Reason of State

Reason of state has been a central concept of political and international thought since it emerged in the late sixteenth century. Often associated with Realpolitik and assumed to be little more than an instrumental, immoral, and ruthless pursuit of power, reason of state remains a surprisingly underexamined concept in the study of international relations. This chapter offers an intellectual history of reason of state beginning with its origins in Renaissance Italy before moving on to discuss its development in the context of religious strife during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It was in this context that Giovanni Botero wrote The Reason of State (1589), revising the language of political analysis and expanding the knowledge on which government and statecraft depend. The literature spawned by the concept of reason of state helped to legitimize the idea that states operated according to distinctive political and moral rules, even if debate persisted between secularizing thinkers and those intent on reconciling statecraft with religious doctrines. Natural law thinkers in the seventeenth century such as Thomas Hobbes and Samuel Pufendorf helped consolidate the idea of the modern state as an impersonal entity possessing its own legitimate form of political morality.