Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age

Front matter

'OMMERCIAL REPUBLICANISM | THE DUTCH GOLDEN AGE

THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF JOHAN & PIETER DE LA COURT

ARTHUR WESTSTEIJN

Contents

A Note on References

INTRODUCTION van a AEE EEE 1 I THE MAKING OF AN CEUVRE annen senen soenensoenen senen soenensoenenveenen ven 25 A Humanist Education nanasan ausoenenseen eneen eneeun eneen eneen eneenenseenense 26 The Making of an Œuvre na aaaaronnanovenns venne ennveensereneeceneeeens een 50 II THE RHETORIC OF THE MARKET aan neenon oenen soenen senen soenensoenensoenen sen 69 Persuading the Passions eerte uneeeenveceneecanseeanseenne 71 In the Public Arena: Rhetoric in Action naa nenne sense nennens: 87 Citizenship in Theory and Practice naan eee 157 The Ethics of Self-Interest uns sanvensennseneense neen eunsensenssensensens 168 Representing the Wise Merchant... naan aansoeunsesenevensecenneeenseen 184 Conclusion: Commercial Citizenship in Perspective … 200

IV THE COMMERCIAL COMMONWEALTH

Introduction

New Year’s Eve 1672. On the threshold of what would become the most disastrous year in the Dutch Golden Age, Pieter de la Court, a textile entrepreneur from Leiden, was in Hamburg. Business had brought him there, but De la Court’s expertise went well beyond the intricacies of the market: in the wee hours of the night he took up his pen and wrote a long letter to a like-minded author on the other side of the North Sea, the English republican James Harrington. De la Court told Harrington that the plans being laid for a future French-English attack against the Dutch Republic were unlikely to be successful. War, he argued, would only serve the hegemonic cause of Louis XIV, and the English people would therefore “rather see the king of France reduced than the states of the United Netherlands”. Moreover, even if England did attack, its armies would be no match for the Dutch, who had “with small means, but because of greater frugality, wisdom and resolution — which are generally to be found in all republics — endured and humiliated the remarkably larger resources and power of the king of England.”

With these words De la Court claimed the superiority of the Dutch Republic, which was prospering because of its commerce, liberty and concord, qualities not to be found in England: “Since England is ruled by a king and all powerful kingdoms are mostly restrained by interior or foreign wars that their kings deliberately wage against neighbours, therefore it is apparent that during those times trade and navigation could not be maintained there at all.” In short, the English, subjected to the arbitrary

' Pieter de la Court, “Consideratién over den gevreesden oorlog, die de koningen van Engeland ende Vrankrijk souden mogen ofte konnen aandoen,” addressed to James Harrington, written on 31 December 1671 and signed on 1 January 1672. The original draft of this letter is in the The Hague Royal Library, Ms 75 C37, fols. 273-282. Apparently, De la Court wrote the letter at the explicit request of Harrington, but there is no evidence of any other correspondence. The letter is published in J.H. Kernkamp (ed.), “Twee ‘niet ter drukperse bereide’ geschriften van Pieter de la Court,” Bijdragen en mededelingen van het historisch genootschap 56 (1935), 195-214, 198-199: “... veel liever den koning van Vrankrijk als de staten der Vereenigde Neederlanden verminderd sagen … met kleine geldmiddelen, door grotere spaarsaam-, wijs- en standvastigheid — die gemeenelik in alle republiken gevonden werden — die merkelik meerdere subsidiën en magt des konings van Engeland verduurd ende te schande gemaakt hebben.”

* [bidem, 205: “Want vermits Engeland geregeerd werd van eenen koning ende alle magtige koningryken den meesten tijd onderworpen zijn binnenlandse oorlogen, ofte ook greed of a monarch, would never be able to achieve the same commercial splendour as the United Provinces. And therefore, as De la Court went on to explain to Harrington, England should not try to subdue the Dutch but rather join them in a coalition against France, a state with a comparable outlook and therefore England’s real adversary. As De la Court concluded:

According to the interest of the king of England and his subjects it is totally unadvisable to form an alliance with the king of France to subdue the Free Netherlands. On the contrary, it very well suits the interests of the king of England and his subjects to form with other close neighbours and especially with the State of the Free Netherlands an alliance for mutual protection against that all-powerful and otherwise all-swallowing France.

