Making Exceptions: Some Remarks on the Concept of Coup d’état and its History

Political Theory

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 323-346

  Bartelson, Jens ^a  

^a STOCKHOLM UNIVERSITY   (Sweden)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84992861120     PISSN: 00905917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0090591797025003001     Document Type: Article

References (88)

1. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 43.
2. Cf. Terence Ball, “The Ontological Presuppositions and Political Consequences of a Social Science,” in Changing Social Science: Critical Theory and Other Critical Perspectives, ed. D. R. Sabia and J. Wallulis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), 31–51.
3. The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Institutions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 158. However, in The Oxford English Dictionary—whose prime task is not to reflect an existing consensus within the social sciences—we learn that a coup is “a sudden and great change of government, carried out violently or illegally by the ruling power.”
4. Gabriel Naudé, Considérations Politiques sur les Coups d'éstat (Political reflections on Coups d'état) (Paris, 1667), 103: “des actions hardies & extraordinaires que les Princes sont contraints d'executer aux affaires difficiles & comme desesperées, contre le droit commun, sans garder même aucun ordre ny forme de justice, hazardant l'interest du particulier, pour le bien du public.”
5. Locke, Second Treatise, § 226–7
6. Two Treatises of Government, ed. P. Lasiert (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 434.
7. Locke, Second Treatise, § 197, 415.
8. Cf. Alessandro Pizzorno, “Politics Unbound,” in Changing Boundaries of the Political, ed. Charles S. Maier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 27–62.
9. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. G. Schwab (Boston: MIT Press, 1985), 5.
10. See, for example, Jean Bodin, Six Books of a Commonweale (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), bk. 1, chap. 10.
11. Hans Morgenthau, Politics among Nations, 6th ed. (New York: Knopf, 1985), 344.
12. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
13. James Farr, “Understanding Conceptual Change Politically,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Ball, J. Farr, and R. L. Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 24–49.
14. Cf. Christian Meier, The Greek Discovery of Politics, trans. D. McLintock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 13–19.
15. b7.
16. See, for example, Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The Middle Ages (Hammondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1965), 15 f.
17. See Nicolai Rubinstein, “A History of the Word ‘Politicus’ in Early-Modern Europe,” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. A. Pagden (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 42–3;
18. C. J. Nederman, “Aristotelianism and the Origin of ‘Political Science’ in the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 2 (1991): 179–94.
19. See Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 301.
20. Maurizio Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State: The Acquisition and Transformation of the Language of Politics 1250–1600 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), chap. 2.
21. See, for example, Quentin Skinner, “The State,” in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. Terence Ball, Russell L. Hanson, and James Farr (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 90–131.
22. An interesting example is the commentary of contemporary chroniclers on the usurpation of the Florentine republic in 1434 by Cosimo de Medici. See Vespasiano da Bisticci, The Vespasiano Memoirs, trans. W. George and E. Waters (New York: Dial Press, 1926);
23. for a background to the event, see D. Kent, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence 1426–1434 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978).
24. Cf. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 237;
25. Garrett Mattingly, Renaissance Diplomacy (London: Cape, 1955), chap. 3;
26. Justin Rosenberg, “Secret Origins of the State: The Structural Basis of Raison d'état,” Review of International Studies 18 (1992), passim.
27. G. Giovanni Botero, Deila Ragion di Stato. Con tre libri delle cause delle grandezza delle Città (The reason of state) (1586. Reprint, Turin, Italy: UTET, 1948), preface.
28. Cf. Maurizio Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept of Politics,” Political Theory 20, no. 3 (1992): 480.
29. For an overview, see E. W. Cochrane, “Machiavelli 1940–1960,” Journal of Modern History 33, no. 2 (1961): 113–36;
30. J. H. Geerken, “Machiavelli Studies Since 1969,” Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 351–68.
