What follows is an attempt to uncover the relationship between Calvin's practical experience as a political actor and his political theology. My purpose, therefore, is as much to explain how Calvin came to put forward the views he did, as to specify, for each point of his career, what precisely those views were. The guiding thought that informs these pages is that Calvin's practice as a framer of ecclesiastical polity is not a matter of the simple application of principle to practice; this I take to be an impossibility, both in general, for political conduct is always a matter of political judgement as well as principle, and in this particular case, for, as I hope to show, Calvin's theology did not yield any direct injunctions to conduct. Nor is Calvin's political theology a simple rationalization of preceding practice, if for no other reason than that I think his political theology did not adequately assimilate his practice – he wrought better than he knew. Again, I think Calvin's later writings in many respects more satisfactory than his earlier ones, but the reader will find here no echo of that debate of the higher Marxist scholasticism about the ‘young’ versus the ‘mature’ Marx; and ‘development’ seems to me a dispensable concept in intellectual history. There is, in short, no simple account to be given of the relationship between experience and ratiocinative thought, and no such story is told here.

The ground I cover is familiar, the material excellently predigested.