The further events of the following year would prove that De la Court had been far too optimistic in his assumptions. England (or at least its king) did find it in its interest to join the French in their assault on the United Provinces, eventually with catastrophic results for the Dutch. That summer, when almost the whole country was occupied by the invading troops and only the province of Holland could stand firm by flooding part of the land as a natural barrier against the enemy armies, the republican government of ‘True Liberty’ collapsed and the Prince of Orange was called back to power by an outraged populace. Four days after Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt survived a first assault on his life (only to be massacred in an orgy of violence two months later), De la Court started to make safe his belongings and fled for Antwerp. He did so for good reason: according to legend, on one of those hot days of the summer of 1672 an unruly group of Orangists gathered in front of De la Court’s former house in Leiden. When they did not find who they were looking for, the aggressors bound a dog with its belly cut-open to the tree in front of the house, put a candle in its buitenlandse, die hunne koningen teegen de naburen moedwilliglik voeren, soo is kennelik, dat gedurende denselven tijd de koopmanschap ende zeevaart aldaar gansch niet gehanteerd soude kunnen warden.”

3 Ibidem, 213: “... dat volgens het interest des konings van Engeland ende syner onderdanen gansch ongeraden is met den koninge van Vrankrijk een verbond aan te gaan ter verdrukkinge der Vrye Neederlanden. Ende dat het in teegendeel met des konings van Engeland ende syner onderdanen interessen seer wel overeenkomt met andere omleggende naburen ende insonderheid met den Staat der Vrye Neederlanden te maken verbonden ter gemeene bescherminge teegen dat oovermagtige ende andersins alles inslokken willende Vrankrijk.” De la Court’s argument is strikingly similar to a pamphlet of the English republican Slingsby Bethel, written almost exactly a year before, The Present Interest of England Stated (London, 1671), which in turn explicitly refers to De la Court's Interest van Holland (1662).

cloven body and left a note saying “De la Court, if you won't shut your mouth, we'll treat you as we did this dog".^ Not eager to verify the truth of this menace, De la Court chose the surest way out.

De la Court's reputation as a spokesman of the previous regime, which so firmly discredited him in the eyes of the Orangist populace, dated back to the 1660s. At the beginning of that decade, he had published a series of political treatises about the nature of good government and its practical implications for the situation in Holland, treatises that were partly written by his younger brother Johan, who died in 1660 before any of them had been published, and partly by Pieter de la Court himself. Together, the brothers De la Court had thus constructed an ceuvre that was highly contested and debated throughout the Republic. With their radical plea for a truly republican government devoid of any monarchical element such as a Stadholder, for far-reaching religious toleration and comprehensive economic liberty, the brothers were seen by many as advocates of the disputed government in power, the oligarchic regime of regents gathered around De Witt. In the heated political debate of the period, a stream of pamphlets followed which denounced the "false calumnies and adorned lies", the “never sufficiently despised”, “rebellious” writings of De la Court, this “new born Dutch Cromwell alias Leiden Quaker".5 Such insinuations were particularly powerful in 1672 when the country, on the brink of total collapse, needed a scapegoat to blame for its downfall.

Yet the works of the brothers De la Court are not only of interest in the context of this turbulent era. Above all, they stand out as a highly significant contribution to early-modern European political thought in general. Merging various elements from natural law theory, reason of state literature, the new philosophy' of the age and classical and contemporary historical writing, their ceuvre provides a distinct argument for a republican

4 "La Court zoo je niet snoert Uw mond, Doen we je als deezen hond." The story is told in B. W. Wttewaall, Proeve uit een onuitgegeven staathuishoudkundig geschrift, het Welvaren der stad Leyden (Leiden, 1845), xxiv-xxv, but its sources are unclear.

5 Haeghs Hof-Praetje, ofte 't samen-spraeck tusschen een Hagenaer, Amsterdammer, ende Leyenaar. Op ende tegens de valsche calumnien ende versierde leugenen van Pieter la Court, gestelt in sijn alsoo genoemde Intrest van Holland ende gronden van 't Hollands welvaren (Leiden, 1662); Een onverwelckbare kroon, gevlochten op het noyt-genoegh verachte boeck, genaemt de Hollantsche Intrest, door Pieter la Court [1662]; Op de op-roerige schriften van Pieter la Court, door hem uyt-gegeven onder de naem van V.D.H. en D.C. [1662]; De gansche distructie van den nieuw-gebooren Hollantschen Cromwel alias Leydtschen Quaker; genaemt t'Intrest van Hollandt, ofte gronden van 's Hollants welvaren (Schiedam, [1663]); Helle-vreucht over den herbooren, ende nieu-regeerende Hollantschen Cromwel alias s'Hollandts Intrest ende Stadthouders Regeringh Beschrijver [1662].

