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The Perils of Anachronism: Contextualizing Early Modern Political Philosophy

Introduction


Understanding philosophers within their historical context is essential for accurately interpreting their ideas. Without this grounding, there is a risk of anachronism, projecting contemporary meanings onto concepts that had entirely different connotations in earlier centuries.


Political philosophy is often mined for insights into modern governance, democracy, and liberty. However, interpreting the ideas of early modern thinkers without reference to their historical context risks distorting their meaning and misapplying their theoretical frameworks.


This article argues for the necessity of “historical contextualization” in political theory by examining the social, political, and economic conditions that shaped the philosophies of a number of philosophers.


Avoiding anachronism allows for a richer understanding of both the content and intent of their works and reveals the deep entanglement between intellectual production and historical facts.


Philosophical texts do not emerge in a vacuum. The political theories are the products of deeply contingent moments in history. Yet, modern readers often risk interpreting these thinkers through the lens of contemporary problems, committing the error of “anachronism.” To understand their contributions without distortion, we must reintegrate these ideas into the worlds from which they emerged.


This article is an integral part of the articles written previously on Demos, my website.


Machiavelli and the Crisis of Italian Republicanism


Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought cannot be fully understood without situating it within the deeply fractured political landscape of early 16th-century Italy.


Born in Florence in 1469, Machiavelli lived through a period of continual instability marked by foreign invasions, internal factionalism, and the collapse of republican institutions. His two most important works, The Prince (1513) and Discourses on Livy (written between 1513 and 1517), emerged from the ruins of a short-lived Florentine Republic and the broader disintegration of Italian political autonomy.


The Italy of Machiavelli’s time was “not a unified state but a mosaic of competing city-states and principalities,” Florence, Milan, Venice, Naples, and the Papal States, each vying for regional dominance. These polities were frequently entangled in wars, dynastic intrigue, and shifting alliances.


The foreign invasions beginning with Charles VIII of France in 1494 marked a decisive turning point: the Italian Wars (1494–1559) turned Italy into a battleground for the French, Spanish, Holy Roman, and Papal armies. The illusion of Italian self-determination collapsed as these major powers treated the peninsula as a prize to be carved up, occupied, and manipulated.


Machiavelli entered public service in 1498 as a senior official of the Florentine Republic, following the expulsion of the Medici and the execution of the apocalyptic preacher Girolamo Savonarola. For the next 14 years, he served as a diplomat and defense strategist, working to preserve Florence’s fragile republican structure amidst foreign invasions and domestic instability. He met Cesare Borgia during one of his missions, an encounter that deeply influenced The Prince. Borgia’s ruthless yet efficient consolidation of power seemed to exemplify the “virtù” Machiavelli believed necessary for preserving political order in a fractured world.


Machiavelli’s career was abruptly halted in 1512 when the Medici family returned to power with Papal and Spanish military support. The Republic was overthrown, and Machiavelli, suspected of conspiracy, was imprisoned and tortured. Though eventually released, he was barred from public office and retreated to his estate in Sant'Andrea in Percussina. There, he wrote The Prince, not merely as a manual for tyrants, as often misread, but as a desperate proposal for political stabilization in a region dominated by weakness, betrayal, and collapse.


The Florentine Republic’s failure convinced Machiavelli that virtuous intentions and abstract ideals were insufficient in the face of realpolitik. His emphasis on institutional design, especially in the Discourses, arose from the experience of watching both monarchical tyranny and populist idealism succumb to factionalism and corruption. His republicanism was not utopian but forensic, drawn from the empirical observation of Rome’s longevity and Florence’s failure.


His praise of the Roman Republic’s institutions, especially the Tribunate, which gave the plebeians constitutional representation against aristocratic domination, must be seen as a response to the deep class tensions and elite manipulation he saw in Florence. In this way, Discourses on Livy serves as a theory of durable republicanism amidst conflict, not despite it.


