Israel - The Intellectual Origins of Modern Democratic Republicanism (1660-1720)

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article
The Intellectual Origins of Modern

Democratic Republicanism
(16601720)
Jonathan Israel
Princeton University, USA
EJPT
European Journal
of Political Theory
SAGE Publications Ltd,

London, Thousand Oaks
and New Delhi
issn 1474-8851, 3(1) 736
[DOI: 10.1177/1474885104038988]
a b s t r a c t : Arguably, the tradition of democratic republican theory which arose in

the Dutch Republic in the years around 1660 in the writings of Johan and Pieter de la
Court, Franciscus van den Enden and Spinoza played a decisively important role in
the development of modern democratic political theory. The tradition did not end
with Spinoza but continued to develop in the United Provinces and in the work of
Bernard Mandeville, who seemingly belongs more to the Dutch than the British
republican tradition in London, down to the early 18th century. The failure in most
histories of republicanism to appreciate how strikingly different intellectually, and as
an ideology, the Dutch tradition was from the Anglo-American republican tradition,
has had the effect of obscuring its central importance in the development of radical
republicanism in mid- and late 18th-century France.
k e y w o r d s : democratic republicanism, Dutch Republic, freedom of the individual, radical
enlightenment, Spinozism, toleration
The western academic world has, of course, long taken a keen interest in the
theoretical origins of what is everywhere regarded as probably the most important
single component in the make-up of modernity, namely the concept of the
democratic republic based on equality, toleration and freedom of the individual.
Not unnaturally, the search has focused in particular on the intellectual contexts
of the English, American and French revolutions. Indeed, in terms of political
theory, the discussion has revolved almost entirely around English, American and
albeit perhaps to a lesser extent French themes and ideas.
Yet it is possible to question whether all the major elements of the picture
have yet been taken into consideration. Certainly, there are relevant intellectual
traditions which have been noticeably played down. In the years since the many
affinities linking the political ideas of the Brothers de la Court with those of
Spinoza and Spinozas extensive use of the writings of the de la Courts in
Contact address: Jonathan Israel, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA.

Email: jisrael@ias.edu
Downloaded from ept.sagepub.com at Umea University Library on April 5, 2015
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European Journal of Political Theory 3(1)

formulating his own political philosophy1 first began to be emphasized, in the
1960s and 1970s, especially by Ernst Kossmann and Eco Haitsma Mulier, the
works of these three late 17th-century writers have been seen as forming the core
of what is significant and original from a wider western and global perspective in
Dutch Golden Age republican political thought.2 It is, furthermore, as Kossmann
remarks, a corpus of theory which contrasts in notable respects with what J.G.A.
Pocock has so influentially dubbed the Atlantic republican tradition, a body of
thought which, however, is in reality not Atlantic at all but, rather, specifically
the Anglo-American classical republican tradition.
Pocock broadly characterized the latter as the republicanism of an oppositionminded gentry agrarian, anti-commercial, asserting the special status of free
property-holders and the duty of the citizenry to participate in government; it was
grounded, he held, on the Machiavellian theory of the possession of arms as
necessary to political personality.3 In this tradition of Harringtonian republicanism, also termed by Pocock English Machiavellianism, the ties between land,
republican freedom and the bearing of arms are perceived as crucial. As in
Machiavelli, he observed:
. . . the bearing of arms is the primary medium through which the individual asserts both his
social power and his participation in politics as a responsible moral being: but the possession
of land in nondependent tenure is now the material basis for the bearing of arms.4
This was the creed of one wing of the land-based, parliamentary gentry which
dominated 18th-century England, and English political ideas, a creed which, seen
from this Pocockian perspective, displays few real affinities with the neighbouring
Dutch republican context. This is true especially with regard to the agrarian
dimension and the strong post-1688 British republican (as well as more conservative) preference for mixed government the view that if absolute monarchy is
tyrannical, absolute democracy, as Bolingbroke put it, is tyranny and anarchy
both.5 However, the character of Dutch republicanism also seems distinctly
remote from other typical traits of the English republican tradition which Pocock
and fellow commentators may perhaps be said to have understated, such as the
aristocratic, anti-democratic drift inherent in a republicanism of the gentry and
proclivity towards empire, and cultivating a martial spirit among the citizenry,
basic to the Cromwellian, and also anti-Cromwellian, Commonwealth revolutionary legacy, the latter especially pronounced in the outlook of Algernon
Sidney.6
Dutch 17th-century republicanism, by contrast, with its different social base
and strong emphasis (from Johan de Witt onwards) on the peacefulness of
republics as compared with monarchies,7 developed in a strikingly different direction, even while drawing on some of the same sources as the English variety, and
being no less steeped in Machiavelli. In view of the existing historiography, one
might not think this particularly important in the wider western and global intellectual context since hitherto very few, if any, general discussions of 17th- and
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Israel: Intellectual Origins of Republicanism

early 18th-century political thought in English, French, Italian or German assign
much weight to Dutch influences in the wider picture. In fact, most of the historiography, in all these languages, simply assumes that the so-called Atlantic
republicanism of the English gentry is by far the predominant, generally presiding tradition in post-Renaissance Atlantic republicanism as a whole, much as
Locke and Early Enlightenment English liberalism are seen, in Europe as in
America, as the foundation of the western liberal tradition in general. It all fits
admirably with the notion rapidly gaining currency in recent years that the
European Enlightenment as a whole drew its primary inspiration and momentum
from British ideas and example.8
Yet there are grounds for casting doubt on this widely favoured approach and
arguing, in opposition to it, that the tendency to focus heavily on the AngloAmerican republican tradition screening out, or marginalizing, the de la Courts
and Spinoza as well as van den Enden, Koerbagh, Walten, van Leenhof, JeanFrderic Bernard and other Dutch and Dutch Huguenot political writers of the
Early Enlightenment period, is not just a grave mistake but actually fatal to any
proper understanding of the emergence of modern democratic republicanism. To
begin with, while English republicanism was that of a landed gentry, and rarely
emphatically democratic in tendency, Dutch republicanism was plainly not the
ideology of a rural elite, aspiring to dominate a national parliament, but rather of
city burghers whose interests were overwhelmingly civic, commercial and nonagrarian. Thus the Dutch 17th-century experience was distinctively modern in a
sense in which no other European republicanism of the 17th century, including
Britains, can claim to have been.
Then, secondly, since agrarian interests in Dutch political thought remained
wholly subordinate to urban trade and industry, the implicit basis of social
hierarchy inherent in much English classical republicanism (unlike Locke from
whence Jefferson seemingly derived his principle of the self-evident equality of
all men)9 is replaced, arguably with wide-ranging implications for the later
Enlightenment, with theories of equality which firmly classify all those not
dependent on others that is who are not women, children and servants as a
single category of citizen. Indeed, in one of the most militantly democratic texts
discussed in this article, the Vrije Politieke Stellingen (Free Political Institutions) of
1665, by the atheistic schoolmaster Franciscus van den Enden (160274), we find
one of the first general affirmations of the universal rationality and fundamental
equality of all men of whatever race, colour or creed in modern western
thought.10 At bottom, Dutch democratic republicanism was a republicanism
which pivoted on the idea of the common good as the pre-eminent principle of
society, envisioning merchants and wage-earners as the backbone of the citizenry.
Third, and no less vital than the stress on equality and the civic context, Dutch
republicanism was philosophically altogether more radical, and more coherently
radical, than English republicanism, or to express the point more precisely, from
van den Enden onwards its Spinozist wing tended to be more systematic and
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more obviously anchored in general philosophy than the English republican
tradition. This vitally important difference has nothing to do with innate
national tastes or aptitudes but rather with circumstances. Being at once more
emphatically anti-monarchical, anti-hierarchical and more concerned with equality than English republicanism, the Dutch tradition simply needed more and
better arguments for rejecting the prevailing hierarchical vision of society generally prevalent in baroque Europe with its built-in stress on princely authority,
aristocratic values and ecclesiastical authority. The fact that the United Provinces
was a republic created by a long and bloody revolt against a legitimate monarch,
an originally de facto republic which, in the 1580s, had gradually abjured
monarchy in principle as well as fact, and which had no real state church on the
model of the Church of England, while post-1688 England was a parliamentary
monarchy, managed by a landed aristocracy with an established church which
revered the monarch as its head, and tended to adulate mixed government
and respect the principle of aristocracy, meant that the institutional frameworks
within which these distinct (and by the later 18th century ultimately rival) traditions of republicanism diverged fundamentally from the outset.
Furthermore, the impact of the Glorious Revolution of 168891 of crucial
significance for Britain and the United Provinces alike tended to sharpen the
divergence between the two rival traditions by softening and in significant measure deradicalizing English republicanism.11 Hence, where English compromise
produced an increasingly stable balance between king and Parliament which
encouraged a stress in 18th-century British culture on the uniqueness and singularity of the British model, the elimination of monarchy, aristocracy and a state
church in the Dutch model continued to encourage a more philosophical,
generalized approach which by the 1750s had been taken over as a result of a
complex transition process in which Dutch-based Huguenots played a vital part
by French republican and quasi-republican theorists such as Boulanger, Mably,
Diderot and, in some respects, Rousseau. It was this DutchFrench trajectory,
arguably, and not the English tradition which despite having been largely
submerged and ignored in histories of western political thought constitutes the
main line in the emergence of modern western democratic republicanism.