society in which liberty and commerce intertwine. Their ideal republic is a commonwealth of free citizens who engage in virtuous trade, harnessing their self-love to the common good in a harmony of public and private interests — a harmony that is not constrained by the arbitrary powers of others (as happened, according to De la Court, in Harrington’s England) but rationally regulated by the rule of law. In a highly rhetorical style, crammed with popular expressions and jokes, vivid historical examples and Aesopian fables, the brothers De la Court set out their theory in the vernacular, clearly addressing a broad contemporary audience. Nonetheless, the appeal of their works has reached wider horizons. Though obviously being a product of the time and place in which it was formulated, the political thought of the De la Courts transcends its relevance within this context as it amounts to the most passionate republican theory in all of Dutch history — and one of the most radical critiques of monarchy in Ancien Régime Europe.

This book provides a comprehensive, strongly contextualized analysis and interpretation of the political thought of the brothers De la Court. Starting from the letter to Harrington in which De la Court emphasized the intrinsic link between republican liberty and commercial splendour, it argues that their ceuvre pivots on the unconditional embrace of commerce as the mainstay of republican politics. Through their self-representation as ‘wise merchants’, outspoken truth-tellers schooled in political insight and mercantile expertise, the De la Courts maintained that a true republic could only be a commercial commonwealth, and that trade could only prosper under a truly republican government. As the letter to Harrington reveals, this commercial republicanism originated from the mercantile culture of the Dutch Republic, yet within a context of international comparison, collaboration and competition, crossing the North Sea from Hamburg to London, discussing the combined fate of England, France and the Netherlands, employing the international concept of ‘interest’ as the general measure of the res publica, the common good. Accordingly, the republican thought of the De la Courts must be studied by looking at the interaction between the Dutch and European contexts of their intellectual endeavour.

The general purpose of this book is therefore twofold. First, I intend to show how the brothers De la Court, armed with a large theoretical arsenal of international political languages, engaged in a wide-ranging critique of the Dutch republican experience during the seventeenth century. The rhetorical characteristics of this critique reveal in particular the importance of rhetoric and ideological conflict in the political culture of the

Dutch Golden Age. Secondly, I aim to argue that the commercial core of the republican thought of the De la Courts, formulated in the most successful early-modern republic at the height of its power, is of fundamental significance for our understanding of the development of republicanism in Europe at large between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. As an ideology of active civic participation in politics, free of any form of arbitrary domination, seventeenth-century republicanism was strongly informed by the rise of commercial society.

REPUBLICANISM: THE DEBATE

Was there ever a single unitary tradition of republican thought in early-modern Europe? Whoever considers the recent historiographical debate on the ‘republican heritage’ should hesitate to answer this question in the affirmative. On the one hand, grand-scale attempts to give an all-encompassing overview of the republican tradition have been rightly disputed because of their one-sidedness and lack of attention to geographical variety. On the other, fruitful research of the diverse and dispersed aspects of this tradition has apparently fragmented an unequivocal concept of what republicanism then actually means. Therefore, one may wonder whether it still makes sense to speak about early-modern republicanism at all. This introductory section argues that the answer to this last question is a far more straightforward ‘yes’.

By far the most important and influential representative of the idea that one large tradition of republican thought can be excavated from below the surface of early-modern political thought is John Pocock. In his epoch-making study The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, first published in 1975, Pocock gives a grand-scale overview of a paradigmatic language of republicanism that originated in classical antiquity, was revived in the Florentine Renaissance, transported to Civil War England and ultimately came to a close with the American Revolution. It has often been remarked that Pocock’s dense argument defies any attempt to summarization, but given the absolute predominance of the work in the historiographical debate, such a short synopsis is nonetheless indispensable.

