Johannes Althusius Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Johannes Althusius (1557–1638) was born in Diedenshausen in Westphalia. After studying in Cologne, Paris, Geneva, and Basel, he took a doctorate in both civil and ecclesiastical law at Basel in 1586. In the same year he accepted a position on the law faculty at the Reformed Academy in Hebron. Upon the publication of his most famous work, Politica, in 1603, Althusius was offered the position of Syndic in Emden, East Frisia, where he guided the city until his death in 1638. Althusius had tremendous influence in this city for thirty-five years, a city that was one of the first in Germany to accept the Reformed articles of faith.

His appointment at Emden, and its association with the Reformation, reflect his intellectual debt to John Calvin. Like Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, Althusius argued in Politica that all power and government come from God, and civil authorities cannot use their power to serve any ends other than God’s. Thus, a citizen’s first allegiance is to God. Politica was widely embraced by the Dutch, who saw it as a theoretical justification for their revolt against the Spanish. While not generally recognized in the modern canon, Politica was a divisive force during its time.

Althusius calls for a unifying covenant, a covenant that is quite different from the social contract of Thomas Hobbes or John Locke. The covenant must be agreed to by all who enter it. Althusius is accused of transforming all public law into private law with his idea of covenant. He preserves this distinction, but recognizes the connection and symbiotic relationship between the two.

Althusius finds the origins of his federal design, and understanding of covenant, in the Bible and bases the design on biblical lessons: (1) The federal design is based on a network of covenants beginning with the original covenant between God and man on which all others are based. (2) The classical biblical commonwealth was a federation of tribes tied to one another by covenant that functioned as a unifying set of laws between the tribes. (3) The Bible ends with a restoration of the tribal system on a global scale in which each nation is able to preserve its own integrity while supporting a common covenant. Althusius’ biblical observations served as the inspiration for his theoretical work that confronted the problem of divisible sovereignty. For a federal system to work, sovereignty must be divided among the constituent parts while still binding the parts to the whole. Althusius addressed this problem by relying on a covenant that would bind the sovereign parts to a sovereign whole. This arrangement mirrors the symbiotic relationship that exists between private law and public law.

Althusius’ work contributed to the intellectual reputation of the Reformation. He wrote in direct refutation of the theory of indivisible sovereignty as understood by Jean Bodin. The idea of a single sovereign and self-determination could not be reconciled until Althusius introduced his theory of federalism with the covenant as its central feature.

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