31. For influential interpretations, see Isaiah Berlin, “The Originality of Machiavelli,” in Studies on Machiavelli, ed. M. Gilmore (Firenze: Sansoni, 1972);
32. Quentin Skinner, Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 132–8;
33. Viroli, From Politics to Reason of State, chap. 3.
34. Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. R. Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chaps. I–III.
35. Cf. Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept of Politics,” 486–9.
36. Machiavelli, The Prince, chap. VI, pp. 21–2.
37. Cf. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, 160–80.
38. Cf. M. McCanles, The Discourse of Il Principe (Malibu: Undena, 1983), 12 ff;
39. J. D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989).
40. As Hexter has argued, Machiavelli uses the term stato quite consistently to denote an object of agency, and rarely with its medieval connotations of status or estate left intact. See J. H. Hexter, The Vision of Politics on the Eve of the Reformation: More, Machiavelli, and Seyssel (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 150–60.
41. The classical example in this respect is of course Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d'Etat and Its Place in Modern History, trans. D. Scott (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1984). Against this reading of Machiavelli as the precursor of modern Realpolitik stands an alternative tradition that emphasizes his defence of republican and policentric values in The Discourses (1521).
42. See, among others, Hans Baron, “Machiavelli: The Republican Citizen and the Author of The Prince,” English Historical Review 76 (1961): 217–53;
43. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, passim;
44. G. Bock, Q. Skinner, and M. Viroli, eds., Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
45. Meinecke, Machiavellism, 50–3, 50;
46. Felix Raab, The English Face of Machiavelli: A Changing Interpretation 1500–1700 (London: Routledge, 1964);
47. Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and Mystery of State (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), chaps. 1 and 2;
48. V. Kahn, “Reading Machiavelli: Innocent Gentillet's Discourse on Method,” Political Theory 22, no. 2 (1994): 539–60.
49. For a penetrating analysis of the relationship between neostoicism and raison d'état, see Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government 1572–1651 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 31–64.
50. Montaigne, “L'Utile et l'Honorable” (The useful and the honourable) in Essais, vol. III, essay I (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1922);
51. Lipsius, Six Bookes of Politicks or Civil Doctrine (London, 1594), bk. IV, chap. XIV;
52. Charron, De la Sagesse (On wisdom) (Paris, 1820), bk. III, chap. II.
53. Cf. G. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern Stau (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 28–38, 48 f.
54. Cf. Wiliam F. Church, Richelieu and Reason of State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973), 58–62.
55. Lipsius, Six Bookes of Politicks, bk. IV, chap. XIV;
56. Cf. Oestreich, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, 49, 107 f.
57. For a background to Naudé's life and work, see J. V. Rice, Gabriel Naudé 1600–1653 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1939), chap. 4;
58. J. A. Clarke, Gabriel Naudé 1600–1653 (Hamden, CN: Archon Books, 1970), chap. 3;
59. A. E. Bakos, “‘Qui Nescit Dissimulare Nescit Regnare’: Louis XI and Raison d'état during the Reign of Louis XIII,” Journal of the History of Ideas 52, no. 3 (1991): 399–416.
60. Naudé, Considérations, 52 f., 116.
61. Naudé, Considérations, 64: “nous pouvons encore dire qu'ils ont pareillement depravé la nature de la chose, veu qu'ils nous proposent des preceptes generaux & des maximes universelles, fondées sur la justice & droit de Souveraineté.”
62. Naudé, Considérations, 121: “soit pour la necessité ou evidente & importante utilité publique de l'Estat, ou du Prince.” Naudé here and in other passages in Considérations tries to separate princely interest from general interest, semantically but without being able to do so analytically. That princely interest and general interest coincided appeared almost self—evident to most continental theorists of absolutism, since the general interest commonly was defined in terms of a hypothetical vantage point situated over and above rivaling interests in the social body, a vantage point that coincided perfectly with the perspective of the sovereign, who consequently came to embody this general interest. In the French context, it took d'Argenson some labour to articulate a recognizably modern doctrine of the general interest, later popularized by Rousseau.
63. Cf. Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 175 f.
64. Naudé, Considérations, 64 f.
