Unit 5: Political Thought of the New Age

At the Dawn of the New Age

By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. In Europe feudalism and new tradesman led to a suppression of the strongest force, that is church. Church, which was one of the most important institutions of the Middle Age, became the victim of social forces, on which the absolute monarchy depended. Church administrators increasingly came under the rule of the kingdoms, and in the end the legal authority of the church disappeared. These changes that appeared in the entire Europe were gathered around Machiavelli’s personality, which was hard to understand and which was full of contrasts.

Machiavelli and Politics

Nicola Machiavelli was born on May 3, 1469 in the city of Florence in Italy. During his lifetime, Italy suffered from an economic collapse due to its ever-growing political weakness, dissolution of feudal structures and disunity on capitalism, which was about to emerge. There was also an endless fight for power between the bourgeoisie and nobility in cities where the middle class had reached a certain level of power. Machiavelli’s city, Florence, was one of the most typical scenes of the fight for power between these classes.

His personal objective was to return to his active duty in the state. His second objective arose from rejection of the past. According to Machiavelli, the Italian city states, including Florence, often had instability for that reason and they obviously tended to decline. As a result, they were dominated by external powers such as Spain, France or the Papacy. Machiavelli’s second objective was of political: to ensure stability and to free entire Italy from any kind of secular or religious external control. Therefore, The Prince goes on these two lines that overlap at the same time. According to Machiavelli, violence may be a necessary means in politics, but it is rarely sufficient.

Machiavelist ruler must be both a lion and a fox at the same time: he must know in which case cunning and trick yield better results than directly using violence. Machiavelli often expressed that there is evil in man’s nature. However, this conceptualization of evil is not of religious but of earthly. According to Machiavelli, the instinct that lies at the bottom of human behavior is the instinct of ownership. Because the human greed does not have a limit, individual desires and interests constantly conflict.

The protestant Reformation and Martin Luther

As a religious faction, the reformation movement took place in the early 1500s in Europe. It emerged as a political, intellectual and religious reaction to the established religious tradition of Catholicism of the Medieval era and demanded a return to the basic principles of Christianity. As the movement, became popular and had a great deal of support from the public particularly in Germany during the 1520s, it was able to establish its own church. These reformation movements regarded themselves as the ones serving for “the action of the gospel” and reconstructing, restoring and reforming the original religion. In other words, what they aimed was a return to the uncontaminated core source of spiritual Christianity without adding anything in an undegenerated situation.

The fact that the church tried to centralize and protect its status quo led to the questioning of the Catholic universalism represented by the Roman Church. This religious universality would be dissolved with Renaissance and Reformation. The technological development that laid the groundwork for this new social formation was that the printing technology had been renewed. At such a time, Martin Luther lit the fuse of the Reformation movement. On October 31, 1517, he posted The Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the church of Wittenberg Palace. These theses had social and political demands as much as theological ones. These demands had three main consequences.

1. Catholic world was divided.
2. The churches were brought under the control of the states.
3. The bourgeoisie used these these demands as a weapon against its opponents such as aristocracy and the Roman Catholic Church.

For Luther, the essence of religion lies in an inner life that is essentially mystical and nontransferable. One of the issues that Luther emphasized was using force. Luther does not mention the state as a union of institutions operated systematically but as a political power (the princes), who uses force in order to maintain the order and its being legitimacy is in the presence of God. Luther, who expresses that the first and the last action of human will is nothing but devotion, states that the only thing to be done is to obey the governors. On the contrary, Luther’s followers did not refrain from heading for a complete elimination of the church order without paying attention to obedience approach and this appeared especially in the Peasants’ Revolt.

Jean Calvin

French theologian and reformist Calvin became a citizen of Geneva in 1559. His reformist and polemical work on church, theology and biblical interpretations made him one of the most prominent figures of reformist church in France, Holland, England and Central Europe. Calvin claims that earthly power is responsible to fulfill religious and divine duties, and in this he differs from Luther. The limits of obedience are the limits of earthly power fulfilling the religious duties. When the earthly power is far from fulfilling these duties, the prior responsibility of the citizen is obedience to God. However, it is not so clear in Calvin’s thought how disobedience may occur. Calvin claims that social order organized in accord with the true religion is composed of three elements:

1. The Governors, the source of duty is God.
2. Laws, as the products of natural justice imprinted in all minds by God.
3. The Governed, who are responsible to obey the governors as much as the laws of God.

Sovereignity and Jean Bodin

Bodin, who was a French philosopher and a political writer from Angers, was born in 1529. After studying law at the University of Angers, he went to Toulose to study history, metaphysics, mathematics and astronomy. As a result of a career design in the legal field, he entered politics, took a place in the palace and entered Henry III’s brother Duke d’Alen.on’s service. Since Bodin objected to the alienation of sovereignty and to the war waged against the Huguenots, he retired in 1577 after winning the king’s affection. Bodin defines the state as the administration of various family members and their common properties stem from the dominant power. Here are three principles of sovereignty for Bodin as given below.

