Trude Dijkstra discusses how Chinese religion and philosophy were represented in printed works produced in the Dutch Republic between 1595 and 1700. By focusing on books, newspapers, learned journals, and pamphlets, this study sheds new light on the cultural encounter between China and western Europe in the early modern period. Form, content, and material-technical aspects of different media in Dutch and French are analysed, providing new insights into the ways in which readers could take note of Chinese (...) religion and philosophy. This study thereby demonstrates that there was no singular image of Chinese religion and philosophy, but rather a varied array of notions on the subject. (shrink)

The Dutch Republic holds a marginal position in the debate on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, despite its significance in the early stage of the development of global capitalism. While the positions of those Marxists who did consider the Dutch case range from seeing it as the first capitalist country to rejecting it as an essentially non-capitalist commercial society, all involved basically accept an image of Dutch development as being driven by commerce rather than real (...) advances in the sphere of production. Their shared interpretation of the Dutch ‘Golden Age’, however, rests on an interpretation of Dutch economic history that does not match the current state of historical knowledge. Rereading the debate on the Dutch trajectory towards capitalism in the light of recent economic historiography seriously challenges established views, and questions both major strands in the transition-debate. (shrink)

The European Legacy, Volume 17, Issue 4, Page 559-560, July 2012.

The Dutch Republic had a broad range of means to establish an individual's identity, and a rudimentary ‘system’ of identity registration, essentially established at the local levels of town and parish. This chapter seeks to provide a description of the ways in which the Dutch established an individual's identity. The various registration methods covered almost the entire population of the Dutch Republic at some stage in their life, and it is argued that on balance identity (...) registration in the Dutch Republic was fairly successful. The chapter contends that the degree to which identity was registered and monitored in the early modern era in the Netherlands, while certainly not wholly effective, is remarkable given the absence of a centralized state and the lack of a large bureaucracy. (shrink)

This article examines and compares Adam Ferguson's and Guillaume-Thomas Raynal's analyses of modern commercial states by reconstructing their accounts of the history and politics of the Dutch Republic. For both writers, the Dutch case stood as a clear instance of the political dangers implicit in a particular type of commercial polity, and both sought to apply its lessons to an understanding of the future of their own states. Although Ferguson's and Raynal's arguments about the decline of the (...) Dutch trading state overlapped, their analyses reflected different evaluations of the relationship between modern states and modern economic institutions (trading companies and public debts). The broader purpose of the article is to shed light on the distinctive theories of commerce and models of European development that informed the major works of Enlightenment historiography and political thought produced by Ferguson and Raynal in the 1760s and 1770s. (shrink)

