Montesquieu
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Thursday 18 January 2024 is the 335th anniversary of the birth of Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (18 January 1689–10 February 1755), known to posterity simply as Montesquieu, who was born at the Château de la Brède on this date in 1689.
Montesquieu was the author of one of the great books of Western civilization, The Spirit of the Laws, but, before he wrote this classic, he wrote Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, 1734 (translated as Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans and Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire), which introduced several themes that would see further development in The Spirit of the Laws. Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence was first published anonymously in Amsterdam, and later in 1748 Montesquieu published a revised edition under his own name in Paris.
In this earlier book, Montesquieu takes up a question very similar to that which Gibbon sought to answer: given that the Romans made themselves great as they did, how did they manage to fall so far? In Chapter IX Montesquieu notes that other historians have cited the divisions within Rome, but Montesquieu rejects this with the observation that the Romans
“It was inevitable that divisions should exist among the Romans, and it was not to be expected that those warriors who were so fierce, so audacious, and so terrible abroad, would be very moderate at home.”
Then, in the following paragraph, Montesquieu expands and generalizes on this observation with a remarkable comment on social cohesion:
“That which is called union in a body politic is a very equivocal thing. A true union is one of harmony, by which all the social elements of the state, however opposed to each other they may appear to be, concur in promoting the general good of society, just as the discords in music concur in producing the total accord. There may be union in a state — that is to say, a harmony from which results the welfare of the people, and which is the only true peace — where all appears to be a scene of confusion. Such a union of the different elements in a body politic may be compared to the union which pervades the universe, all the parts of which are eternally held together by the action of some and the reaction of others.”
In antiquity this was called the Concordia discord — the concord of discordant things. In 1714 Bernard Mandeville published “The Grumbling Hive,” part of The Fable of the Bees, in which the idea that private vices can be public virtues is given an exposition, and this would receive further elaboration as the “invisible hand” in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Montesquieu does not go nearly as far in this regard as Mandeville and Smith.
It is later, in Chapter XVIII, when Montesquieu delivers himself of the view for which he would be known later:
“The world is not ruled by fortune. We may appeal to the Romans, who experienced a continual succession of prosperities whilst they governed themselves upon a certain plan, and an uninterrupted series of reverses when they conducted themselves upon another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act upon every monarchy, building it up, maintaining it, or casting it down. All accidents are submitted to the control of these general causes; and, if the hazard of a battle — that is to say, a particular cause — has been sufficient to ruin a State, there was a general cause which determined that such State should perish by a single battle. In a Word, the principal movement of events draws with it all particular accidents.”
This is a primarily nomological account of historical development, in which history is presumably governed by laws. This idea would be developed at greater length and in more detail in The Spirit of the Laws.
The Spirit of the Laws was written between 1739 and 1748. Montesquieu published it anonymously in Geneva in 1748. This book is one of the foundations of Enlightenment political thought, and establishes the idea of the separation of powers within government. In spite of the stature of the work, or perhaps because of it, Montesquieu must have known that the book was cause trouble, and it did. Both the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris and the Congregation of the Index in Rome examined it in two separate processes. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (1961) by Robert Shackleton devotes several pages to both of these processes, describing how Montesquieu disputed both actions. While we may think of the censoring of books in the early modern period as being a product of theological zeal and prosecutorial fury, in fact these processes were plodding and pedantic and bureaucratic, like Jarndyce v. Jarndyce in Bleak House.
Montesquieu’s interventions were unsuccessful in regard to the church, and his book was placed on the Papal index of banned books on 29 November 1751. With the Faculty of Theology as the University of Paris, this process dragged on from 1749 to 1754 (essentially for the remainder of Montesquieu’s life. Montesquieu was presented with thirteen problematic propositions plucked out of the book, and he reportedly wrote a response to the proposed condemnation. The inquiry petered out and the book was never formally condemned at Paris. I was curious about the thirteen objectionable propositions, so I did some digging.
Shackleton in Montesquieu: A Critical Biography says only that “books hostile to religion” were singled out for condemnation, but he cites Histoire de Montesquieu: sa vie et ses œuvres (1878) by Louis Vian, and this book does indeed include the thirteen propositions, which are as follows:
I (p. 87). — Repudiation due to the woman’s sterility can only take place in the case of a single woman.