Machiavelli’s ideal of liberty (libertà) does not rest on harmony, but on regulated conflict. This reflected not only the legacy of Roman constitutionalism but also the lived Italian reality of competing classes and foreign domination. “The tumults between the nobles and the plebs,” he wrote, were not signs of decay but engines of republican energy. This was a strikingly original contribution to early modern political thought, a radical departure from Aristotelian harmony and a profound critique of monarchical absolutism.


Aristotelian harmony refers to the ideal of political and social order based on balance, proportion, and the natural roles of different elements within a polity. In The Politics and Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle outlines a vision of a well-functioning state as one in which different classes and social functions are in equilibrium, each contributing to the common good in accordance with its natural place.


Aristotle compares the city-state (polis) to a living organism: just as the body has different parts with different functions, so does the polis. Harmony arises when all parts, rulers, soldiers, craftsmen, farmers, perform their roles in proportion and balance. Justice is defined as “everyone doing their own work” (to ta heautou prattein), which ensures that no class oversteps its role or dominates others.


In Ethics, Aristotle proposes that virtue lies in a balance between extremes (e.g., courage is the mean between rashness and cowardice). Politically, this translates into a preference for “mixed constitutions” that avoid excesses, neither oligarchy (rule by the few rich) nor democracy (rule by the many poor) alone is ideal, but a balanced regime that incorporates both elements.


Aristotle believed that a stable polis requires “homonoia,” a kind of political friendship or concord among citizens. This is not mere absence of conflict, but a deep agreement on the ends of political life: shared values, a common conception of justice, and mutual respect among citizens. In Politics, he warns that factional conflict (stasis) arises when parts of the polity seek their own advantage at the expense of the whole, disrupting harmony.


Every political arrangement has a telos (end), and for Aristotle, the purpose of the polis is to enable “Eudaimonia,” the flourishing or well-being of its citizens. Political harmony is achieved when laws, education, and institutions are ordered toward cultivating virtue and the good life for all.


Whereas Aristotle idealized political “homonoia” and balance, Machiavelli rejected harmony as unrealistic and even undesirable. For him, conflict, particularly between social classes, was inevitable and potentially productive if channeled through republican institutions. He saw Rome’s “tumults” between patricians and plebeians not as signs of disorder, but as the source of liberty.


Thus, Machiavelli breaks sharply from Aristotelian political teleology, replacing the goal of harmony with a theory of dynamic conflict and competitive checks. This departure marks a key moment in the emergence of modern political realism.


In sum, Machiavelli’s political philosophy is a response to a world ravaged by division, betrayal, and foreign conquest. It is a republican theory born not of stability but of collapse. To extract his ideas from the specific historical moment of Renaissance Italy, from the Medici’s rise and fall, from the sack of Prato (1512), from the shadow of Savonarola and Cesare Borgia, is to risk reducing his republicanism to mere pragmatism or opportunism.


Hobbes and the Trauma of Civil War


Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, most famously articulated in Leviathan (1651), is inseparable from the seismic historical upheavals of 17th-century England. Born in 1588, “the year of the Spanish Armada,” Hobbes entered the world during a moment of national anxiety. His entire intellectual career would unfold against the backdrop of intensifying conflict between parliament and the monarchy, religious polarization, and the eventual implosion of the English political order.


The English Civil War (1642–1651) did not erupt suddenly. It was the culmination of deep-rooted tensions that had been building for decades—religious, political, economic, and constitutional.


After the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, the Tudor line ended and James VI of Scotland ascended to the English throne as James I. This marked the beginning of the Stuart dynasty. James believed in “the divine right of kings,” the idea that monarchs derive their authority from God and are accountable only to Him. This belief clashed with parliament’s growing desire for constitutional limits on royal power.


James I also inherited serious financial problems. Wars, inflation, and corruption had left the monarchy in debt. To raise revenue, he relied on “non-parliamentary taxes” like forced loans and monopolies, sowing distrust in parliament.


