Eighteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

In Spanish political treatises and commonplace books of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the word “happiness” underwent a piecemeal secularization. Where, in the Counterreformation, the word had often referred to the beatific vision, by the late seventeenth century it typically referred to the political security underwritten by an absolute and absolutely virtuous prince. This was accomplished by the synthesis, in the reason-of-state tradition, of Machiavellian security with Christian and Aristotelian eudaemonism (the practice of virtuous happiness). As this process of secularization was nearing completion, a second mutation occurred: happiness became inextricably linked with personal and national industry and commodity production. This paper explores the Political Crisis (1719) of Juan de Cabrera SJ (1658-1730), among the first Spanish political theorists to predicate public happiness on an export surplus. Rather than representing a sharp break from late Habsburg political literature in the tradition of Scribani and Saavedra, Cabrera’s vision of public happiness consummates the reason-of-state tradition. In Cabrera, it is precisely because “the ends are more estimable than the means” that most aspects of public and ecclesiastical life ought to be subsumed into the cultivation of the birth rate and export surplus. With this commoditization of public happiness comes a similar subsumption of virtue into the logic of mercantilism: Cabrera deems saintly those who boycott all foreign cloth. In Cabrera’s eudaemonic vision, this virtuous nationalism will reconcile monarch, aristocracy, and subject, but doux commerce will also lead automatically to reconciliation with the inhabitants of New World possessions and with foreigners at large.