The Politics of societas and the Early Modern State

Abstract

This article contributes to a recent shift in the study of early modern political thought, moving away from a state-centric view of the period towards an interest in the political significance of a range of other communities. More specifically, I argue that debates about the scope of one key concept, that of societas, resulted in different visions of the relationships between a variety of human associations. To demonstrate this, I reconstruct Johannes Althusius’s theory of societas and compare it to those of several contemporaries, ranging from Renaissance Ciceronianism to Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. I show that Althusius provided an innovative juridical interpretation of societas, which he used to ground a conception of politics according to which all human associations, from the family to the corporation to the state, are political. This complements traditional theological interpretations of his thought, which alone cannot fully account for its distinctiveness. Althusius’s conception of politics enabled him to chart an original middle way between two options available at the time: on the one hand, the isolation of politics from social and religious life; on the other, its subordination to or full identification with other kinds of community.

During the second half of the twentieth century, intellectual historians studied early modernity mainly as the period in which the state emerged and triumphed as the locus of politics. Accordingly, canonical histories of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century political thought traced the origins and development of the intellectual resources that made the state possible.¹ Building on these narratives, scholars of the Enlightenment identified a second, decisive step towards full modernity in the appearance of the sphere of society, existing outside of but always in relation to (and in tension with) the state.²

In recent decades, however, historians have begun to shift their attention away from the state–society binary and towards a more nuanced understanding of the conceptualization of politics between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Scholars have recast the state as just one of the many available options, showing that the boundaries of the political were drawn, redrawn, and negotiated over the course of complex debates.³ These debates intensified especially in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, as many European thinkers confronted Bodin’s theory of sovereignty, often drawing on Aristotelian insights as well, and came to very different conclusions on the relationship between politics and other spheres of human life, such as the domestic and religious ones.⁴ Politics was thus increasingly studied as an autonomous discipline or even science.⁵

In this article I will focus on one of the intellectual resources employed in this process: the juridical category of societas. Given the success of the state–society paradigm, it is unsurprising that pre-eighteenth century theories of societas have mostly been interpreted either as contributing to the theorization of the modern state or as anticipating civil society.⁶ I will show instead that the meanings of early modern societas transcended the state–society dichotomy, and that recovering the forgotten complexity of societas allows us to better understand the nature and the boundaries of both the state and other kinds of communities. To do so, I will follow recent studies in re-evaluating the importance of early modern Ciceronian jurisprudence – which ascribed a central role to societas ⁷ – and in exploring the political significance of a variety of societates, from the family to the church.⁸

I will focus primarily on the thought of Johannes Althusius (1563–1638), reconstructing his use of societas and contrasting it with that of various contemporaries, from Renaissance Ciceronianism to Jean Bodin and Hugo Grotius. Althusius is an apt case study not only because he developed arguably the most sophisticated seventeenth-century theory of societas, but also because his thought has traditionally been read as expressing a ‘modern idea’ of politics as ‘the study of statecraft’,⁹ one that repurposed the medieval theory of corporations to support popular sovereignty.¹⁰ I will claim instead that his interpretation of the concept of societas led him to an original theory of politics, one in which a range of forms of associated life, from the family to the town to the state, were all political. He articulated this theory by characterizing politics as the study of consociatio, a peculiar word which lends itself to both a theological and a juridical interpretation. Although scholars have mostly emphasized its theological dimension, I will make the case that the juridical one is at least as important.

After demonstrating that Althusius’s works unmistakably suggest a connection between consociatio and societas, I will explore this connection, first by summarizing the legal meaning of societas between classical Rome and the Renaissance, and then by studying how this term is used in Althusius’s juridical texts, which have been almost universally neglected by scholars. This will reveal that the Althusian consociatio should be understood as a specific type of societas. I will then argue that, even though Althusius only explicitly develops his mature juridical theory in the later Dicaeologica (1617), we can see its categories at work as early as the first edition of his Politica (1603).

The final sections of this article will develop the implications of this interpretation. First, I will demonstrate that the theoretical features of societas allow us to make sense of consociatio’s distinctive communal and collaborative aspects. Second, I will situate Althusius’s theory of societas in relation to the political and intellectual circumstances of the cities of Herborn and Emden, where the various editions of the Politica were written and published. I will conclude that Althusius’s use of consociatio enabled him to chart a middle way between the isolation of politics from social or religious life and its subordination to or full identification with them.

I

The Politica begins with a definition of its subject matter: ‘Politics is the art of associating (consociandi) men for the purpose of establishing, cultivating, and conserving social life among them. Whence it is called “symbiotics”. The subject matter of politics is therefore association (consociatio).’¹¹ As the rest of the work makes clear, all forms of associated life, from the married couple to the respublica, are instances of consociatio; by definition, they are all political. On this point, Althusius differed sharply from most contemporaneous theories of politics, which followed classical (typically Aristotelian) models in carefully distinguishing the private/non-political from the properly political realm. This broadening of the meaning of politics was made possible by the choice of consociatio as the defining political category. Understanding the precise meaning of consociatio has therefore been a major topic of debate in Althusius scholarship.