James I’s son, Charles I, intensified religious tensions. While officially head of the Protestant Church of England, Charles married a Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France, raising suspicions of Catholic sympathies. Even more divisively, he supported Archbishop William Laud’s campaign to enforce a High Church (ceremonial and hierarchical) version of Anglicanism, something Puritans viewed as dangerously close to Catholicism.


The imposition of the Book of Common Prayer on Scotland in 1637 triggered a massive backlash known as the Bishops’ Wars (1639–1640). These wars forced Charles to call parliament in 1640, ending an 11-year period of personal rule (1629–1640) during which he had governed without it.


Also known as the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny,” this was a period in which Charles I ruled without summoning parliament, using questionable fiscal methods like Ship Money (a tax historically levied on coastal towns in wartime but expanded inland during peacetime). This deeply angered the landed gentry and merchants who made up much of parliament.


Without parliament's financial support, Charles's military options were limited, especially in handling uprisings in Scotland and Ireland.


Faced with Scottish rebellion and desperate for funds, Charles summoned the Short Parliament in April 1640, but it was dissolved in three weeks. In November 1640, he was forced to call the Long Parliament, which quickly took radical steps:



These moves were seen by Charles and his supporters as revolutionary. The relationship broke down further when parliament began discussing military control amid rebellion in Ireland (1641).


This was a list of over 200 grievances against the king, passed by a narrow margin in the House of Commons. It was effectively a manifesto against royal misrule and suggested parliament, not the king, should control ministers and the army. This alarmed moderates and radicals alike and widened the gap between king and parliament.


In a final, disastrous miscalculation, Charles entered the House of Commons with armed guards to arrest five members of parliament for treason. They had already fled. No king had ever entered the Commons before. This act was seen as tyrannical and unlawful, solidifying fears of absolutism.


Parliament raised its own militia. Charles left London and raised his Royal Standard in Nottingham in August 1642—marking the formal beginning of the First English Civil War.


The English Civil War (1642–1651) was not merely a contextual influence on Hobbes’s thought. It was the very trauma that forged it. This conflict pitted Royalists (supporters of King Charles I) against parliamentarians (many of whom were Puritan dissenters), culminating in the execution of Charles I in 1649, the first regicide of a sitting monarch in English history, and the brief establishment of the Commonwealth under Oliver Cromwell.


Hobbes, who had already published De Cive in 1642, an early defense of absolute authority, was deeply disturbed by these events. He had witnessed what he called “the dissolution of all order,” and from this disintegration he drew the conclusion that civil war is the greatest of all political evils.


Although often misunderstood as a theorist of tyranny, Hobbes was in fact driven by fear of anarchy. As tensions in England rose, he fled to France in late 1640, shortly before open conflict erupted. He would remain in exile for over a decade, primarily in Paris, where he interacted with other intellectuals, including Marin Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi.


It was during this exile, amid reports of military confrontations like the Battle of Marston Moor (1644) and the eventual capture and execution of the king, that Hobbes developed the full structure of Leviathan.


The central premise of Leviathan is that human beings, in their natural condition, are driven by fear, competition, and the desire for power. The famous phrase bellum omnium contra omnes, “the war of all against all,” describes not merely a hypothetical state of nature but, for Hobbes, the lived reality of civil war. His writing reflects a psychological and political response to a society he perceived as careening toward chaos.


Key historical moments reinforce this reading. For example:


  • The Grand Remonstrance of 1641, which presented over 200 grievances against King Charles I, convinced Hobbes that unchecked pluralism led to destabilization.

  • The 1649 execution of Charles I shocked Europe and reinforced Hobbes’s conviction that sovereignty must be indivisible and absolute to prevent a descent into civil violence.

  • The rise of the Levellers and other radical groups during the 1640s revealed to Hobbes how appeals to liberty, equality, and religious autonomy could fragment political unity.


