Slingsby Bethel's Analysis of State Interests
2014; Routledge; Volume: 41; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/01916599.2014.926659
ISSN1873-541X
Autores Tópico(s)Australian History and Society
ResumoSummarySeventeenth-century thinking on the relationship between trade and state power was routinely conducted using the concept of state interests, which enabled users to conceive a Europe of competing states that managed the balance of power through trade and war. Poor interest management could arise from ignorance, error, or the divergence between the private interests of rulers and a state's true interests. The stakes of pursuing or neglecting true interest were high: the survival and prosperity of the state. The dominance of ‘mercantilism’ as a historiographical category has obscured the role of interest in early modern thought. This paper examines the work of one of England's most prolific interest writers, Slingsby Bethel, to demonstrate the importance of reading interest writings without recourse to mercantilism. The two focuses are, first, how the rhetoric of counsel was used to defend an ordinary subject's presumption to comment on state affairs and, second, the capacity for interest writers to construe the rise and fall of state power in terms of good laws and statesmanship.Keywords: Balance of powerEuropeinterestmercantilismSlingsby BethelAdam Smith AcknowledgementsI am grateful to Alex Cook, Keith Tribe, and the referees for insightful comments. Special thanks are due to Conal Condren for generous assistance in thinking through the interest-office relationship. This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (DE130101505).Notes1 James Tully, ‘Editor's Introduction’, in Samuel Pufendorf, On the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, edited by James Tully (Cambridge, 1991), xiv–xl (xiv).2 The key accounts of interest are Jonathan Scott, Algernon Sidney and the English Republic (Cambridge, 1988), chapter 13; J. A. W. Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1969), chapter 1; Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of raison d'état and Its Place in Modern History (London, 1957), chapter 6. Honourable mentions are more common, such as those given by J. G. A. Pocock to ‘another genre of historiography’, in J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, 5 vols (Cambridge, 1999), II, 276. ‘Interests’ are not given a listing in the index—and only incidental mentions in the text—of David Armitage's brilliant study of the foundations of international thought; see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge, 2013).3 For key instances of two dominant approaches, see Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge, 1999); Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (New York, NY, 1979).4 For the difficulties involved in the standard international relations treatment of Hobbes, see Noel Malcolm, Aspects of Hobbes (Oxford, 2002), chapter 13; Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, chapter 4.5 Henry Stubbe, A Justification of the Present War Against the United Netherlands, (1672), preface.6 Noel Malcolm, Reason of State, Propaganda, and the Thirty Years' War: An Unknown Translation by Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 2007), 93–94.7 J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Clergy and Commerce: The Conservative Enlightenment in England’, in L'età dei lumi: studi storici sul settecento europeo in onore di Franco Venturi, edited by Raffaele Ajello, Massimo Firpo, Luciano Guerci, and Giusseppe Ricuperati, 2 vols (Naples, 1985), I, 523–62; J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Perceptions of Modernity in Early Modern Historical Thinking’, Intellectual History Review, 17 (2007), 55–63 (59–61); J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment, Revolution and Counter-Revolution: A Eurosceptical Enquiry’, History of Political Thought, 20 (1999), 125–39 (127–30).8 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Indianapolis, IN, 1981), IV.i–viii. Wealth of Nations is cited by book and chapter and, where relevant, section and paragraph. For the polemical nature of Smith's construction, see D. C. Coleman, ‘Mercantilism Revisited’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 773–91; Keith Tribe, ‘Natural Liberty and Laissez Faire: How Adam Smith Became a Free Trade Ideologue’, in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations: New Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Stephen Copley and Kathryn Sutherland (Manchester, 1995), 23–44; Donald Winch, ‘Adam Smith: Scottish Moral Philosopher as Political Economist’, Historical Journal, 35 (1), 91–113.9 This framing overlaps with Istvan Hont's account of political economy as responding to a ‘jealousy of trade’ that analytically fused politics and economics; Hume and Smith separated the logics of politics and economy to then describe their interaction; see Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation-state in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2005), 1–156. A complication is that an interest theorist such as Slingsby Bethel also bemoaned jealousy of trade, understood as English resentment toward Dutch commercial success. But what Bethel could not do was examine trade in isolation from state power, and in this sense jealousy of trade was really jealousy of power, which the balance of power maxim