Reason of State, Information Management and the Power of Necessity in Early Modern Spain: The Case of Virgilio Malvezzi

Tension between ruthless pragmatism and moral integrity in politics has been the subject of debate among political writers from classical antiquity until the present day. It is also at the heart of reason of state, or a pragmatic way of thinking and writing about preserving a ruler's personal power and dominion. Nowhere was the need for pragmatic state management greater than in the global Spanish empire, yet pragmatic politics were problematic in this Catholic monarchy, steeped in ideals of justice and divine justifications of power and kingship. According to contemporary political theory, necessity created by unusual circumstances could temporarily suspend moral or religious laws. But when was necessity in place? In this paper I show that in both theory and practice, statesmen used the act of selecting and organizing information to rhetorically present the condition of necessity, resulting in a greater range of options for political action. As a case I will draw on the oeuvre and actions of Virgilio Malvezzi, the Bolognese historian who had a prominent career in the service of King Philip IV and the Count-Duke of Olivares in the 1630s and 1640s. In letters he wrote during several missions in the Low Countries and small-scale diplomacy with French nobles conspiring against their king, Malvezzi reflected on necessity. Through the careful ordering of information, he reported circumstances in such a way that they legitimized the application of unorthodox strategies such as dissimulation and pretence. Moreover, as we can observe in the emergence of one of Malvezzi’s published works from an early manuscript draft, the method demonstrating necessity through ordering could also be at the base of a chronological narrative, in the context of an apologetic political history. Thus through extenuating necessity, I will suggest, information management could be central to early modern power politics.

Lisa Kattenberg starts as research fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge, in October 2019. She received her PhD in 2018 from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation on reason of state in the early modern Spanish monarchy, which was awarded the Keetje Hodshon prize for best doctoral thesis in history completed at a Dutch university during the past five years. She holds a Research MA degree from the University of Amsterdam in History and an MA in History of Political Thought and Intellectual History from Queen Mary / UCL, and she was short term research fellow at the Royal Dutch Institute in Rome and the Casa de Velázquez in Madrid. She has published several articles and book chapters on intellectual and cultural history of the Spanish empire and the Mediterranean.