Hobbes's emphasis on the need for an all-powerful sovereign is thus a reaction to the failure of divided governance. His rejection of Aristotelian and scholastic traditions in favor of a mechanistic, geometrical view of politics reflects a broader intellectual shift, but also his desperation for certainty and order in an age of collapse. Unlike Locke, who came of age in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution (1688) and could afford a more optimistic vision of constitutionalism, Hobbes’s formative experience was civil war—brutal, disorienting, and existential.


To read Hobbes without this historical backdrop is to misinterpret the very foundation of his political theory.


Spinoza and the Crisis of Liberty in the Dutch Republic


Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) lived in one of the most paradoxical moments in European history: the Dutch Republic during its “Golden Age.” On the surface, this era was defined by flourishing trade, scientific discovery, and unprecedented degrees of religious pluralism compared to other European states. Beneath that surface, however, lay profound social tensions, political instability, and the ever-looming threat of war.


Although officially Calvinist, the Dutch Republic was home to a mosaic of religious groups: Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, Jews (Sephardic and Ashkenazi), and later Arminians and Mennonites. Tolerance was pragmatic, not principled. Non-Calvinists could reside and trade but were often excluded from public office or subjected to local restrictions.


The internal split between the strict Calvinist “Gomarists” and the more liberal “Arminians” (followers of Jacobus Arminius) culminated in the Synod of Dordrecht (1618–1619), where the Arminians were declared heretical. This schism had lasting effects on religious policy and governance, setting a precedent for exclusionary politics based on doctrinal orthodoxy.


Spinoza’s excommunication by the Amsterdam Jewish community in 1656 reveals the social pressure to conform, even within so-called tolerant minorities. His case illustrates how economic integration coexisted with intellectual repression and community self-policing, especially among exiles wary of attracting hostility in their host society.


The Sephardic Jewish community in Amsterdam, to which Spinoza belonged, had fled the Iberian Peninsula in the wake of the Spanish and Portuguese Inquisitions. Many had lived for generations as “conversos” or “crypto-Jews,” publicly professing Christianity while secretly maintaining Jewish practices. When they resettled in the relatively tolerant Dutch Republic, especially after the Union of Utrecht (1579) and the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609), they gained commercial freedom and relative social stability, particularly in cities like Amsterdam.


The Sephardic Jews were deeply integrated into the Dutch mercantile economy, involved in shipping, finance, and the sugar trade from Brazil and the Caribbean. This success made them visible and valuable but also vulnerable. Their wealth and commercial networks brought them prestige, but also necessitated a strategy of respectability and religious conformity to avoid political backlash or envy.


In this way, economic integration did not translate into full intellectual or political autonomy. The very openness of Dutch society had limits: it tolerated difference as long as it remained quiet, orderly, and apolitical.


Economic success during the Golden Age produced new bourgeois elites (merchants, bankers, shipping magnates), but wealth was unequally distributed. Laborers, sailors, and artisans in port cities often experienced insecurity, urban overcrowding, and rising prices, particularly during wartime.


The Dutch Republic was governed not by a monarch, but by a confederation of provinces dominated by the States of Holland, with powerful cities like Amsterdam at the helm. The Grand Pensionary (such as Johan de Witt) functioned as the de facto leader. But opposing this republican system was the House of Orange, which periodically sought to reclaim the hereditary role of “Stadtholder,” a quasi-monarchic, military, political office.


Tensions escalated in the mid-17th century, particularly after William II's attempted coup in 1650 against Amsterdam. The resulting First Stadtholderless Period (1650–1672) was a time of heightened republican authority—but fragile and contested.


Cities like Amsterdam favored commerce, religious tolerance, and diplomatic neutrality. Others, including the more rural provinces (like Zeeland), aligned with the Orangists and supported militarism and stricter Calvinism. This urban-rural split shaped debates over domestic policy and foreign engagement.


The political equilibrium broke in the “Disaster Year” (Rampjaar). After a triple invasion by France (under Louis XIV), England, and the bishoprics of Münster and Cologne, the Dutch populace turned against the republican elite. The Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis were brutally lynched by a mob in The Hague, likely with tacit support from the Orangists.