According to Pocock, the republican tradition dates back to the Aristotelian portrayal of man as a zoon politikon, a political animal that actively participates in the public life of the city-state. This characterization of the good life as a vita activa civile was revived in the Florentine

Renaissance, in particular by Niccolo Machiavelli, for whom the virtu of the free citizen who engages in the defence and expansion of liberty, formed the foundation upon which a republic can confront unpredictable fortuna.’ This Machiavellian republicanism, Pocock insists, did not entail a political program with a clearly defined objective but rather a political language that survived the downfall of the Florentine republic. Lingering on as an alternative discourse amidst natural law and reason of state theory, it re-emerged in England in the mid-seventeenth century. James Harrington is the central character in Pocock’s analysis of this English resurgence and adaptation of the language of republican virtue. In his major work, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), Harrington argued as an English Machiavelli for an expansionist republic of land-owning citizens who participate actively in politics and are thus empowered to confront the corruptive sirens of commercial wealth. From Harrington on, the republican discourse of virtue would continue to dominate political debate in the Anglophone world until it reached its apogee across the Atlantic with the American Constitution — in Pocock’s famous remark “the last act of the civic Renaissance”” With this portrayal of a longue durée republican tradition, Pocock clearly challenged the hegemonic position of liberalism as the dominant force in seventeenthand eighteenth-century political thought. Indeed, Pocock sees liberalism, rooted in a jurisdictional language that emphasizes the rights of the citizen, as diametrically opposed to the republican language of

* In Pocock’s own words: “On the one hand virtú is that by which we innovate, and so let loose sequences of contingency beyond our prediction or control so that we become prey to fortuna; on the other hand, virtú is that internal to ourselves by which we resist fortuna and impose upon her patterns of order, which may even become patterns of moral order. … It was the virtue, as it was the end, of man to be a political animal; the polity was the form in which human matter developed its proper virtue, and it was the function of virtue to impose form on the matter of fortuna. The republic or polity was in yet another sense a structure of virtue: it was a structure in which every citizen’s ability to place the common good before his own was the precondition of every other's, so that every man's virtue saved every other’s from that corrupt part of whose time-dimension was fortuna. … [S]uccess was a function of virtú and virtú was a matter of the autonomy of personalities mobilized for the public good. Only in republics could it be mobilized, and every republic was a finite particular in which only a finite number of individuals could be trained and assembled to display virtú. However defined, the virtú of every individual depended on the virtú of every other; its decline was impossible to arrest once it was well started; and it must be manifested in arms as well as in citizenship, in the external world of war as well as in the civic world of justice.” J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, 2d. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 167, 184, 213.

civic virtue." By highlighting the importance of this republican language for the ideological origins of the American Revolution, Pocock deliberately downplayed the role of liberalism in the creation of the modern world.

Like all great books, Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was not only highly influential but also much debated and passionately criticized — and this remains the case to this day. As Pocock remarks in the afterword to a recent new edition of his masterpiece: “I notice in the historical profession generally, and among historians of political thought in particular, a low level of tolerance, even after thirty years, toward the notion that civic virtue as studied in The Machiavellian Moment enjoys a history of its own; there is a fairly constant desire to diminish or dismiss its presence.” This desire has appeared in various guises, and importantly, much of the resulting debate has been, like Pocock's own position, intensely politically coloured.” All in all, though it was argued in 1992 that the study of republicanism was by then “perceptibly thinning out, like a nova entering

»nu its red giant phase"," this prophecy has proved far too hasty. Twenty years later the study of republicanism is still at the forefront of discussions of early-modern political thought, and it does not seem very close to becoming a black hole of past memories.

The historiographical criticism of Pocock's sweeping overview of the Atlantic republican tradition has, very generally, deviated into two

8 See Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners: a Model for Historians of Political Thought," in Idem, Virtue, Commerce, and History. Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 37-50. Later, Pocock has toned down his earlier claims. Cf. the recent afterword to The Machiavellian Moment, 561: "The sharp distinction I aimed to draw was one between two conceptual premises: between a right to which one may lay claim (perhaps because it is imminent in one's nature) and a virtue which one must find in oneself and express in actions undertaken with one's equals. ... This distinction is not “hard and fast", since the two modes of understanding have constantly overlapped and interacted; but it has to be insisted on if we are to understand the tensions which have arisen in the course of this interaction."

? Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 562.