This book attempts to provide a general interpretation of the history of philosophy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 276-277 [Access article in PDF] Wiep Van Bunge. From Stevin to Spinoza: An Essay on Philosophy in the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Republic. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. xii + 217. Cloth, $80.00 By 1660 there were probably more followers of Descartes in the Dutch Republic, population 1.4 million, than in France, population 20 million. Protestantism and prosperity encouraged high (...) rates of literacy and the universities of Leiden and Utrecht were among the liveliest in the world. This vibrancy infused the metaphors that Descartes put into his great Discours de la methode published first in Leiden in 1637. In it he spoke about the beauty of cities that looked as if they had been built by a single architect and of the freedom to be found among people so busy with their business as to leave thinkers to their pursuits. Indirectly he spoke about his adopted homeland where he found many followers—some more eager than loyal. By the 1640s disputes raged in the Republic and the anti-Cartesian forces were led by the Aristotelian and anti-Copernican Gisbertus Voetius. What has been missing in our scholarship up to now has been any convincing account as to why these disputes occurred, and how they resonated within the Dutch context. Wiep Van Bunge's book takes a big step toward closing that knowledge gap.Van Bunge convincingly argues that the vibrancy of the stadtholder-less period up to 1672 produced a willingness to entertain new ideas. It also did not hurt to have Descartes on the scene and active on behalf of his mechanical philosophy, even to the point of addressing the Utrecht magistrates publicly and asking that his critics be chastised. What is remarkable—especially given the resistance to Descartes seen at Oxford and Cambridge—was the speed with which Cartesian ideas entered the Dutch classrooms where as many as a third of the students came from abroad. Again Van Bunge provides context when he starts with the Dutch engineer Simon Stevin and demonstrates the vitality of mathematics for a commercial society but also for a militant one. (The Netherlands was at war with Spain up to 1609.) A recent exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, April to July 2002, also illustrates another aspect of mathematics in the Republic. Precisely in the 1630s when Descartes was putting the finishing touches on his Discours, Pieter Saenredam applied geometry to the interiors of the elegant Utrecht churches so as to give his paintings a regularity and precision worthy of the Cartesian dream of order and clarity. The Dutch commitment to discipline and order also made their army one of the most accomplished in the world. It was perhaps over-determined that Descartes, who had trained with it, would find such a sympathetic audience in the Republic.One of the more fascinating aspects of Van Bunge's detailed study, first of Cartesianism and then of Spinozism in the Republic, concerns the political and ideological meanings to be extracted from the new philosophy. Hobbes also finds a place in the narrative, surprisingly taken up by republicans eager to construct a state that could control the passions. Abraham van Berkel, who put Hobbes's Leviathan into Dutch in 1667, gave the allegiance of his text and himself to Jan de Witt and the cause of the regents and the estates. We can only wonder what Hobbes would have made of the association. The republican affiliations of the mechanical philosophy in the Republic provide a distinctively Dutch context to the [End Page 276] political writings of Spinoza, the most famous and outrageous Cartesian of the century. Van Bunge is especially deft in finding Spinozists and providing far more evidence than I could back in 1981 when I argued for a radical enlightenment within the late seventeenth-century Dutch context (see The Radical Enlightenment. Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans [London: 1981]). None of these positions with their deeply heretical implications could be taken lightly or without danger. Men lost... (shrink)

This book attempts to provide a general interpretation of the history of philosophy in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. It concentrates on the heritage of Humanism, and on the rise of Dutch Cartesianism and Spinozism.

Why was scholar Hadriaan Beverland banished from Holland in 1679? This book answers this question by positioning Beverland’s sexual studies in their historical context for the first time, examining how his radical works challenged the intellectual, ecclesiastical, and political elite of Dutch Republic.

Thirteen chapters on individual authors such as Spinoza, Bayle, Van Effen and Hemsterhuis, and on schools of thought such as Dutch Cartesianism, Newtonianism and Wolffianism. It also addresses the early Dutch reception of Kant.

This book investigates for the first time key theological and philosophical convictions of an influential, yet hitherto neglected, Dutch theologian who developed his ideas on the threshold between the age of Protestant orthodoxy and the emerging Enlightenment.

ArgumentThis article highlights the epistemic concerns that have permeated the historical discourse around charlatanism. In it, I study the term “charlatan” as a multivalent actor’s category without a stable referent. Instead of defining or identifying “the charlatan,” I analyze how the concept of the charlatan was used to make epistemic interventions about what constituted credible knowledge in two interconnected controversies. Focusing on these controversies allows me to thematize how the concept of “the charlatan” expanded beyond medical contexts and to bring (...) a history of knowledge perspective to the history of medicine.The title of the article, “Charlatan Epistemology,” indicates a historical epistemological approach to charlatanism as well as the existence of a charlatan’s embodied epistemology. On the one hand, I historicize the epistemic characteristics of charlatanism, focusing on virtues as well as vices, knowledge as well as ignorance, by addressing the historical and contextual specificities of two case studies and the larger epistemic concerns at play. On the other hand, I show how references to charlatanism implied the existence of specific embodied knowledges, special skills and techniques to manipulate either natural secrets or the human psyche, and I explore the similarities and differences between charlatan epistemology and artisanal epistemology. (shrink)

The claim is widespread that the preservation, or reintroduction, of Western traditions of holy war in the post-Reformation period was due mostly to Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist variety. This paper makes a case for examining the thought of a much broader selection of minor intellectuals on just and holy war than is usually done, and to do so in other national contexts than exclusively the English Puritan one. To test the apparently widespread view that, historically, Calvinism has had a (...) particular proclivity for holy war, the article treats theological justifications of war in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Dutch moral theology. Showing that a full-blown concept of "holy war" was largely absent from Dutch theological thought, it falsifies the assumption that historical Calvinism (or Protestantism in general) is inherently belligerent. The paper demonstrates that justifications of violence religionis causa and ideological motives for war have always been contingent, not on religions, but on the historical contexts in which those religions operate. (shrink)

This is the first comprehensive study of the early modern logic of ideas. It is also a profound contribution to our understanding of the interaction between Aristotelianism and new philosophy and between rationalism and empiricism.