required every statesman to feel. Smith also charged the statesman with security and gave it priority over wealth, and this is manifested in the ‘exceptions’ to free trade that he described in Book IV of Wealth of Nations. In other words, Smith's arguments substituted a concurrent analysis of strength and wealth for a specialised treatment of wealth, with a policy casuistry providing the links back to strength. This has been obscured by the tendency to accept ‘mercantilism’ as a description of the forms of concurrent analysis. I return to the stakes of this issue in the conclusion.10 Donald Winch, ‘Scottish Political Economy’, in Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, edited by Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler (Cambridge, 2006), 443–64 (450).11 But note that in private correspondence Smith was more prepared to attune himself to the realities of geopolitics or, as Winch put it more expansively, to the ‘Realpolitik decisions facing politicians’; see Donald Winch, Riches and Poverty: An Intellectual History of Political Economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), 50.12 Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest, 36; Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government, 1572–1651 (Cambridge, 1993), chapter 2.13 Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, translated by P. J. and D. P. Waley (London, 1956, first published in 1589), xiii.14 Robert Bireley, ‘Scholasticism and Reason of State’, in Aristotelismo politico e ragion di stato: atti del convegno internazionale di Torino, 11–13 febbraio 1993, edited by Artemio Enzo (Firenze, 1995), 83–101 (87, 91).15 Botero, The Reason of State, xiii–iv, 41.16 Peter Burke, ‘Tacitism, Scepticism, and Reason of State’, in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450–1700, edited by J. H. Burns and Mark Goldie (Cambridge, 1991), 479–98 (483). Conal Condren was more cautious, doubting that this reason of state literature could be described as having assumed a form as stable as a genre; see Conal Condren, ‘Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England: A Question of Ideology?’, Parergon, 28(2) (2011), 5–27 (18). On reason of state see also the treatment in Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 11–17.17 P. J. Jones, The Italian City State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997), 519.18 One might see the mirror-for-princes literature as shading into reason of state in view of Condren's point that ‘reason of state was most likely to be named when under attack and called something else when being relied upon. Acceptable reason of state (or a narrow sense of prudence, policy, or ancient wisdom) exercised in the interests of the common good, sound rule, and so forth, has its place in the immediate linguistic context of the positive register of the vocabulary of office-holding and is presented as occasional, retrospective, or hypothetical, being largely hidden in the arcana imperii’; see Condren, ‘Reason of State and Sovereignty’, 16.19 Here I draw on Skinner's treatment of the advice books; see Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978), I, chapter 5.20 Skinner, Foundations, I, 138.21 Elizabeth M. A. Human, ‘House of Mirrors: Textual Variation and the Mirror for Magistrates’, Literature Compass, 5 (2008), 772–90 (774).22 The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (New York, NY, 1960), 65.23 The Mirror for Magistrates, 65.24 Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, edited by Lily B. Campbell (New York, NY, 1946), 32–33.25 John Higgins, the author of these words, wrote that he had seen a manuscript by Galfridus of Munmouth, which he lost; see Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, 35. The reference is likely to Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae, where Iago is mentioned in passing as the seventeenth king of the Britons; see Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of the Kings of Britain: An Edition and Translation of De Gestis Britonum (Historia regum Britanniae), edited by Michael D. Reeve, translated by Neil Wright (Woodbridge, 2007), 44, paragraph 33.26 Parts Added to the Mirror for Magistrates, 236.27 Rohan was addressing Richelieu in an idiom the Cardinal used himself in his Testament Politique, where the notion of state interests was also used to make politics intelligible, centred on the premise that only ‘the monarch and his advisors can perceive the public interest; and it is the business of the king to ensure that this prevails over others at all times’; see Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ, 1980), 175. See also J. H. M. Salmon, ‘Rohan and Interest of State’, in Renaissance and Revolt: Essays in the Intellectual and Social History of Early Modern France, edited by J. H. M. Salmon (Cambridge, 1987), 98–116.28 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207.29 Henri duc de Rohan, A Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome Written in French by the Duke of Rohan, translated by Henry Hunt (London, 1641).30 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface.31 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface.32 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 18.33 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 23.34 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 59.35 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part