Montesquieu
Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go.
Montesquieu
Montesquieu founded the comparative science of politics. Where others asked, in the abstract, what the best government would be, he asked why the actual laws and governments of the world differ so widely, and he answered that they grow out of a whole web of causes, climate and geography, economy and trade, religion and history, the general spirit of a people. Along the way he handed the modern world the doctrine that would shape its constitutions, the separation of powers, but his deeper achievement was to make politics an object of patient, empirical, causal inquiry.
The corpus and how the chat cites it. This room reads two public-domain works by way of the Internet Archive: The Spirit of the Laws in the standard English translation descending from Thomas Nugent, and the Persian Letters in a nineteenth-century English version. The chat cites the Spirit of the Laws by book and chapter and the Persian Letters by the number of the letter. Expect citations of the form The Spirit of the Laws, XI.6, or Persian Letters, Letter 24.
Life. Montesquieu was born in 1689 near Bordeaux into the nobility of the robe, the magistrate class, and served as president of the Bordeaux parlement before selling his office to give himself to travel and to writing. He journeyed across Europe and spent crucial time in England, whose constitution fascinated him and whose liberty he came to admire. The anonymous Persian Letters of 1721 made his name overnight, and after some two decades of labor he produced his vast masterwork, The Spirit of the Laws, of which he liked to say that it was the child of twenty years. Its influence on the political thought and the constitutions of the modern world has been almost without equal.
Where to begin. Start with the Persian Letters for the wit and the social criticism, then take up The Spirit of the Laws: its early books on the forms of government, then Book XI on political liberty and the separation of powers, and then the books on climate and on commerce. The Considerations on the Romans shows the same causal method applied to the rise and decline of a single great state.
The Persian Letters. His first masterpiece is a satirical novel told in letters, in which two Persian travelers, Usbek and Rica, journey through France and write home with an outsider's astonishment at European manners, religion, and politics. The device of the foreign observer lets Montesquieu mock the absurdities of his own society, lay bare the workings of despotism in the figure of the harem the travelers have left behind, and plant the seed of a cultural relativism: the recognition that what each society takes to be self-evidently natural is in truth local and contingent. It is witty, subversive, and seriously philosophical at once.
A science of laws. The governing idea of The Spirit of the Laws is that laws are not arbitrary commands but, in his famous phrase, the necessary relations that arise from the nature of things. To understand any nation's laws you must see them in relation to everything else about it, its form of government, its climate and soil, its economy, its religion, its manners and history, the whole general spirit that makes a people what it is. This is the founding move of political sociology and of comparative law: to explain laws by their causes rather than measure them all against one abstract ideal.
The three kinds of government. Montesquieu sorts governments into three sorts, each with its own nature and its own animating principle. Republics rest on virtue, the citizens' love of the common good and of the laws. Monarchies rest on honor, the love of rank and distinction that, rightly channeled, can serve the state. Despotisms rest on fear, the terror by which a single will crushes all others. The classification is no idle exercise: each principle, he shows, shapes a society's education, its laws, and its whole way of life, and each government begins to fail the moment its principle is corrupted.
Liberty and the separation of powers. Here is his most influential teaching. Political liberty, Montesquieu argues, exists only in moderate governments, and only where power is so arranged that it cannot be abused, for constant experience shows that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and so, by the very nature of things, power should be a check to power. From his idealized picture of the English constitution he drew the remedy: divide the powers of government into the legislative, the executive, and the judicial, and set them to limit one another, so that liberty lives in the spaces their mutual restraint opens up. When these powers are gathered into a single hand, he warns, liberty is at an end. The framers of the American constitution took the principle directly from him.
Climate, moderation, and reform. Two further strands complete the picture. Montesquieu argued, controversially, that climate and physical setting shape national character and incline different peoples toward liberty or servitude, a theory now largely abandoned but a founding attempt to explain politics by natural causes rather than by providence or chance. And through the whole work runs his temper of moderation: he prized liberty, the rule of law, and balanced, limited government, and he condemned despotism, judicial torture, and religious persecution. His chapter pretending to justify slavery is one of the great ironic assaults on that institution in all the literature of the Enlightenment.
Reception, and adjacent reading. The Spirit of the Laws became the most influential work of political theory of its century; its separation of powers is built into the constitution of nearly every modern republic, and its comparative, causal method founded political science and sociology. Read now, Montesquieu is the thinker who taught us to read laws as living parts of a whole society and who armed liberty with the architecture of checks and balances. He took the analysis of liberty and limited government from Locke and the cold study of power from Machiavelli; his comparative typology of regimes descends from Aristotle; his search for the causes of a society's laws in its climate, economy, and spirit makes him kin to Ibn Khaldun, who had sought the same causes three centuries before; and his work passed to Rousseau and to Edmund Burke, who built on it and argued with it. His question, how to arrange power so that it does not devour liberty, is the founding question of constitutional government.