The Theory and Practice of Politics and Government, 1500–1800

Abstract

The Reformation marked a watershed in political ideas, particularly with regard to the crucial matter of resistance to government. Many Catholics and Protestants accepted St Augustine’s view of the essential purpose of Church and state, to keep fallen man in check; but, in a period when Protestant rulers had Catholic subjects and Catholic rulers Protestant ones, it is not surprising that some of them, like Luther and Calvin, came to reject his related belief that resistance to established authority could not be justified. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries governments were alive to the psychological bases of power and authority, as their predecessors had been, so that there was nothing novel in Machiavelli’s view that power was based upon reputation. In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries demographic growth and bullion imports from Spanish America caused a marked rise in prices and an associated increase in poverty, unemployment and vagrancy.