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Conclusion the Brothers De La Court and The CONCLUSION THE BROTHERS DE LA COURT AND THE COMMERCIAL REPUBLICAN TRADITION History has not been generous to the brothers De la Court. In 1702, the London bookseller John Darby published an English translation of their work under the name “John de Witt, and other Great Men in Holland”, in which he praised how “many nice and curious Subjects, as well Religious as Civil and Political, are accurately handled”.1 This erroneous attribution certainly made the work of the De la Courts appeal to a wider audience, yet it also caused the brothers themselves to fall into utter oblivion. New English editions of their work appeared in 1743 and 1746, again under the authorship of De Witt, while a 1709 French translation was issued under the resounding title Mémoires de Jean de Wit, Grand Pensionnaire de Hollande. Among the last to remember the name of the true author was the famous German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. In 1676, Leibniz paid De la Court a visit when he was on his way to meet Spinoza in The Hague, a visit he recalled in his Essais de Théodicée of 1710. Referring to the recent French translation of De la Court’s work, Leibniz deplored that it had been attributed to De Witt, “as if the thoughts of an individual who was efffectively of De Witt’s party, and habile, yet who did not have sufffijicient knowledge of public afffairs, nor sufffijicient capacity to write like that great Minister of State, could pass for the production of one of the prime men of his age”.2 With this posthumous blow, the reputation of De la Court was sealed – and before long his name submerged entirely in the scrapheap of history. This book does not intend to show that Leibniz was wrong (because perhaps, in the end, he was right), but rather that the political thought of the brothers De la Court is of fundamental signifijicance for the history of 1 Books Sold by John Darby in Bartholomew-Close, London [1717], 10–11. 2 G.W. Leibniz, Essais de Théodicée III.375, in C.J. Gerhardt (ed.), Die philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 7 vols. (Berlin, 1875–1890), vol. VI: 339: “… comme si les pensées d’un particulier, qui étoit en efffect du parti de de Witt, et habile, mais qui n’avoit pas assés de connoissance des afffaires publiques, ny assés de capacité, pour ecrire comme auroit pu faire ce grand Ministre d’État, pouvoient passer pour des productions de l’un des premiers hommes de son temps.” Arthur Weststeijn - 9789004221406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:03:44PM via free access 346 conclusion early-modern republicanism. True republics, so the De la Courts argued, are commercial republics, and truly commercial states must be republi- can states. This intrinsic parallel between trade and republicanism that forms the core of the brothers’ œuvre substantially broadens and sharp- ens our understanding of what early-modern republican thought was all about. In particular, it shows that the seventeenth-century development of republicanism as an ideology of active civic participation in politics, free of any form of arbitrary domination, was strongly connected to the rise of commercial society. The case of the brothers De la Court, arguably the most radical republican theorists in the most successful early-modern republic, reveals how the embrace of commercial enterprise led to a pow- erful plea for comprehensive republican liberty and to a categorical rejec- tion of monarchical rule in all its guises. The commercial republican outlook that pervades the work of the De la Courts comprises three related claims: fijirst, that a true citizen connects his self-interest to the common good by pursuing mercantile honour within the disciplinary limits of civil society. Second, that the increase of trade as the essence of reason of state requires liberty (which includes freedom from interference and freedom from domination), and that such liberty can only be fostered by a broad representative government in which any form of single rule is impossible. And third, that social concord and prosperity in this commercial republic are fostered by secular control over the public church and toleration of private religious dissent. All three claims crucially combine an argument in favour of commerce with an argument against monarchy: the monarchical lust for domination is inherently incompatible with the civic ethics of mercantile moderation, with the liberties that foster commercial prosperity, and with the reli- gious toleration characteristic to a society based on trade. In short, for the brothers De la Court commerce and republicanism go hand in hand. The rationale behind this theory stems from the application of a range of internationally constituted political languages to the local context of the centre of seventeenth-century global trade, the Dutch Republic. Combining natural law theory from Grotius to Hobbes with reason of state literature from Botero to Rohan, Augustinian and Cartesian theories of the passions with the republicanism of Machiavelli and Boccalini, and classical historical writing with late humanist rhetoric