Whereas 18th-century British, and some pre-1789 anglophile continental,
political thought, notably Montesquieu, did conceive of limited monarchy on the
British model as the highest ideal in politics, limited monarchy exerted comparatively little attraction on either Dutch republicans or the French Radical
Enlightenment after Montesquieu. By 1770, Mably was warning the Poles, as a
vital point of principle, that if they wished to save their country from the Russians
and reconstitute Poland and the Polish constitution on a strengthened and viable
basis, they should make sure:
10
. . . quils nimitent pas les Anglais, qui se plaignent continuellement des entreprises de la
cour et de la corruption du Parlement, et qui aiment mieux tre dans des alarmes
continuelles, que de convenir des vices de leur gouvernement, et de les corriger.12
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This rejection of the British model was in fact inherent in the main line development of the early modern republican tradition. As Kossmann remarks, the de la
Courts deemed Harringtons ideal state of a regnum mixtum with a monarch
deprived of absolute power but left with some influence thoroughly undesirable
and inherently unstable as well as continually in danger of degenerating into
despotic monarchy.13 van den Enden was even more disdainful.14
Spinoza, for his part, considered the English revolution of the 1640s not
just defective but a total failure in which while attempting to get rid of their
tyrannical king the English had merely substituted, in the person of Cromwell,
another and worse monarch, under another name.15 Admittedly, in his late
treatise, the Tractatus Politicus, which lay unfinished at the time of his death in
1677, Spinoza allows that monarchy is redeemable up to a point. But this is only
where and when it can be so drastically degraded as to approximate to democracy
and hence to share in democracys strengths and advantages. In indicating how
this should be done, he so utterly emasculates government by kings that what
survives is no more than a caricature. The perfect monarchy, he suggests (doubtless tongue in cheek), is constitutional monarchy on the model of the old kingdom
of Aragon before it was subverted by the despot Philip II, a kingdom so saturated
with legal procedures and restrictions that the king scarcely has the authority even
to arrest an ordinary mortal merely on the strength of royal prerogative!16
Nor were the Dutch radical writers who came after Spinoza any less negative
or sarcastic about kings, princely power and the monarchical principle. Ericus
Walten (166397), a friend of the engraver Romeyn de Hooghe and participant
as a propagandist on the side of William III in the Glorious Revolution, who
exhibited increasingly radical tendencies in the early 1690s,17 dismisses monarchy
in his Orangist tracts written during the years 168891 as always, universally, and
inherently, inferior to republics: so that not only has all absolute power (absolute
macht) which any monarch has ever exercised, he declared in 1689, in support of
William IIIs and the States Generals invasion of England:
. . . been usurped, in violation of the fundamental laws of the state, but monarchical
government itself is against Gods intention, especially when exercised in the form of a
sovereign power in one person alone, since God and Nature lodged the sovereign power in
a full gathering of men.
so dat niet alleen alle Absolute Macht, die oit eenig Monarch geoeffend heeft,
ge-usurpeerd en tegen de fondamentale wetten van hare regeringe strydig is, maar de
Monarchiale regeringe ook tegen Gods oogmerk is, voornamelijk alse sig vertoond in de
gedaante van een souveraine magt in een mensch alleen, als God en de Natuur de
souveraine magt in een hele vergaderinge van menschen geplaatst hebben.18
As was long ago observed by a Dutch scholar researching Waltens life and writings, he and Romeyn de Hooghe seem to have derived their political theory from
studying Spinoza, the de la Courts whom Walten repeatedly cites, Machiavelli
and Hobbes.19
Similarly, Fredrik van Leenhof (16471713) an ardent and systematic Spinoz-
11
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ist as recent research has shown20 was convinced republics are always better than
monarchies and that, if one must be saddled with a king, monarchy is rational and
justifiable only where he is placed under the law, just like everyone else, and can
only change a given law met gemeene of genoegzaame toestemminge (with
general or sufficient consent).21 Mandeville, a Dutch radical Cartesian medical
man resident in London, likewise deemed parliamentary monarchies unreliable
since mixd government leads to doubts about where sovereignty lies.22 Yet, held
Kossmann, despite the impressive vitality and originality of late 17th-century
Dutch republican political ideas, from the perspective of the later Enlightenment,
Dutch republican theory did not, so it seems, draw inspiration from its own intellectual past so that the earlier corpus of theory never developed, as far as I can
see, into a peculiarly Dutch intellectual tradition which it would be correct to
define as the Dutch paradigm.23
Doubtless Kossmanns stricture here is right regarding the mainstream,
moderate Dutch Enlightenment with its increasingly anti-democratic, conservative and (by 1813) monarchical tendencies. But this arguably misses the point
regarding the Dutch democratic and wider European context. For it is precisely
the radical character of Spinozas and the de la Courts ideas as well as those of
van den Enden, Koerbagh, Walten, van der Muelen and van Leenhof which
separates what is most original and significant in late 17th-century and early 18thcentury Dutch political thought from the more mainstream, respectable Dutch,
and wider western, moderate Enlightenment. In other words, unless one first
clearly differentiates the Radical Enlightenment from the conservative oligarchic
republican and CalvinistOrangist mainstream, and looks at the philosophical
underpinning of Dutch democratic republicanism which Kossmann to an extent
failed to do, it makes scant sense searching for a distinctive Dutch republican
tradition based on the de la Courts and Spinoza.
If, then, rather than concentrating on the conservative and moderate mainstream, whether Dutch, British or French, one focuses instead on the radical
fringe, one encounters a wholly different syndrome from that recounted by
Kossmann and other recent commentators on Dutch republicanism. For the more
democratic elements of the pre-revolutionary Patriottenbeweging of the 1780s
made no secret of their admiration for the theories of the de la Courts while at
the same time seeing themselves (and being regarded by their opponents) as
adherents of a broad European philosophical radicalism.24 Similarly, the hardhitting critique of democratic republicanism offered by the conservative Orangist,
Elie Luzac (172196), as part of his campaign against the anti-Orangist Patriots
in the 1780s, selected the Brothers de la Court as one of his chief theoretical
targets.25 Meanwhile, the Spinozist tradition, which to a greater or lesser extent
gained ground everywhere in the late 17th century, was renewed in the early 18th
by a variety of radical writers in Italy, Germany and England as well as France and
Holland, among them Mandeville who played a prominent part in the Rotterdam
riots of 1690 and whose thought is indeed much better interpreted as Dutch and
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Spinozist (and to an extent also Baylean) than as Hobbesian and a product of his
adopted country.26
Seen in this light, the political thought of the de la Courts and Spinoza appears
not, after all, to have been a dead-end, or abortive endeavour, but, rather, as I have
said, to have constituted what in the broader European context can be construed
as the main strand of early modern western republican political theory, the strand
which developed ultimately into Jacobinism, and attempted, after 1789, to eradicate monarchy, social hierarchy and church power by revolution. Furthermore,
while historians of modern political thought generally take it for granted that,
after 1650, the English republican tradition predominated and led the way, the
comparative rarity of most of the works of the English republicans (with the
partial exception of Milton and Sidney) in late 17th-century and early 18thcentury continental libraries, and relative paucity of French and German editions,
afford further grounds for querying the established view. It is true there were not
any French or English translations of Koerbagh, Walten or van Leenhof either,
while the French version of van den Endens Vrije Politieke Stellingen extant in
manuscript at the time of his death failed to survive. But, as against this, there is
little doubt as to the relative frequency with which works by the de la Courts and
Spinoza crop up first in German and later, in numerous 18th-century libraries, in
French, German and English editions. Already before 1672, three different major
political treatises of the de la Courts appeared in German, the first in 1665, so it
is by no means surprising that Leibniz should have gone out of his way to meet
Pieter de la Court, in Leiden, when visiting Holland in 1676.27 During the early
18th century, following publication under the supposed authorship of Johan de
Witt of Pieter de la Courts True Interest, French and English editions of the de
la Courts books were both frequent and influential.28
At the same time, one of the few English political works frequently encountered
in European libraries, Temples Observations, had the effect of spreading awareness in some degree of what might be termed the radical Dutch rather than the
English republican paradigm while simultaneously subtly cushioning English
sentiment against the former. The Observations upon the United Provinces of the
Netherlands (1672) was a work rooted in Temples own deism, advocacy of a
sweeping toleration, dislike of ecclesiastical authority, antipathy to Louis XIV and
personal admiration for de Witt and Dutch institutions, which worked in the
wider European context in a way which was both republican and seditious.
Temple unstintingly praised features of the Dutch Republic, yet needing, under
the Stuart monarchy, not to appear defiant of the English court, did so in a
peculiarly discreet and ambiguous fashion decried by Sidney.29 Temple, the diplomatic servant of Charles II, distinctly played down, for English consumption,
precisely the republican political and institutional framework which underpinned
the free thinking, toleration and anti-French diplomacy he privately favoured,
presumably so as all the more surreptitiously to smuggle them in.
Meanwhile, Spinoza like Temple with whom he very likely held discussions
13
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at the time resided in The Hague during the mid- and later 1660s and, in 1670,
published his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus amid a highly charged political and
intellectual atmosphere. This lent his text added intensity and urgency and
helped, together with its revolutionary Bible criticism, give the work a much
wider European notoriety but also impact, especially in Germany (where
Leibniz filled his copy with handwritten notes which survive today) and France
than would probably have resulted from a work of pure political theory alone.30
Indeed, the highly competent French translation, clandestinely produced under
three different false titles, in 1678, had an unparalleled impact for such a subversive work not just in France but also the German courts where the mother of
George I of England, the future Electress Sophia of Hanover, was one of
Spinozas first and most enthusiastic readers among court ladies.
The kind of democratic republicanism first expounded by Johan de la Court
(162260) in his Consideratien van staat of 1660, then, was totally at odds with, and
inherently unlikely to influence, any generally approved and received moderate
mainstream tradition of political thought anywhere in early modern Europe,
including Britain and the Netherlands. Despite the wide circulation and undoubted impact of the books of the Brothers de la Court in the United Provinces,
as well as abroad, practically no pamphleteers or propagandists of the 1660s,
1670s or later (Orangist or anti-Orangist), and virtually none of those who aligned
with either main bloc of the Dutch Reformed Church, praised or emulated the
political theoretical works of these two remarkable writers or even mentioned
them in anything other than a thoroughly hostile and dismissive fashion. Those
who did not frown on their writings and arguments, such as van den Enden,
Koerbagh, Spinoza, Walten and Mandeville, were themselves far too radical, and
beyond the pale, owing to their general philosophical stance, hostility to ecclesiastical authority, and promotion of individual freedom, to be esteemed, quoted
positively or recommended by anyone with the slightest pretension to standing
and respectability.
Hence, Dutch democratic republicanism was from its very inception, around
1660, a universal outcast and renegade both inside and outside the Netherlands.
Partly this was due to its egalitarianism, advocacy of personal freedom and
hostility to ecclesiastical authority as well as (beyond the Netherlands) its antimonarchism and partly to its close links with radical, that is Spinozist, philosophy more generally. For the reality is that this kind of republicanism, as
manifested in van den Enden, Adriaen Koerbagh (163269),31 Lodewijk Meyer
(162981) probable author of the anonymously published De Jure Ecclesiasticorum (1665),32 a vehement attack on ecclesiastical status and power and
Spinoza, stemmed directly from, and intellectually was closely tied to, a philosophical underpinning rejecting miracles, and therefore divine revelation, and was
fundamentally incompatible with Christianity and all forms of revealed religion.
Hence, the chief characteristics of Dutch radical republicanism its egalitarianism and stress on individual freedom and democracy were and, indeed, were
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seen to be, inextricably connected to a philosophical framework which before the
advent of the French Revolution was almost universally deemed subversive,
destructive and wicked.
