Chapter Six - Beyond ‘Reason of State’: The Moral and Religious Foundations of the New Politics Ex Parte Civium

Summary

The time was ripe for a comprehensive reconsideration of the traditional way of conceptualizing the political. The Old Regime was creaking everywhere, clearly revealing the epochal changes that were taking place not only in terms of society, politics, and institutions, but in terms of the very way in which people thought. In the old Europe of the eighteenth century, Filangieri was certain, ‘a peaceful revolution is brewing.’ He explained its causes and motives in his usual prophetic and optimistically visionary tone in the Introduzione to the Scienza della legislazione. For centuries, princes had privileged the solution to a single obsessive problem: how to win wars and extend their dominions. ‘To find the way to kill the greatest number of men in the shortest time’ was the constant preoccupation of those participating in that veritable ‘military mania’ which, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had led the absolutist powers of the continent to favour the creation of huge standing armies, and the construction of formidable arsenals, while neglecting public happiness. Finally, after decades of preaching by philosophers like Grotius, Pufendorf, Locke, and Montesquieu, things seemed to be changing rapidly.