1. Sovereignty is continuous because beyond the changing governments, the society remains the same. The continuity of sovereignty results from the idea of continuity of political society.
2. The continuous power makes law for the subjects, changes the law, makes the new one. The sovereign governor is not subject to the law.
3. Sovereignty, above all, is the power to make laws for everyone generally, and specifically and to change laws.

Bodin’s preference for the best form of government is monarchy. Bodin bases his preference for monarchy on three basic reasons.

1. By stating that all-natural laws lead us to monarchy, he claims that monarchy is the most appropriate form of state to nature.
2. He expresses that the talented people in the country could come into prominence only in the monarchy.
3. He asserts that the fact that sovereignty that is absolute, indivisible and continuous, can only take place in the form of monarchy.

Thomas More and Utopia

Thomas More, who was the most progressivist and the most fanatic thinker of the English Renaissance, was born in London on February 7, 1478, and was beheaded on July 6, 1535. More is mostly known as the author of the book titled Utopia (1516). He is also known to have been a lawyer, a politician, a diplomat, one of the leading figures of the Northern European Renaissance and later one of the advocates of the established belief in his age. He took education in London and Oxford.

As in all parts of Europe, the problems arising from Protestant Reformation in the 16th century overshadowed all of the other considerations in England as well. The political demand of various churches concealed the serious economic disorders that emerged parallel to the rise of modern trade and the collapse of the old. Utopia, which was written under these conditions, is a satire. The origin of the word utopia, which was created by Thomas More, is Greek. More used the prefix “ou”meaning “not” in front of the word “topos” meaning “place” and created this term which means nowhere, no place, anywhere, or placeless. He called his book Utopia, which he published in Latin in 1516. Since that date, the term has been generally used for a place that is outside the known boundaries of geographical world and human experience world.

Thomas Hobbes and the State

Hobbes was born on 5th April 1588 in Malmesbury. His family came from middle class. Her mother was the daughter of a farmer; whereas his father was a low-level church man, and he abandoned the family. Hobbes was raised by his uncle. At an early age, he tended to classical languages, so he went to Oxford. Here, he was recommended to the earl of Devonshire. He tutored the Earl’s son. He spent the next part of his life in Cavendish’s mansion.

Hobbes succeeds in making a stringent transition from organic metaphors to mechanical metaphors to describe politics. For him, the state is not a biological but mechanical body. This emphasis on mechanical body takes Hobbes’ thoughts to a different level:

1. Stance against religious authority and the scholastic philosophy that feeds it.
2. Hobbes’ mechanical metaphor removes the political arena from the dominant religious notions about the divine right of the kings and of those who are blessed by God.
3. Unlike Machiavelli, Hobbes thinks that performing permanent acts with regard to political creation ceases to be a job of great people, so a red-blooded prince is replaced with a bodiless system that can create stability without the help of charismatic leaders.

Hobbes lists the chain of causes that creates the state of war as follows:

1. People are equal in the state of nature.
2. Inequality causes insecurity.
3. The result of insecurity is war.

The Characteristics of the Covenant

Sovereignty rights are identical whether it is established by a covenant or by subjugation. Some of the characteristics of the covenant are as follows:

1. First of all, as men establish the state by consensus, not by a natural means, state is artificial.
2. What men agree upon is that they surrender their rights to the state in order to be in peace and safe.
3. Each and every man equally surrender their rights to the one and the same entity.
4. The sovereign is not included, only the governed subjects are. The relationship between the sovereign and the citizens is one of inequality.
5. Any individual who agrees, authorizes Leviathan in decisions in his name. The superior government or sovereign power has the right to use all the powers and opportunities of all the people.
6. Only the sovereign power can keep the covenant valid and sustainable.

John Locke and the Right of Property

John Locke was born in Somerset in 1632, as the son of a rich family. He began his career as a medicine student in the Church of Christ. Before the revolution, in the period of the first Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, John Locke’s career continued. In the period of King James II, he involved in a counter-regime conspiracy, and he was exiled to Holland. During his years in Oxford, he wrote Essays on the Law of Nature (1660) and An Essay on Toleration (1667). His book Two Treaties of Government brought him enormous reputation. He spent his last fifteen years with a strong political power, as he was assigned to a high rank political position.

Locke’s Political Thought

Locke’s political thought is based on a basic metaphysical law that explains the political power and the administrative law. His epistemology privileges reason and empirical experience. He claims that human mind is a tabula rasa [blank slate]. All individuals have potential dispositions and capacities. In this context, Locke is a follower of Hobbes: He claims that ideas emerge from individual experiences that influence senses and actions emerge from these rational ideas. Locke posits the natural law in such a way that corresponds to human behavior and moral law. Natural law indicates normative codes of what ought to be. In this sense, it is universal. Natural law corresponds to rational law. Locke’s nature is defined by equality, freedom and rationality.

Equality: Equality, according to Locke, is to have the equal rights for everyone to attain their own freedom, without being subject to any other’s will and authority.

Freedom : Every individual has the right to make use of himself and his property in the way he wishes; however, he is not free to destroy himself or his property without a higher purpose than of its protection.

