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Reason of State and Sovereignty in Early Modern England: A Question of Ideology?

Much of the intellectual history of early modern England has been written as a story of emergent ideologies, with constitutionalism, Ciceronianism, Tacitism (new humanism), de factoism, divine right, ascending political legitimacy, mixed monarchy theory, liberalism, and republicanism all being treated as arising between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A generation or so ago, energies were spent on unearthing the antecedents of socialism to show that it was not a naughty French or Hunnish importation, but authentically native to England. Environmentalism is, no doubt, waiting in the wings with, at least initially, the standard cast of lineal suspects being scrutinized for where they stood on the exploitation of nature and the conservation of its resources. It might even seem to the untutored, or cynical, that all that is needed is to add the suffix 'ism' to a noun and we can discover some sort of abstract agency at work to which there have been clear commitments and whose history can now be written. As Nietzsche put it in a typically spirited half-truth: the name givers are the great originals, for they make us see what is already before us. With all these ideological names, the search is for intimations of ourselves who have, after all, lived in an age marked by clearly articulated competing ideologies. The textbooks and university courses devoted to these are legion. To construe those earlier turbulent times also in terms of ideological conflict no doubt makes them more accessible, but that access may be to the non-existent. It should at least be asked how close the whole enterprise of unearthing ideological formations in the early modern world is to institutionalized myth-making. And, as I shall briefly discuss below, the shift of focus among some historians from ideologies to languages may be just as problematic.