After decades characterized by an opposition between the two classic interpretations of Otto von Gierke, who emphasized the individualistic and voluntaristic character of consociatio, and Carl Friedrich, who portrayed consociatio as a purely natural and involuntary phenomenon, more recent research has concentrated on the history of this term, which was not common in classical and medieval Latin.¹² A crucial exception was its use by Cicero, especially in De officiis (1.100, 1.149, and 1.157), which is often cited as the source from which Althusius derived the term.¹³ The technical meaning of consociatio has been explained either as an expression of Aristotelian natural sociability or, more frequently, as a category of the ‘federal theology’ that constituted a shared theoretical framework at the Herborn School where Althusius taught.¹⁴ According to this line of thought, the relationship between God and human beings was mediated by a covenant (pactum or foedus) established at the beginning of time and renewed through Christ, which in some cases also entailed a pact between rulers and ruled. To describe the kind of communion (with God and with other human beings) that resulted from such pacts, these writers sometimes used technical terms, such as consociatio and κοινωνία (koinonia), which Althusius also frequently employs.¹⁵ This has led scholars to interpret Althusius’s consociatio as a theologically inspired ‘covenant-as-fellowship’.¹⁶

Althusius does mention a ‘religious covenant’ between God and the people, which concerns not only spiritual duties but also ‘the correct administration of justice’.¹⁷ And just like some of his Herborn colleagues, such as Johannes Piscator and Wilhelm Zepper, he sees these two dimensions as inextricably intertwined: magistrates and ministers must co-operate in applying divine and natural law, the former in the realm of external actions and the latter in the care of souls.¹⁸ These remarks, however, appear not when introducing the concept of consociatio but in a later chapter dedicated to ‘ecclesiastical administration’, which is separate from ‘secular’ administration. Likewise, Althusius distinguishes the ‘ecclesiastical’ from the ‘secular communion’ as pertaining to two complementary but distinct ends: the welfare of the soul and of the body.¹⁹ His concept of communion is therefore not exactly the same as the standard Reformed position, upheld by Zepper, which allowed only different means aimed at one common end: the glory of God and the realization of his kingdom on earth.²⁰ This suggests that Althusius’s consociatio is not an exclusively theological concept.

This impression is reinforced when we consider that, in the prefaces to both the first and the second edition of the Politica (also reprinted in the third), Althusius argues for a distinction between politics on the one hand and theology and jurisprudence on the other.²¹ This argument is an application of the lex iustitiae (law of justice), a fundamental methodological precept of Ramism, the pedagogy adopted at the Herborn School.²² According to Ramist principles, each discipline must have as its point of departure the general definition of its subject matter, which is determined by its end, and from which the whole range of its contents should be derived. The lex iustitiae specifically forbids importing materials from other fields of knowledge.²³ The choice of such a peculiar term as consociatio can thus be read as an attempt to create a term of art that identifies the basic political phenomenon and thereby renders it irreducible to other disciplines. This does not mean that there is an incompatibility between politics and theology – on the contrary, ‘all arts in their use’ are ‘always united’²⁴ – but rather that they look at the same objects from different points of view, according to their different ends. However, this approach distinguishes Althusius from Calvinist theorists such as Lambert Daneau, whose Politices christianae (1596) was an important source for the choice of the term consociatio, but who insisted that politics should be explicitly grounded in scriptural precepts.²⁵

Althusius distinguishes politics not only from theology, but also from jurisprudence. However, he acknowledges that he ‘experienced difficulties in separating juridical matters from [political] science’.²⁶ If federal theology can illuminate the religious dimension of Althusius’s politics, jurisprudence might shed more light on its secular side – especially given that Althusius dedicated his academic career to civil law. His first publication was titled Jurisprudentia romana (1586) and his mature masterpiece, the Dicaeologica (1617), provided a monumental synthesis of public, private, and biblical law. As Christoph Strohm has shown, these works were remarkable – when compared to mainstream Reformed jurisprudence – for the relatively limited role that theological principles played in their conceptual architecture.²⁷ Of course, we should not overstate the distance between theology and jurisprudence: after all, some federal theologians, including those of Herborn, had already articulated their theories in explicitly juridical terms.²⁸ But precisely because consociatio cannot be fully reduced to either theology or jurisprudence, a full understanding of this concept requires recovering its juridical side. This, in turn, requires an identification of its roots in the legal category of societas.

