Sarah Stilton, Review:
Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws: A Critical Edition
Edited by W. B. Allen (Anthem Press, $215, 954 pages)
There are Marxists and Lockeans, Nietzscheans and Aristotelians but there are no Montesquieuans. The knock against Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu is that he created no system, that he was not a theorizer.
Montesquieu is considered a political observer or historian of ideas, rather than a philosopher of the way the world works, or ought to. Perhaps, though, Montesquieu’s influence is so ingrained in the way we think about political systems that we take his contributions to our understanding of political ideas and systems for granted. He has been forgotten in the academy largely because he dealt with the reality of politics, not with abstractions. Academics love abstractions.
Leo Strauss says in What is Political Philosophy that Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws is a “document of an incessant fight … between two social and political ideals: the Roman Republic, whose principle is virtue, and England, whose principle is political liberty.”
Roger Scruton says in What is Conservatism that “it is customary following Montesquieu to divide the powers of the state into three: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary.”
Montesquieu is forgotten because 1) the debate between virtue and liberty has been won decisively by the latter, and 2) at least in the West, it is so common, and common sensical, that there are three branches of government, we assume it was always thus.
W.B. Allen has edited and provided commentary to a critical edition of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws published by Anthem. It is a large book with both the original French and Allen’s excellent English translation. But it is in the final 150 pages, through 10 chapters on discrete topics, that this critical edition becomes essential. In those ten chapters Allen provides keys for reading and understanding Montesquieu’s thought. As a matter of advice, the reader should start there before tackling the actual text of The Spirit of the Laws, at least Allen’s “Order and Structure in Esprit des Lois”.
Unlike many political philosophers from Machiavelli and Hobbes to Locke and Rousseau, Montesquieu was thought to have no underlying anthropology, no foundation in nature – what man was before the creation of law (religion or government). Instead, he approaches the political as a sociologist or historian, observing the laws and mores, the people and their political order.
Through 31 books collected in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu makes his way through the political life of ancient Greece and Rome to modern (17th century) England and France. Although Montesquieu is obviously erudite, with a great depth of learning, his prose is easy to follow, but to understand the context, Allen’s commentary is a useful aid to readers unfamiliar with some of the historians, philosophers, and places Montesquieu references.
Montesquieu does not merely describe the different systems of laws through time, he judges one, England (liberty), better than the other, Rome (virtue). He thus appears to be a (classical) liberal philosopher, and he is to an extent. But for Montesquieu the political answer to society’s most vexing problems is always moderation, and thus he belongs in the pantheon of conservative philosophers. His observations of European political systems and cultures leads him to believe that a vibrant economic system (capitalism) produces peace and comfort and thus stability; this comes at the cost of virtue but it is a cost Montesquieu considers worthwhile. (Allen provides an excellent commentary on the misuse of the translation of commerce, which is not merely economic exchange but a description of the relationship or interaction between people, which has a moderating effect on behaviour.) The Spirit of the Laws, in one sense, is the political response to the zeitgeist. The separation of powers (executive, legislative, judicial) limits government power to both temper that response to the zeitgeist, but also to thwart any political attempt to veer too far from it, which Montesquieu would characterize as tyranny or despotism.
It should be noted, however, that William Allen challenges this interpretation because he says past translations have not properly understood the French word esprit which is more than the spirit of the laws or a representation of the spirit of the public (zeitgeist). Rather, Allen argues, the word must be understood as founded in reason, that the laws governing society, whether they be the formal laws that rule or the informal laws that govern mores, have in their foundation underlying reasons based in virtue; while most political science and political philosophy instruction of the past century has denied that Montesquieu accepted or taught a natural law, Allen argues that Montesquieu not only reported on the natural law governing classical systems, but accepted and incorporated the idea into his system of thought. In other words, rather than being descriptive, Montesquieu was being prescriptive. This is a novel interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws but probably the correct one based on the translation Allen provides.
Another useful corrective of Allen’s translation and commentaries is against the idea that Montesquieu was a determinist, that the natural environment (climate, terrain) dictates the form of political systems. Allen correctly points out that Montesquieu found these factors to be influential rather than determinative. Central to Montesquieu’s thought is human agency, that we — both as individuals and collectively through our politics – are free to make choices, whether from “well or ill” reason.
A third corrective is Allen’s argument that previous interpretations claim that Montesquieu had nothing to say about justice other than it was determined by the circumstances of time and place. Allen firmly rejects that interpretation, saying that Montesquieu acknowledged “justice as a norm of nature” that could be universal or particular.
Allen refers to Montesquieu’s four “cardinal goods”: virtue, liberty, justice, and constitutionalism. The priority is liberty, with Montesquieu concerned that the ancient focus on virtue and justice can lead to tyranny (we once again see Montesquieu’s moderation when he warns against an excess of virtue). Yet it is important to understand, as Montesquieu did, that mankind is not made for hyper-individualism, that he is grounded within a community, both familial and political. Montesquieu, Allen explains, viewed liberty as the priority among the four cardinal goods because it both enabled the other goods and minimized their excesses. Montesquieu was comfortable letting people make mistakes with their liberty – their “ill” reason – as the cost of protecting the totality of the four virtues.
Previously, interpretations, especially David Lowenthal, have tended to focus on one of the cardinal goods at the cost of the others. Allen makes a compelling case that Montesquieu speaks authoritatively to all four goods. Previous interpretations have mostly focused on the constitutions or systems of government described by Montesquieu, but Allen argues that Montesquieu examines forms of governments as a means to the other goods (justice, virtue, liberty). Montesquieu’s thought about the separation of powers is reflected in the U.S. Constitution and several of America’s founders acknowledge his influence in The Federalist Papers. They shared Montesquieu’s vision that power diffused through different branches of government was the best mechanism to avoid despotism, to create a limited government.
At a time when regimes are increasingly committing violence against justice, virtue, and liberty, the public and their public servants would do well to reach right reason by reacquainting themselves with all four of Montesquieu’s cardinal goods. W.B. Allen has done a great service bringing fresh eyes to an important thinker.
Sarah Stilton studied the classics at Harvard and Oxford. She worked in British and European politics for more than two decades.