and ethics, the De la Courts endeavoured to construct a novel theoretical framework to substantiate as well as criticize the existing Dutch republican model. The central tenets from their thought all follow from this attempt to give meaning to the Dutch experience within a broad amalgam of various Arthur Weststeijn - 9789004221406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:03:44PM via free access conclusion 347 international political vocabularies. The brothers adopted and adapted the fashionable ideas of Hobbes on the origin of the commonwealth and Cicero’s time-honoured ethics of ambition, to assess the practices of Dutch citizenship and mercantile enterprise, justifying the honourable pursuit of commercial wealth as the prime characteristic of a ‘wise merchant’. They employed the principles of reason of state and the republican language of liberty to insist that a commercial commonwealth can never subsist under the single rule of a Stadholder, that peculiar monarchical element of the Dutch republican constitution, nor under a small oligarchic government such as the De Witt regime. In line with the Erasmian model of concord, the Grotian plea for a broad public church and the practice of religious co-existence in Dutch cities, they maintained that dissenters like Catholics ought to be granted freedom of worship in private so that general peace and prosperity are secured. Finally, they employed the precepts of late humanist rhetoric to make their case within the pulsating arena of public debate during the Dutch Golden Age. This rhetorical engagement forms the thread that weaves together the various parts of this book. The frank speech that characterized the De la Courts’ rhetorical practices and self-presentation makes clear how the brothers departed from late humanist rhetorical conventions to arrive at a novel form of public speech: a mercantile rhetoric of outspo- kenness which, adopting the classical fijigure of parrhèsia, contended that telling the truth is all that matters, regardless of the reins of decorum or censorship. This rhetoric of the market underlies the argument that true citizens embody the archetype of ‘wise merchants’ who engage in honourable trade and frankness. Such a form of public speech is essential for assessing the common good, and therefore these wise merchants should form a broad representative assembly that governs the republic. Moreover, this rhetoric of outspokenness entails the best way to address political and confessional diffferences in the public realm, for social and religious concord can only be maintained if the truth progresses with- out restraints in the marketplace of ideas. Political debate and decision- making, in short, should follow the rules of mercantile frankness – or so the brothers De la Court maintained. Their own passionate practice of such frankness reveals the extent to which their successful stirring of the Dutch debate eventually resulted in the utter failure to win over their readers. Rhetoric, then, is a crucial key to disclose the De la Courts’ ideas on the relationship between language and politics and to assess their fate in Arthur Weststeijn - 9789004221406 Downloaded from Brill.com09/30/2021 02:03:44PM via free access 348 conclusion seventeenth-century Dutch debates. Contrary to the institutional focus central to the few existing studies of the brothers’ thought, turning our attention toward rhetoric illuminates how the essence of their republi- can endeavour is not a passive reflection on governmental structures, but rather an active engagement in public debate, challenging existing notions of what Dutch republican politics were all about. This new approach to the thought of the brothers De la Court has important impli- cations for the study of the political culture of the Dutch Golden Age, which was clearly much more rhetorical and ridden by ideological con- flict than is often assumed. Moreover, the case of the De la Courts points to the general importance of the study of rhetoric to assess ideas about public speech, citizenship and deliberative politics within early-modern republican thought at large. Armed with an extensive rhetorical arsenal, the brothers De la Court positioned the seventeenth-century Dutch experience within this inter- national republican tradition. They strongly maintained that the Dutch Republic was part of a long-standing republican heritage that originated in antiquity, evident from their use of Ancient Athens as a prime model of inspiration for a commercial commonwealth, their references to Roman law and the Italian Renaissance as the main source for their concept of liberty, and their discussions of various examples of republican practice in the classical and contemporary Mediterranean. Yet the brothers gave a distinctive twist to this shared international heritage by championing the cause of commerce. They applied the Ciceronian language of honour to the mercantile society of the seventeenth century, changing the classical focus on virtue to the commercial language of interest, whereby the wise merchant eclipsed the land-owning citizen as the embodiment of civic morality.
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