II (ibid.). — Maldivian law allows you to take back a woman who has been divorced. The law of Mexico forbade assembly under penalty of life. Mexico’s law made more sense than that of the Maldives.
III (p. 290). — The scholastics became infatuated with it (the philosophy of Aristotle) and took from this philosopher their doctrine on loans at interest; they confused it with usury and condemned it.
IV (p. 360). — Money is the sign of values; he who needs this sign must rent it… It is indeed a very good action to lend another one’s money without interest; but we feel that this can only be a religious council, and not a civil law.
V (p. 13). — When religion gives rules, not for the good, but for the best; not for what is good, but for what is perfect, it is appropriate that these be advice and not laws… Celibacy was an advice of Christianity: when it was made a law for a certain order of people, new ones were needed every day to reduce men to observing it. The legislator got tired, he tired society, etc.
VI (p. 50). — I will not speak here of the consequences of the law of celibacy: we feel that it could become harmful, in proportion as the body of the clergy becomes too large.
VII (p. 58). — As it is only intolerant religions which have great zeal to establish themselves elsewhere… It will be a very good civil law, when the State is satisfied with the religion already established, not to suffer the establishment of another. Here then is the fundamental principle of political laws in matters of religion. When one is free to receive a new religion in a State, or not to receive it, one must not establish it there; when it is established, it must be tolerated.
VIII (p. 40). — When the religion based on the climate shocked the climate of another country too much, it was unable to establish itself there… It seems, humanly speaking, that it was the climate which prescribed limits to the Christian and the Mohammedan religion.
IX (p. 36). — When Montézunjaj was so stubborn in saying that the religion of the Spaniards was good for their country, and that of Mexico for his, he was not saying something absurd.
X (p. 286). — During the time of the first emperors, the great families of Rome were constantly exterminated by judgments. The custom was introduced of preventing condemnation by voluntary death. There was a great advantage: the honor of burial was obtained, and wills were executed; This was because there was no law against those who killed themselves. But when the emperors became as greedy as they were cruel, they no longer left those whom they wanted to get rid of the means of preserving their property, and they established that it would be a crime to take one’s life through the remorse of another. crime.
XI (p. 70–72). — The law of polygamy is a matter of calculation… But I find it hard to believe that there are many countries where the disproportion is great enough to require the introduction of the law of several wives, or the law of several husbands. This only means that the plurality of women, or even the plurality of men, is more in conformity with nature in certain countries than in others.
XII (p. 44–47). — Virtue is not the principle of monarchical government… Honor, that is to say the prejudice of each person and each condition, takes the place of virtue and represents it everywhere… Thus, in well-regulated monarchies, everyone will be more or less a good citizen, and we will rarely find anyone* who is a good man; because, to be a good man, one must have the intention to be one.
XIII (vol. III, p. 10). — No, there was no prince after (Julian the Apostate) more worthy to govern men.
One can easily understand, under a monarchical government, that proposition XII was objectionable, as the ideological superstructure of the French ancient regime was not about to admit that virtue is not a principle of monarchical government; seen in the context of contemporary political theory however, it was something of a commonplace at the time that republics require public virtue to function effectively, whereas monarchies do not. It should be understood that this was considered a point in favor of monarchies, as public virtue was generally reckoned to be insufficiently common for republics to be anything other than a rarity.
Proposition VIII was probably even more controversial, since it links the scope of religion with the climate of geographical religions; geographical determinism was no less controversial in the eighteenth century than it is today. Montesquieu’s work is now indelibly associated with geographical determinism, also called environmental determinism, which may be roughly summarized such that geography or climate is the primary determinant of human societies. A weaker formulation would hold that geography and climate are among the determinants of a society, i.e., one determinant among others, and not necessarily the primary determinant. Environmental determinism need not be deterministic in a metaphysical sense of determinism, and in fact Montesquieu’s formulation is not, but, of course, the charge of fatalism is made. Robert Shackleton addresses this in his biology of Montesquieu:
“The imputation of determinism or of fatalism has often been made against the author of L’Esprit des lois on the strength of his theory of climate. A reply to this charge can be based on the instruction which Montesquieu gives to the legislator when confronted with a people climatically disposed in a certain way. The good legislator, he says, must resist the vices of the climate. The bad legislator will accept them. In hot lands, for example, in order to overcome the idleness engendered by the climate, laws should seek to remove all possibility of living without work.”
