The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe

Abstract

The history of the word politicus in early-modern Europe begins in the thirteenth century; as in other instances, the origins of modern political language have to be sought in the late Middle Ages. John of Salisbury had already used the term in the Policraticus to denote the institutions of the State; in his Didascalicon, Hugh of St Victor divides the practical science alternatively into solitary, private, and public, and into ‘ethicam, oeconomicam et politicam’; but politicus and other words with the same root definitively entered medieval political language after the middle of that century as the result of the translation of Aristotle's Politics and, to a lesser extent, of his Nicomachean Ethics. Albert the Great criticises the civilian lawyers who wrongly call themselves politici, although they are ignorant of the ars politica; and Brunetto Latini draws on a translation of the Ethics when defining, in his Tresor, the ‘gouvernment des cites’ as ‘politique’; but it was William of Moerbeke's translation of the Politics, used first by St Thomas Aquinas and then by all Aristotelian political writers until the fifteenth century, which introduced politicus, and its Latin equivalent civilis, into the language of Western political thought. In the Politics, the adjective politikos shares with the other derivatives from polis a variety of meanings.