Despite the evident lexical proximity between societas and consociatio, Gierke has been the only one to acknowledge the importance of the connection between the two terms.²⁹ Twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship has either ignored it or, in the case of Friedrich, explicitly declared that ‘Althusius does not attribute systematic importance to the word societas’.³⁰ This position, however, does not stand up to a scrutiny of the textual evidence. For one, a connection between societas and consociatio was already present in Althusius’s crucial classical source, Cicero, who often used the two terms interchangeably.³¹ Similarly, the text of the Politica uses societas at various points to refer to the groupings that are elsewhere described as consociationes.³² This was already evident in the preface to the first edition, where Althusius summarized the subject matter of the work as ‘consociatio or humana societas’.³³ The Politica does not, however, contain an explicit treatment of societas. For the clarification of this term we must turn to Althusius’s juridical writings.

II

To understand how Althusius uses societas, we must begin with its meaning in Roman law.³⁴ Societas was a type of consensual contract through which people shared money, resources, and labour. The fact that a societas was a consensual contract meant that, as Gaius explains, ‘no formality whether of words or writing is required, but it is enough that the persons dealing have consented’.³⁵ Societates could be of many kinds. They could be aimed at one specific business or at multiple ones, or they could involve all of one’s possessions.³⁶ Each partner contributed something to the partnership – but not necessarily the same amount nor even the same kind of resource – and received something from it in turn. In the absence of a specific agreement, the distribution of benefits was supposed to be equal; otherwise, it allowed for differences according to the different contributions made by each partner.³⁷ Societates could only be formed for legal purposes – a dishonest societas was null³⁸ – and normally subsisted as long as the partners remained the same, possessed the same legal status, and did not opt out.³⁹

Two aspects of societates are of particular importance. First, a societas imposed reciprocal duties on the partners, who had to manage the common goods and affairs in the same way as they would have cared for their own.⁴⁰ Losses caused by one of the partners’ negligence or by dolus (fraud or deceit) would result in the partner having to bear them on their own; otherwise they could trigger a legal procedure (called actio pro socio), available when someone failed to comply with the terms of the contract.⁴¹ Second, a societas was a flexible arrangement that required only consent and which could be dissolved at virtually any time if one of the partners wished to do so.⁴² It was therefore a type of association that was only meant to work for the members’ benefit; a societas leonina – from which one or more partners did not benefit at all – was invalid.⁴³ A societas was an agreement between people who were extremely close to each other and who entertained brotherly relationships of trust; that is why initiating an actio pro socio automatically implied the dissolution of the societas.⁴⁴

During the middle ages, the scope of the concept widened somewhat, as more abstract meanings of societas gained currency in legal texts alongside the more strictly contractual one, leading to a certain ambiguity.⁴⁵ At times, the term was taken to refer to any legally recognized group of people, as a near-synonym of conventus, coetus, concilius, corpus, or even civitas;⁴⁶ the Decretum Gratiani at one point spoke of the body politic as the societas civitatis.⁴⁷ For the most part, however, discussions of societas as a juridical category between the middle ages and the Renaissance continued to be concerned primarily with the contractual and commercial domain of partnership.⁴⁸

In the Dicaeologica, Althusius’s treatment of the concept of societas begins with this classical meaning. At the beginning of chapter 78, he defines societas as ‘that by which a sharing and community of goods, works, and honours based on good faith arises among a group of people through simple consent’. Immediately afterwards, however, he distinguishes between two types of societas: the societas bonorum, ‘only limited to [commercial] goods’; and the societas vitae, which concerns the sharing of ‘whatever is necessary to life’.⁴⁹ The rest of chapter 78 analyses the first in largely conventional terms.⁵⁰ Chapters 79–81, by contrast, address the societas vitae in a very distinctive manner.

Some elements of this innovative account had been anticipated in chapters 7 and 8, which surveyed all the groups that constitute the subject matter of the Politica, from the family to the collegia to the respublica, and repeatedly used both societas and consociatio to describe them. The collegium, for instance, was defined as a ‘hominum … consociatio’, but was also called ‘societas, sodalitas, confraternitas’.⁵¹ While, in that context, these may have appeared to be generic uses of societas as ‘grouping’, chapters 79–81 provide a more technical treatment of the same associations, presenting them as instances of societas vitae: first, marriage and the family as societates privatae; then the societas publica, which comprises all consociationes publicae, from the collegium to the respublica.⁵² All consociationes are therefore in juridical terms societates.

