Isegoria

Most of us know at least a little bit about Cardinal Richelieu, if only from The Three Musketeers, but few have heard of his less successful Spanish counterpart, Olivares. Joseph Fouché compares and contrasts Richelieu and Olivares:

• Richelieu (1585) and Olivares (1587) were born within two years of each other.
• They died within three years of each other (Richelieu 1642, Olivares 1645).
• They became first minister to their respective kings within three years of each other (Olivares 1621, Richelieu 1624).
• They left office within a year of each other (Richelieu by death in 1642, Olivares by dismissal in 1643).
• Both relied on the tenuous health and often more tenuous support of young, occasionally resentful monarchs for their political (and physical) survival.
• Both were deeply unpopular with the people they governed over, from noble to commoner.
• Both sought to reform their kingdoms but existing power structures and the demands of war frustrated their efforts.
• Both initiated long wars that severely strained their governments, societies, and economies.
• Both were devout Catholics who sometimes found themselves allied with Protestant heretics.
• Both were hard workers.

Richelieu and Olivares both sought to adopt Dutch innovations:

As part of a Europe-wide trend, Richelieu and Olivares sought to adopt Dutch innovations. Both set up versions of the VOC. Both tried to encourage their aristocracies to become more commercially minded and work. Both expanded their navies and merchant marines. Both pursued colonial ventures and tried to increase trade.

Both only went skin deep.

They both overlooked the subtle factors undergirding Dutch success, the most important of which was the Dutch’s power to harness late medieval institutions like Estates. An earlier pan-European phenomena, Estates represented the estates of the realm. Originating in the late Middle Ages, Estates started as a way for feudal overlords to consult (and propagandize) their vassals and subjects. However, after the estates were brought together in Estates, the discovery of their collective power led many Estates to challenge the power of their overlords and win a substantial share of the judicial, legislative, and financial power of their realms before the late fifteenth century.

The Dutch themselves rebelled against Phillip II to preserve the power they exercised through their medieval institutions. The revolt came after Phillip II tried to centralize what was formerly local power by transferring it to his personal appointees. The Dutch Republic’s successful defense of its old order during the Eighty Years’ War gave the men who held the money the power and the interest to vote on whether or not to tax and borrow from themselves. This control over government funding by the Dutch moneyed class guaranteed that the Republic would never arbitrarily confiscate property or default on its debt since the moneyed classes were the state.

In other parts of Europe, developments went in the opposite direction. During the 17th century, Estates after Estates was weakened, suppressed, and bypassed in favor of centralized control by the ruler. In some cases, like the Netherlands, Poland-Lithuania, England, and Scotland, Estates held on and won supreme authority. In many more cases, aspiring divine monarchs defeated their Estates.

This newfangled absolutism was the hip new thing. With cutting edge thinkers like Bodin, Hobbes, Filmer, and Bossuet, absolutism was the future. Unfortunately, there were holdouts on the march to progress. In England and Scotland, the efforts of progressive monarchs like James I and VI, Charles I and I, Charles II and II, or James II and VII were thwarted. History actually turned-tail and went backwards when the Dutch conquered England in 1688 under the leadership of James II and VII’s nephew and son-in-law Willem III and II and III and forced England, her colonies, Ireland, and Scotland to become permanent members of the reactionary Bataviasphere.

Richelieu and Olivares, on the other hand, were both men of the future. Both were pioneers of absolutism. Ironically, Richelieu started out as a representative in the French version of Estates, the Estates-General. But the 1614 session of the Estates-General was the last such assembly called until 1789. Richelieu was the major reasons it remained unsummoned for another 175 years. He set out and largely succeeded in making the king the absolute power in France in fact as well as theory

Richelieu’s task, however, was easy. While French administrative practices remained in flux after the Wars of Religion, giving Richelieu the freedom to innovate, Olivares faced a well-established, elaborate, and sclerotic central bureaucracy. On top of this, Phillip IV was not the king of Spain. While Louis XIII was the king of a unitary kingdom of France, Phillip IV was king of Castile, Aragon, Valencia, Portugal, Naples, and various other dominions that were loosely lumped together as Spain. Each of these dominions had its own institutions, laws, liberties, and politics and jealously guarded them.

With the king’s support, Olivares attempted to overcome both. He used ad-hoc juntas packed with his own creatures to bypass the established court bureaucracy, but to little effect. He continuously tried to bypass the Estates of Phillip IV’s various dominions, especially when Olivares was trying to collect more taxes. Though Castile was the heart of Phillip IV’s power, even the Castillian Cortes resisted his efforts. Olivares’ fared even worse with the other realms’ Estates. The Corteses of Aragon, Navarre, and Portugal and the Corts of Catalonia and Valencia each contributed less to overall Spanish efforts than Castile. Olivares made several attempts to remedy this imbalance, the most ambitious effort was the “Union of Arms” that would have distributed the cost of raising and supporting troops among each realm based on their size and population. This plan failed but Olivares persisted in his efforts as Spanish finances deteriorated.