2 Pocock's emphasis on a distinctive Atlantic (i.e. British-American) tradition of political thought clearly follows from his view on the position of the British Commonwealth vis-à-vis continental Europe. According to Pocock, "the concept of 'Europe' is in danger of fetishization": Pocock, “Clergy and Commerce. The Conservative Enlightenment in England,” in R. Ajello (ed.), L'Età dei Lumi. Studi storici sul Settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi 2 vols. (Naples: Jovene, 1985), vol. I: 530, note 10. See on this topic also Pocock, The Discovery of Islands. Essays in British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

= Daniel T. Rodgers, “Republicanism: the Career of a Concept,” The Journal of American History 79 (1992), 1-38: n.

different directions.” The first direction, notably pursued by Quentin Skinner, maintains the emphasis on one long-standing republican tradition from antiquity to the modern age, but with some important adjustments. These adjustments entail in particular the claim that the roots of the humanist plea for an active civic life and participatory politics do not stem principally from Aristotle, but rather from Roman theories of virtue, justice and liberty that had remained current throughout the Middle Ages.” Above all, Skinner stresses the republican ideal of liberty in the sense of non-domination as the central characteristic of this Roman legacy, which amounted to a grand tradition of European political thought that offers a historical alternative to contemporary liberalism.* While Skinner thus continues along the lines set by Pocock, a second line of critique, especially associated with Paul Rahe, has sought to disclaim Pocock’s entire project. Rahe contends that there is an almost complete rupture between classical and Renaissance republicanism, a rupture exemplified by Machiavelli who radically departed from his classical predecessors.” Moreover, he argues that Machiavelli’s ambiguous legacy within the Anglophone Atlantic disproves the existence of a single paradigmatic language of early-modern republicanism as opposed to liberalism.”

The increasing attention over the past two decades to the role of rhetoric in political thought has resulted in a further blurring of Pocock’s unitary republican tradition. One particularly important exponent of this ‘rhetorical turn’ is Victoria Kahn’s Machiavellian Rhetoric, which again

2 For an overview of the various critiques of John Pocock and of the concept of ‘civic humanism’, coined by Hans Baron and explicitly used by Pocock as the basis of his work on republicanism, see James Hankins, “Introduction,” and William J. Connell, “The Republican Idea,” in Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism. Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) 1-29.

5 See Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), vol. I, esp. 69-112; Idem, “Machiavelli's Discorsi and the Pre-humanist Origins of Republican Ideas” and “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 121-141, 293-309.

^ Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), and Idem, Hobbes and Republican Liberty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

5 See Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern, 3 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Rahe’s interpretation of Machiavelli is summarized in Idem, “Situating Machiavelli,” in Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism, 270-308.

5 Rahe (ed), Machiavelli's Liberal Republican Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Idem, Against Throne and Altar. Machiavelli and Political Theory under the English Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). See also the comparable argument of Vickie B. Sullivan, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

highlights the ambivalence of Machiavelli's early-modern legacy. Arguing directly against Pocock, Kahn maintains that the “Machiavellian moment of Renaissance culture is a rhetorical moment”: a moment that involved the claim that politics is all about contingency, and that contingency can only be mastered by the art of persuasion. Machiavelli, according to Kahn, “offered a rhetoric for dealing with the realm of de facto political power, rather than a political theory with a coherent thematic content”. Accordingly, Machiavellianism did not primarily entail a republican language of virtu, but rather a way of writing about politics that emphasized the predominance of fortuna, of de facto power and the unsettling potential of language. In particular in seventeenth-century England, so Kahn maintains, this Machiavellian politics “offered a rhetoric not only for constituting but also for challenging the status quo” — a combination of political commitment and ideological critique which, with its attention for dissimulation and fraud, disconcertingly merged republicanism and tyranny.”

Following Kahn, the study of the role of rhetoric in politics has led to different appraisals of English republicanism in the seventeenth century. Thus, David Norbrook contends that the English republican experience did not suddenly come about with the beheading of Charles I, but that it was deeply rooted in the humanist rhetorical culture of earlier decades which poetically imagined republican practice. For Norbrook, therefore, republicanism already enjoyed a powerful presence before the actual establishment of the English Commonwealth. In an elegant move to reconcile Pocock and his critics, he states: “Republicanism before the 1640s may not have had the practical option of being a programme rather than a language; but a distinctively republican emphasis on language could become a programme."? At the other side of the debate, Kevin Sharpe powerfully maintains that English republicanism failed precisely because of this relation between ideology and aesthetics. Both as a language and as a programme, Sharpe argues, English republicanism did not offer a coherent alternative for the powerful set of representative images that constituted the Stuart monarchy.”

" Victoria Kahn, Machiavellian Rhetoric. From the Counter-Reformation to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ix, 4, 238.