To view the emergence of modern democratic republicanism in its proper light,
therefore, one needs to appreciate the close causal connection in radical minds
between philosophy as they understood the term that is, something like what
the French philosophers were soon to call lesprit philosophique and the
progress of individual freedom, equality and the principle of democracy.33 They
believed, in effect, that realization of their political ideals depended on the prior
re-education of the public. Particularly emphatic (and optimistic) in this regard,
was van den Enden for whom popular enlightenment is not just a desirable but, in
contrast to the de la Courts,34 also a feasible and imminent reality, so that consciousness of the common good as a political, social and cultural imperative in
his writing carries already much of the weight it acquired later in Diderot,
Boulanger, Mably and Rousseau.35 Indeed, in van den Enden harmony between
private interest and the common good is thought to ensue almost automatically
from the establishment of the democratic republic.36
But whether militant and impatient, as in van den Enden, or more measured
and cautious, as in Spinoza, the discrediting and delegitimizing of social hierarchy, and elimination of monarchy, hereditary status and ecclesiastical authority,
which their systems involve, and replacement of hierarchy with the postulated
equality of the state of nature, derives from a common espousal of the doctrine
of one substance, and consequent denial of revelation and divine commandments.
Hence, their redefining of Man as an exclusively natural phenomenon determined
in the same way, and as completely, as other natural phenomena seems, at any rate
in this early formative stage of modern democratic republicanism, to have been a
sine qua non for its formulation as a coherent and systematic theory of politics and
society.
Democratic republicanism in early modern Europe, then, stems from a particular philosophical movement itself the product of a highly fraught philosophical milieu marked by an acute sense of violent intellectual confrontation with its
intellectual adversaries.37 This wider philosophical ferment in the Netherlands
began in the late 1640s and 1650s as a conflict between Cartesianism and
Aristotelian scholasticism and this remained part of the general background for
over half a century until after 1700: I have observd as much hatred and animosity
between the Aristotelians and Cartesians when I was at Leiden, commented
Mandeville, referring to his student days in the late 1680s, as there is now in
London between High Church and Low-Church.38 But out of this long and
acrimonious confrontation between Cartesianism and Aristotelianism arose a
radical philosophical response to Cartesianism which in the sphere of political
theory generated perspectives which undoubtedly were and which the Dutch
radicals themselves conceived to be dramatically new in the history of European
and wider western thought.
15
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Van den Enden twice makes a point of the sweeping novelty, as well as universal
significance, of the democratic republicanism he so powerfully advocates. The
first time he does so is where he remarks, early in the Vrije Politieke Stellingen, that
in upholding the cause of the just commonwealth based on equality he had, to his
own knowledge, been preceded (albeit only recently) by two other writers in
Dutch. Unfortunately, he then fails to specify whom he had in mind,39 though
presumably he was alluding either to both Brothers de la Court or, alternatively,
just Johan (whose democratic proclivities were stronger than those of his older
brother)40 together with the radical Collegiant Zeelander, Pieter Cornelis
Plockhoy (dates unknown) who was an associate of van den Endens in the early
1660s. Plockhoy was already in the late 1650s a fervent republican and egalitarian
albeit from an essentially biblical perspective, like the Levellers who in no way
minced his words when discussing kings, aristocrats and priests, as we see from his
English-language pamphlet A Way propounded to make the Poor in these and other
Nations happy (London, 1659) written while revolutionary democratic fervour was
still alive in England, and he resided there, hoping his utopian vision could be
realized in that country.41
The second occasion van den Enden characterized democratic republicanism
as a fundamentally new idea in the history of political theory occurred a decade
later, in 1674, following his arrest by the Paris police in connection with the
conspiracy of the Chevalier de Rohan. Under interrogation at the Bastille by the
lieutenant-general of police, the Marquis dArgenson in person, van den Enden
was asked to explain the political theory he had been expounding in his writings
and as a private tutor. This time, he claimed to have invented the new concept
himself and to be its chief publicist. Over the centuries, he told dArgenson, three
different kinds of republic had figured in the published literature. These he
classified as first, the Platonic, second, that of Grotius meaning the oligarchic
or regent republic and third, the utopian, meaning the republican ideal of Sir
Thomas More. Latterly, though, he recounted, not without a note of pride, had
arisen, through his own writings, a wholly novel political construct the free
republic based on equality, freedom of expression and the common good.42 The
expression common good t gemenebest, in Dutch was also the term which van
den Enden used to designate a free republic of the kind he advocated.43 This was
the ideal, he added, to which he had converted his former pupil and principal
French associate and ally, the Norman noble Gilles du Hamel, sieur de la
Traumont.
La Traumont had been not only van den Endens prime French disciple but
was de Rohans chief co-conspirator and right-hand-man in Normandy where the
planned revolution was scheduled to begin. However, he had been shot while
resisting capture by the royal police, in his lodgings in Rouen, and mortally
wounded, just before van den Endens own arrest. The plotters, dArgenson learnt
from van den Enden, had hoped to establish in Normandy precisely such a free
commonwealth as the latter proclaims and eulogizes in his Vrije Politieke
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Stellingen and as he and Plockhoy had attempted to create in the Dutch colony at
Swanendael (16634) on the Delaware Estuary, in New Netherland, in America.44
Whether la Traumont was really as enthusiastic about van den Endens new
democratic republicanism as the latter implied we shall never know. But it is at any
rate certain that the noblemans rooms, on being searched by the police, were
found to contain French translations not just of the published part of van den
Endens Vrije Politieke Stellingen but also of the unpublished second part and other
relevant material, including republican placards, all subsequently burnt by the
authorities and now lost.45
Of van den Endens two incompatible statements regarding the origin in political theory of the modern democratic republic, the earlier seems much the more
plausible. For in afterwards appropriating the prestige of the invention for himself, he was quite unjustifiably setting aside Johan de la Courts Consideratien van
staat, of 1660, a pivotal work which was unquestionably the founding document
of 17th-century Dutch democratic republicanism. For Johan de la Court did not
merely consider the democratic republic a better, or more effective, type of state
than monarchy or aristocracy but expressly grounds its superiority on the principles of equality and reason, deeming it the most natural form of government
(natuirlijkste) and the most rational (redelijkste).46 It is that which best serves the
interests of the community as a whole.47 Spinoza was following him when he
says, in the sixteenth chapter of his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, that he puts
democracy first among the various political systems:
. . . because it seemed to him the most natural form of state, approaching most closely to
that freedom which nature grants to every man.
. . . quia maxime naturale videbatur, et maxime ad libertatem, quam natura unicuique
concedit, accedere.48
According to Spinoza, democracys superiority over other types of government

stems from its guaranteeing the individual more autonomy than the rest, leaving
man closer to the state of nature than other forms of constitution and ensuring
maximum approximation to equality among individuals.49
This heavy emphasis on what is most natural and what is most rational runs
like a thread right through the whole gamut of the more characteristic Dutch
democratic republican doctrines. A typical feature of the tradition from the de la
Courts and van den Enden onwards, for example, was their invariable insistence
on a much wider toleration, and freedom of expression, than was then anywhere
acceptable to mainstream opinion, or advocated by any English republican
thinker apart from Milton. Logically, as well as socially and culturally, such an
all-inclusive toleration entailed a drastic reduction, if not complete demolition, of
ecclesiastical power and authority. Inevitably, at that time, this meant that their
sweeping toleration was, even in the Netherlands, condemned as dangerously
impious. So much so, indeed, that even the concept could not be freely advocated.
The chief reason why the States of Holland banned Pieter de la Courts Aenwysing
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der heilsame Politieke Gronden (1669), a hard-hitting rehash of his earlier Interest
van Holland (1662), shortly after its publication, was precisely because of its
uncompromising advocacy of a free practice of all religions and sects.50
This new, theoretically grounded Dutch republican toleration culminated in
the writings of Spinoza and Bayle. It was a toleration arguably far broader, as well
as more modern, than that of Locke, even though, traditionally, it is Lockean
toleration which historians of political thought tend to focus on when searching
for the origins of modern liberalism. From its very inception, it had been one of
the chief aims of Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus to convince readers of the
legitimacy, and advantages, of permitting individual freedom of thought, expression and publication, about man, God, the universe, religion and morality. This
unrestricted independence of the individual to express views about fundamental
issues Spinoza called imparting a special twist to the term libertas philosophandi.
In his system, as in Bayles, freedom of thought and expression is a form of liberty
accorded as of right to everyone without any of the restrictions stipulated by
Locke.
This comprehensive toleration was not, then, permitted in society anywhere at
the time. But it was a common feature of the thought of the de la Courts, van
den Enden, Koerbagh, Spinoza, Temple, Bayle, Walten, van Leenhof, Toland
and Mandeville, as well as Radicati, Edelmann and other early 18th-century
radicals Dutch, French, German, British and Italian. Philosophically, this
secularized, near unrestricted, toleration remained throughout the 18th century
something wholly distinct from the theologically anchored toleration (which was
also originally developed in the Netherlands) expounded by Locke and his
Arminian allies, Philippus van Limborch and Jean le Clerc.51 One key difference
was the principle, fundamental to the radicals, but rejected by the moderate
mainstream, that a stable, enduring toleration is impossible without the assimilation of ecclesiastical power and resources into the state; for if left with their
autonomy, the clergy will always, for their own purposes, exploit their position
and prestige, as well as the peoples addiction to superstitious and intolerant
notions, to mobilize the masses against any political decision or opponent of
which they disapprove.52 The Counter-Remonstrants had done exactly that
when, stirring up popular passion with their hard-line Calvinist theology, they
succeeded in 1618 in overthrowing the States of Hollands Advocate,
Oldenbarnevelt. Accordingly, Lodewijk Meyer, in his De Jure Ecclesiasticorum,
and Spinozist radicals more generally, insisted on completely eliminating the
independent authority, autonomy, privileges, censorship functions, property and
grip on education of the clergy. In this spirit, Pieter de la Court, especially in his
Aanwijsing of 1669, combines his plea for a comprehensive religious and intellectual toleration with a passionate critique of ecclesiastical privilege and authority which antagonized many Dutch contemporaries and for which he was sternly
rebuked by the Leiden Reformed Church consistory.53
Ericus Walten (166397), another ardent advocate of freedom of thought and
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expression, denounced by at least one opponent as a crypto-Spinozist,54 besides
likewise being a fierce critic of the Reformed Church preachers, held there are
clear links between the principle of democracy, comprehensive toleration, and the
elimination of ecclesiastical autonomy and authority: the ecclesiastical, in his
view, being
. . . under the political government, for if the ecclesiastical government were not
subordinate to the political, neither would the latter derive from the people.