The inclusion of these elements under the heading of societas vitae is a bold move. In the Digest the expression societas vitae appears only once – in a section that Althusius references – to describe the sharing of goods that arises through marriage.⁵³ A more flexible use of the category could already be found in Cicero, who employed it to describe various non-domestic social ties.⁵⁴ In the post-classical period, societas vitae was mainly used by jurists to refer to situations in which a sharing of goods took place for the purpose of living together, most notably in marriage or between siblings who inherited and shared a patrimony.⁵⁵

The Renaissance jurists whom Althusius quotes in the chapters on societas took for granted that the meanings of that term could be summarized through the dichotomy societas bonorum–societas vitae;⁵⁶ they disagreed, however, as to what the second category included. A strict adherence to Roman sources led the French humanist Hugo Donellus to identify societas vitae simply with marriage.⁵⁷ At the other end of the spectrum, the Italian Pietro Niccolò Mozzio used societas personarum colligativa (as opposed to societas bonorum acquisitiva) to refer to a wide variety of associations, from those dedicated to celebrating the patron saint of his native Macerata to cultural academies.⁵⁸ Another Italian, the cardinal Francesco Mantica, took a more conventional intermediate position, restricting the category of societas vitae exclusively to situations in which people live together.⁵⁹ None of them, however, characterized politics as a type of societas vitae in their juridical treatises.

By reconceptualizing societas vitae as political, Althusius in the Dicaeologica differs not only from these sources but also from his own earlier treatment of the topic in the Jurisprudentia romana. In that text, he had taken the traditional approach of simply distinguishing the societas promercalis (commercial partnership) from the societas coniugalis (marriage);⁶⁰ other types of association were simply not societates. Political authority was described as a Bodinian absolute power (potestas absoluta) over another, with no hint that it should be related to a consociatio or societas.⁶¹ Between his first and his last work, Althusius therefore transforms his conception of societas from a narrow category that closely tracked its use in Roman sources to a general one that encompasses an unprecedented range of human relationships, from the family to the state.

III

So far we have seen that, in the Dicaeologica (1617), Althusius radically expands the scope of the juridical category of societas. This does not necessarily mean, however, that when we encounter societas in the Politica – whose three editions were published in 1603, 1610, and 1614 – the term is already endowed with the same juridical meaning. As Merio Scattola has shown, a number of factors stimulated a significant development in Althusius’s thought in the late 1590s, which led to the numerous differences between the Jurisprudentia romana and the Politica; these changes may well have included a rethinking of the meaning of societas.⁶² This is not enough, however, to establish a connection with the Dicaeologica. The Politica, after all, was a standalone work that treated politics as an independent discipline, while the Dicaeologica was an innovative jurisprudence aimed at ‘caring well for the human symbiosis’, which might have revisited earlier political ideas in the light of later theoretical developments.⁶³

The choice of societas to characterize politics in a textbook of political philosophy was not remarkable: its generic senses as ‘association’ or ‘community’ were ubiquitous in medieval and Renaissance political thought and practice. For instance, Althusius’s two crucial sixteenth-century sources, Jean Bodin and Pierre Grégoire, used societas quite loosely, to describe both intermediary, non-political bodies and the respublica. Neither of them drew an explicit connection between its juridical and political meanings.⁶⁴

Much more than Bodin’s and Grégoire’s, Althusius’s use of societas in the Politica resembles that of Renaissance Ciceronianism. This tradition can be traced back to Cicero’s De republica, which, as Elizabeth Asmis has shown, employs the model of partnership to conceptualize the res publica.⁶⁵ The work famously defines the res publica as a res populi, and then draws on the language of societas to characterize a people as ‘an assemblage of some size associated with one another through agreement on law and community of interest’ (coetus multitudinis iuris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus).⁶⁶ In subsequent sections, the metaphor is used extensively, emphasizing the nature of the civitas as an ‘association of citizens under law’ (iuris societas civium).⁶⁷ The De republica was not known in post-classical times until the nineteenth century. However, some of the passages in which the societas metaphor appears were preserved by various sources, most notably Augustine’s De civitate dei.⁶⁸ Moreover, in some of Cicero’s works which were not lost, societas is used to refer to the societas rei publicae (De legibus 1.39), societas civilis (1.62), or societas civium (2.16), and to develop the argument that being part of a societas civitatis implies sharing with other citizens a range of resources, from infrastructure to laws.⁶⁹

These ideas were widespread in humanist political thought during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when thinkers from Coluccio Salutati to Matteo Palmieri to François Connan characterized the civitas as a societas.⁷⁰ However, they mostly used societas as a political term of art: that is, they revived its features as a metaphorical partnership – in particular the idea of sharing common laws – only insofar as they borrowed them from Cicero and Ciceronian texts, but without establishing an explicit connection with its juridical meaning. An exception was Mario Salamonio’s De principatu (written in 1512–14, twice mentioned in the Politica), which developed an extended parallel between the civitas and the commercial societas.⁷¹ Even in that case, however, the emphasis was not on reciprocity and co-operation between partners, but rather on the affinity between contracts and political laws, which were viewed as binding for both people and magistrates.⁷²