The Dutch fought three naval wars with England during Spinoza’s lifetime (1652–1654, 1665–1667, and 1672–1674). These wars threatened the Republic’s maritime supremacy and trade dominance, particularly as England sought to expand its commercial empire.


Louis XIV’s aggressive expansion and the 1672 invasion of the Dutch Republic marked the low point of Dutch security. France quickly occupied much of the eastern provinces, only stopped by the Dutch tactic of flooding the countryside (the “Holland Water Line”).


The constant military threat led to debates about standing armies, conscription, and taxation, topics that divided the republicans (who feared militarism would invite monarchy) and the Orangists (who saw the military as a tool of unity and strength).


Spinoza lived through an age in which toleration was conditional and reversible, political authority was decentralized and contested, and foreign invasions were a recurring reality.


His emphasis on rational governance, freedom of expression, and democratic participation reflects a response to this volatile environment, an effort to theorize how liberty could survive amid chaos, factionalism, and the tyranny of religious passion.


Spinoza was born in Amsterdam into a Portuguese-Jewish family of conversos, Sephardic Jews who had fled the Inquisition in Iberia. The Dutch Republic, with its relatively tolerant Calvinist establishment, offered these exiles a space of conditional refuge. Yet, Spinoza’s own life would show the limits of this tolerance. In 1656, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam’s Jewish community for heretical views that questioned the immortality of the soul, the divine authorship of the Bible, and the authority of religious law. This event marked Spinoza’s break not only with Jewish orthodoxy, but with all forms of sectarian authority, further sharpening his political vision.


Spinoza’s major political works, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) and the unfinished Political Treatise (posthumously published in 1677), must be read in the context of both his excommunication and the broader political volatility of the Dutch Republic. During his lifetime, the Republic was governed by a fragile balance between the Republican States Party, led by the Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt, and the Orangist faction loyal to the House of Orange, which favored hereditary stadtholdership and military centralization.


The 1660s and 1670s saw escalating tensions between these factions, exacerbated by foreign wars (especially with England and France), economic downturns, and public unrest. The disastrous “Rampjaar” (Disaster Year) of 1672 was a turning point. That year, the Republic was simultaneously invaded by France, England, and two German principalities. In a frenzy of blame, the De Witt brothers were brutally murdered by an Orangist mob in The Hague, and William III of Orange was restored to power.


Spinoza, who admired De Witt’s leadership and the States Party’s commitment to republicanism, was reportedly so horrified by the lynching that he had to be restrained from posting a placard denouncing the murderers as “barbarians.” He would go on to draft the Political Treatise in the final years of his life, likely as a theoretical response to the failure of moderate republicanism to withstand populist and princely backlash.


Spinoza’s political theory develops a radical form of “naturalist republicanism.” He rejects the idea that political authority is divinely ordained or rooted in custom. Instead, he argues that states are justified only to the extent that they enable individuals to live rationally and securely. Unlike Hobbes, who sees fear as the primary political motivator, Spinoza centers his theory on the collective cultivation of reason. Humans are not merely fearful beings, they are capable of improvement through education, dialogue, and mutual understanding.


Spinoza is no naïve idealist. He acknowledges the dangers of irrational passions, especially religious enthusiasm and populist demagoguery, but unlike Machiavelli or Hobbes, he does not seek to repress them through coercion or channel them through conflict. Instead, he proposes institutional forms that gradually neutralize destructive passions through inclusive, participatory governance.


Crucially, Spinoza advocates for a secular state not as a neutral arbiter of pluralism but as a rational structure that protects freedom of thought. His famous statement in the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670) that “the purpose of the state is not to dominate men, but to free them from fear” articulates a foundational principle of modern democratic theory.


Spinoza’s critique of religious authority and his defense of freedom of expression are inseparable from the historical experience of being both a political exile and a religious heretic. His political writings are not speculative philosophy detached from reality. They are deeply situated reflections on the collapse of a tolerant republic, the fragility of liberty, and the conditions under which humans can form stable, cooperative, and free societies.


