ABSTRACT
Hitherto every epoch and every special spiritual and moral mode of thought had attempted, with its own weapons and on the basis of its own particular aims of life, to struggle with the daemon of raison d’état. Machiavelli had bluntly acknowledged it, but had tried to use it as an instrument for the regeneration of his fatherland; Boccalini, with a mixture of disgust and curiosity, had been able to conceive it as an evil and gruesomely absorbing basic phenomenon of State life. Campanella had known how to hate it more profoundly than Boccalini, and yet with a cynical resolve had undertaken, like Machiavelli, to use it as an instrument for even higher, indeed altogether utopian aims. All this took place during the period of an absolutism that was still incomplete and crude, and which, particularly at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was deeply agitated by the conflict between the continuing heathenism of the Renaissance and the resurrected vital force of the Church. Simultaneously, and more and more as time went on, there was a reaction, on the basis of Christian and Church ethics, against the heathen naturalism of raison d’état, and an attempt was made to render it harmless in the interests of a respectable form of politics, without essentially influencing its practical development which necessarily continued along the lines of Machiavelli and only gradually tended to become more civilized with regard to its means. Then, after the close of the religious wars, there came a period of a certain stabilizing and fixing of the problem, as was attempted for instance by Pufendorf’s rigid practicality. The inner consolidation of absolutism continued; its inner work of forming the State and shaping the economic structure became more forceful and beneficial. So that, in spite of all the complaints about the evils of raison d’état, the rulers were no longer thought any the worse of for making use of its unclean methods in their struggles with other States. The deeper element of passion in dealing with this problem began to diminish. For the realism of the later seventeenth century, which gradually loosened the hold of dogmatic thought, did not succeed at 273the same time in producing any new stronger and more deeply moving ideals which might have had to come to terms with raison d’état.
