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Paradigms or Conceits? Metaphors of the State in Sixteenth-Century England

The distinction between a fundamental concept or paradigm and what the sixteenth century called a conceit, a metaphor or image, is usually determined by whether it is consciously formulated or not. A fundamental concept is an automatic assumption, a shaping idea or paradigm, a presupposition that gives its form to all other concepts. A conceit on the other hand is recognisably a metaphor or analogy, similar but not identical to the conceived object. Bacon's warning about finding analogies had its point for Tudor writers: 'The human understanding, from its peculiar nature, easily supposes a greater degree of order and equality in things than it really finds; and although many things in nature be sui generis and most irregular, will yet invent parallels and conjugates and relatives, where no such thing is.'! Both self-consciously making conceits and unconsciously using concepts were common practices in that time of unprecedented verbal inventiveness. The two predominant concepts of the state were the body politic and the social contract. Both have a good claim to be fundamental concepts. The displacement of the body poliric by the social contract in the seventeenth century has even been identified as a classic case of paradigm displacement on Kuhn's pattern for scientific revolutions. That is an attractive proposition. It depends, though, on the degree to which each concept can be shown to be fundamental, an automatic and shaping presupposition. Sixteenth-century usage suggests that both were used as conceits, and that the displacement of one by the other was a complex process bearing little resemblance to the Kuhnian pattern. The Henrician Reformation of the 1530s laid new demands on the way people conceived of the state, because by taking it out of the Catholic