Althusius’s Politica certainly belongs to this tradition, as suggested by the fact that, immediately after introducing the concept of consociatio, he quotes De republica’s definition of populus in the slightly modified form provided by Augustine.⁷³ And while the quote itself does not appear in the first edition of the Politica, several references point to sections of Daneau’s Politices christianae where both this and other similar Ciceronian references can be found.⁷⁴ Althusius, however, does not limit himself to the traditional Ciceronian use of societas. At the beginning of the same paragraph in which the Ciceronian quotation appears, he also refers to consociatio as ‘this mutual communication, or common enterprise (κοινοπραξία)’.⁷⁵ As Cornel Zwierlein noted, κοινοπραξία (koinopraxia) is not classical Greek, in which κοινοπραγία (koinopragia) was the more common form; it is rather a Byzantine innovation, inserted from the sixteenth century onwards to replace a missing Greek word at the beginning of the chapter on societas in Justinian’s Institutes.⁷⁶ In this way, κοινοπραξία became synonymous with the kind of partnership in which all goods are shared.⁷⁷ By using this very specific word, Althusius is referring to this juridical model as the framework within which his concept of consociatio should be understood. This is even more explicit in the first edition, where κοινοπραξία appears as early as the second paragraph of the work, precisely when Althusius is explaining what consociatio means.⁷⁸ Moreover, just as in the Dicaeologica, in chapter 2 of the Politica the consociatio privata is defined as ‘vitae societas & symbiosis’.⁷⁹ At the beginning of chapter 9, the societas publica is described in similar terms: ‘this mixed society (societas vitae mixta), constituted partly from private, natural, necessary, and voluntary societies, partly from public societies, is called a universal association’.⁸⁰ This evidence reveals that, already in the Politica, both private and public consociationes are instances of societas vitae.

We cannot conclusively establish whether the full juridical background was present by 1603; as we saw in section I, a treatment of the juridical meaning of societas would have been inappropriate in the context of a strictly political treatise. However, the presence of koinopraxia and societas vitae suggests that at least some features of the later juridical model play an important role in the Politica. This is also the impression that Althusius wants his reader to get from the Dicaeologica, which refers to and relies on the Politica on this point.⁸¹ The next section will show that a detailed analysis of the conceptual properties of consociatio further substantiates this hypothesis.

Before exploring the conceptual significance of the connection between consociatio and societas, it is important to highlight some contextual implications of the arguments reconstructed so far. By identifying politics and societas vitae, Althusius can characterize as political most of the societates, from the family to the corporation, which in Ciceronian thought had remained non-political. However, since he preserved a clear distinction between these dimensions, his position was not as radical as that of some coeval French divine-right thinkers, who came close to identifying families and states.⁸² Still, it clearly ran counter to the direction in which the discipline of politics was moving in the Holy Roman Empire, where rulers encouraged its development as a way to strengthen their authority. This often resulted in theories that, drawing on both Bodinian and Aristotelian elements, isolated politics from the wider social world, and sometimes even from religion.⁸³ One of the key protagonists of this process, Henning Arnisaeus, would soon attack Althusius for his over-inclusive definition of politics, sparking a lively debate between the two.⁸⁴

Arnisaeus criticized both Grégoire and Althusius for their use of societas and consociatio, but there were crucial differences between the two theorists.⁸⁵ Unlike Althusius, Grégoire (and Bodin) had separated political from non-political associations. Furthermore, unlike Grégoire’s Catholic distinction of the church and the ecclesiastical order from politics,⁸⁶ Althusius saw the two as intimately connected. Since all associations are political, the church cannot be a separate, non-political body, nor can it be fully identified with the political community; it is rather embedded within a framework of societas-like structures, some – but not all – of which have both a secular and an ecclesiastical dimension. As we will see in section V, there were pressing local reasons for this peculiar compromise.

IV

If Althusius’s consociatio is to be interpreted as a societas vitae, we should also expect him to apply the same normative standards – derived from the classical model of partnership – to all types of association. We can verify this by following his presentation of the properties of consociatio through its four Aristotelian causes.

The formal cause of ‘political association’ is consociatio itself. If the Aristotelian form is what makes something what it specifically is, then consociatio is what makes human interaction political. Its crucial feature is communicatio, the fact of sharing what is ‘useful and necessary to this social life’.⁸⁷ This corresponds to the fundamental ‘communicative’ aspect of the juridical partnership, reflected in the Dicaeologica’s definition of societas vitae: ‘that by which a symbiosis is stipulated, and things, works, duties, and goods are united by the members for the conservation of the symbiosis’.⁸⁸ This is the ‘form’ that families have in common with larger associations such as corporations, cities, provinces, and states.

