In the following
extract from Reason of State: Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes, Noel Malcolm gives a lucid exposition of the idea of “reason of state”
during the Renaissance and its aftermath. Malcolm's long introduction (123 pp.) is superb, actually more interesting than the pamphlet that is put in its historical context--a translation by Hobbes that is an intervention in the Thirty Years' War on behalf of the Hapsburgs. In these passages Malcolm identifies various currents in the "reason of state" literature, and draws attention to "red" and "black" interpretations of Tacitist (and Machiavellian) ideas. He intimates that we should pay attention to Justus Lipsius, a figure who once had a huge influence and was counted among the wise, but is now largely forgotten.
The idea that politics should be understood in terms of the
pursuit of interest was supported by more general ideas about human nature and
human action, derived from many sources, including the Augustinian theological
tradition (with its emphasis on man's fallen nature) and the various currents
of thought that can be described as Renaissance naturalism. What they all had
in common was an assumption that human beings would not naturally follow the
dictates of conscience or 'right reason', and that they would seek a 'good'
conceived more narrowly in terms of benefit or advantage; it followed that
their interactions might often be conflictual, and that social or political
coexistence must depend on artifice and discipline rather than natural harmony.
In the modern political literature, these ideas were most forcefully expressed
by Machiavelli and his followers (and by the historian Guicciardini); the
Machiavellian influence on the `ragion di stato' tradition was fundamental. But late Renaissance humanists, searching for
models and authorities in the ancient world, found a near-equivalent to
Machiavelli's teachings in the writings of Tacitus; and, insofar as Tacitus'
imperial Rome differed from the world of small principalities, independent republics,
and politically active citizenries described by Machiavelli, it seemed actually
closer to the world of sprawling monarchies and febrile court-politics they now
inhabited. Tacitus' writings offered a radical alternative both to the
Aristotelian textbook tradition and to the pious moralism of Christian advice
literature; they made politics seem, instead, like a complex and ruthless game
in which all players are self-interested and power is the prize. On this view,
the common people, though always eager to advance their own crude interests,
are stupid and easily tricked; an ambitious demagogue can deceive them, making
them think that they will advance their interests when they will in fact only
promote his, and a wise ruler can, and in some ways should, deceive them, both
by keeping them in awe of unknown powers, and by giving them those 'simulacra'
of liberty which will make them content. Much of the art of ruling thus
consists of making deceptions of various kinds: these, the `arcana imperii',
were easily identified with the stratagems of the Machiavellian prince.
Part of the attraction of Tacitist political literature was
that it offered the reader a key to unlocking all kinds of mysteries of state
(the same attraction, indeed, that was exerted by analyses of `ragion di
stato'): politics thus became decipherable and legible. But opinions differed
as to whether the discussion of these arcana was, on the one hand, a way of
alerting the people to the tricks of their rulers, or, on the other, a way of
teaching rulers how to trick the people more expertly (or at least, a way of
explaining to some people that such stratagems were necessary and justified):
one classic study has divided the Tacitan authors of this period into 'red' and
'black' Tacitists—that is, republican and monarchical—on those grounds.
Nevertheless, the basic assumptions of these various Tacitist writers about the
nature of politics and government did not significantly diverge. Among the most
controversial of those was the assumption that religion must be regarded as an
instrument of rule. Fear of unknown powers was a very powerful factor in human
psychology (here early modern Tacitism went hand in hand with the Epicurean
psychology of religion found in Lucretius). It followed that religion should be
carefully managed and controlled by the ruler, for more than one reason:
because it could shore up his power; because if it lay outside his control, it
could be used against him by demagogues and rivals; and because, as Machiavelli
had argued, the power of religion over human behaviour was such that a religion
of the wrong sort could have a harmful effect on the people, and thus on the
strength of the state as a whole.
While the underlying assumptions of the Tacitists about
human nature and politics were shared by most writers on `ragion di stato',
this Tacitist (and Machiavellian) instrumentalizing of religion offended many
of them deeply. The genre of treatises on reason of state which Botero
inaugurated was strongly motivated by a desire to oppose this line of argument;
many of the authors of these treatises, indeed, were Jesuits, and if one
followed only their self-understanding of what they were doing one would say
that they were engaged in a re-Christianizing—or, to be precise,
re-Catholicizing—of political theory, fully in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation.
(One of their greatest bugbears was the `politique' tradition of writers such
as Bodin, whose experience of the French Wars of Religion had led them to
recommend the toleration of religious minorities for the sake of peace; the
Jesuit writers saw this as a Machiavellian subjection of religion to the state,
and fiercely criticized it.) However, while they thought that they were
confronting the Machiavellian-Tacitist doctrine head-on, the fact that they
shared so many of its underlying assumptions meant that their whole style of
argument tended, in some ways, to run parallel to it, or even to reinforce it.
Against the Machiavellian claim that Christianity was enfeebling, and in
opposition to any idea that religion should be merely instrumentalized by the
state, they wanted to show that Christianity should be the very basis of the
state, and that a state so grounded in true religion would be more successful
and more advantageous. . . .
A different approach was taken by a number of writers whose
attitude was less exaltedly theological than that of the Counter-Reformation
theorists. The key exponent of the alternative approach was the Flemish humanist
(and editor of Tacitus) Justus Lipsius, whose treatise on politics, Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex—a
work much admired for the elegant way in which it wove together a tissue of
quotations from classical sources—exerted a huge influence. Like the Jesuit
writers, Lipsius subscribed to some fundamentally Machiavellian and Tacitist
assumptions about the nature of politics; unlike them, he did not believe that
it was possible to construct, even in theory, a perfectly virtuous 'reason of
state', accepting instead that the art of ruling must make some compromises
with vice. In his scheme of politics and government, there were three levels of
fraudulent behaviour: 'light' (involving dissimulation, the concealment of
intentions), 'medium' (involving the active deception, or corruption by
bribery, of enemies), and 'great' (involving such actions as breach of treaty).
The first, he wrote, was advisable, the second tolerable, and the third
unacceptable. His justification for this position was framed, at first sight,
in merely quantitative terms: 'Wine does not cease to be wine if it is lightly
diluted with water; nor does prudence cease to be prudence, if you add some
little drops of fraud.' But he went on to add, importantly, that the permitted
frauds were tolerable only when done for the common good; any deception not
aimed at that end was a great sin.
* * *
Noel Malcolm, Reason
of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years’ War: An Unknown Translation by
Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 95-98, 100-101.
