Studying the Stillborn: The Ideology of the Estates’ Absolutism and Proto-Bureaucratic Thought in the 17th Century Dutch Republic

DOI10.1177/0020852302681005
Published date01 March 2002
Date01 March 2002
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-18Sl9sy5442sRF/input 02_IRAS68/1 articles 8/3/02 10:52 am Page 95
Studying the stillborn: the ideology of the estates’
absolutism and proto-bureaucratic thought in the
17th century Dutch Republic
Pieter Wagenaar
Introduction
American public administration history traditionally takes Woodrow Wilson’s
(1887) article, ‘The Study of Administration’, as the discipline’s starting point.
Wilson, after all, drew a clear distinction between politics and administration, and
proposed a separate theoretical underpinning for the latter. That foundation he
sought in European theorizing on bureaucracy which, he claimed, had been
fostered by absolutism. In ‘The Study of Administration’ he explicitly states:
Those governments are now in the lead in administrative practice which had rulers still
absolute but also enlightened when those modern days of political illumination came
in which it was made evident to all but the blind that governors are properly only the
servants of the governed. In such governments administration has been organized to
subserve the general weal with the simplicity and effectiveness vouchsafed only to the
undertaking of a single will. Such was the case in Prussia, for instance, where adminis-
tration has been most studied and most nearly perfected. (Wilson, 1997: 17)
What ideas was Wilson referring to? And how had these come about, one might
ask.
Much is written on bureaucracy, bureaucratization and bureaucratic thought,
but, surprisingly enough, the emergence of ideas on bureaucracy is a neglected
subject. Even Max Weber, who described what modern bureaucracy is, and to a
degree why it came into being, pays no attention to its intellectual history. Weber
obviously related bureaucratization to the rationalization of the western world
view in general, which in his opinion was caused to a large degree by Calvinism.
The point to be made here is that, when he focuses on bureaucratization, con-
scious design caused by ‘proto-bureaucratic thinking’ plays no part in his argu-
ment. No reference to such thought is to be found in his writings. Barbara
Stollberg-Rilinger, conversely, has demonstrated just how much intellectual
effort German theorists devoted to bureaucratic thinking during the Ancien
Dr Pieter Wagenaar is at the Department of Public Administration, Leiden University, The
Netherlands. CDU: 342.2(091)(492)
International Review of Administrative Sciences [0020–8523(200203)68:1]
Copyright © 2002 IIAS. SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New
Delhi), Vol. 68 (2002), 95–112; 022639

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International Review of Administrative Sciences 68(1)
Régime. From the second half of the 17th century onwards many practitioners
in the public services of Germany’s princely states devoted themselves to the
construction of a true administrative theory. The tradition these scholars — the
so-called cameralists — founded, Rilinger argues, has had a lasting impact on
current administrative ideas and practice and, finally, even produced Weber
himself (Stollberg-Rilinger, 1986; Lindenfeld, 1997).
Rilinger, of course, belongs to a scholarly tradition too, albeit a rather modest
one. The study of proto-bureaucratic thought restricts itself to research on
German cameralism. One explanation for this narrow spatial focus could obvi-
ously be that proto-bureaucratic thinking was actually limited to the German-
speaking parts only during the early modern period. The available empirical
research into Dutch bureaucratization, for example, seems to push that conclusion
home. No conscious design appears to have been behind the phenomenon. As
Holland’s government grew and became more intricate, the need to control it
simply grew continuously. Government bodies therefore experimented with
different ways of functionalizing, and imposed ever-stricter regulations on public
functionaries, which were recorded in the form of written instructions. These
instructions were gradually refined, adjusted as they needed to be to changing
circumstances and, thus, in an incremental, ‘accidental’ way, patrimonial rule
slowly started to change into bureaucracy (Raadschelders, 1990; Wagenaar,
1999).
Could conscious design nevertheless have played a role in the development of
Dutch bureaucracy in early modern times? Were there, at least, public function-
aries who carried a sort of ‘Weberian master plan’ in their minds? One might
expect the answer to be positive. After all, cameralism owed quite a lot to
Netherlandish thinking, especially to that of Justus Lipsius, whose neo-stoicism,
by emphasizing discipline, diligence, sense of duty and obedience, contributed
heavily to its intellectual foundations (Oestreich, 1982: 5–9, 19, 30, 34, 131; Van
Gelderen, 1992: 186).
In a previous publication I discussed Dutch proto-bureaucratic thought as
found in the works of Mr Paulus Teding van Berkhout (Wagenaar, 2000). In this
article my research continues by also paying attention to the works of the political
theorists Van Alphen and Graswinckel, and linking these to their ideology of the
estates’ absolute sovereignty, but not by limiting myself solely to the history of
ideas. Instead, in compliance with Pocock’s and Skinner’s view that the evolution
of ideas can only be properly understood in their economical, societal, political
etc. contexts, I also investigate how authors arrived at their opinions, i.e. examine
what discussions they were involved in and why. With Bonney I would like to
draw attention to the problem of how these ideas then, in their turn, influenced the
society from which they arose (Oakley, 1984: 27–9; Bonney, 1995: 61).

