Titolo della tesi: People and Multitude in Early Modern England: Towards a Conceptual History
The dissertation traces the history of the concepts of people and multitude in English political thought, approximately from the early sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century. The thread running through its four chapters is the idea that in this period there were factors neglected by historical scholarship that played an important role in elevating the concept of the people in political discourse in a way relevant to the affirmation of theories of popular sovereignty and appeals to the people more generally later in the years of the Revolution and the Commonwealth. In exploring those yet uncharted areas, the dissertation aims at bridging older narratives on the emergence of modern popular sovereignty with more recent historiographical approaches that have turned their attention to socially heterogeneous political languages and political cultures.
The first chapter critically assays some theoretical and methodological assumptions embedded in the historiography of political concepts and vocabularies, notably in the strand of linguistic contextualism elaborated by the Cambridge School of intellectual history. By drawing on fields as diverse as historical linguistics, the history of media, and the history of linguistic conceptions, it places the linguistic turn in historical studies within a long-term perspective, highlighting the significance of the changes that occurred in the material organization of texts since the early modern era. Through case studies on Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, and John Wilkins, the chapter demonstrates how such organization affected and was exploited by those philosophers in constructing their conceptual apparatuses, with special regard toward the concepts of the people and the multitude. Where Bacon deliberately favored a cursory deployment matching his conception of the political world, Hobbes made an astute and more systematic use of explicit redefinition, and Wilkins’s grand project for a philosophical language climaxed in a full tabulation of collective political concepts.
Chapter two scrutinizes the transition from the political language of the commons to that of the people and the multitude. It advances the argument that a host of sixteenth-century political writers with ties to the expanding Tudor State attempted a neutralization of the perceived egalitarian and subversive connotations that words such as commons and commonwealth had acquired over centuries of popular social protest. Among the authors studied are eminent humanist scholars such as Thomas Elyot, Thomas Starkey, and Thomas Smith. While their efforts were by no means uniform in orientation or outcome, the overall result of their linguistic redescriptions was the distinction of the people as a unitary and obliging political entity from the unruly and unreasonable multitude, a distinction to a great extent molded after the Latinate concepts of populus and plebs. In this way, the vocabulary of commons and kindred words was either marginalized or recuperated from politically unsettling usages, while the people was thrust towards the center of ordinary political language.
The third chapter focuses on a broader range of sources such as parliamentary records, sermons, and political tracts, to probe how the concepts of the people and the king were related in the early seventeenth century, in particular by those who were not sympathetic to popular sovereignty. The argument put forward is that even among the most scathing critics of popular sovereignty a space had to be carved out that assigned a positive function to the people as the object of political power, entrusting its protection to the action of royal government. After canvassing the historiographical debate between Glenn Burgess and J. P. Sommerville on conflict and consensus in early Stuart political thought, the chapter outlines the historical development of the doctrine of the divine right of kings and moves on to considers how the safety of the people was routinely wielded in political argument by speakers of disparate persuasions in matters of principle or policy in order to further their aims, all the while abiding by the conventions of the idiom of theological monarchism. It finally analyzes how different metaphors linked together by the language of love—God and creation, shepherd and flock, husband and wife, father and child—were used to thematize the relationship between sovereign and subject, suggesting that their pervasiveness entailed a persistent ambiguity in the way the political roles of the king and the people were conceived.
The fourth and final chapter examines the concept of the multitude in the ‘politic’ idiom that came into fashion between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century. The most distinctive feature of this idiom, typically employed in essays, aphoristic collections, and historical writing, was the way in which it construed political affairs as characterized by deception and the pursuit of self-interest. Notably, the idiom contained definite notions about how its own diffusion should be limited to competent statesmen and kept from the ignorant, undependable multitude. The chapter starts by describing the reception of Machiavellian, Tacitean, and reason of State literature at the turn of the sixteenth century, to pass to an evaluation of how concurrent social and political phenomena such as the cooptation of larger segments of the population into State apparatuses, the pauperization of the masses, and the advent of a public sphere engendered both the necessity for a wider circulation of the ‘politic’ idiom and diffuse misgivings over the potentially disruptive effects of that circulation. Following a review of the negative cultural associations carried by the multitude across early modern psychological and rhetorical theories, the chapter explores the attitude taken by writers conversant in the ‘politic’ idiom towards popularity, namely demagogic politics, thought to be as debasing and perilous as unavoidable for the good statesman. Such an ambivalent stance comes to the fore in the approach adopted by English administrators towards the multitude in Ireland, as exemplified in the tracts of Richard Beacon and John Davies. After a survey of the significance of alternative, more positive appraisals of the multitude in early modern political discourse, the chapter concludes by showing how the disparaging views of the multitude found in the ‘politic’ idiom related to the discourse on the welfare of the people as the aim of government seen in previous chapters.