. . . kerkelyke onder de politijke regeringe is, want indien de kerkelijke niet onder de
politijke regeringe was gesubordineerd, so soude sy ook niet van het volk afhangen.55
Thus, according to Walten, if the clergy are assigned a special autonomous status
and privileges then the common good and interests of the people cannot be the
sole criterion of legitimacy in politics. Hence also the dictum of Mandeville
who, rather curiously, agitated on the opposite side from Walten in the Rotterdam riots of 169056 that the greatest argument for toleration is, that differences
of opinion can do no hurt, if all clergy-men are kept in awe and no more
independent of the state than the laity.57
While several scholars have commented recently on what has been called the
powerful influence of the de la Courts on Mandeville, especially with respect to
his theory of the passions and human motivation, there has also been a noticeable
tendency to downplay, ignore and sometimes even deny, his radical deism.58 As a
result, his broad intellectual affinity to Spinozism and the Dutch radical republican stream more generally, has been obscured by claims that he was not as radical
or deistic as he sounds and even that his religious views are really much more
conventional and anodyne than Bayles.59 Hence, while it is granted that
throughout his works Mandeville criticized the excessive pretensions of the
clergy, accusing them of inciting disputes among the laity and interfering in
secular affairs,60 there is nevertheless a marked unwillingness to concede what
Bishop Berkeley, Francis Hutcheson and many other critics claimed in his own
time, namely that he was an atheist or radical deist beyond the pale of respectability.61
In fact, there was much that was radical and subversive in Mandeville.
Following the Brothers de la Court, van den Enden and Spinoza, his own
writings show that he sought nothing less than the complete eradication of ecclesiastical authority and its theological premises from society and politics and moral
and intellectual debate. Just as Spinoza, in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, holds
true faith to consist solely in obedience to the law, and in justice and charity, so
once for all, echoes Mandeville, the Gospel teaches us obedience to superiors
and charity to all men, implying this is, in essence, all it teaches.62 As a student,
Mandeville had probably been taught by Bayle in his home town of Rotterdam
and, as we know for certain from his published Leiden university thesis, Disputatio
philosophica de brutorum operationibus (Leiden, 1689), presented sub presidio B. de
Volder, became steeped in Dutch Cartesianism.63 One might object that this in
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itself need not prove any inclination towards radical thought or that he necessarily
read Spinoza. But Mandevilles principal Leiden teacher, Burchardus de Volder
(16431709), we know not only introduced his pupils to the latest Dutch philosophical debates but was later rumoured by some of his colleagues to have been a
crypto-Spinozist himself and, in particular, as a Franeker anti-Cartesian put it, to
have misled many a student who later became infected with Spinozas errors.64
Thus, it is extremely improbable that Mandeville, whose father was a prominent
Cartesian medical reformer in Rotterdam, and an associate of the radical
Cartesian (and suspected Spinozist) Dr Cornelis Bontekoe, should not have had
first-hand knowledge of the work of Spinoza, especially given that he cites, or it is
clear that he knows, the writings of the de la Courts, Bayle, van Dale, and
Bekker.65 Furthermore, it is inconceivable that he had not been part of debates
about Spinoza.
In any case, Mandeville upheld the kind of toleration that required the elimination of ecclesiastical authority. Another key difference between the two rival
views of toleration, moderate and mainstream, ArminianLockean and Spinozist
Baylean, was the question of whether or not society should tolerate atheism and
non-providential deism. Locke, who had doubts about tolerating Catholics, and
leaves deists and agnostics in a vague limbo, firmly rules out toleration of atheists
since by definition atheists are not concerned with saving their souls, a religious
preoccupation which, for Locke, is every individuals highest obligation and the
grounding on which he bases his justification of toleration; and because in his view
in contrast to Bayle atheism dissolves every form of obligation and hence the
moral order.66 Most writers on toleration in the 18th century aligned with Locke,
including, for instance, the Danzig republican, Michael Christopher Hanovius,
who considered Christian Wolffs philosophy the best available account of the
cosmos aside from its lacking a detailed political dimension, an omission he hoped
to make good with his four-volume treatise on civic republicanism published at
Halle in the years 17569. Hanovius, as a Wolffian, had no special regard
for Locke. But, though a republican, he was against democracy, in favour of oligarchy, respected ecclesiastical authority and totally opposed to the Spinozist
Baylean concept of toleration. Using terms strongly reminiscent of Locke,
Hanovius held that neither atheism omnem tollens obligationem divinam et
religionem, nor deism, could nor should be tolerated in a properly regulated,
Christian republic.67
By contrast, the broader toleration of van den Enden, Koerbagh, Temple,
Spinoza, van Leenhof and Mandeville, since it permits the expression of all views,
accommodating all religious denominations and heresies besides atheism and
deism, implies the sovereign is indifferent to the saving of souls. It also suggests
that belief in a providential God, as Bayle maintained, is not essential to the
orderly functioning of civil society or upholding the moral order. Hence, contemporaries were right to connect this kind of toleration with the sort of philosophy advocated by Spinoza, (the crypto-Stratonist late) Bayle and their disciples.
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It was clear that, according to Spinozists, philosophical truth is the only genuine
theology and theology, as conventionally understood, something which has no
independent truth content of its own; and while Bayle ostensibly softened this by
claiming, instead, that faith cannot support, or be supported by, reason, nor vice
versa, so that whatever is explicable to human reason can only be explained philosophically and not theologically, for most intents and purposes, including the
issues of toleration and individual freedom, the two positions amounted to
the same thing. For the unremitting outcome of both strategies is that neither the
state nor ecclesiastical authority have any right at all to direct or restrain mens
beliefs, the individuals moral conscience or our opinions in general.
This grounding of theories of comprehensive toleration in Spinozistic or
SpinozisticBaylean philosophy linked to democratic republicanism, and the clear
perception in early 18th-century intellectual culture that a comprehensive toleration necessarily entails eliminating ecclesiastical authority, is well illustrated by
the ideas and the attacks on the writings of Frederik van Leenhof (16471712).
Van Leenhof was a Zwolle Reformed preacher who in his two books about the
biblical King Solomon, published in 1700, and his highly controversial Den Hemel
op Aarden (1703), expounds a moral and social theory rooted in an avowedly
republican stance widely condemned in the Netherlands during the first decade
of the 18th century as a vehicle of popular Spinozism.68 Van Leenhof, a writer
steeped in Spinoza since at least the 1680s, despised kings in general, albeit not
Solomon whom he, like Spinoza, thought of as a symbolic exception to the usual
selfishness and mediocrity of royalty. Van Leenhof links his political theory to a
plea for popular enlightenment and a comprehensive toleration of all beliefs as
well as freedom of expression of all views. As one of his innumerable outraged
critics correctly observed, these works of van Leenhof advocate a political religion which consists of just a few basic doctrines designed to secure social peace
and love within civil society giving everyone complete freedom to think and speak
about religion just as he pleases.69
Van Leenhofs writings also echo Johan de la Courts claim that the democratic
republic is the most rational form of government and exhibit yet another
characteristic feature of radical republicanism, differentiating it philosophically
and politically from other sorts of republicanism and Lockean liberalism
namely the Spinozist insistence that reason is the only legitimate criterion in
evaluating types of state.70 For not only divine right monarchy and theocracy but
also constitutional monarchy, and all forms of oligarchy, and aristocracy, retain
the dynastic principle and other hierarchical modes of legitimation deriving
their prestige and authority from tradition, popular sentiment and ecclesiastical
sanction. Indeed, we can be quite certain of his radical credentials whenever any
Early Enlightenment author follows Spinoza in claiming that in human affairs,
including deliberations about the best types of constitution, reason is the only
valid criterion of what is good or bad:
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sicuti in statu naturali ille homo maxime potens maximeque sui juris est qui ratione
ducitur, sic etiam illa civitas maxime erit potens et maxime sui juris quae ratione fundatur
et dirigitur.
just as in the state of nature that man has most power and is most autonomous who is
guided by reason, thus also that state will be most powerful and most autonomous which is
based on and guided by reason.71
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Van Leenhof fervently reaffirms that reason, and not tradition, or the hereditary
principle, must be the basis of political legitimacy and that everything is good
insofar as it accords therewith and can rightly be considered divine, everything
else being slavery under the appearance of government.72 Consequently, held this
author, knowledge of matters is the sole light by which we can proceed in debate
about politics and which helps us to conform to the nature of Gods order and
guidance, a typical Spinozist phrase of the time, meaning the fixed and rational
structure of reality; conversely, ignorance and lack of knowledge is in politics, as
everything else, the root of all evil.73
Reason and wisdom, affirmed van Leenhof, again in typical Spinozist phraseology, is not just the key in politics but also being waar door we Gods nature
deelagtig zijn t hoogste menschelyke goed en geluk is (whereby we become part
of Gods nature is the highest human good and happiness). Hence an unreservedly
rationalistic philosophy is, for van Leenhof, not just the only admissible and
effective grounding for the new doctrine of democratic republicanism but
nothing less than the path to true happiness and salvation. Reason alone can
justify equality and show that the common good is the true standard for legislation; and since reason teaches that the common interest is the only authentic
measure, the inevitable corollary is that serving princes, and cultivating their
interests, and devoting oneself to the pomp and circumstance of court life, is, as
van Leenhof (following the de la Courts) avers, inherently reprehensible,
corrupt and morally base.74 The honour most men derive from proximity to
kings and their courts is, for him, merely deceitful, counterfeit and opposed to the
common good. For as he, like the other Dutch radicals, saw it, there can be no
kingship, aristocracy, hierarchy, subordination, submission or slavery where
power rightfully belongs to all and where laws should be passed by common
consent. Contrary to conventional notions, he insists that the genuine form, or at
any rate the highest honour is God en reden, en t gemeen te dienen (is to serve
God and reason, and the community).75
A further distinctive feature of democratic republicanism, the wider European
Radical Enlightenment, and indeed also of the age of Revolution (17801848),
which again undeniably originated in a particular type of philosophy is the
argument, based on the Spinozistic doctrine that there is no absolute good or
evil, that what is good is what is good for men in society. From this, it follows
that the republics laws, as the only publicly agreed and designated guide as to
what is good and bad in human conduct, are if not the foundation (which is
reason) at any rate the chief mirror and support of morality.76 In this way, the
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republics legislation becomes the grounding of moral obligation, allegiance and
duty, indeed the only valid object of public reverence and obedience, while, conversely, morality in Spinozas particular sense and, therefore, the common good,
become the yardstick by which to evaluate and judge proposed and actual laws as
well as suggested amendments. Since there are no divine commandments, according to the Spinozists, and no reward or punishment in the hereafter, heaven and
hell being as van Leenhof dared to affirm with disastrous consequences for
himself77 purely worldly states of mind, there exists in their view no other means
of maintaining order, repressing crime and instilling discipline than by means
of worldly rewards and penalties proclaimed and enforced by the state and its
legislature.78
According to van Leenhof, the magistrate who understands what is good and
bad for society meer kan doen tot weringe der Godlooze als alle de predikanten
zamen (can do more to curb the Godless than all the preachers together): for the
sovereign power has long arms and a thousand eyes through its officials and loyal
subjects.79 Crime and criminals flourish, held van Leenhof, where government is
weak and the law inadequately enforced: for even in a well-regulated republic only
a very few people are truly free and virtuous, that is, exercise their own reason
adequately, most people obeying the law, as Mandeville later emphasized, not
through love of virtue but merely through fear of punishment.80 But whether
government is strong or weak, it is the law-abiding and those who revere the law
who are the most rational and, whatever priests may say, also the most pious,
and this has always been so.
