The Reason of State

The Reason of State is a work of political philosophy by the Italian Jesuit Giovanni Botero, published in 1589. The book was the first to popularize the term reason of state, referring to the right of rulers to act against the dictates of natural and positive law with the overriding aim of acquiring, preserving and augmenting the dominion of the state for the public welfare, a way of thinking about government morality that emerged at the end of the fifteenth century and remained prevalent until the eighteenth. Botero supports the political role of the Catholic Church in the work and criticizes the immoral methods of statecraft associated with Niccolo Machiavelli.