* David Norbrook, Writing the English Republic. Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627-1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 13. See also Markku Peltonen, Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought, 1570-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

? See Kevin Sharpe, “A Commonwealth of Meanings: Languages, Analogues, Ideas and Politics,” in Idem, Remapping Early Modern England. The Culture of Seventeenth-Century

The issue of rhetoric has thus opened up different vistas that deviate from the path set out by Pocock. In contrast, another dominant topic in the historiographical debate on early-modern republicanism follows directly in Pocock’s footsteps. This is the issue of commerce. Pocock characterizes the republican tradition as highly critical of, if not openly antagonistic to, the rise of commercial society and its capacity to distract the virtuous citizen with the temptations of private wealth and luxury. For Pocock, republican virtue was intrinsically linked to ownership of land, and ‘the ideals of virtue and commerce could not therefore be reconciled to one another'^ Nonetheless, other historians have claimed in reply that the relation between republican ideology and commercial society was not necessarily antagonistic." In a particularly important article, Steve Pincus has argued that many seventeenth-century English republicans merged a commitment to the common good with an embrace of commercial society. While Pocock's role model Harrington fiercely opposed commercialization, a range of other supporters of the English Commonwealth, according to Pincus, came to see "the creation and increase of commercial wealth as an unequivocal social good". These authors pleaded for a republic based on trade and an "economics of abundance",

Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 38-123; and Idem, “‘An Image Doting Rabble’: The Failure of Republican Culture in Seventeenth-Century England,” in Idem and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.), Refiguring Revolutions. Aesthetics and Politics from the English Revolution to the Romantic Revolution (Berkeley etc.: University of California Press, 1998), 25-56.

2 Pocock, “Virtues, Rights, and Manners,” 48. Cf. also Idem, The Machiavellian Moment, 460-461, 463-464: "We have found that a ‘bourgeois ideology,’ a paradigm for capitalist man as a zoon politikon, was immensely hampered in its development by the omnipresence of Aristotelian and civic humanist values which virtually defined rentier and entrepreneur as corrupt, and that if indeed capitalist thought ended by privatizing the individual, this may have been because it was unable to find an appropriate way of presenting him as citizen. ... [R]eal, inheritable, and, so to speak, natural property in land was the paradigmatic case [within republican theory]. ... The landed man, successor to the master of the classical oikos, was permitted the leisure and autonomy to consider what was to others' good as well as his own; but the individual engaged in exchange could discern only particular values — that of the commodity which was his, that of the commodity for which he exchanged it. His activity did not oblige or even permit him to contemplate the universal good as he acted upon it, and he consequently continued to lack classical rationality."

? See esp. David Wootton (ed.), Republicanism, Liberty, and Commercial Society, 1649— 1776 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994). Cf. as well Hiram Caton, The Politics of Progress. The Origins and Development of the Commercial Republic, 1600—1835 (Gainesville: University of California Press, 1988). For a wholly different argument against Pocock focusing on the related issue of collective vs. private property, see Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

? Steven Pincus, "Neither Machiavellian Moment nor Possessive Individualism: Commercial Society and the Defenders of the English Commonwealth," The American Historical Review 103 (1998), 705—736: 722.

INTRODUCTION 1l with commercial Athens as the primary classical example. Within this new political economy, the concept of interest partly displaced that of civic virtue: as Marchamont Nedham, one of its most prominent representatives, observed, "Interest is the true zenith of every state and person”. Mercantile interests and commercial activity as the basis of active political participation became the central elements of this strand of republican thought, which, as Pincus contends against Pocock, lay at the roots of liberal political philosophy.

Overall, then, Pocock's notion of a unitary republican language of Machiavellian virtù has been criticized and revised from many different angles. Yet for all their disagreements, these angles of critique share one important common feature: a fairly restricted geographical focus on the Italian Renaissance and the Anglophone Atlantic. In particular the period of the English Commonwealth dominates the scholarly debate on early-modern republicanism. However broad or narrow one envisages the republican tradition to be, the focus is often purely English. Thus, Blair Worden, who claims that there were only a few true republicans in the seventeenth century, also states that these republicans are first and foremost to be found in England. “It was in England”, Worden writes, “that the classical vision of Italian Renaissance humanists was preserved (and adapted) in the seventeenth century, and it was from there that it subsequently reentered political thought elsewhere."^ Other scholars like Skinner or Norbrook, who perceive republicanism to be present on a much larger scale, deeply rooted in humanist culture and rhetoric, also focus predominantly on the English case.