What Mandeville added to the radical republican tradition was his insight that,
in the process of inculcating obedience to the law, it is not just fear of penalties,
and hope of reward, which count but also, indeed still more, the mechanics of
pride and shame. For he considered these emotional and psychological impulses, together with the resulting preoccupations with honour and dishonour,
particularly potent aids to disciplining men and rendering societys notions of
good and bad socially and politically effective.81 Thus, he assures readers that:
. . . it was not any heathen religion or other idolatrous superstition that first put man upon
crossing his appetites and subduing his dearest inclinations, but the skilful management of
wary politicians; and the nearer we search into human nature, the more we shall be
convincd that the moral virtues are the political offspring which flattery begot upon
pride.82
Morality, then, according to the Spinozists and Mandeville, is relativistic in the

sense that there is no God-ordained good and evil and that the sole criterion for
judging good and bad is what rational men judge beneficial, or not, to man and
what society agrees, preferably democratically, tends to the common interest.
Yet this purely secular, quasi-utilitarian morality is at the same time universal, and
always the same, since it is as reason dictates and reason, held Spinozists, is one,
all-embracing and eternal. Hence, the ethical relativism of Spinozist republicanism yields a single moral code invariable and universal, based on reciprocity,
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equality and personal freedom, totally unlike the moral relativism of the late 20thcentury postmodernist cult of difference.
An unrestricted individual freedom under the law, including full freedom of
speech and expression, is of course fundamental in the radical tradition. In
Spinoza, and the democratic republicans, very differently from in Hobbes, mans
natural right is retained in its entirety under the state quod ego naturale Jus semper sartum tectum conservo (because I always conserve the natural right safe and
sound), as Spinoza explains,83 so that, as Ericus Walten recycles Spinozas idea:
. . . not only are all men naturally born free, but also this natural freedom always remains
intact until restricted through ordinances, enactments, contracts or laws.
. . . so dat niet alleen alle menschen van natuur vrijgeborene zijn, maar ook die natuurlijke
vrijheid altijd in t geheel blijft, tot datse door voorweerden, provisien, contracten of
wetten bepaald wordt.84
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Consequently, moral obligation and obedience extend no further than the capacity of the state and society to enforce compliance, a capacity which, according to
Spinoza and van Leenhof, shrinks proportionately the further one departs from
democracy.85
The gap between the Hobbesian conception of the state and Spinozas is a wide
one, as has been pointed out by Alexandre Matheron and other scholars,86 but
needs special emphasis here owing to the long and entrenched tradition, especially in the English-speaking political thought literature,87 of classifying Spinozas
political theory as close to, or virtually the same as, that of Hobbes. In one recent
reaffirmation of this error we are told that Spinoza recommended a Hobbesian
state that provides peace and security by mixing power with knowledge.88 In
reality, neither Spinoza, nor his disciples, among whom I again include Mandeville, recommend anything remotely like the Hobbesian state; and while one can
reduce the essential difference between Hobbess political theory and Spinozas
as the latter himself states, in a letter to Jarig Jelles of June 167489 to the single
point that in Spinoza mans natural right always remains intact, in civil society
just as it was under the state of nature, whereas in Hobbes this natural right is
surrendered when the state comes into being under the terms of the supposed
contract which forges the state, this crucial difference then opens up in various
directions with numerous implications for toleration, censorship, participation
and political ambition as well as personal liberty.
A one-off countervailing of human nature which is ultimately the least persuasive and realistic part of Hobbess theory, the sudden definitive loss of natural
right under the state was never going to be easy for subsequent naturalistic
minded political thinkers to swallow.90 In any case, the de la Courts and Spinoza
were clearly diverging dramatically from Hobbes in claiming that the individuals
natural right unalterably corresponds to his desires and power, what Mandeville
called that natural instinct of sovereignty, which teaches Man to look upon every
thing as centering in himself.91 Consequently, as Matheron and Negri rightly
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stressed, where Hobbess concern, with his surrender of the individuals natural
right, is to reinforce monarchical sovereignty by restricting liberty, Spinozas
political thought enhances liberty by dispersing and redefining sovereignty,
banishing it from monarchy.92 The gulf between the Hobbesian state and the
Spinozan then becomes even more starkly apparent when we see that, for Hobbes,
securing civil peace and harmony is the states overriding function whereas
Spinoza, while granting history teaches that democracies are more prone to disunity, factionalism and civil strife than monarchy or aristocracy, nevertheless
insists the risk must be borne for the sake of advantages the democratic republic
affords.
For Spinoza, the kind of peace imposed by the despotic sovereign who
disdains the common good, and suppresses freedom of expression, is a wretched
thing altogether abhorrent to reason. Civil peace wrought by tyranny and curbing individual freedom he condemns as the peace of the desert, not true peace
but a state of oppression and slavery: nam pax, ut jam diximus, non in belli privatione, sed in animorum unione, sive concordia consistit.93 Thus, where Hobbes
recommends, to reinforce monarchical sovereignty, strong censorship and a
powerful ecclesiastical arm albeit subordinate to the sovereign, Spinoza, like
Walten and van Leenhof after him, spurns these Hobbesian accoutrements.94 The
true purpose of the state, counters Spinoza, is to afford men freedom: finis ergo
republicae revera libertas est (the true end of the state therefore is freedom),
meaning security plus the maximum of independence compatible with the
general interest.95 Whenever a state no longer upholds a liberty which safeguards
the individual from the irrationality, selfishness, greed, unruliness and passions of
others, including the sovereign, its citizens ipso facto have the right as well as the
motivation to change it.
For Spinoza, Walten and Mandeville, then, government has no more right
over its subjects than power over them, whereas Hobbes separates right of
the sovereign no less than the individual fundamentally from power with his
hypothetical contract.96 Where Hobbes sees no way of ensuring safety and social
peace other than by repressing mans impulses with the might of the sovereign,97
Spinoza and Mandeville envisage the state as the outcome of an evolutionary
process constituting a single continuum with the state of nature.98 Where Hobbes
counteracts the chaos and brutality of the state of nature by assigning the
sovereign a decisive and overriding power over society and the individual,
Spinoza, once again following the Brothers de la Court, not only as far as possible preserves individual freedom but, where he limits it, absorbs and merges the
individuals right (and power) and autonomy not into the executive but into the
sovereign redefined as the majority of the whole community of which he is part,
that is into any state conceived as the collective body of society.99
This crucial divergence in turn generates further major differences. Where for
Hobbes power can and should be concentrated effectively in a sovereign monarch,
for Spinoza true monarchy is literally impossible.100 Power is always widely dis-
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persed so that even the most despotic monarchy is really nothing but a concealed,
unregulated form of aristocracy or unsatisfactory mixture of aristocracy and
democracy. The aggressive and selfish instincts of each individual which Hobbess
sovereign seeks to curb, in Spinoza, van Leenhof and Mandeville following on
from the de la Courts are instead pitted against each other in society and, rather
than being repelled, transmuted according to Spinozas mechanics of the passions
into positive and beneficial equivalents. The main difference at this point between
Spinoza and Mandeville is that, where the former sees these as bad impulses
transformed into good, the latter envisages men as behaving at the behest of
society in ways perceived as good, virtuous or chaste which, however, do not
represent genuine virtue but rather an elaborate system of hypocrisy. Men do the
rights things, according to Mandeville, not by and large out of virtue, but rather
for honour and influence and to avoid shame.101 But here too the difference
is probably more apparent than real since Mandeville speaks of virtue in the
conventional sense while Spinoza, as so often, is redefining the term to denote
something different.
Hence, where, for Hobbes, man in civil society is essentially a subject, Spinoza
renders him an active citizen who, whatever his desires and degree of rationality,
participates and contributes through sociability to the civilizing, law-enforcing,
morality-generating process. In society, according to the Dutch radicals, individual interests clash and largely neutralize each other, thereby restricting mens
desires. But at the same time, men being useful to each other, they afford
innumerable possibilities for satisfying individual desires in complex ways which
Mans natural right left to itself, in the state of nature, would not provide. In
other words, the state and society in Spinozism and Mandeville not only guarantees security and peace but also opportunities and scope for participation and
expression, politically and economically, of a kind the Hobbesian debars.102 In this
way the Spinozist state, unlike the Hobbesian, makes room for promotion, political ambition and faction as well as the desire for honour and to achieve glory.
