The renaissance of political realism in Early Modern Europe : Giovanni Botero and the discourse of "Reason of State"
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct a type of early modern political realism that is perhaps less widely researched in the English language scholarly context than the main stream Machiavellian type. The Italian ex-Jesuit, Giovanni Botero’s book Della Ragion di Stato (1589) is a fascinating experiment to combine some of the basic insights into arcana imperii (secrets of the state/power) made famous by the Florentine, and a refashioned Catholic teaching, as it was presented by the Jesuits. The paper tries to show the author’s motivations and his main line of argumentation. The paper starts out with a historiographical overview of the state of the art in the field of the history of political realism, focusing on two representatives of the so-called Cambridge School, Richard Tuck and István Hont. This is followed by a short reconstruction of some of the key terms of Botero’s treatise, based on the assumption that the history of ideas has to concentrate on the discourse used in a given context by the particular political agent or theorist. Next, certain contexts of Botero’s thought are examined, including 16th century Tacitism, Lipsius, and the Jesuit tradition with its links to the Salamanca school. Finally, one of Botero’s key concepts, the virtue of prudence is analysed, showing the deep-seated connections between Botero’s political realism and the ancient Greek, Roman, and Catholic traditions of practical philosophy. A postscript links the early modern discourse with the birth of the study of international relations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".