II, preface.36 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part II, preface.37 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface.38 J. A. W. Gunn, ‘“Interest Will Not Lie”: A Seventeenth-Century Political Maxim’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 551–64 (552–54).39 A. C. Houston, Algernon Sidney and the Republican Heritage in England and America (Princeton, NJ, 1991), 80–81.40 Algernon Sidney, Discourses Concerning Government, edited by Thomas G. West (Indianapolis, IN, 1990), 538.41 Marchmont Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, Stated, edited by Philip A. Knachel (Charlottesville, VA, 1969, first published in 1650), 25.42 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England, 13.43 Nedham, The Case of the Commonwealth of England. This is the subject of the second half of Nedham's work.44 Christopher Feake, A Beam of Light, Shining in the Midst of Much Darkness and Confusion (1659), 54.45 Feake, Beam of Light, 53.46 Feake, Beam of Light, 56.47 Feake, Beam of Light, 57.48 Feake, Beam of Light, 58.49 Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England: The Presupposition of Oaths and Offices (Cambridge, 2006), 344.50 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207.51 See Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1996), 69.52 Pieter de la Court, The True Interest and Political Maxims of the Republick of Holland and West-Friesland (London, 1702), 487.53 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 211. The text circulated earlier in England in manuscript form, while John Locke owned a copy of the Dutch edition; see Arthur Weststeijn, Commercial Republicanism in the Dutch Golden Age (Leiden, 2012), 352.54 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 214.55 de la Court, The True Interest, ix.56 de la Court, The True Interest, 368, 377.57 Gary S. De Krey, ‘Bethel, Slingsby (bap. 1617, d. 1697)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2303 (accessed 20 May 2014).58 Robert W. McHenry, ‘Dryden's History: The Case of Slingsby Bethel’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 253–72 (257–58).59 Slingsby Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative of the Most Material Debates and Passages in the Late Parliament (1659).60 Bethel, A True and Impartial Narrative, 14.61 Slingsby Bethel, The World's Mistake in Oliver Cromwell (1668).62 Anne McGowan, ‘The Writings and Political Activities of Slingsby Bethel, 1617–1697’ (Cambridge University, M. Litt dissertation, 2000), 43.63 Slingsby Bethel, Et à Dracone, or, Some Reflections Upon a Discourse Called Omnia à Belo Comesta (1668).64 Slingsby Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated (1671); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, One of His Majesties Privy Council, Upon the Reading of a Book Called The Present Interest of England Stated (1672).65 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 38.66 Slingsby Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, Upon the Reading of a Book Called The Present Interest of England Stated Written in a Letter to a Friend (1673). Authorship has also been attributed to François Paul, baron de Lisola.67 C. R. Boxer, ‘Some Second Thoughts on the Third Anglo–Dutch War, 1672–1674’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 19 (1969), 67–94 (70–71).68 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 16–17.69 Slingsby Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation Upon the Trade of England (1679).70 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 31.71 McGowan, ‘Writings and Activities of Bethel’, 142.72 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface.73 See especially Bethel's treatment of Genoa under Andrea Doria in Slingsby Bethel, The Interests of the Princes and States of Europe (1681).74 Slingsby Bethel, The Providences of God, Observed Through Several Ages, Towards this Nation (1691).75 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, preface.76 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 3.77 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 3.78 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 4.79 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 4–5.80 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 7–8.81 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 5.82 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 5–6.83 Bethel, The World's Mistake in Cromwell, 11.84 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 9–16.85 By analogy with Conal Condren's argument in relation to the ‘promotional rhetoric’ of office; see Conal Condren, ‘The Persona of the Philosopher and the Rhetorics of Office in Early Modern England’, in The Philosopher in Early Modern Europe: The Nature of a Contested Identity, edited by Conal Condren, Stephen Gaukroger, and Ian Hunter (Cambridge, 2006), 66–89 (72). For the interaction between conceptions of counsel and office holding, see Condren, Argument and Authority, 162–71.86 This suggestion to foreground the statesman-counsellor couple might be an alternative to multiplying the species of counsel with reference to intellectual lineage, such as humanist, ecclesiastical, feudal-baronial. For this approach, see Jacqueline Rose, ‘Kingship and Counsel in Early Modern England’, Historical Journal, 54 (2001), 47–71, which builds on John Guy, ‘The Rhetoric of Counsel in Early Modern England’, in Tudor Political Culture, edited by Dale Hoak (Cambridge, 1995), 291–310.87 [Peter du Moulin], Englands Appeal from the Private Cabal at White-hall to the Great Council of the Nation, the Lords and Commons in Parliament Assembled (1673).88 K. H. D. Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 1672–4 (Oxford, 1953), 12–29.89 Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, 88–111.90 [du Moulin], Englands Appeal, 45.91 See the discussion in Haley, William of Orange and the English Opposition, chapter 8.92 Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons, From the Year 1667 to the Year 1694, 10 vols (1769), II, 200.93 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface.94 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface.95 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface.96 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface.97 Bruce Yardley argues that Buckingham's pro-toleration actions can be seen as self-interested and pragmatic, as was Buckingham's rationale for the war—the Dutch were commercial rivals and hence natural enemies; see Bruce Yardley, ‘George Villiers, Second Duke of Buckingham, and the Politics of Toleration’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 55 (1992), 317–37 (325).98 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 4.99 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 4.100 Villiers, A Letter to Sir Thomas Osborn, 18–19.101 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 17.102 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 6.103 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 6.104 And then asserted again in Providences of God, where Bethel writes that wicked ‘Statists’ have used two notions to justify their positions: ‘calling Knavery Reason of State’ and that ‘Wit and Parts do alone qualifie a person for the service of his Prince’, when the true ‘vertues’ needed of counsellors are diligence, integrity, uprightness, industry, and sincerity; see Bethel, The Providences of God, 24.105 For this theme more generally see Richard Devetak ‘“The Fear of Universal Monarchy”: Balance of Power as an Ordering Practice of Liberty’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 190 (2014), 121–37.106 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, preface.107 Rohan, Treatise of the Interest of the Princes and States of Christendome, part I, 23.108 Slingsby Bethel, A Discourse of Trade (1675), 1. In the seventeenth century, circulation was a dominant metaphor for conceiving the flow of trade and bullion and goods in the polity, as shown some time ago by Keith Tribe, Land, Labour, and Economic Discourse (London, 1978), 80–109. One inspiration for physiological analogies was William Harvey's theory on the circulation of blood, and he claimed to have identified the ‘continuous and uninterrupted movement of blood from the heart through the arteries to the body as a whole, and likewise back from that body as a whole’; William Harvey, The Circulation of the Blood, and Other Writings (London, 1963, first published in 1636), 115.109 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 1–2, 6.110 Also argued by Tribe, Land, Labour and Economic Discourse, 88. Smith largely elided the notion of circulation in Wealth of Nations by defining wealth as productive labour and then evaluating uses of capital with reference to the quantity of productive labour that they supported. But circulation still played a part in Wealth of Nations, for example, when Smith wrote that the ‘sole use of money is to circulate consumable goods’; see Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.iii.23.111 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 11.112 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 9.113 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 10.114 Bethel, A Discourse of Trade, 10.115 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1.116 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1–2.117 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 1–3.118 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 7.119 Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation, 12.120 Bethel, The Present Interest of England Stated, 27–31.121 Bethel, Observations on the Letter Written to Sir Thomas Osborn, 11.122 John Campbell, The Present State of Europe. Explaining the Interests, Connections, Political and Commercial Views of its Several Powers (1750), ix.123 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 207.124 Scott, Sidney and the English Republic, 209.125 Jonathan Scott, Commonwealth Principles: Republican Writing of the English Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), 328.126 Gunn, Politics and the Public Interest, 3.127 Steve Pincus, ‘Rethinking Mercantilism: Political Economy, the British Empire, and the Atlantic World in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, The William and Mary Quarterly, 69 (2012), 3–34.128 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.2.129 The best discussion of this aspect of Smith is Keith Tribe, ‘Reading Trade in the Wealth of Nations’, History of European Ideas, 32 (2006), 58–79.130 Smith, Wealth of Nations, II.v.12.131 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.9.132 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.11.133 Smith, Wealth of Nations, IV.iii.c.11–13.
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