The efficient cause – that which actively produces such a form – is ‘consent and agreement (pactum) among the communicating citizens’.⁸⁹ At the beginning of the work, consociatio was similarly presented as created by ‘explicit or tacit agreement’ (pacto expresso, vel tacito).⁹⁰ These expressions have generated considerable controversy among interpreters, whose positions range from that of Gierke, who presented Althusius as ‘the creator of a genuine theory of the Social Contract’, to that of Friedrich, who denied the importance of the pactum, and underscored that Althusius is not a contract theorist in the modern sense.⁹¹ Scholars who read consociatio in federal-theological terms have identified this pact with a religious covenant, conceptualized as an ongoing process that constitutes the fellowship as both earthly and spiritual.⁹²

But consociatio also has a secular, juridical side. If we start from the hypothesis that it should be understood as a societas, we can also interpret ‘pacto expresso, vel tacito’ as referring to the creation of a partnership.⁹³ This helps to make sense of its processual nature: a societas is brought to life ‘through mere consent’ (ex solo consensu)’;⁹⁴ as long as the partners are willing to co-operate and respect its terms, a societas exists. As we have seen, Althusius sometimes calls his consociatio a koinonia or koinopraxia. Since Byzantine times, these terms had been employed to refer to both the classical societas and the communio incidens.⁹⁵ The latter was the legal arrangement that described situations in which a partnership arose from circumstances which people had not explicitly willed, but which they could agree to through their actions; it was especially useful in explaining how children could be members of the societas of the family. The Dicaeologica provides a similar account of how consent can be expressed tacitly: ‘by living in a certain place and engaging in social interaction, which demonstrates the acceptance of the laws and practices of the place in which one lives’.⁹⁶

This shift in focus is also helpful in further illuminating the relationship between the theological and secular dimensions of consociatio. As Althusius himself explains in his discussion of the religious covenant – echoing Herborn’s federal theologians – the conceptual structure of this pact consists in a debtor and a creditor promising to each other the performance of specific actions (for instance, obedience and protection).⁹⁷ By contrast, the pact that constitutes consociatio as societas consists in an agreement to share life and resources, and to respect certain rules that apply to all parties. As Zwierlein has shown, this communal dimension was already present in some federal-theological theories, including that of the Polish-born Herborn Reformer Johannes à Lasco, who had used the model of the communio incidens to theorize the relationship between human beings and God.⁹⁸ Unlike him, however, Althusius partially disentangles the vertical relationship between humans and God, conceptualized as a pact between a debtor and a creditor, from the horizontal relationship among humans, modelled on societas and communio incidens. While there is an overlap between the two, they are not as fully identified with one another as they were in some federal-theological precedents.

The final cause of politics is ‘the enjoyment of a comfortable, useful, and happy life, and of the common welfare’.⁹⁹ In a commercial societas everyone must provide a certain contribution and can in exchange expect a fair reward. Participation in associational life also imposes on each member a duty to contribute something to the common stock of what is needed for a prosperous life, whether it be goods or works. In commercial societates not everyone contributes the same; poorer partners can make up in services what richer ones provide in money.¹⁰⁰ This dimension is explored in detail in the chapter of the Dicaeologica dedicated to the societas publica, which – after the initial definitions – is an enumeration of the various types of contributions (munera) provided by citizens, and which effectively constitutes a summary of chapters 11–14 of the Politica. These contributions are distinguished into munus personale (works) and munus reale (goods); in the case of the latter, much attention is dedicated to their proportionality, especially that of taxation. At the end of the chapter, a list of the benefits to be expected – the bona communia publica – complements the presentation of duties.¹⁰¹

The terms according to which partners contribute to this kind of societas are what the fourth cause refers to: ‘the material of politics is the aggregate of precepts for communicating those things, services, and rights that we bring together, each fairly and properly according to his ability, for symbiosis and the common advantage of the social life’.¹⁰² The ‘precepts’ that regulate this kind of societas are what ‘materially’ constitute the consociatio in the sense that they determine the relationships between members, the duties imposed on each, and the benefits that each can expect to receive. The content of these precepts, in turn, is based on Ciceronian ideals of harmonious concord, as well as on a strictly hierarchical conception of the cosmos, in which subordination is natural and beneficial at every level, from the angels to the human body to the animals.¹⁰³ As chapter 6 explains, ‘concord is fostered and protected by fairness (aequabilitas) when right, liberty, and honour are extended to each citizen according to the order and distinction of his worth and status. … Contrary to this fairness is equality (aequalitas).’¹⁰⁴ A societas bonorum can be egalitarian – though it need not be – because in a purely commercial context it is in principle possible for everyone to contribute the same amount.¹⁰⁵ A societas vitae, on the contrary, is never egalitarian because it requires its members to share so much that it is almost impossible to contribute exactly the same. The reason is that ‘God distributed his gifts unevenly among men’;¹⁰⁶ each person will therefore be required to contribute only as much as their possibilities allow for. Concord is the expression of the consensus by which people accept and abide by the rules that govern the unequal – and, precisely because of this, fair – terms of contribution and co-operation.

