This volume of essays honors the scholarship of Wyger Velema on the occasion of his retirement from the University of Amsterdam in 2021. Over the past decades, Velema has played a prominent role in international discussions on the history of political thought and the culture of the Enlightenment, especially regarding the eighteenth-century Dutch Republic. Born in 1955, he closely witnessed and participated in the development of the historiography of early modern republicanism, first as a student of Ernst Kossmann at the University of Groningen, then as a doctoral student of John Pocock at Johns Hopkins University, and subsequently at the University of Amsterdam, where, in 2009, he succeeded Eco Haitsma Mulier on the Jan Romein chair for the Philosophy of History and the History of Historiography. Velema’s many contributions to the history of political thought include his initiative, together with Terence Ball and Jörn Leonhard, to start the book series Studies in the History of Political Thought with Brill publishers. We are grateful to the current editor, Annelien de Dijn, for including this volume in that series, as it is the most fitting venue to honor Velema’s scholarship. Thanks are due also to Stichting Daendels, which provided funding for the copy-editing of the volume, and to Kate Delaney for her corrections. This volume was edited and published in the context of the ERC-funded research program RISK: Republics on the Stage of Kings, with which two of the editors are affiliated. We would like to thank Alessandro Metlica of the University of Padua, the PI of this program, for making it possible to publish this volume in open access. Finally, we would like to thank all the friends, colleagues, and former students of Wyger Velema who contributed to this volume. We are confident that the diversion of their reflections on the theme of decline will avert the menace of intellectual decline that looms after academic retirement.
The editors