Shackleton also writes, “at the very beginning of the great work there is a vigorous denial of the fatalism of the Spinozists.” I assume that Shackleton was writing of Book 1, Chapter 1, where we find this denial on the very first page of the book :
“Those who have said that a blind fate has produced all the effects that we see in the world have said a great absurdity; for what greater absurdity is there than a blind fate that could have produced intelligent beings?”
My guess is that Montesquieu knew that the charge of fatalism would be made against his work, so he came out swinging on the first page to try to forestall any such interpretation. Perhaps this was also the reason he chose to published the book anonymously in another country. In any case, Montesquieu’s efforts notwithstanding, it is the charge of determinism that still echoes, and still seems to be a stumbling block, no matter how circumspectly it is formulated. Montesquieu had good reason for arguing against a strictly deterministic reading of his book, which he also lays out right in the first chapter:
“Particular intelligent beings can have laws that they have made, but they also have some that they have not made. Before there were intelligent beings, they were possible; therefore, they had possible relations and consequently possible laws. Before laws were made, there were possible relations of justice. To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what positive laws ordain or prohibit is to say that before a circle was drawn, all its radii were not equal. Therefore, one must admit that there are relations of fairness prior to the positive law that establishes them…”
Note that Montesquieu’s formulation is in terms of “intelligent beings,” which is a significant generalization away from the specificity of human beings, and a sure marker of a naturalistic conception of humanity. About a half century later Kant would employ a similar idiom in his ethics, which is formulated in terms of the ethical duties of any rational being. I was not able to find any satisfactory expositions of Montesquieu’s use of “intelligent beings,” but this would be a good place to dig deeper into Montesquieu, as one would likely find something interesting whether or not Montesquieu came to this formulation independently or not.
And at the end of the first chapter Montesquieu summarizes what I take to be the central dilemma of intelligent beings as Montesquieu conceives them to be:
“Man, as a physical being, is governed by invariable laws like other bodies. As an intelligent being, he constantly violates the laws god has established and changes those he himself establishes; he must guide himself, and yet he is a limited being; he is subject to ignorance and error, as are all finite intelligences; he loses even the imperfect knowledge he has. As a feeling creature, he falls subject to a thousand passions. Such a being could at any moment forget his creator; god has called him back to him by the laws of religion. Such a being could at any moment forget himself; philosophers have reminded him of himself by the laws of morality. Made for living in society, he could forget his fellows; legislators have returned him to his duties by political and civil laws.”
In a fully naturalistic interpretation of Montesquieu we could argue that the climate has a selective effect on the population of a geographical region, and therefore upon any society built by this population, and, while this selective effect will guide the development of a society, it is not deterministic, any more than biological evolution is deterministic, though subject to selection pressure.
The environmental determinism of which Montesquieu gives us the locus classicus is still with us. Ellsworth Huntington gives a formulation of early twentieth century environmental determinism in Civilization and Climate (1915):
“From the days of Aristotle to those of Montesquieu and Buckle, there have been men who have believed that climate is the most important factor in determining the status of civilization. Others have held that wherever food is available for a moderately dense population and man can avoid diseases like tropical malaria, human culture can rise to the highest levels. The location of the world’s great nations seems to them largely a matter of accident.”
Even while arguing for a form of environmental determinism, Huntington distances himself from it, presumably like Montesquieu on the first page of The Spirit of the Laws seeking to dispel an interpretation which, while an obvious inference, is not the intended interpretation. The later twentieth century up to the present day has seen a resurgence of this view, which has been called neo-environmental determinism, especially in the work of Jared Diamond, who presented the idea to a large audience in widely read books and television appearances. Diamond, of course, has been charged with geographical determinism, which is today largely used as a slur.
Contemporary neo-environmental determinism could learn from Montesquieu’s conception of the distinctive dilemma of intelligent beings in their relationship to natural and positive law. I regard Montesquieu’s formulations as promising but unfinished. His first chapter involves a lot of difficult counter-factuals that require further explication. But Montesquieu was unquestionably right that human beings (and indeed any intelligent beings) are subject to both to natural law and positive law, as well as being subject to limitations and passions that shape us and our behaviors no less than the laws that would presume to shape us. This unique dilemma of intelligent beings distinguish us from natural beings that are exclusively subject to laws of nature.
