ABSTRACT
The whole intellectual atmosphere in the transitional period from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century was much more favourable to working on that aspect of the theory of raison d’état which was universally valid, than it was to studying the individual differences between the interests of the States in the various countries. This is to be seen from that interesting school of Italian theoreticians of statecraft, of whom the best-known are Botero, Paruta, Ammirato and Boccalini. But it could not fail to happen that even the most generalized theses about statecraft should, merely by the practical use one made of them in applying them to the special situation of one’s own time and one’s own country, take on the colour of the soil from which they sprang, and thus provide an involuntary self-portrait of the perfectly concrete interests of State and nation.