Spinoza lived through the failure of the De Witt-led republican experiment, the rise of military populism under William III, and the violent entanglement of religion with politics. His political theory, developed amid censorship and violence, offers one of the earliest sustained arguments for democratic governance grounded in rational autonomy rather than divine command or aristocratic virtue.


His thought, while often interpreted through the lens of Enlightenment rationalism, was forged in a republic riven by contradiction: a commercial powerhouse deeply reliant on civic freedoms but threatened at every turn by religious intolerance, external war, and internal factionalism.


Montesquieu and the Anxiety of Absolutism


Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (1689–1755), wrote during the height of French absolutism and the early Enlightenment. His seminal work, De l'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws, 1748), is often misread as a universal defense of liberal constitutionalism. In reality, the work is a complex product of a France deeply marked by the long reign of Louis XIV, the erosion of aristocratic independence, and the early stirrings of Enlightenment political critique.


Born into a family of the provincial nobility near Bordeaux, Montesquieu inherited the presidency of the Bordeaux Parlement, one of the regional sovereign courts that had once served as a check on royal authority. However, by the time of his adulthood, the power of the parlements had been significantly curtailed. Louis XIV’s long rule (1643–1715) had centralized state power in the monarchy, suppressing feudal autonomy, weakening the estates, and turning the aristocracy into courtiers dependent on royal favor at Versailles.


Montesquieu’s political theory can be read as a response to the degeneration of intermediary powers and the loss of civic virtue under absolutism. He admired the ancient republics and, especially, the English constitutional system for preserving liberty through a balance of powers, monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic. Yet, his praise of England was not simply an idealization. It was a foil against the French model of centralized authority.


The England Montesquieu encountered during his travels (1729–1731) had emerged from a tumultuous 17th century marked by civil war, the Glorious Revolution (1688), and the establishment of a constitutional monarchy under William and Mary. Montesquieu’s experience of this relatively stable system, in which the executive, legislature, and judiciary were separated, inspired his most influential theoretical contribution: the separation of powers. But this was not a purely abstract doctrine. It was aimed squarely at the problems of absolutism in France.


French society under Louis XIV and his successors was marked by rigid social stratification, heavy taxation of the lower classes, and widespread censorship. Montesquieu, who wrote during the regency and reign of Louis XV (1715–1774), witnessed a monarchy burdened by fiscal crisis, a discontented nobility excluded from meaningful political participation, and the slow crumbling of the Ancien Régime’s ideological legitimacy.


The Spirit of the Laws also reflects Montesquieu’s deep engagement with historical, geographical, and sociological factors in shaping political systems. He argued that no single form of government could be universally applied: the proper form of governance depended on a country’s size, climate, economy, religion, and social structure. This anti-universalism set him apart from many Enlightenment contemporaries and foreshadowed modern political sociology.


His famous tripartite typology of regimes, republics (based on virtue), monarchies (based on honor), and despotisms (based on fear), was not simply a classificatory scheme, but a normative warning. Montesquieu feared that France, by centralizing authority and eroding intermediary institutions, was sliding toward despotism. His theory of checks and balances was, in this sense, not a celebration of political plurality for its own sake, but a desperate attempt to reinstate the political mediations that had historically buffered liberty.


Montesquieu also drew on his legal training and classical education to craft a vision of liberty that combined institutional balance with legal predictability. His definition of liberty as “the tranquility of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety” reflects a deep concern for legal clarity and security, not radical participation. Unlike Rousseau, who would later emphasize popular sovereignty and civic equality, Montesquieu retained a conservative respect for tradition and the role of elites in sustaining the republic.


His aristocratic sensibility was based on a vision of power that needed restraint through multiple counterweights. Thus, Montesquieu’s ideal regime was not democratic in the modern sense but was republican in the classical sense: governed by laws, mediated through virtue and honor, and protected by the fragmentation of power.


