has been called a ‘technology of authority’. There was necessary to a
prince’s state a ‘civil prudence’, consisting in the first place of an under-
standing of the people’s ‘motions and affections’ and the limits of
his ability to coerce them, and a ‘military prudence’, which means
imposing a ‘severe discipline’ on citizen-soldiers in order to preserve the
commonwealth from the miseries of civil war. Neo-stoicism put a public
morality of ruler and subject in the place of an over-arching law as the
foundation of the polity. Oestreich sees here the emergence of a modern
image of the state ‘based on order, power, unity, authority, discipline
and obedience’, which appealed to rulers on both sides of the religious
divide because its ethics were not tied to any confession.^59
Indisputably the turmoil of the religious wars bred an acceptance of
the state, not as a piece of metaphysics or a legal construction but as a
fact of political experience. The writings of Lipsius’s admirer, the retired
lawyer Michel de Montaigne, show this best of all because they are not
political treatises but superb essays ranging over the whole field of
human psychology and experience and revelling in the diversity of
human nature. Tacitus is the most useful historian, Montaigne believes
‘for a state troubled and sick (estat trouble et malade) as ours is at
present’, indeed ‘you would often say that it is us he is depicting and
stabbing at’. The agonizing question for the individual which Lipsius
inserts at the end of his Politicsseems to have been in Montaigne’s mind
throughout the 1570s and 1580s: can and ought a good man to stand
aside from a civil war? The damage done to the country by the demands
of religious conscience was obvious. The worst of the wars was that no
obvious marks of language, manners, laws, or customs distinguished
you from your enemy; when religion served as a pretext for a fight, your
valet and your own relations could be on the other side and it was no
use to fortify your house. ‘In my neighbourhood, the prolonged licence
of these civil wars has hardened us to a regimen (une forme d’estat)
so evil that it’s a veritable marvel that it survives.’ No political evil,
not even a tyrant’s seizure of a state (l’usurpation de la possession
tyrannique d’un estat), was worth treating with a medicine like that. In
‘the present confusion of this state’, Montaigne will not let his con-
victions attach him so firmly to one side that he cannot recognize the
laudable qualities of the other. In the last of his one hundred and seven
essays, ‘On experience’, a ‘record of his life’s endeavours [essais]’ and a
description of the cheerful philosophy they had brought him to at last,
324 From Law to Politics: ‘The Modern State’
(^59) Sixe Bookes of Politickes, 25–6, 31, 59 ff., 67, 78–9, 145, 151, 158, 201, 202–5, 206;
Giovanni Botero, The Reason of State, tr. P. J. and D. P. Waley (London, 1956); G. Oestreich,
Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. B. Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, tr.
D. McLintock (Cambridge UP, 1982); P. Burke, in The Cambridge History of Political
Thought, 1450–1700, 491–2; M. Senellart, Les Arts de gouverner: Du regimen medieval au
concept de gouvernement (Paris, 1995), 230–41.