Patriots, contracts and other patterns of trust in a polyarchic society: the Dutch 17th century

It is sometimes appropriate to look at things in a slightly different light, and transpose their meaning to a different level. In this contribution to patriotism in the early-modern period I intend to show that at least part of this deconstruction lived in the imagination of the actors of the period. Thus when I claim that patriotism in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth Dutch centuries might be regarded as one of the alternatives (and a discarded one, for that matter) in the quest for political and social stability, and that religion was considered a better candidate, I will try and validate this claim by textual proof from the sources.