When these terms are violated, the societas is dissolved. The chief example of this is tyranny, which both the Politica and the Dicaeologica characterize as destroying the bonds of the consociatio/societas vitae.¹⁰⁷ It is on this basis that Althusius justifies an extensive right of resistance, according to which specific magistrates called ‘ephors’ are empowered to formally indict and even punish tyrants. When they threaten the foundational features of the body politic, tyrants sever the bonds that made them part of the consociatio.¹⁰⁸ The same logic applies to any abuse of authority, when it is directed against the constitutive features of the societas: for instance, adultery in the case of marriage.¹⁰⁹ The crucial difference is that, in the case of public associations, the exclusion of one of the members (the former ruler) does not dissolve the societas as a whole, but only the obligation between that member and the rest of the body.¹¹⁰

V

These theoretical features confirm that the juridical model of societas was already at work in the Politica in shaping the properties of consociatio. To better understand why Althusius turned to this model, we must keep in mind that his theory was meant to be at once general and local. The Politica was first written as a textbook for the Herborn School, which had been founded in 1584 as part of a series of sweeping reforms, by which Count Johann VI of Nassau-Dillenburg aimed to solidify his rule and indoctrinate his subjects in the newly introduced Calvinist faith.¹¹¹ Althusius’s theory reflected the complex nature of Count Johann’s project – and could not have done otherwise, given that all works published in Herborn were subject to rigorous censure by political authorities.¹¹² On the one hand, Althusius provided a justification of resistance that could be used to legitimize the external efforts of polities such as Nassau and its neighbours in the Wetterau region, which co-operated in a league against anti-Calvinist threats. On the other hand, the Politica’s emphasis on ‘symbiotic’ cohesion fits the co-operative internal structure that Count Johann was trying to build in Nassau-Dillenburg: from the creation of a citizen militia to the employment of burghers in the administration, his project required a high degree of participation and loyalty from his subjects.¹¹³

The peculiar nature of societas is useful in clarifying how Althusius’s theory could integrate these very different aspects of resistance and co-operation. Those who participate in a societas recognize an internal hierarchy of subordination and have specific duties imposed upon them. They also share with each other the benefits that flow from this co-operation and its legal terms, the violation of which can lead to the dissolution of the contractual bonds. This is exactly the outlook that the new model subject of Nassau-Dillenburg was supposed to exhibit: a combination of loyalty to the ruler and personal investment in the well-being of the respublica, as demonstrated through participation in a complex network of intermediary institutions. These included the church, over which Count Johann exercised an inflexible control,¹¹⁴ and which – as we have seen – Althusius saw as part of his ‘consociational’ framework. The hybrid nature of consociatio thus enabled him to present politics as encompassing and co-ordinating both the secular and the ecclesiastical dimensions of associated life – precisely its role in the plans of the Wetterau counts too.

The model of societas also explains how a consociatio can relate to others externally in a proto-federal structure.¹¹⁵ Not coincidentally, Count Johann’s political projects included the establishment of connections with other Calvinist churches and polities, with the ultimate goal of uniting them in a supra-national network.¹¹⁶ In both the internal and the external sphere, the contract of societas provided theoretical resources capable of structuring ‘symbiotic’ co-operation without compromising the autonomy and prerogatives of each member. Relying on a theory like Althusius’s was, however, something of a gamble for Count Johann: by fostering partnership-like ties with his subjects, he sought to ensure that the monarchomach side of the doctrine would only be directed against the external enemies of Calvinism, and not against himself.¹¹⁷

This tension became evident when Althusius became syndic of the East Frisian city of Emden, which turned to him for help in 1604, at the height of a standoff with Count Enno III to defend its liberties.¹¹⁸ Once again, the model of societas was ideally suited to Emden’s complex external situation: nominally part of the county of Ostfriesland, it had asserted its Calvinist identity against the Lutheran counts since the 1590s.¹¹⁹ During his thirty-four-year tenure as syndic, Althusius developed in theory and applied in practice his resistance theory against the absolutist ambitions of the East Frisian counts, emphasizing the political roles of the city and province as self-ruling consociationes, and fighting for the establishment of more collaborative governing bodies in the county.¹²⁰ In the new editions of the Politica of 1610 and 1614, he also expanded and refined its symbiotic and ‘consociational’ aspects.¹²¹ This, however, represented an increasingly idealized version of the internal conditions of Emden, which Althusius administered in such a non-co-operative way that frequent discord and conflict with the other ruling bodies ensued.¹²²

The intellectual significance of the politics of societas, however, goes beyond the borders of Herborn and Emden. For instance, when defining civitas in the first chapter of his De iure belli ac pacis (1625), Hugo Grotius describes it as ‘a complete association (coetus) of free men, joined together for the enjoyment of rights and for their common interest (juris fruendi & communis utilitatis causa sociatus)’.¹²³ This is a distinctively Ciceronian definition. Coetus and sociatus are the same two words that opened and closed the definition of populus in De republica 1.39, just as juris fruendi and communis utilitatis causa clearly correspond to Cicero’s juris consensus and utilitatis communio. The ‘associational’ language reappears in chapter 5 of the second book, which begins with a discussion of marriage but then states in §17 that ‘besides the most natural association of marriage, there are other associations (consociationes)’.¹²⁴ Among these, one stands out in §23: ‘an association (consociatio) in which many fathers of families unite into a single people … is the most perfect society (perfectissima societas)’.¹²⁵ Other passages similarly present the societas civilis as the result of a voluntary and consensual contract, and explicitly compare its operation to that of a commercial societas through which people share resources.¹²⁶ This suggests that, despite the emphasis that has been placed on the differences between Althusius and Grotius,¹²⁷ a more thorough comparison would reveal significant affinities on this point.

