The Present State of Germany. Samuel Pufendorf
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Although the Monzambano did not address the specific conflict directly, it dealt with the underlying structural issues that created it, not just in historical and constitutional terms but also according to the natural law theory developed in Pufendorf’s dissertations before and after this period.
Unlike Pufendorf’s shorter polemic, the Monzambano was controversial because it challenged long-established views that undergirded complex and hard-won arrangements within the empire. Indeed, it can be read as a brusque complaint about the pointlessness or practical uselessness of those views. This perspective, as well as the work’s independent, aggressive, and disrespectful demeanor (which many readers enjoyed), meant that it could not be published in Germany and that it was safer to issue it under a pseudonym. So the manuscript went to Paris (in late 1666), where Samuel’s brother Esaias, then acting as the Swedish liaison, arranged for a printer. The latter in turn consulted the French historian Mézeray, whose brief response was reprinted by Gundling in the 1706 edition (see below). Mézeray praised the piece, which he called a work of politics, not history, but thought it too dangerous to approve because of passages potentially offensive to the French and certainly to the clergy. Therefore, like other refugees of the age, the book migrated to the Netherlands and was published at The Hague in early 1667 by Adrian Vlacq, who had previously issued Pufendorf’s Elements (1660). Even then it seemed prudent to purport Geneva as the place of publication to mislead anticipated critics.
Despite its irreverent, populist tone, Monzambano was immediately recognized as a substantial critique of the empire and its theorists or publicists, as they were called. Since the printer could not meet demand, especially in Germany, the book was frequently pirated. An imperial prohibition and confiscation order, on account of the work’s treatment of Austria and Catholicism, merely whetted appetites and increased the circulation. Few works had seen so many editions, according to a 1710 editor, who estimated a total distribution of over three hundred thousand copies.10 Even if the figure is exaggerated, the book was clearly a seventeenth-century best-seller, achieving a notoriety that lasted for decades. Indeed, even its critics contributed to the book’s success by sometimes republishing it with their own commentaries and refutations.11
In the broadest terms, the pseudonymous author—whose detailed knowledge of German affairs belied his purported Italian persona—was accused of undermining the empire by attacking its unifying self conception: that is, critics charged, he lacked patriotism (Reichspatriotismus). This was not an anti-intellectual, timid, or merely dogmatic response but a reaction to the boldness of Pufendorf’s critique and its concrete implications. Indeed, the outcry against the work was so widespread and intense precisely because Monzambano took on everyone who had written on the empire; it did not ally itself with any particular interpretation or school but mockingly dismissed them all. This “purely negative criticism”12 left the work without any established allies and made it seem wholly destructive.
The hunt for the brazen author began almost immediately, with Samuel himself and his brother Esaias, along with Hermann Conring, Karl Ludwig, and von Boineburg on the short list of suspects—the last three because they were favorably mentioned in the book. Boineburg was particularly embarrassed by the suggestion because he seemed to have a motive (dismissal from Mainz, in 1664) and happened, inconveniently, to be in Vienna, the imperial center, after the book appeared.13 However, more observant minds soon focused on Samuel, not only because of private reports from Heidelberg but also because of similar content in several of his earlier dissertations.14 Indeed, he confirmed these suspicions by a detailed defense in the following year (1668). On Irregular States (De republica irregulari) was Pufendorf’s first publication at Lund: it provided a systematic analysis of this key notion in Monzambano and specific refutations of the book’s early critics.15 From then on his authorship was essentially an open secret, though he denied it until the end of his life.16
Critiques of Monzambano began appearing almost immediately and kept coming for decades. Of varying length and competence, they typically expressed outrage and insult as well as scholarly disagreement. Some addressed specific elements of the work (including factual claims), others attempted broader defenses of positions Pufendorf had panned, and still others offered extensive commentaries on the whole. Most were in the scholastic mode that Pufendorf so despised: merely reiterating traditional categories to schematize the empirical realities of the empire.17 Their authors ranged from young doctoral candidates still cutting their teeth to accomplished scholars and diplomats.18 Pufendorf himself continued to engage his critics indirectly until about 1675, when he inserted into the collective edition of his dissertations two lengthy supplements—Additions—to On Irregular States;19 and he continued to enjoy the reactions that the work provoked, even as he prepared the second edition.20
Conceptual Context
Accused by his enemies in Sweden of defending Monzambano and seeking to destroy the German political order, Pufendorf replied that he (i.e., Monzambano) actually sought to preserve the Westphalian settlement and to protect the liberty of the German estates and the security of the Protestant religion.21 That is, as the additions to the second edition (especially in chapter VIII) make even more apparent, the work was motivated by the very patriotism that its critics found wanting.22 The empire could not serve its purpose if it misconceived itself and failed to recognize the concrete obstacles to its proper functioning. The title of the book, “On the State [status] of the German Empire,” is suggestively ambiguous in this respect, by both announcing a description of actual political conditions in Germany and suggesting an assessment of the empire in terms of the general criteria for statehood. The failure of the descriptive and normative aspects to coincide implied not condemnation but the need for meliorative adaptation. That is, any destructiveness at work was thoroughly Cartesian.23
The great amount of previous theorizing about the empire24 that Severinus de Monzambano mentions dismissively in the preface had generally taken place within an Aristotelian framework according to which there are three correct forms of state (kingship/monarchy, aristocracy, polity/republic) and three deviant or degenerate ones (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy). Most attempts to characterize and diagnose the empire had used these categories. For example, Jean Bodin (Six livres de la republique, 1576) had declared the empire an aristocracy on account of the power of the territorial estates, particularly the electors; so did Hippolithus a Lapide (i.e., Bogislaw Philipp Chemnitz, in Dissertatio de ratione status in imperionostro Romano-Germanico, 1640), whose position is extensively criticized by Pufendorf (VIII. 1–3). Others, such as Dietrich Reinkingk (Tractatus de regimine seculariet ecclesiastico, 1619), had emphasized the position of the emperor and presented the empire as a monarchy. Although it was clearly not a polity or republic (see VI.3), there were those, such as Johannes Althusius (Politica methodice digesta, 1603), who emphasized the popular origins of political power, even in the empire as a whole. However, Althusius himself saw the best state as a combination of all three forms and thus belongs rather to the so-called mixture theorists, who combined different forms in order to explain the phenomena. Simple or mixed, Pufendorf thought all such explanations—including the distinctions invented to make them plausible, such as real versus personal sovereignty or majesty—inadequate to the actual complexities of the empire.
Following Bodin and Hobbes, Pufendorf emphasized sovereignty (summum imperium) as the defining characteristic of a state, and he distinguished regular from irregular states in terms of whether sovereignty was unified and effective or not.25 Whatever particular form a statemight have was irrelevant so long as king, council, or people had sole and sufficient power to direct the state as a single entity, governed “by one Soul” (VI.8; VII.7). When regular, states could realize their goals: protection of individuals from one another, both singly and in groups, and relief of the general insecurity of human affairs; when irregular, they could not.26 According to these criteria, which were carefully elaborated in On Irregular States and On the Law of Nature and of Nations, the empire was an irregular, dysfunctional state. In fact, it did not seem like a state at all, but more like a hybrid or chimera, produced by a gradual, unplanned, and unsystematic devolution from an originally regular state/ status.27
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