Empire, Economy and the Dawn of the Enlightenment: Some Explorations into Seventeenth-Century Dutch Intellectual History

The transition from the age of late humanism, in which the Bible and the ancients dominated the world of learning, to the age of the Early Enlightenment, in which both the Bible and the ancients came under increasing attack and in which the old humanist and Aristotelian precepts came to be replaced by new notions of the law of nature, constitutes one of the most important developments in European intellectual history. Normally, in general accounts of this transition, the focus lies primarily on the novel ideas of famous philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes or Baruch de Spinoza and their impact. This article, however, will argue that the replacement of the old concepts of the Aristotelian-humanist tradition by the ideas of the Enlightenment was in a large part also due to the contributions made by a host of figures, whose name and fame have now fallen into relative obscurity. It will do so by focussing on a number of these lesser-known figures, who lived and worked in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. By exploring how they thought about contemporary events and, for example, about topics like empire and wealth, this article will demonstrate that in the decades around 1650 important intellectual changes were already under way in the Dutch Republic thanks to the work of ‘minor’, ostensibly ‘traditional’ figures, who thereby helped transform their own intellectual world.