The opposite is true of Bodin and Grégoire, for whom societas was only political when it denoted not just a group of associated people but also their subordination to a common sovereignty (imperium or maiestas). This was the position that Althusius, explicitly relying on Bodin, had endorsed (albeit without using the language of societas) in the Jurisprudentia romana.¹²⁸ By contrast, in the Politica every consociatio is political simply because it is a societas vitae; societates exist independently of the state, which is the most comprehensive consociatio but which is not different in kind from any other political association. While some consociationes are voluntarily created and dissolved, others (like the family or the republic) pre-exist most of their members’ decisions, and yet constitute a juridically and morally binding framework.

Grégoire influenced another Ramist thinker (and a former student at the Herborn School from precisely when Althusius taught there), Johann Alsted, who quoted the Frenchman’s De republica in his Encylopaedia when defining res publica.¹²⁹ Like Grégoire, Alsted used civitas, respublica, and societas in a fluid way. He, however, was much closer to Althusius in examining the various consociationes which marked the progression of the societas civilis from the societas conjugalis to the individual urbes to the civitas.¹³⁰ While Arnisaeus had proposed to distinguish between the civitas as the multitude of associated people and the respublica as the ordo or command structure that organized them, Alsted insisted that – if one wanted to distinguish between them – the form and defining characteristic of the respublica was the ‘community of multiple citizens’ (ommunitas plurium civium), while the civitas was properly its ‘government or administration’ (regimen seu administratio).¹³¹

These brief remarks show that Althusius’s use of the concepts of societas and consociatio place him at the centre of a conversation which spanned multiple decades and intellectual contexts in continental Europe. While Martin van Gelderen and Annabel Brett have explored some of the republican, Stoic, and Aristotelian aspects of these debates, I have suggested that the notion of societas, and especially its Ciceronian interpretation, played an equally important role in informing the positions of some of these thinkers and in distinguishing from each other apparently similar theories.¹³²

VI

This article has argued that attending to Althusius’s Ciceronian use of Roman law allows us to better understand his original conception of politics as a specific kind of association, to which everyone contributes and from which everyone receives benefits in a fair and proportional way. I have also argued that, while there is an important federal-theological background which informs Althusius’s concept of consociatio, that is not enough to fully account for its peculiarities, which were at least in part devised to reflect the specific political situations of Herborn and Emden. This reconstruction allows us to revise Althusius’s collocation in the scholarly debates mentioned in the introduction.

Influential contributions have presented Althusius’s political thought as centred around the concept of corporation (universitas), making him an important character in the development of the idea of the modern state.¹³³ It is true that, despite the fact that in classical Roman law societas and universitas were incompatible categories,¹³⁴ Althusius explicitly affirms that consociationes can act as corporations, most notably by being represented, and can even be called by the name universitas.¹³⁵ Focusing on the consociatio’s character as universitas, however, misleadingly diverts attention from the distinctiveness of Althusius’s co-operative conception of politics: for him, politics is essentially societas; the dimension of universitas is a decisively secondary aspect. The primary meaning of universitas in the Politica is not even the corporate one, but simply ‘city’.¹³⁶ The members of Althusius’s societas do not disappear in a homogeneous multitude by being represented or by transferring power. On the contrary, by sharing goods and laws they constantly have duties imposed upon them and can expect rewards. Rather than as an intermediate step in the trajectory that leads from medieval corporations to the state as an abstract unity, Althusius is best read as an alternative to this whole history.

Once we shift attention away from the state, we can appreciate Althusius’s contribution as one of many creative ways in which the political thought of the decades around 1600 defined politics and related it to a variety of communities. While some sought to insulate government not only from the family but also from social realities and from religion, Althusius provided one of the most expansive conceptions of politics in the history of Western political thought. At the same time, he also refused to follow those positions which endeavoured to subordinate politics to religion, or to abolish the distinction between politics and other communities, from the family to the church. His remained an account of politics as an independent discipline and as the overarching social reality within which the church, as well as all secular groups, could find its proper place and flourish. The concept of consociatio, with its multiple meanings, enabled him to synthesize the peculiar status of the discipline and of the reality of politics, at once theological and juridical, but ultimately something more than the sum of its parts.