His efforts failed. As a result of Olivares’ depredations, Catalonia, Naples, Andalusia, and Portugal revolted in the 1640s and for a time it seemed like Spain itself would fragment. While the worst case didn’t happen and the Catalan, Neapolitan, and Andalusian revolts failed, Portugal was able to regain its independence and take its wealth and its colonies with it. Something resembling Olivares’ vision of a more unified and absolutist Spain eventually did come to Spain but, ironically, it had to wait until Louis XIII’s great-grandson Phillip V brought Richelieu’s vision to Spain as its first Bourbon king.

Whether Richelieu or Olivares could have creatively engaged their Estates is impossible to say. It would have meant ceding more power to their nobility and gentry than either man demonstrated comfort with. Even then it’s less than sure whether or not an empowered French or Spanish Estates would have cooperated with Richelieu’s or Olivares’ ambitious agendas. What we do know is that Richelieu and Olivares didn’t engage their Estates and that they paid the consequences. The lack of sustained financial buy in by French and Spanish moneyed classes led to chronic funding crises for France and Spain well into the twentieth century.

The crisis of Estates led to the naive efficiencies of absolutism triumphing on the Continent. It was only on the fringes of the European world that late medieval institutions like Estates survived. There, when even an outlier like England showed signs of absolutist ambitions, its colonies followed the earlier Dutch example and rebelled to preserve their archaic institutions and keep them under local control.

It’s ironic that the American Revolution occurred just as the last traces of the traditional Estates disappeared from continental Europe. In 1787, Prussians annihilated the old Dutch Republic. In 1791, Russia, Austria, and Prussia destroyed the Sejm of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the final partition of Poland. In France, an attempt to employ the old Estates-General ended up suborned by the sinister new religion of Jacobinism. In the name of a reality free but philosophically pure revolutionary faith, French armies swept away what remained of the old medieval institutions on the Continent along with old medieval republics like Venice and Genoa. This clear cutting destroyed the evolved diversity of Europe’s social ecology. The way was clear for the future subjection of continental Europe to idealized monocultures of the mind. The United States was left as the last besieged outpost of medieval European experience.

If Americans claim not to understand Afghan corruption, P.J. O’Rourke says, we’re lying.

Bribery has been a dominant part of our foreign policy in Afghanistan, the way it’s been a dominant part of everyone’s foreign policy in Afghanistan including al Qaeda’s. What we Americans don’t understand about Afghan corruption is why it’s so transparent, just a matter of openly taking money. Don’t the Afghans know that you should take bribes indirectly — by collecting publicity, popularity, public recognition, prestige, influence, and, most of all, power? Then big corporations put you on their boards of directors and that’s when you get the money. Meanwhile you’ve been riding in government cars, flying on government planes, eating out of the government pork barrel (lamb barrel in Afghanistan), so why worry about payoffs up front?

Afghans have failed to move their corruption from the Rod Blagojevich model, which we all deplore, to the Barack Obama model, which we all admire.

Maryland doesn’t allow concealed carry, in case you were wondering. It’s not a shall-issue state but a may-issue state:

Maryland law contains provisions for citizens to apply for a concealed carry permit under a limited set of circumstances. These include several occupational reasons such as business owners or their employee who makes large cash deposits, retired police officers, doctors, pharmacists, private detectives, security guards, and railroad police. Correctional officers (who do not require a permit while on duty but cannot carry off duty) may obtain a permit if they can provide legally documented evidence of threats on their life. Similarly, private citizens can obtain a permit if they provide evidence of 3 death threats that have been documented by the police.

Alex Jung believes that Germany’s social democracy is vastly superior to our American system — but his answer to the question, How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place?, could have been written by the reactionary Mencius Moldbug:

The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans.

Conservatives have a tragic view of Man as imperfect and imperfectible — but modern conservatives have a generally favorable view of Civilization, what it has accomplished, and what it may accomplish yet if we don’t dismantle the traditions and institutions that have brought us this far.

Modern liberals and progressives hold the opposite set of views, Fred Siegel notes:

For the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, American liberals distinguished themselves from conservatives by what Lionel Trilling called “a spiritual orthodoxy of belief in progress.” Liberalism placed its hopes in human perfectibility. Regarding human nature as essentially both beneficent and malleable, liberals, like their socialist cousins, argued that with the aid of science and given the proper social and economic conditions, humanity could free itself from its cramped carapace of greed and distrust and enter a realm of true freedom and happiness. Conservatives, by contrast, clung to a tragic sense of man’s inherent limitations. While acknowledging the benefits of science, they argued that it could never fundamentally reform, let alone transcend, the human condition. Most problems don’t have a solution, the conservatives maintained; rather than attempting Promethean feats, man would do best to find a balanced place in the world.

In the late 1960s, liberals appeared to have the better of the argument. Something approaching the realm of freedom seemed to have arrived. American workers, white and black, achieved hitherto unimagined levels of prosperity. In the nineteenth century, only utopian socialists had imagined that ordinary workers could achieve a degree of leisure; in the 1930s, radicals had insisted that prosperity was unattainable under American capitalism; yet these seemingly unreachable goals were achieved in the two decades after World War II.

Why, then, did American liberalism, starting in the early 1970s, undergo a historic metanoia, dismissing the idea of progress just as progress was being won? Multiple political and economic forces paved liberalism’s path away from its mid-century optimism and toward an aristocratic outlook reminiscent of the Tory Radicalism of nineteenth-century Britain; but one of the most powerful was the rise of the modern environmental movement and its recurrent hysterias.