He also understood liberty to be fragile. In large states, he argued, despotism was always a threat. His deep interest in the Persian, Roman, and Ottoman empires reflects a comparative political anthropology concerned with the psychological and institutional roots of tyranny. His fictional Persian Letters (1721), written in the voice of Persian travelers in France, was both a critique of absolutist pretensions and a mirror held up to European society’s own irrationalities, hypocrisies, and cultural myopia.


By historicizing political institutions and recognizing their contingency, Montesquieu laid the groundwork for a modern, empirical approach to political theory. His work emerged from a France on the brink of revolution, a country struggling to reconcile ancient privileges with new economic and intellectual currents. To read The Spirit of the Laws outside this context is to miss the urgency of its warnings and the subtlety of its reforms.


Art, Conflict, and Political Imagination


Philosophical thought does not emerge in isolation. It resonates with the art, literature, and music of its time. Just as early modern political philosophers responded to the collapse of order, religious conflict, and the crises of sovereignty, so too did artists and writers across cultures reflect the tensions of their worlds through symbolic forms, allegories, and aesthetic innovations.


The following examples illustrate how major social, political, and economic transformations were embedded not only in theoretical texts, but also in the cultural imagination of the era, both in the West and beyond.


England: Hobbes and the Trauma of Civil War



Italy: Machiavelli and the Crisis of the Renaissance



The Dutch Republic: Spinoza and the Crisis of Liberty



France: Montesquieu and the Anxiety of Absolutism



Global Parallels: Non-Western Reflections of Political Crisis


Though Hobbes, Spinoza, and Montesquieu were Western thinkers, the early modern world was marked globally by imperial collapses, doctrinal fragmentation, and debates about power and legitimacy. These tensions were deeply embedded in the cultural output of non-Western societies as well.


Ottoman Empire



Mughal India


  • Mir Taqi Mir, Diwan (1723–1810) – His ghazals express personal and collective despair during the Mughal Empire’s disintegration, capturing the psychological toll of political decline and foreign invasions.

  • Sauda, Shahr-Ashob (City Lament) (1713–1781) – A poetic form describing social breakdown and urban suffering during the empire’s collapse, mirroring the sense of instability Spinoza observed in the Dutch Republic.


Qing China



Tokugawa Japan



Political Thought and Economic Knowledge: Parallel Currents


To further appreciate the intellectual atmosphere in which early modern political philosophy evolved, it is essential to consider the economic writings that emerged during the lifetimes of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Montesquieu. These philosophers did not operate in intellectual isolation. Their conceptions of the state, liberty, sovereignty, and virtue intersected with, and were sometimes in tension with, contemporary discourses on trade, money, property, and commerce.


In the age of Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527), formal economic theory had not yet emerged as a separate discipline. However, the Renaissance was saturated with mercantile practice, early financial innovation, and humanist treatises on commerce. Texts like Benedetto Cotrugli’s The Book of the Art of Trade (1458) and Leonardo Bruni’s De Monetis (written around 1428-1430) reflected a growing awareness of money, exchange, and ethics in trade.


Although not theorists in the modern sense, these writers framed economic life within the broader question of civic virtue, a theme that would deeply influence Machiavelli’s republicanism. Moreover, Machiavelli’s Florence was embedded in a network of commercial city-states whose political volatility was often tied to economic rivalry, especially in banking and textile markets. His practical insights on power thus resonate with the emerging logic of statecraft as tied to economic control.


By the time of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), economic thought had begun to crystallize around mercantilism, a doctrine that emphasized state intervention, a favorable balance of trade, and control over bullion flows.


Works like Thomas Mun’s England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade (1664), Gerard de Malynes’s The Canker of England’s Commonwealth (1601), and Josiah Child’s writings on interest and trade reflected a growing concern with national wealth, monetary policy, and colonial commerce. Most significantly, William Petty’s Political Arithmetick (1676) introduced the systematic use of quantitative data in economic reasoning, anticipating modern econometrics.


