THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF THE COUNTER-REFORMATION ERA AND REASON OF STATE

This article reconstructs the history of political thought from the sixteenth to the first decades of seventeenth century: a period of strong conflicts between the religious sphere and the political changes of the states in their trajectory towards absolutism. The analysis of the polemic against Machiavelli, Bodin and the politiques shows how it was questioned at the conceptual and practical levels the autonomy of politics from religious morality and the tendency of the states to evade ecclesiastical control respectively. The schools of thought discussed here -from anti-Machiavellism to the encomiastic literature of the existent governments, from Tacitism to the reason State, to the critical writings of the society, mainly utopia-outline on the one hand, the effort to preserve an image of politics as just government, with a virtuous prince, but on the other, the inevitable commitment to the praxis of political realism, well represented by the developments of the concept of reason of State in Botero and other writers from the seventeenth century. It was only with the arrival of Modern natural law which brought to the fore the questions of the origin and purpose of civil society, that political thought partly detached from the eternal conflict between morals and political praxis opening the era of rational and scientific research and individual rights.