Reason of State and Predatory Monarchy in the Dutch Republic, 1638‐1675 : The Legacy of the Duc de Rohan

Abstract

The purpose of this thesis is to explore changes in understandings of 'interest' and 'reason of state'; not as abstract and coherent theories about modernisation and a secularised conception of the political, but as responses to very practical and immediate political problems, challenges and crises, producing quite unintended consequences. It does so through the adaptive reference to and reliance upon Henri Duc de Rohan who provided, as it is argued, a vocabulary organised into a way of seeing the political world that was itself stimulated and constrained by a perceived crisis, both national and 'international', secular as well as religious.