Working paper
17th Century Political Cartesianism and Its Opponents, Or Imaging the State from point fixe
In the last decades of the 16th century, Giovanni Botero (ca. 1544-1617) and Tommaso Bozio (1548-1610) put forward versions of political science that, in their opinion, disproved the principal points of Machiavelli’s political doctrine. In my paper I am going to address primarily Botero’s treatises Della ragione di Stato (1589) and Delle cause della grandezza e magnificienza delle città (1588), and Bozio’s De robore bellico diuturnis et amplis catholicorum regnis adversus Machiavellum (1593) and De ruinis gentium et Regnorum adversus impios Politicos libri VIII (1598). I am going to focus on some of Botero and Bozio’s ways of reasoning which, while enabling them to criticize Machiavelli’s political doctrine (although I never mean to say their reading of his texts was adequate!), demonstrate the extent to which these Counter-Reformation thinkers and apologists of the Holy See’s authority depend in their concepts on the author of The Prince and The Discourses on Livy. Of course, this paper cannot cover all the illustrative instances of this kind. Therefore, I will only cite the ones that, in my opinion, allow us to see the ways in which certain points of the so-called ‘Machiavelli doctrine’, while being criticized (see example #1), were ‘smuggled’ by Botero into his theory of governance and by Bozio into his new versions of church history. These new political theories were based on ‘strong’ arguments that were attributed to Machiavelli and most sharply criticized because they obviously contradicted to Christian morality. 1) Justification of manipulative governance. Anthropological and sociological ideas repeatedly articulated in the writings of Machiavelli justified the ruler using violence against his subjects. In Botero, Machiavelli’s rhetoric of salutory violence was replaced by a rhetoric of benevolent control. Whereas Machiavelli based his discourse on rejecting classical ethics, Botero based his on negating the discourse of Machiavelli rather than on rehabilitating the classical ethic discourse. Quite often, themes and provisions of the Ragione di Stato are rebuttals referring to similar themes and provisions in The Prince: quite obviously, Botero speaks of the comforts and pleasures for subjects because Machiavelli speaks of the fear they should have and the necessity of violence against them (see Example #2 - [Dell`utilità]). Whereas Machiavelli recommends the ruler to show his subjects terrible performances like Ramiro d’Orco’s execution, Botero recommends things peaceful and pleasant like good architecture, beautiful open landscapes, Carlo Borromeo-style religious feasts and sports. In his model of society, pleasure and convenience are the main needs of the subjects. Good knowledge of these needs allows the ruler to achieve all his goals and even to regulate the population numbers in different provinces of the state. Botero develops most sophisticated measures of ‘indirect’ control over the population, i.e. a kind of control that is executed not by way of orders, encouragement or punishment, but by creating an environment in which people can’t but behave the way the authorities want them to (s. example #3 for the establishment of a university and overcoming with the help of landscape planning the inconvenience of the city being filled by hard-to-control hyperactive youth, and example #4 for recommendations concerning the demoralization of disloyal subjects). 2) The secular use of the Christian religion. J. Najemy and V. Sullivan’s interpretations of Machiavelli’s attitude towards Christianity in general and to Roman Catholicism in particular allow us to gauge the extent to which Botero depends on Machiavelli in his thesis on the usefulness of the Christian religion for rulers, both Catholic and non-Catholic (see example #5). They also make it possible to clarify the genesis of Bozio’s signa Ecclesiae doctrine, including the section concerning signa temporalis felicitatis and the immanentist interpretation of what the Gospel promises to the faithful (see example #6). Analyzing the composition of Botero’s Della ragione di Stato we see how a specific political and theological logic is constructed in this work which makes it possible to seamlessly combine Christianity as a control know-how understood in an immanentist way, on the one hand, and Christianity as a transcendent source of authority and, at the same time, its eschatological horizon, on the other (see example #7 - the story about the rise of the house of Habsburg, only a few pages away from the abovementioned case made for the secular usefulness of Christianity, #5). 3) The idea of Christianity as the idea of total power. Posing as emanation of God’s authority over the world and mankind, Christian authorities model themselves on Him not only in being universal and ubiquitous, with their omniscience extending from global historic processes to the smallest details of the most insignificant man’s everyday life, but also in being incessantly and unsleepingly active. In Botero, the strength and the appeal of the ‘disciplinary power’ is based on an illegitimate pairing: minimalist anthropology and preference for manipulative measures found in Machiavelli are combined with classical teleology of political action. A Christian state of universal righteousness coupled with well-being takes the place of the Machiavellian terrorist regime that is radical and unattractive for many. A thorough control over the subjects that manifests itself in patronizing them on a daily basis is just propaedeutics, a demo of what will happen during the Last Judgment. This high degree of penetration into the life of every ordinary mortal and the desire to regulate every moment of their ordinary existence matches the importance of the ultimate task. The eschatological horizon is gradually turning into a habitual backdrop for ordinary bureaucratic procedures and centralized day-to-day dispatching of the subjects’ work, military, intellectual and other constructive efforts. Christian authorities take care of all societal institutions, even those whose presence in a Christian state always represented a problem for theologians (for example, refuting Machiavelli’s thesis that Christian soldiers lack heroic spirit and love of freedom as a result of popes’ misinterpreting Christianity to favor ozio rather than virtù, Bozio makes a case for Christian warriors excelling all others at the art of war, which, he insists, is primarily thanks to the Roman pontiffs who founded military monastic orders, an unprecedented institution serving solely the aim of promoting the art of war: see example #8) . Botero prefers to work with social and spatial totality (cf. his Relazioni universali, 1591, for geographic totality), whereas Bozio deals with historical totality. In order to refute two or three of Machiavelli’s points, he deploys whole new versions of world history: a history of proving the righteousness and the power of the Catholic Church and the truth of its teachings; a history of mankind in terms of improving the arts of politics and warfare; a history of human happiness from paganism to Bozio’s times. The main proof of the Church and the pontiffs’ authority being established by God is, according to Bozio, the spread of Catholicism throughout the known world. His version of world history has it that Catholic nations always conquered non-Catholics, and only nations that fell away from Catholicism and allowed heretics or non-Christians to rise were defeated. Bozio does not even shrink from paltering with facts of recent past. He tells about battles in which Catholics allegedly lost but a dozen of soldiers while their enemies lost hundreds of thousands. This kind of reasoning strikingly resembles that of Botero, who incorporates the pious story of Rudolph of Habsburg in his Della ragione di Stato. In Botero and Bozio’s discourse, Christianity tends to turn from a meaningful teaching into a source of authority (i.e. an authoritative self-identification of the pontiff) and, on the other hand, into a simple technique of persuasion and control to implement the pope’s authority. One very important consequence of this is that, apart from their tendency to reduce religion to mere technique and name, apologists of papal authority also excessively expand and absolutize the name of religion, identifying religion with their own authority and with this authority’s ambition to turn the entire universe to its domain. The source of the ecclesiastical authority (and of the pontiffs’ power, too) is thus substituted: the belief in absolute supremacy and sanctity of the Christian doctrine gives place to what Carl Schmitt called representation of a totality transcending all doctrines and all sanctity. In the writings of Counter-Reformation apologists, the Catholic Church turns into a symbol of the pure idea of totality, an ideal of unlimited domination that erases all differences between the present and the future, between the already implemented and the yet planned, between the material and the spiritual, between the inner and the outer, between one’s own and other people’s things, between self-motivated and forced actions, between the conscience and sense of responsibility of a person and the vigilance of the state exercising external control of each citizen’s conscience.
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