Rationalism : Hobbes claims that equality and freedom direct us to rationalism. When human individuals are supposed to be rational, it means that they have the ability to make a contract.

The State of War

Locke does not depict a fearsome natural state, but he is hesitant in this issue. A harmless natural state may well transform into a state of war in a sudden and unbeknown fashion. This ambivalence makes human individuals leave the natural state. Locke claims that the cause of the state of war is not a superior will that holds the authority to judge and punish, but a will to subjugate the other with an absolute power, and to enslave the other depriving him of his freedoms.

The Concept of Property

According to Locke, property is a natural right. His initial idea is that everything in the world is the common property of everyone. Locke sets some limits to property:

The limit of needs : We must leave enough, and as good, to those who need it.

The limit of spoilage and destruction: God does not give the world and its possessions to us to spoil or destruct them. These are supplied to meet the need of individuals. Individuals should not possess more than they need.

The limit of labor: Ad individual can only possess what he contributed his labor for.

There is a reason why Locke focuses on property before exploring the establishment of the state by the social contract: As property is a right gained in the natural state, and the limitations to possess money and property disappear in the same state, political power does not have the right to remove this particular right, just as the right to live and right to freedom.

The Social Contract

According to Locke’s social contract, political power is necessary, with the condition that it should not be absolute. It is necessary because the lack of a common authority would make the society vulnerable to the assault of others. The lack of a common judge with authority leads to a state of war. Locke’s social contract has two aspects: In the first, the individual, knowingly and willfully, gets his properties out of their natural states, and agrees on gathering together with others to compose a single community. In the second phase, the individual constitutes and authorizes a government in order to act in the name of the majority.

According to Locke, the reasons of transition from natural state to political society are as follows:

1. The lack of a situated and commonly recognized law of common consent to refer in case of conflicts.
2. The lack of a common authority which can make decisions based on such a law.
3. The lack of an authority (jurisdiction) to exercise a punishment as a result of a rightful decision.

David Hume

Hume was born in 1711 into a Lowland Scottish gentry family fond of claiming noble descent from the ancient house of Home. Young David Hume was a youth of ‘acumen and parts’, as they used to say, fond of his books (especially Virgil and Cicero), and was ambitious for ‘literary’, that is to say intellectual and philosophical, fame from a very early age. After a gentleman’s education—he was a student at Edinburgh—Hume was pushed by his family in the direction of the law, which he had no taste for, and of business, for which he had neither taste nor aptitude. He had a small private fortune which he thought could keep him if he went abroad, and he spent two years in France, returning in 1737 with part of his Treatise of Human Nature ready for publication in London. Like most of the books Hume was to publish, it was not well or widely received.

What is peculiar to Hume’s exploration of morals is his two ways of analyzing reasonable and true propositions. The former belongs to the relationship among ideas, and the latter to that between ideas and phenomena. Secondly, according to Hume, reason is (and has to be) the slave of passions. Moreover, he claims that a particular passion cannot be considered as rational or irrational.

In sum, there is little or no objective moral content to the political theories of Hobbes and Hume. There is especially no reliance on the morality of keeping promises or contractual agreements. There is only social scientific explanatory content to any such agreement on a form of government or on a sovereign. Again, because Hobbes thinks we are obliged to obey even a government that has come to power over us via conquest, there is no moral claim for our obedience to it. Through its power, however obtained, government merely obliges us. Whereas for Locke, contract makes government right, for Hobbes, at best, it merely makes government happen, and for Hume, the whole apparatus of contracting is a silly idea.

Benedict (Barusch) Spinoza

Spinoza was born in Amsterdam in 1632. His ancestors were Spanish Jews who had to migrate to Holland due to religious oppression in 14th century in Spain. Spinoza spent his entire life in Holland. He wrote on politics, metaphysics and ethics. He had correspondence with many prominent European philosophers. He earned his living by grinding lenses. At first glance, his political thoughts may seem to be a collage of the religious, scientific and political concepts of writers of the classical period, of the middle age and of his own period.

Spinoza claims that what seem strange, absurd or bad to us in nature do so since we cannot grasp the elements and their organizing principles in its entirety. Therefore, it can be considered that the point of departure for Spinoza’s political theory is similar to that of Hobbes. They both claim the following propositions to be the basics of their political thoughts:

1. Men are conditioned by the nature in such a way that they realize their own benefits.
2. Political order or the state, although it limits men, is based on rationality.

In Spinoza’s thought, the theoretical privilege of democracy is expressed through the closely interlinked usage of the concepts of the social covenant and of reason. Every civil society can be considered as the outcome of a pact, whether tacit or explicit. It is rational to try to escape from the poverty and insecurity of the state of nature, in which men are guided exclusively by their particular appetites and desires. Spinoza aims at leaving a room for democratic participation in monarchic and aristocratic models, since he considers democracy as the most natural organizational model. As democracy entails the right to elect and to be elected for the largest part of people, it is the most rational way to keep the balance of interest between the governors and the governed.