However selfish in themselves, such impulses acquire a positive potential and
purpose in civil society so that they cease to be purely negative, aggressive or
disruptive but as both Spinoza and Mandeville famously held further the
common good while simultaneously serving individual greed and desire.103
Respect for, and compliance with, the laws conceived for the common good,
being elevated by Spinozists above all other forms of obedience, and infinitely
above deference for kings, aristocracy, ecclesiastical authority, tradition or belief,
Dutch radical writers typically follow Spinoza in redefining piety and religion
to denote reverence for the law and the common interest, while simultaneously
redefining atheism and godlessness to mean wilful defiance of societys laws and
well-being. Using these terms in this way, Spinoza argues, rather remarkably, that
it is disastrous for religion, as well as the state, to permit the clergy to issue
decrees or concern themselves with legislation or political decisions and, still
more remarkably, that it is essential not just for society but also for religion that
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the sovereign powers should be assigned the right to determine what is right
and what is wrong (quam necesse sit, tam reipublicae, quam religioni, summis
potestatibus jus, de eo, quod fas, nefasque sit, discernendi, concedere).104 Such an
approach, despite their divergent vocabularies, is typical also of van Leenhof and
Mandeville. For them, too, true sovereignty resides less in the executive power
than the legislation produced by the governing body in accordance with societys
needs, legislation to which everyone, office-holders and ordinary citizens alike, is
subject.105 Nothing could be more atheistic, as van Leenhof typically describes
it, than men koningen boven de wetten stelt (that kings are placed above the
laws).106
Accordingly, in Spinoza, Walten and van Leenhof, again totally unlike Hobbes,
the primacy of the rule of law, as distinct from the executive, should always be clear
and unchallenged. Power, on the other hand, being despite appearances always
highly dispersed even in the most absolute of absolute monarchies, is best shown
to be divided in an open, formalized and balanced fashion, so that factions and
ambitious men are boxed into a stable equilibrium by committees, constitutional
procedures, checks and balances.107 Hence the only way rule of law can be upheld
in monarchies, and a people can preserve a considerable measure of freedom
under a king, concludes Spinoza, is if every possible precaution is taken to ensure
that royal authority is checked by the peoples power and by the peoples armed
might.108 Weapons in the hands of the citizenry are as vital in Spinoza, as in van
den Enden and the de la Courts, for defending the peoples interest not only
against external enemies but also ones own king (where one is unfortunate
enough to have one), as well as oligarchs and usurpers of whatever sort.109
Another consequence of the radical argument that only laws rooted in a morality devised by society for the common good are truly sovereign is the claim that
human rewards and penalties in the here and now are more effective in civilizing
and disciplining men, and repressing aggression and crime, than revealed religion
with its allegedly divine commandments and the promise of heaven and threat of
hell. Van Leenhof, in a striking passage of Den Hemel op Aarden, affirms that rulers
have learnt from experience that theological doctrines instilling dread of divine
chastizement, and the terror of hell, in practice exert no effect on hardened criminals and reprobates. Such men mock divine admonitions and entirely set them
aside when embarking on a life of pillage, murder and other mad and bestial
passion. They can be effectively restrained, he says, only by vigorous policing and
credible legal deterrents.110
Mandeville, as Spinozists, rules out freedom of the will, contending that man is
a being determined with respect to both motives and actions.111 Yet it is precisely
this principle that he, like Spinoza and van Leenhof, utilizes to support his doctrine that rewards and penalties enacted by the state are the only realistic means
to correct mens moral and social conduct. Self-interest is what leads the criminally inclined to behave in a well-ordered state. There is nothing, asserts
Mandeville:
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. . . so universally sincere upon earth, as the love which all creatures that are capable of
any, bear to themselves: and as there is no love but what implies a care to preserve the
thing beloved, so there is nothing more sincere in any creature than his will, wishes and
endeavours to preserve himself.112
This, he explains, is the law of nature, by which no creature is endowed with any
appetite or passion but that which either directly or indirectly tends to the
preservation either of himself or his species.113 Hence, in Mandeville no less than
Spinoza, the fact that man is bound to conserve his being, and satisfy his desires,
means that he can be systematically deflected and deterred from antisocial
conduct, with the threat of prompt punishment and exposure.
Hence Mandevilles notorious contention, detested by so many 18th-century
commentators, including Hume, that virtue is not innate and natural in man and
cannot be taught, is his equivalent of Spinozas equally infamous doctrine that
virtue is really equivalent to power and is always selfish in motivation.114 Instead
of virtue as something inculcated or learnt, Mandeville offers his Spinozistic
principle that:
. . . whoever will civilize men, and establish them in a body politick, must be thoroughly
acquainted with all the passions and appetites, strengths and weaknesses of their frame, and
understand how to turn their greatest frailties to the advantage of the publick.115
Accordingly, respect for the law, integrity and conscientiousness among officeholders and state officials should never be attributed to what Mandeville calls
virtue and the honesty of ministers, even in the case of the Dutch Republic which
he considered a higher type of state than the monarchies of his day, one that
afforded citizens more effective rule of law, order and justice than Europes kings.
This praiseworthy republic was such, held Mandeville, only due:
. . . to their strict regulations concerning the management of the publick treasure, from
which their admirable form of government will not suffer them to depart: and indeed one
good man may take anothers word, if they so agree, but a whole nation ought never to
trust to any honesty, but what is built upon necessity; for unhappy is the people, and their
constitution will ever be precarious, whose welfare must depend upon the virtues and
consciences of ministers and politicians.116
In Mandeville, accordingly, as in Spinoza, the degree of probity and respect for

the common good evinced by government officials in a given state has little to do
with the personal inclinations of office-holders which, broadly speaking, remain
always the same, and invariably liable to corruption, but stems from the effectiveness or otherwise of regulations, checks and penalties designed to exact accountability and respect for the law. Wrongdoing by ordinary citizens, similarly, is
restrained only by good government and well-made laws precisely as, conversely,
it feeds on badly framed laws and neglect. The first care therefore of all governments, asserts Mandeville:
28
. . . is by severe punishments to curb [mans] anger when it does hurt, and so by encreasing
his fears prevent the mischief it might produce. When various laws to restrain him from
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using force are strictly executed, self-preservation must teach him to be peaceable; and as it
is every bodys business to be as little disturbd as is possible, his Fears will be continually
augmented and enlargd as he advances in experience, understanding and foresight.117
The retaining of mans natural right intact under the state in so many ways integral to the political radicalism of Spinoza, Walten and van Leenhof highlights yet
another significant difference between the Dutch and English republican models
or rather between democratic republican theories of justified resistance to
monarchical despotism and those of theorists recommending limited monarchy.118 In England, after the Glorious Revolution, because the new parliamentary monarchy met at least in part many of their old concerns, republicans
mostly tended to soften, play down or go back on, their previous willingness to
justify armed opposition to tyrants and absolutists who menace the liberty and
laws of the community. Fewer and fewer agreed with the Dutch radical republicans in upholding a wide-ranging, generalized right of resistance to tyranny valid
for the future no less than the past.119
Where English apologists for justified resistance in and after 1688 maintained
that sovereignty originates in the people but is wholly relegated, by contract, to
Parliament, writers such as Walten and van der Muelen held that peoples who
install kings or emperors not only never concede an absolute of arbitraire macht
but also retain the souveraine macht within themselves including an inalienable
right of armed resistance.120 Walten argues that because kings are subject to the
laws, and not above them not only may kings and regents be punished if they have
deserved it, but subjects may also always resist the latter, if they do something
illegal, and attack them in their religion, freedoms or property.121 In the work of
the surprisingly radical Utrecht regent Willem van der Muelen (16591739), one
encounters, as Kossmann observed, a remarkably wide-ranging right of resistance
to monarchical oppression, or bad faith, in breach of that contract which seemingly (even if rather vaguely formulated) extends to every individual and again is
inalienable.122 Mandeville is less explicit on the subject of resistance but it was
surely not for nothing that Bishop Berkeley denounced him not just as one of
those pretended advocates for private light and free thought but also as someone
excessive in his Revolution-principles, one of those seditious men, who set
themselves up against national laws and constitutions.123
Meanwhile, the principle of equality fundamental to the new doctrine of
democratic republicanism was likewise inherent not only in the moral ideas
underpinning Spinozist conceptions of law and sovereignty but also in the radical
republicans view of the general goals and purposes of the state and its rational
structure. Hence, yet another typical feature of democratic republicanism standing in contrast to English classical republicanism as well, observed Boulanger,
as ancient Greek republicanism was its denial that the state is the guardian or
repository of any divinely sanctioned tradition or institutions, or divinely revealed
mysteries. Explicit assertion of human rather than divine origins was deemed
necessary not just to harmonize with the ideas of those preferring philosophy to
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fables but also safely to regulate the decision-making machinery, legal terminology and legislation. In particular, it seemed advisable that all public declarations
should affirm that the purpose of political institutions and legislation is to provide
safety, protection, freedom, order and heightened opportunities for all, or as van
Leenhof expresses it bring a thousand advantages and services to every individual. For even where political institutions have, unavoidably, to be explained to
the masses in theological terms, it is still vital, held the radical republicans, that
priests be prevented from staging religious ceremonies associated with the states
institutions, or influencing the decision-making process, or interfering in legislation. For the laws of the state have to be framed solely for the benefit of the
general good on a basis of equality for all, and must not, therefore, be publicly
dedicated or inaugurated in the name of some purportedly sacred, priestly or
mysterious purpose.124
Individual passions and interests, as the de la Courts, Spinoza and all the
participants in the Dutch republican tradition stressed, will always pervade the
governance of the state. Van Leenhof, for one, acknowledged that there is no way
to ensure laws are introduced purely for the common prosperity and well-being
without any particular interest being involved; nor can every eventuality be foreseen.125 But if perfection is unattainable, and no republic immune to degeneration
and corruption, republics still offer humanity better prospects for the common
interest than other kinds of state. Ultimately, it is not the form of state as such
which matters but efficacy in serving the common good, the purpose which
constitutes the states raison dtre. The Spinozist notion of the common good,
defined in terms of safety, freedom and the rule of law, was in every sense a full
precursor of the general will of Diderot and Rousseau, providing a universal
criterion of good and bad by which states, of whatever kind, can be appraised.126
The best type of state is easily identified, held Spinoza, from the purpose of the
political order, which is simply peace and security of life.127
Even the model democratic republic which has long respected the common
good can nevertheless quickly degenerate, owing to malicious men, into something quite different. No system or particular state is infallible; nothing is legitimate that ceases to uphold the common good. In the end, the best kind of state,
the Spinozist radicals maintained, is simply that which fulfils its basic functions
consistently and durably: that is the best constitution, concluded Mandeville:
. . . which provides against the worst contingencies, that is armed against knavery,
treachery, deceit and all the wicked wiles of human cunning, and preserves itself firm and
remains unshaken, though most men should prove knaves. It is with a national
constitution, as it is with that of mens bodies: that which can bear most fatigues without
being disorderd, and last the longest in health, is the best.128
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Notes
1. E.H. Kossmann (1987) Politieke theorie en geschiedenis, p. 220. Amsterdam. E.H.
Kossmann (2000) Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, pp. 7483, 1789. Amsterdam.
I.W. Wildenberg (1986) Johan en Pieter de la Court (16221660 en 16181685), p. 51.