Hobbes’s own views on sovereignty and order emerged in this environment where economics and politics were increasingly entangled: just as political authority required concentration to prevent civil collapse, economic policy was seen to require coordination to protect national interests. Hobbes did not write economics, but he lived in a world in which political authority and economic regulation were being theorized in tandem.


In Baruch Spinoza’s Dutch Republic (1632–1677), the economic context was radically different: a globally dominant commercial empire, reliant on shipping, finance, and colonial exploitation. This period saw the rise of stock markets, joint-stock companies, and speculative finance—Amsterdam being a center of global capital. The works of Hugo Grotius, particularly Mare Liberum (1609), defended free navigation and open trade as natural rights of nations, laying foundations for liberal economic theory. Meanwhile, Jan de Witt’s anonymous tract Interest of Holland articulated a vision of peaceful commerce, decentralized governance, and civic toleration, one that directly influenced Spinoza’s political thought.


Spinoza’s emphasis on rational cooperation and institutional freedom mirrors these republican-commercial ideals, while his deep mistrust of clerical and monarchical authority echoed Dutch fears of foreign entanglements and domestic authoritarianism.


Montesquieu (1689–1755), writing at the height of French absolutism and the dawn of Enlightenment liberalism, lived through a transitional moment in economic thought. His Spirit of the Laws (1748) includes extended reflections on commerce, arguing that “peace is the natural effect of trade.”


For Montesquieu, commerce fostered moderation and mutual interdependence among nations—an idea that presaged liberal internationalism. Simultaneously, foundational texts of political economy emerged during his lifetime.


John Locke’s monetary writings, particularly Some Considerations on the Consequences of the Lowering of Interest (1691), developed early theories of value and capital. Bernard Mandeville’s The Fable of the Bees (1714) scandalously proposed that private vices generate public economic benefits.


Near the end of Montesquieu’s life, Richard Cantillon’s Essai sur la nature du commerce en général (c. 1730) laid out a systematic framework for understanding markets, land, and entrepreneurship, while François Quesnay’s Tableau Économique (1758) would soon initiate the Physiocratic school, emphasizing productive labor and the primacy of agriculture. Montesquieu’s skepticism of centralized power and his nuanced typology of regimes mirrored these emerging economic debates over productivity, liberty, and governance.


Thus, the centuries that produced these pivotal figures in political philosophy were also those in which economic thought began to mature into systematic reflection. Each philosopher, in articulating their visions of order, sovereignty, or liberty, inhabited a world where markets were expanding, capital was concentrating, and the relationship between the individual and the state was being reimagined, not only politically, but economically. Their ideas must therefore be situated within this parallel development of economic theory and practice, which both informed and was shaped by the crises of their time.


Conclusion: Toward a Historically Situated Reading of Political Thought


Anachronism in political philosophy is not merely a scholarly error. It is a form of conceptual violence that severs ideas from the historical conditions that gave them meaning.


Hobbes was not an apologist for tyranny, but a traumatized witness to civil collapse who sought order in the face of disintegration.


Machiavelli was not a teacher of amorality, but a desperate republican attempting to preserve civic autonomy in an Italy ravaged by internal faction and foreign domination.


Spinoza was not merely a secular rationalist, but a Jewish dissident negotiating the limits of tolerance within a fractured republic.


Montesquieu was not a liberal ideologue in the modern sense, but a nuanced critic of monarchical excess and a theorist of institutional balance forged in the shadow of absolutism.


To read their works today requires resisting the temptation to transplant their theories wholesale into modern frameworks. Political concepts such as liberty, sovereignty, and reason must be understood not as timeless abstractions, but as historical responses to particular crises and challenges. Only by drawing from these thinkers with fidelity to their contexts can we appreciate the richness of their thought, and make their political wisdom speak meaningfully to our present struggles over power, legitimacy, and institutional design.

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© 2025 by Arda Tunca

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