Abstract
This article reconstructs the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the first decades of seventeenth century: a period of strong conflicts between the religious sphere and the political changes of the states in their trajectory towards absolutism. The analysis of the polemic against Machiavelli, Bodin and the politiques shows how it was questioned at the conceptual and practical levels the autonomy of politics from religious morality and the tendency of the states to evade ecclesiastical control respectively. The schools of thought discussed here –from anti-Machiavellism to the encomiastic literature of the existent governments, from Tacitism to the reason State, to the critical writings of the society, mainly utopia- outline on the one hand, the effort to preserve an image of politics as just government, with a virtuous prince, but on the other, the inevitable commitment to the praxis of political realism, well represented by the developments of the concept of reason of State in Botero and other writers from the seventeenth century. It was only with the arrival of Modern natural law which brought to the fore the questions of the origin and purpose of civil society, that political thought partly detached from the eternal conflict between morals and political praxis opening the era of rational and scientific research and individual rights.
Highlights
This article reconstructs the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the first decades of seventeenth century: a period of strong conflicts between the religious sphere and the political changes of the states in their trajectory towards absolutism
The schools of thought discussed here –from anti-Machiavellism to the encomiastic literature of the existent governments, from Tacitism to the reason State, to the critical writings of the society, mainly utopia- outline on the one hand, the effort to preserve an image of politics as just government, with a virtuous prince, but on the other, the inevitable commitment to the praxis of political realism, well represented by the developments of the concept of reason of State in Botero and other writers from the seventeenth century
It was only with the arrival of Modern natural law which brought to the fore the questions of the origin and purpose of civil society, that political thought partly detached from the eternal conflict between morals and political praxis opening the era of rational and scientific research and individual rights
Summary
Los escritores políticos de la segunda mitad del 1500 tuvieron que atender las nuevas situaciones institucionales y las condiciones en las cuales se desarrollaba de hecho la vida política en la península italiana y en los otros estados católicos. Si bien Scipio di Castro, fraile de origen español siempre bajo la vigilancia del Santo Oficio, desembarcado en Roma para ganarse la vida con intrigas, no era un personaje común, sus textos son significativos y reveladores de este ámbito del pensamiento político, un tanto más difundidos y leídos que los de ámbito erudito. No se puede eliminar del pensamiento político de ese periodo la vasta literatura sobre la nobleza sin reducir la imagen del Estado en el siglo xvi a una relación abstracta entre el príncipe y los súbditos que no tenía base en la realidad, ya que el poder principesco era gestionado sobre la base de un acuerdo consolidado con las aristocracias.
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