Amsterdam. Further see Hans W. Blom (1993) Politieke filosofie in het Nederland van
de zeventiende eeuw, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 4: 168. Hans W. Blom
(2002) The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe, in A. Pagden (ed.) The Idea
of Europe, pp. 94, 99, 11112. Cambridge.
2. Kossmann (1987, in n. 1), pp. 60, 856, 182, 193. See also E.H. Kossmann (1960)
Politieke theorie in het zeventiende-eeuwse Nederland. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands
Academy of Sciences/Letterkunde: Proceedings, new ser. 67(2). Kossmann (1987),
pp. 21133. E.O.G. Haitsma Mulier (1980) The Myth of Venice and Dutch Republican
Thought in the Seventeenth Century, pp. 120209. Assen. In addition, see Hans W. Blom
(1995) Morality and Causality in Politics: The Rise of Naturalism in Dutch SeventeenthCentury Political Thought, pp. 157246. N.pl. Hans W. Blom (1985) Politics, Virtue and
Political Science: An Interpretation of Spinozas Political Philosophy, Studia Spinozana 1:
20930. Hans W. Blom (1993) The Moral and Political Philosophy of Spinoza, in
G.H.R. Parkinson (ed.) The Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Rationalism. The
Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. 4, pp. 31348. London: Routledge.
3. J.G.A. Pocock (1975) The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the
Atlantic Republican Tradition, p. 386. Princeton.
4. Ibid. p. 390. Kossmann (1987, in n. 1), p. 225.
5. Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1997) Political Writings, ed. D. Armitage, pp. 127,
156, 2301. Cambridge. Pocock (n. 3), pp. 47880, 4856. J.G.A. Pocock (1992) The
Dutch Republican Tradition, in Margaret Jacob and Wijnand Mijnhardt (eds) (1992)
The Dutch Republic in the Eighteenth Century, p. 189. Ithaca, NY.
6. Jonathan Scott (1991) Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 16771683, pp. 2367,
25960. Cambridge. Blair Worden (1991) The Revolution of 16889 and the English
Republican Tradition, in J.I. Israel (ed.) The Anglo-Dutch Moment. Essays on the Glorious
Revolution and its World Impact, pp. 2648. Cambridge.
7. See Jonathan Israel (1995) The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 14771806,
pp. 7313, 744, 7623, 78692. Oxford.
8. See, for instance, Peter Harrison (1990) Religion and the Religions in the English
Enlightenment, pp. 3, 176 n. 4. Cambridge. Frederick C. Beiser (1996) The Sovereignty of
Reason: The Defense of Rationality in the Early English Enlightenment, pp. 57, 1617, 3267.
Princeton. Roy Porter (2000) Enlightenment. Britain and the Creation of the Modern World,
pp. 447, 4834. London.
9. Morton White (1978) The Philosophy of the American Revolution, p. 65. New York.
10. Though he does except the Hottentots of South Africa should it prove true, he says, as
travellers reported, that they lack human rationality, see Franciscus van den Enden (1992)
Vrije Politieke Stellingen, ed. W. Klever, p. 169. Amsterdam; originally publ. 1965. J.I. Israel
(2001) Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, p. 180. Oxford.
11. J.G.A. Pocock (1991) The Significance of 1688: Some Reflections on Whig History, in R.
Beddard (ed.) The Revolutions of 1688, pp. 2779. Oxford. Worden (n. 6), pp. 241, 26872.
12. Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (lan III de la Rpublique = 17945) Du gouvernement et des
lois de Pologne, in Collection complte des uvres de lAbb de Mably, 15 vols. vol. 8,
pp. 723, see also pp. 67, 70, 106, 179, 278. Paris.
13. Kossmann (1987, in n. 1), pp. 2223. Kossmann (2000, in n. 1), p. 69.
14. Wim Klever (2003) Democratische vernieuwing in Nederland en de Europese Unie, pp. 467.
Vrijstad [Rotterdam].
31
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32
15. B. de Spinoza (1989) Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, tr, of 1925 Gebhardt edn by S. Shirley,
pp. 2278. Leiden.
16. Spinoza (1958) Tractatus Politicus, in The Political Works, ed. Wernham, pp. 305, 3645.
Oxford. Blom (1995, in n. 2), p. 236.
17. On Waltens radicalism and probable crypto-Spinozism, see Wiep van Bunge (1996) Eric
Walten (16631697): An Early Enlightenment Radical in the Dutch Republic, in W. van
Bunge and Wim Klever (eds) Disguised and Overt Spinozism around 1700, pp. 4154. Leiden.
18. Ericus Walten (1689) De Regtsinnige Policey; of een nauwkeurig vertoog van de magt en pligt
der koningen, pp. 201, 23. The Hague. W.P.C. Knuttel (1900) Ericus Walten, Bijdragen
voor vaderlandsche geschiedenis en oudheidkunde, 4th ser. 1: 3512.
19. Ibid. p. 362.
20. Israel (n. 10), pp. 40635. J.I. Israel (1995) Spinoza, King Solomon and Frederik van
Leenhofs Spinozistic Republicanism, Studia Spinozana, 11: 30317.
21. Frederik van Leenhof (1700) Het Leven van den wijzen en magtigen konink Salomon
leerzaamelijk voorgedragen, pp. 456. Zwolle. The alternative title of this work which was
more or less simultaneously published in Amsterdam, as preserved, for example, in
Spinoza Collection in Columbia University Library in New York is: T Leven van
Salomon en zyn bewys der Ydelheden.
22. Bernard Mandeville (1720) Free Thoughts on Religion, the Church and National Happiness,
p. 297. London.
23. Kossmann (1987, in n. 1), p. 233; Wildenberg (n. 1), p. 51. See also E.O.G. Haitsma
Mulier (1989) Het Nederlandse gezicht van Machiavelli (inaugural lecture), p. 18. Hilversum.
24. I.L. Leeb (1973) The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution, pp. 345, 39. The
Hague. Wildenberg (n. 1), p. 47; Wyger Velema (1994) Verlichtingen in Nederland het
voorbeeld van de politieke theorie, Geschiedenis van de Wijsbegeerte in Nederland 5: 513.
25. Wyger Velema (1992) Elie Luzac and the Two Dutch Revolutions: The Evolution of
Orangist Political Thought in Jacob and Mijnhardt (n. 5), pp. 1367.
26. D.J. Den Uyl (1987) Passion, State and Progress: Spinoza and Mandeville on the Nature
of Human Association, Journal of the History of Philosophy 25: 36995. Rudolf Dekker
(1992) Private Vices, Public Virtues Revisited: The Dutch Background of Bernard
Mandeville, History of European Ideas 14: 48198. Israel (n. 10), pp. 6237.
27. These were V.D.H. [Pieter de la Court] (1665) Interesse von Holland, Oder Fondamenten
von Hollands Wohlfahrt. N.pl. [Johan de la Court] (1669) Consideratien von Staat: Oder
politische Wagschale mit welcher die allgemeine Angelegenheiten, Haupt-Grnde und Mngel
aller Republicken wie sie von langer Zeit biss itzo her gewesen und zugleich die bestndigste,
ntzlichste auch beste Art und Form einer freyen politischen Regierung in gleicher Gegenhaltung
erwogen allen verstndigen politicis zu fernerer Betrachtung und geschichter Vollziehung
dargestellet wird. Leipzig and Halle; tr. from Dutch by Christoph Kormart and dedicated
to a group of Dresden officials. [Pieter de la Court] (1671) Anweisungen der heilsamen
politischen Grunden und Maximen der Republicquen Holland und West-Vriesland. Rotterdam.
These editions were discussed among others by Johann Joachim Becher and the Halle
Baylean academic Nikolas Hieronymus Gundling. See Wildenberg (n. 1), pp. 556, 131.
J.I. Israel (1989) Dutch Primacy in World Trade, pp. 234, 291, 350. Oxford.
28. See J. de Witt [Pieter de la Court] (1702) The True Interest and Political Maxims of the
Republick of Holland and West-Friesland. London. [Pieter de la Court] (1703) Fables, Moral
and Political with large explications, tr. from the Dutch, 2 vols. London. J. de Wit [Pieter
de la Court] (1709) Mmoires de Jean de Wit, grand pensionnaire de Hollande. The Hague.
J. de Wit [Pieter de la Court] (1709) Mmoires de Jean de Wit, grand pensionnaire de
Hollande. Ratisbonne: chez Erasme Kinkius. J. de Witt [Pieter de la Court] (1743)
Political Maxims of the State of Holland. Translated from the Dutch original which contains
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29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
many curious passages not to be found in any of the French versions. London: printed for
J. Nourse, at the Lamb, without Temple-bar. J. de Witt [Pieter de la Court] (1746) The
True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republic of Holland, tr. John Campbell. London.
Scott (n. 6), pp. 108, 114, 224; K.H.D. Haley, An English Diplomat in the Low Countries,
p. 305. Oxford.
On the political and intellectual circumstances, see Israel (n. 7), pp. 78590, 88922.
For Koerbaghs political ideas, see Hubert Vandenbossche (1978) Quelques ides
politiques de Koerbagh, Tijdschrift voor de Studie van de Verlichting 6: 22340. G.H.
Jongeneelen (1991) La Philosophie politique dAdrien Koerbagh, Cahiers Spinoza 6:
24767.
Although there remains some slight doubt about the identity of the pseudonymous author
Lucius Antistes Constans (in the late 17th and early 18th century the work was often
attributed to Spinoza although, reportedly, the latter expressly denied being its author),
there has never been any doubt that he belonged to the circle around Spinoza and shared
the same basic political premises as the other Dutch radical republicans, see Richard Tuck
(1979) Natural Rights Theories. Their Origin and Development, pp. 1401. Cambridge. Blom
(1995, in n. 2), pp. 105, 282. Israel (n. 10), pp. 201, 267, 504, 607, 620, 736.
Emilia Giancotti Boscherini (1978) Libert, democratie et revolution chez Spinoza,
Tijdschrift voor de Studie van den Verlichting 6: 823.
Kossmann (2000, in n. 1), p. 69. Wim Klever (2002) Van den Endens Opposition to De
la Courts Aristocratic Republicanism and its Follow-up in Spinozas Work, Foglio
Spinoziano: Notiziario periodico di filosofia spinoziana 17: 5.
R.J. McShea (1968) The Political Philosophy of Spinoza, pp. 1912. New York. F. Mertens
(1994) Franciscus van den Enden; tijd voor een herziening van diens role in het ontstaan
van het Spinozisme?, Tijdschrift voor filosofie 56; Israel (n. 10), pp. 7880.