ArgumentThe imitation of adults was the dominant educational early modern model, as it had been from the classical era. Yet, from 1500 onward, this traditional model clashed with new pedagogical ideals that explored if and how the youthful mind differed from the adult. To investigate this clash, I examine individual and aggregate cases – taken from the Dutch (illustrated) textual culture – representing conceptualizations of what has been labelled “the curiosity family” (concepts such as curiosity, inquisitiveness, invention). As previously (...) established, during the seventeenth century, curiosity turned from a vice to a virtue among adults. Textual evidence suggests that for the early modern Dutch youth, docility, long valued, remained the guiding ideal. Shortly after 1700, however, two changes can be detected: for youth, travel literature and travel as a metaphor became a means to explore the world without adults; and for adults, the experimental learning style of the young became a new learning model. (shrink)

This volume widens the scope of research into the relation between religion and Enlightenment. The contributions demonstrate the impact of changing worldviews in a variety of intellectual disciplines and cultural milieus.

This study investigates the biblical criticism of Spinoza from the perspective of the Dutch Reformed society in which the philosopher lived and worked. It focuses on philological investigation of the Bible: its words, language, and the historical context in which it originated.

SummaryThis article addresses how and why the Dutch translation of Forbonnais's Elémens de commerce came about and the reasons for its lack of success. It explores the context in which the Utrecht printers and booksellers Spruit and Haanebrink in 1771 published a Dutch version of the first edition of the Elémens. In the preceding decades the deteriorating wealth and power of the Dutch Republic had become a major theme in the transnational debates on political economy. Recent (...) research has established that Dutch authors contributed to this debate as well, initially by propagating neutrality of trade in combination with an attempt reform the staple market system, but increasingly by arguing the necessity of another type of economy. Inspired by foreign examples, a movement of reformative patriotism emerged, advocating a more balanced economy in which international commerce stimulated mature agricultural and industrial sectors. This type of political economy could be found in Forbonnais's Elémens and may have triggered its rendering into Dutch. It was the first in a series of translations instigated by Hendrik van den Heuvel, the organiser of economic patriotism in the Dutch Republic. Spruit and Haanebrink dedicated the Dutch version of the Elémens to him and mentioned Van den Heuvel's recommendation of the French original. The fact that the intended buyers, economic patriots, were able to read the Elémens in French, may have precluded a big sale of the title, but the poor quality of the translation did not help either. However, one should not conclude that the Dutch reading public was not interested in the Elémens. In 1780 Van den Heuvel still recommended another edition in a better translation. Other sources, such as Dirk Hoola van Nooten's Dutch version of Condillac's Le commerce et le gouvernement considérés relativement l'un à l'autre, suggest that Forbonnais's ideas were acknowledged. (shrink)

It is well known that the commercial and political decline of the United Provinces in the eighteenth century was discussed throughout Europe. The aim of this introductory article and this special issue on ‘Dutch Decline in Eighteenth-Century Europe’ at large is to take a first few steps towards developing a new understanding of these discussions. Rather than to attempt to provide an inventory of which foreign writers reflected on the Dutch case and analyse their judgements, the purpose of (...) this introduction is to establish the nature of this interest in the light of the changing dynamics of interstate political and trade relations. Consisting of two parts (each divided in two sections), this introductory article is an attempt to bring together into the same frame, one, the concerns that moved major and lesser figures to discuss the Dutch case and, two, the wealth of economic history studies that have addressed the notion of Dutch decline. In order to eventually make these historiographies mutually productive, it is argued that the idea of ‘intrinsic power’ needs to be recognised not primarily as related to an idea of ‘relative’ (as opposed to ‘absolute’) decline, but in a slightly different fashion. The way in which Dutch political writers increasingly came to understand the predicament of their state and ultimately aligned themselves with their European counterparts was precisely through the concept of ‘intrinsic power’, understood as a comparative notion that referred to the ramifications of political shifts for the capacity of the Dutch Republic to maintain itself on the international scene. (shrink)