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Wagenaar: Studying the stillborn
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Cameralism and absolutism
When searching for proto-bureaucratic thought looking in the writings of absolu-
tist political theorists seems obvious. After all, as Wilson implicitly stated, if one
does not adhere to the notion that authority, especially legislative power, should
ultimately be concentrated in one central point, the whole idea of bureaucracy is
intellectually inconceivable. Yet since Nicholas Henshall, in his book The Myth
of Absolutism
, boldly attacked the very notion that absolutist ideology existed
during the Ancien Régime, presupposing such a relationship has become
problematic. Henshall states that all early modern political thinking was of the
same kind, a kind that is best labelled ‘regimen mixtum theory’. According to
each of the Ancien Régime’s political theorists, who drew heavily on the classics,
a polity could best be a mixture between three systems: monarchy, aristocracy
and democracy. Scholarly orthodoxy has it that Bodin destroyed consensus
among political theorists at the end of the 16th century by concentrating legisla-
tive authority in one single point, calling that ‘sovereignty’, claiming that it
should be indivisible and therefore that all other authority in society emanated
from it, and then ‘pointing it inwards’, i.e. defining it towards the citizen instead
of the pope. Nevertheless, in Henshall’s observation, Bodin spoke out for strong
parliaments and the inviolable rights of citizens. Bodin’s king acts within strict
limitations to his power, the right to property of his subjects, for instance, or no
taxation without representation.
In Henshall’s opinion the problem can be solved by taking into account that
early modern monarchs acted in two spheres of action: one was the king’s God-
given prerogative, in which he was unrestricted, foreign affairs for instance; and
one in which he was not, because in this sphere he had to consult his people as
represented by the estates. It is true that in the course of the 17th century ever
more attention came to be paid to the first sphere, and ever less to the latter, but
that did not mean that political theorists came to deny that subjects had certain
inalienable rights. Hence, Henshall writes that far too much has been made of the
alleged opposition between the ascending and descending (Ullmann, 1975) view
on government. It only exists in the mind of present-day scholars. Discussions on
the limitations to the king’s power were much less fundamental during the early
modern period then we tend to think nowadays; they are best viewed as family
quarrels within a grand regimen mixtum consensus (Henshall, 1992: 126–32,
142–5, 204–8; 1996: 31–3).
In my opinion, nevertheless, the early modern period knew a very real opposi-
tion between adherents to an ascending and descending theory of government.
The reason that these opposing ideologies show certain similarities lies not in con-
sensus, but rather in a shared way of arguing, within an ordering of reality both
parties had in common. And that ordering of reality is probably best described by
using the concept of ‘the political theory of order’: W.H. Greenleaf’s application
of Arthur O. Lovejoy’s notion of the ‘great chain of being’ to political thought.
Order thinking is a medieval notion, which stretches back to antiquity via St
Thomas Aquinas. Those who adhered to it believed that the entire cosmos was

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International Review of Administrative Sciences 68(1)
ordered according to one and the same principle, because it was the expression of
a singular celestial will. This singular principle put all of creation in hierarchical
order and thus formed it into a chain that extended from the material to the
immaterial: from God to man, and on, extending through the realm of animals to
that of plants and finally to that of minerals. It could,...

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