Mertens (n. 35). Wim Klever (1997) Mannen rond Spinoza (16501700), pp. 2931.
Hilversum. Israel (n. 10), pp. 17580.
Ibid. pp. 329.
Quoted in H. Monro (1975) The Ambivalence of Bernard Mandeville, p. 55. Oxford.
Van den Enden (n. 10), pp. 1601. On this point, see also Mertens (n. 35), p. 725;
Herman de Dijn (1994) Was Van den Enden het meesterbrein achter Spinoza?,
Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte 86: 76.
Klever (n. 34), p. 3.
On Plockhoy, see Jean Sguy (1968) Utopie cooperative et oecuumnisme: Pieter Cornelisz.
Plockhoy van Zurikzee (16001700). Paris.
Archives de la Bastille indits (18661904) ed. F. Ravaisson, 19 vols, vol. 8, p. 447. Paris.
Interrogation dated 21 Nov. 1674; Israel (n. 10), p. 183. Blom (1993, in n. 1), p. 174.
Klever (n. 14), pp. 326.
Klever (n. 34), p. 10.
Archives de la Bastille (n. 42), vol. 7, pp. 4201, 467. Wim Klever, Inleiding, to Van den
Enden (n. 10), p. 81.
Marc Bedja (1990) Franciscus van den Enden, matre spirituel de Spinoza, Revue de
lhistoire des Religions 207: 2934.
Marc Bedja (1993) Les Elements dconomie politique du Docteur Franciscus van den
Enden (16611665) matre de Spinoza, p. 12. Unpublished paper, Paris. E.H. Kossmann
(2002, in n.1), pp. 6371. Alexandre Matheron (1969) Individu et communaut chez
Spinoza, pp. 3613. Paris. Velema (n. 25), p. 136.
Hans W. Blom (2002) Burger en belang: Pieter de la Court over de politieke betekenis
van burgers, in J. Kloch and K. Tilmans (eds) Burger: Een geschiedenis van het gegrip
burger, p. 109. Amsterdam.
33
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34
48. Spinoza, Opera, vol. 3, p. 195.

49. McShea (n. 35), pp. 84, 124. Giancotti Boscherini (n. 33), p. 88. tienne Balibar (1998)
Spinoza and Politics, pp. 324, 489. London and New York; originally publ. 1985.
50. Gemeentearchief Leiden Sec. Arch. 191 Notulen Burgemeesteren, res. 21 May 1669.
O. van Rees (1851) Verhandeling over de Aanwysing der Politieke Gronden en Maximen van
de Republiek van Holland en West-Vriesland van Pieter de la Court, pp. 412. Utrecht. Israel
(n. 7), p. 786.
51. On this point, see J.I. Israel (2000) Spinoza, Locke and the Enlightenment Battle for
Toleration, in O. Grell and Roy Porter (eds) Toleration in Enlightenment Europe,
pp. 10213. Cambridge. J.I. Israel (1999) Locke, Spinoza and the Philosophical Debate
Concerning Toleration in the Early Enlightenment (c.1670c.1750), Mededelingen van de
Afdeling Letterkunde (Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences), new ser. 62: 519.
J.I. Israel (1997) The Intellectual Debate about Toleration in the Dutch Republic, in
C. Berkvens-Stevelinck et al. (eds) The Emergence of Tolerance in the Dutch Republic,
pp. 2736. Leiden.
52. Van den Enden (n. 10), pp. 1537, 17881.
53. J.M. Kerkhoven and H.W. Blom, De la Court en Spinoza: Van correspondenties en
correspondenten, in Blom and Wildenberg (eds) Pieter de la Court in zijn tijd, pp. 1446.
N. van der Bijl, Pieter de la Court en de politieke werkelijkheid, ibid., p. 73; Israel
(n. 7), pp. 7601.
54. [Iratiel Leetsosoneus] (1692) Den Swadder Die E.W. op Cartesianen en Coccejanen Geworpen
heft, pp. 12, 21. Amsterdam. Wiep van Bunge (2001) From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on
Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic, p. 144. Leiden.
55. Knuttel (n. 18), p. 355.
56. Ibid. p. 384; Dekker (n. 26), pp. 48198.
57. Mandeville (n. 22), pp. 241, 246, 282.
58. Harold J. Cook (1999) Bernard Mandeville and the Therapy of the Clever Politician ,
Journal of the History of Ideas 61: 116. See also E.J. Hundert (1995b) The Enlightenments
Fable: Bernard Mandeville and the Discovery of Society, pp. 249. Cambridge. E.J. Hundert
(1995a) Bernard Mandeville and the Enlightenments Maxims of Modernity, Journal of
the History of Ideas 56: 5835.
59. E.D. James (1975) Faith, Sincerity and Morality: Mandeville and Bayle, in I. Primer
(ed.) Mandeville Studies: New Explorations in the Art and Thought of Dr Bernard Mandeville,
pp. 512. The Hague.
60. H.T. Dickinson (1976) Bernard Mandeville: An Independent Whig, in T. Besterman
(ed.) Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, pp. 151: 561. Hundert (1995b, in
n. 58), pp. 6, 47, 1023.
61. Monro (n. 38), pp. 1967, 2635. I. Primer (2003) Bernard Mandeville, in Alan Kors
(ed.) Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, 4 vols, Vol. 3, p. 17. Oxford.
62. Mandeville (n. 22), p. 246.
63. Israel (n. 10), pp. 623, 736.
64. Ibid. p. 482. See also Wim Klever (1988) Burchardus de Volder (16431709); A CryptoSpinozist on a Leiden Cathedra, LIAS 15: 191241. Klever, Bernard Mandeville, 2.
65. On Mandevilles Spinozism, see Den Uyl (n. 26), pp. 37481. Israel (n. 10), pp. 5856,
6237. Cook (n. 58), pp. 11118.
66. Michel Paradis (1991) Les Fondements de la tolrance universelle chez Bayle: La
Sparation de lglise de ltat, in E. Groffier and M. Paradis (eds) The Notion of Tolerance
and Human Rights, Essays in Honour of Raymond Klibansky, pp. 2535. Montreal. Israel
(2000, in n. 51), pp. 10311. Israel (1997, in n. 51), pp. 2736.
67. Michael Christopher Hanovius (17569) Philosophiae civilis sive politicae pars prima exhibens
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68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
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Michiel Wielema (1999) Ketters en Verlichters: De invloed van het Spinozisme en
Wolffianisme op de Verlichting in Gereformeerd Nederland, unpublished doctoral
thesis, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, pp. 529. Israel (n. 10), pp. 40635.
Franciscus Burmannus (1704) t Hoogste Goed der Spinozisten vergeleken met den Hemel op
Aarden van den Heer Fredericus van Leenhof, p. 11. Enkhuizen. Israel (n. 20), p. 310.
Israel (n. 10), p. 259.
Spinoza (n. 16), p. 287.
Fredericus van Leenhof (1700b) Het Leven van den wijzen en magtigen Konink Salomon,
pp. 51, 81. Zwolle and Amsterdam. See also Fredericus van Leenhof (1700a) De Prediker
van den wijzen en magtigen Konink Salomon, p. 131. Zwolle and Amsterdam.
Van Leenhof (1700a, in n. 72), p. 84.
Ibid. pp. 1324.
Van Leenhof (1700b, in n. 72), p. 50. Israel (n. 20), p. 312.
McShea (n. 35), pp. 577.
Frederik van Leenhof (1704) Den Hemel op Aarden; of een waare en klaare beschrijvinge van
de waare en stantvastige blydschap, 2nd edn, pp. 37, 15, 1920, 33. Amsterdam. Israel
(n. 10), pp. 41012.
Van Leenhof (1700b, in n. 72), p. 81; (1700a, in n. 72), p. 131. Israel (n. 10), p. 409.
Van Leenhof (n. 77), p. 108.
Van Leenhof (1700a, in n. 72), pp. 239, 242, 249.
Monro (n. 38), pp. 1268, 2323. James (n. 59), pp. 545.
[Bernard Mandeville] (1714) The Fable of the Bees, p. 34. London. D.F. Norton (1993)
Hume, Human Nature and the Foundations of Morality, in D.F. Norton (ed.) The
Cambridge Companion to Hume, p. 154. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wim Klever (1984) Power: Conditional and Unconditional, in C. De Deugd (ed.)
Spinozas Political and Theological Thought, p. 96. Amsterdam.
Walten (n. 18), p. 6. Ericus Walten (1689) Onwederleggelyk Bewys van het regt, de magt en
pligt der overheden in kerkelyke Saken, p. 19. The Hague.
Balibar (n. 49), pp. 346, 389, 104. See also Alexandre Matheron (1985) La Fonction
thorique de la dmocratie chez Spinoza, Studia Spinozana 1: 2689. Alexandre
Matheron (1990) Le Problme de lvolution de Spinoza du Trait Thologico-Politique au
Trait Politique, in E. Curley and Pierre-Franois Moreau (eds) Spinoza. Issues and
Directions, p. 264. Leiden.
Ibid. pp. 258, 266. S. Barebone and L.C. Rice (1996) La Naissance dune nouvelle
politique, in Pierre Franois Moreau (ed.) Architectures de la raison: Mlanges offerts
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Spinozistic Appraisal of Vice, Foglio Spinoziano: Notiziario periodico di filosofia spinoziana
20: 45.
Barebone and Rice (n. 86), pp. 48, 52.
See R.K. Faulkner, Political Philosophy, in Kors (n. 61), vol. 3, p. 320.
B. de Spinoza (1992) Briefwisseling, ed. F. Akkerman, H.G. Hubbeling and A.G.
Westerbrink, p. 309. Amsterdam.
Albert O. Hirschman (1997) The Passions and the Interests, pp. 1516, 20, 312. Princeton;
rep. of 1977 edn.
Monro (n. 38), p. 188; McShea (n. 35), pp. 589.
Ibid. pp. 8691, 1437. Balibar (n. 49), pp. 556. A. Roothaan (1996) Vroomheid, vrede,
vrijheid: Een interpretatie van Spinozas Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, pp. 613. Assen.
M Terpsta (1990) De wending naar de politiek, p. 4. Nijmegen.
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Ibid.
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Quoted in Monro (n. 38), pp. 1967.
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McShea (n. 35), pp. 1079.
Spinoza (n. 16), p. 311.
Mandeville (n. 22), p. 46. Blom (2002, in n. 1), 113.

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