The echoes of the brothers De la Court in early eighteenth-century Republican publications

Abstract

In historiography the afterlife of the brothers De la Court is in general marginalized. The hypothesis in this thesis is that the absence of their names in the publications that appeared in the second Stadtholderless Period are no indication of a neglect of their ideas. A novel application of existing methods is employed for the comparison of those publications with the work of the De la Courts: Political Discourse Analysis comparing the content on premise and argumentation, and Intertextual Analysis determining the various types of linguistic imitation. The corpus consists of treatises, pamphlets and an edition of a spectatorial journal. The analyses show a high degree of similarity in content and imitation of language between the De la Courts’ work and the publications of the second Stadtholderless Period. The array of premises discussed, its frequency and the moment of publication is determined by the historical context. The results confirm that the Republican thoughts of the De la Courts survived the monarchical period of William III in perfect order and were used by the Republican minded authors of the second Stadtholderless Period.