THE RENAISSANCE OF POLITICS: UNVEILING THE CRUCIAL CATALYST FOR EUROPEAN ASCENDANCY
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Understanding how the liberation of art and science, combined with new political ideas, propelled European nations to global dominance from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century.
The famous phrase “the sun never sets in the British Empire” is one example of many different European civilizations ascending to the status of global hegemony throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The trend of global dominance among different European powers, however, have led many to question how these relatively backward nations came to power. The story that most people are familiar with centers around the unshackling of math and science from institutional oppression in the seventeenth century. The thinking goes something like this: once art and mathematics became unrestrained, Europeans could pursue these arts as ends within themselves, enabling them to access technologies and skills that, over the long term, enabled them to dominate the world. While I personally agree that the liberation of art and science was pivotal to the ascendance of Western Europe, I believe that this premise fails to acknowledge the importance of the birth of a new metaphysics of politics. In my effort to uncover this relatively low flying concept within the annals of history, I should first recount for our audience the immense change that occurred between the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
The sixteenth century was a period mired in religious conflict both physically and ideologically. While a seemingly endless number of books can be written, and indeed already have, about the Defenestration of Prague, the Golden Armada, and the Siege of Vienna, the areas that this essay concerns lie within the realm of ideology. With the same intensity as the battles previously described, leading intellectual figures of their day such as Thomas More, Erasmus, and Martin Luther dedicated their mental faculties to the issue of religion. This intellectual tide, however, shifts with the advent of the 17th century and takes on a new understanding. Leading philosophers like Descartes, the father of modern thought, Thomas Bacon, the father of the Scientific Method, and Copernicus, the father of heliocentrism, are not intensely interested in religion like their predecessors, but instead focus on science and art. We shall not delve into why this shift occurred or this article might turn into a multi-volume book. Nevertheless, if I were pressed to give a short remark as to why this is, I would argue that the wars of religion weakened a whole host of institutions that previously had a firm grip over areas like science and math. Rest assured, this statement is not meant to minimize or make light of the issue of religion as one worthy of intellectual pursuit but is meant to simply highlight the fact that from one century to the next, the thinkers of one era were wholly concerned with one topic, and the ones of the next focused on an entirely different one.
Understanding now the pivotal nature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I would like to make the case for the importance of new political ideas as a buttress for the rapid acceleration of math and science within Western Europe during this time. To demonstrate this, I should offer examples of politics in both the physical and theoretical world. To start with the physical, there is the Palace of Versailles built by Louis the XIV. Versailles was not a palace meant for a king who needed a house, since Louis could claim the Louvre as his home, but instead, Versailles was meant to challenge previous conceptions of power through art. So prolific was this idea that many other rulers across Europe adopted the concept and style of Versailles for their own palaces.
The new ideas of politics also existed in the world of theory and many philosophers who contributed to the field of science and math also applied their own ideas to politics. An example of this connection lies in the case of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes. Although most think of Bacon as a figure who only contributed to the development of the scientific method, he also believed that the scientific method could extend beyond its atomized field of study to one that can offer positive political benefit to nations who would use it, exemplified in his work the New Atlantis. In the case of Hobbes, he uses the prominent ideas of science and math of the day as the backbone for his conception of a political philosophy meant for a new age of reason and science. Although Louis XIV was not directly using the ideas of Thomas Hobbes or Francis Bacon, the fact that these radically new styles of thought and works occur in the same time period suggest something serious happening in the realm of politics in the seventeenth century.
So one might ask: So what? What does the new understanding of politics in the seventeenth century relate to European hegemony in the eighteenth and nineteenth century? To start, I think that it is not a coincidence that by the time one arrives in the nineteenth century, the same era that Europe achieves global hegemony, Nietzsche observes in his writing that “God is Dead.” It seems to me that the seeds that eventually led to this reality started in the seventeenth century. Thinkers took advantage of the decline of the institutions of old such as organized religion, old forms of government, and ancient understandings of cosmology, and instead focused on creating something new and consequential. Politics took on a new form in this era, a form of politics that Hobbes really exemplifies in his Leviathan as one that requires total surrender from its citizens, an act in previous ages that was solely reserved for the realm of religion. Sure, part of that new society was a focus on math and science as subjects that were ends in themselves. However, without a new, more aggressive and all-encompassing conception of politics acting as a societal cornerstone, it is unclear to me that continual gradual improvements made in the areas of math and science would have continued.
The School of Athens by Raphael (1511)
In conclusion I think if one accepts the premise that Politics was as important to the conclusion of European Dominance as math and science, one’s understanding for the ascendancy of Europe becomes more complete. Fast forwarding through time, the American Independence, the French Revolution, the rise of Socialism, the idea behind the free market, the abolition of slavery all represents unique political and cosmological ideas that are in some effect tied and can be understood as a side effect of the changes within the seventeenth century. Seeing and understanding these events, I believe we should therefore acknowledge, for better or for worse, the birth of a new political thought as an important contribution engendered by the European spirit to the rest of the world.
