The Science of Politics
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Abstract
In 1576 Louis Le Roy published a new and expanded edition of his translation of Aristotle’s Politics. In the late-sixteenth century, the starting point for academic political reflection remained the Politics, a text which underlined the importance of participation in the constitution. Although Bodin’s alternative concept of sovereignty was widely admired, many readers were troubled by Bodin’s political and religious ideas and wanted to preserve a role for the Aristotelian idea of political justice and for the Church. The effect was a revitalization of politics as an academic disciple or science, in which the civil community was examined alongside the Church. Leading figures in this process include John Case and Richard Hooker in England and Pierre Grégoire in France. In Emden, Johannes Althusius developed a political theory which he described as a reworking of Aristotle; he emphasized the concept of ‘consociation’ and used it to defend the sovereignty of the people. Henning Arnisaeus challenged Althusius’s claims, preferring to see sovereignty as divisible, shared in the Holy Roman Empire between the Emperor and the Princes, and requiring the use of arcana imperii or secrets of state. This chapter shows that the Aristotelian tradition remained important as a way of portraying a hierarchically organized political society as natural to human beings, but that in the wake of Bodin’s writing there was a shift in emphasis away from questions of virtue and distributive justice and towards a discussion of the nature of sovereign power.