ABSTRACT
If the period c. 1550—1640 saw guild theory brought to its highest point of development in Bodin and Althusius, the period c. 1640—1789 was above all characterized by the development of the values of civil society. It hardly needs to be emphasized that the two successful political revolutions of early modern Europe, the Dutch Revolt of 1565-81 and the Revolution of 1688-9 in Great Britain, took place in Protestant countries which either were or were to become leaders in overseas commerce and sea power. Constitutional government, which had earlier flourished in the Italian and German cities, followed the path of trade and empire. It would appear, furthermore, that the values of civil society were first generally diffused among trading populations which were beginning to adopt a more tolerant view of what one might say in public (cf. Parker 1979, 269), and even of religious matters. The values which became dominant here were in the main those whose much earlier development in the European cities has already been noted: property rights, personal liberty and equality under the rule of law. As popular ideals, these were deeply rooted in Germanic-European Christianity, and they had been spelled out by theorists of civil society from the thirteenth century onwards (see ch.3). In the medieval towns, furthermore, belief in these ideals had already contributed to recurrent demands for wider political participation, just as it did in seventeenth-century England. On the other hand, during the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the ideals of civil society were becoming ever more widely diffused in north-western Europe and France. They were acquiring a firmer and more convincing basis in theology and philosophy. And there were new developments. This was the heyday of the theory of natural rights (Tuck 1979,143ff., chs 7-8). There was 'a new belief in the value and rights of the individual' (Macpherson 1962, 2), which may fairly be ascribed to Protestant influence. At the same time as this rise in individualism, the practical utility and moral legitimacy of corporations, whether towns or guilds, was increasingly questioned. New conceptions of man and the state relegated them to the shadows. 'Political society' or the sovereign state was thrust to the fore as the immediate expression of man's social nature, as the one and only adequate answer to his social needs, and as the sole morally meaningful human group other than the family.
