subject to the will of the authorities.[16] Taking issue with such a seemingly narrow – and negative – interpretation of liberty, Locke explains that liberty is not a license to do as one pleases but, in fact, a state of being where one’s rights to life, liberty and property are protected and guaranteed.[17] Perhaps most radical of all is Rousseau’s claim that liberty is not, itself, a reality but also a manufactured convention – like morality – sprung from human society. Where he seems to find common ground with his predecessors is his argument that it is the leader of a state that is tasked with the guarantee of the liberty and freedom of his/her citizens.[18] It is the nature of this leader, however, that occupies much of the discussion about the nature of political organization in the early modern period.
The question of whom, within the state, is legitimately allowed to make policy on behalf of the whole is a dominant subject in the political theory of the early modern period. This office, generically referred to as the “sovereign”, was traditionally synonymous with the aristocratic or royal landlord of a country. With the emergence of the first republican and mixed governments in northern and western Europe came a heated debate about the nature of sovereignty within a state and who, if anyone, should possess it. While, again, some of the ideas offered by each of the most influential thinkers of the time are not entirely unpredictable, they are revealing and noteworthy. Hobbes, being one of the first theorists in Europe to broadly define sovereignty, claims that the sovereign is the individual, or assembly, that holds ultimate – and some might argue absolute – power within a commonwealth. This sovereign is, himself, above the laws of the state, is charged with protecting the state and keeping social and political order, and controls all three traditional branches of government as well as the state religion.[19] The sovereign, in Hobbes’ vision, must be supreme and alone in power. No challengers and no parties of interest, or factions, are to be allowed.[20] Locke, mistrustful of any government where the power is too concentrated in one man, argues that the sovereign power of a state must be endowed to the legislative body. This body, being greater than the sum of its own parts, may be the supreme power in the state but unlike Hobbes’ idea of sovereignty, no one person is ever above the law in state.[21] Ever the progressive, Rousseau seems unwilling to place sovereign power in the hands of any individual or assembly. Rather, it is into the hands of the so-called “general will” that the ultimate power of a state rests. Rousseau does a surprisingly poor job of explaining what the “general will” actually is, with some commentators explaining that it is the majority of a democratic electorate and others likening it to the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith’s economic theory. Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality does provide one clue as to the anatomy of the general will when he claims, right at the outset of his essay, that the interests of the sovereign can never be the same as the interests of the people unless they are, in fact, the same.[22] Furthermore, this general will has no shortage of attributes assigned to it, most notably among them being: indestructibility, indivisibility and inerrancy.[23] What is certain, however, is that he agrees with Locke on the nature of any law produced by this general will: all men within a state, even princes, must be beholden to it.[24] As one might be able to see without much trouble, the various ideas of sovereignty presented by early modern philosophers and political theorists seem to have quite a bit to do with the particular thinker’s expectations for a successfully administered government. If, for instance, a conservative thinker believes that the most important job of a sovereign or of the government is to protect the people from war and internal conflict, then he seems to be more predisposed to a strong, centralized form of sovereignty. If, however, the theorist believes that the biggest threat to a nation’s people is a homegrown tyrant then it seems reasonable for the theorist to conclude that sovereignty should be disseminated broadly among the constituents of the nation. This potentially central question of “who poses the greatest threat to the state” appears not only to influence ideas about sovereignty but also concepts about how states should be – and are – formed, what purpose they serve and how – if ever – they should be dissolved.
The task of today’s anthropologists in determining the origins of civilizations and societies may, in many respects, be easier than that of early modern theorists who – due to the strong presence of Christian cosmology and the dominating medieval tradition of viewing the most ancient of histories through a mythical worldview – were probably not as free to explore the beginnings of civilization in a more scientific or forensic way as their modern counterparts. With those considerations in mind, it is not difficult to see how early modern ideas about the formation of societies and states were developed in a way that was both practical in advancing their particular ideas about the ends of the state as well as staying away from any idea that would be considered flagrantly offensive to those socially and religiously conservative elements in Europe. In that sense, those few theorists that did attempt to explain, in precise terms, how societies and states develop, seem to derive those conceptual notions from their own ideologies about the ends of the state. For instance, Samuel Pufendorf argues that states form because men, wanting to protect themselves and their interests, gather together in a large assembly to decide on the formation of the state.[25] Coupling that idea with his belief that the purpose of the state is to protect the lives and the interests of the constituents, one is able to draw a clear backwards path from one idea to the other.[26] To Pufendorf, like Hobbes before him, the greatest threat to a state is usually an external one, thus, the beginning and purpose of the state is one that protects the people from the brutal “state of nature” and those elements within it that are harmful or hostile to human interests. In the writings of Locke, however, one finds that the greatest threat to someone’s private interests is the unchecked greed, corruption and power that usually comes with the enfranchisement of a few political and social elites. Thus, it is not only the lives of the constituents of a state that require protection but also their property and interests. It is in that light that Locke argues that the ends of government are to protect and preserve the people’s property – of which, life and liberty are part – from threats both internal and external.[27] The difference between these two political camps is, perhaps, illustrated best with the question of when, if at all, it is permissible for a state to be dissolved. Where theorists like Hobbes and Pufendorf vehemently oppose the idea of dissolving a state, others like Locke and Rousseau argue that it is not only possible – and even necessary at times – but also inevitable. To the more conservative thinkers like Hobbes and Pufendorf, the state of nature is so brutal and so incompatible with human interests that the state can never be dissolved. Since the state, in their worldview, is charged with ensuring the wellbeing of the populace, a return to the perilous state of nature is out of the question. To men like Locke and Rousseau, however, a violent and sudden return to the natural state of perfect liberty and equality – regardless of the potentially scathing implications – is preferable to living under an all-powerful tyrant.[28] It should be noted, however, that Locke did not take the notion of revolution lightly, claiming that such violent overthrow of government should be considered only in the wake of a “long train of abuses”, a phrase famously borrowed by Thomas Jefferson and etched into the American Declaration of Independence.[29]
One can be certain that the ideas addressed here were not the only substantial questions debated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Great advances in concepts revolving around private property, justice and civil religion not only happened concurrently with those of sovereignty, the state, natural law, equality, liberty and the state of nature, but also interacted with each other seamlessly in the early modern period of western history. What makes the latter topics “key” to early modern political theory is the highly radical and revolutionary nature of the advancements of the latter group compared to the more organic and evolutionary changes of the former group. It was the advancements of these key concepts that so heavily aided in the creation of the modern liberal state, reshaping both the political face of the West and the future with it.
[6] John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, p. 8; Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen, chapter 7
[13] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 124; On the Social Compact, p. 153
[18] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Compact, p. 141; Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, p. 72
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