65. For a study of the concept arcana imperi and its theological foundations, see Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and Its Late Medieval Origins,” The Harvard Theological Review 48 (1955): 65–91.
66. Interestingly, Naudé seems to use the concept without its Christian connotations, and without reserving its use exclusively for the monarch; his application of the concept comes closer to that of the stoics, see Tacitus, Annals, bk. II, chap. XXXVI.
67. Naudé, Considérations, 104–5: “les causes, raisons, manifestes, declarations, & toutes les formes & façons de legitimer une action, precedent les effets & les operations, où au contraire … [les] Coups d'Estat… [la] principale regle de ceux—cy est de les tenir caches jusques à la fin.”
68. For analyses of the concept of exception in Considérations, see Julien Freund, “La situation exceptionelle comme justification de la raison d'état chez Gabriel Naudé” (The exceptional situation as justification of reason of state in Gabriel Naudé), in Staaträson: Studien zur Geschichte eines Politischen Begriffs (Reason of state: Studies in the history of a political concept), ed. Roman Schnur (Berlin: Dunker & Humblot, 1975), 141–64;
69. esiècles (Reason and folly of state: Theoreticians and theories of reason of state in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), ed. Y. C. Zarka (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1994), 151–69. Both these authors emphasize the objective criteria of the exception rather than its constructive potentials, however.
70. Naudé, Considérations, 123: “L'experience nous apprend, que tout ce qui est émerveillable & extraordinaire, ne se montre pas tous les jours: les cometes n'apparoissent que de siecles en siecles: les monstres, les deluges, les incendies du Vesuve, les tremblemens de terre, n'arrivent que fort rarement, & cette rareté donne un lustre & une coleur à beaucoup des choses, qui le perdent soudain que l'on en use trop frequentement.”
71. Cf. Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths: An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 50–2.
72. Naudé, Considérations, 133: “Nous trouverons toujours qu'elles ont commencé par quelques—unes de ces inventions & supercheries, en faisant marcher la religion & les miracles en teste d'une longue suite de barbaries & de cruautez.”
73. Naudé, Considérations, 133
74. Naudé argues extensively for this point of view in an earlier work, Apologie pour tous les grands personnages qui ont esté faussement supçonnes de magie (An apology for great men falsely suspected of magic) (Paris, 1625), esp. chap. 2.
75. See also Rice, Gabriel Naudé, 47 ff.
76. This critique of myth differed also from then prevalent ways of dealing with superstition, see V-L Tapié, France in the Age of Louis XIII and Richelieu (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 290 f.
77. Naudé, Considérations, 140: “Il est encore à propos de remarquer, que tout ainsi que cette domination Monarchicque ne s'estoit pû établir sans beaucoup de ruses & tromperies.”
78. Naudé, Considérations, 140: “lors qu'il s'agit d'affoiblir ou casser certains droits privileges, franchises & exemptions dont joüissent quelques sujets au prejudice & diminuation de l'autorité du Prince.”
79. p. 164: “ilors qu'il est necessaire de ruiner quelque puissance, laquelle pour estre trop grande, nombreuse, ou étenduë en divers lieux … on ne peut pas facilement abatre par les voyes ordinaires.”
80. Naudé, Considérations, 220: “que ces trois principes internes des Estats venant à veillir & se corrompre, la religion par les heresies ou atheismes; la justice par la venalité des offices, la faveur des grands, l'autorité des Souverains; & les sectes par la liberte qu'un chacun prend d'introduire des nouveaux dogmes, ou de rétablir les anciens.”
81. Cf. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 45 ff.
82. Cf. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988), esp. chaps. 1 and 10, where he argues that this extension of the political realm is imitated by revolutionary practices rather than something that conditions them.
83. Reinhart Koselleck, “Historical Criteria of the Modern Concept of Revolution,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, ed. Reinhart Koselleck (Boston: MIT Press, 1985), 46 f.
84. de Tocqueville, Letter to The Times, 11 December 1851.
85. Reprinted in J. B. Halstead, December 2, 1851. Contemporary Writings on the Coup d'état of Louis Napoleon (New York: Anchor Books, 1972), 45. I am grateful to Jan Sellberg for having drawn my attention to this book.
86. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 216, in The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Everyman's, 1990).
87. For an analysis, see C. Kelly, “‘To Persuade without Convincing’”: The Language of Rousseau's Legislator,” American Journal of Political Science 31 (1987): 321–35.
88. Rousseau, The Social Contract, 259 note.