Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Other Works

** NOTE--We are meeting 1 hour earlier than usual because of room availability. We will start at noon instead of 1 pm. **

Life
Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, was born in 1689 near Bordeaux, France to a noble and wealthy family. He trained as a lawyer at the University of Bordeaux. Through marriage and inheritance of a position in the Parlement of Bordeaux, he was financially secure before 30 and had time to read and write, in addition to his duties at Parlement. His first successful book was Persian Letters, an epistolary novel published anonymously in 1721 that satirizes French society from the point of view of two wealthy Persians. He then sought to turn his literary success into social success at court, salons, and the French Academy. In 1728, he took the grand tour; over the course of several years, he visited Vienna, Hungary, Venice, Florence, Rome, and England, where he became a fellow of the Royal Society. His next major work, published in 1734, was Considerations on the Causes of Romans’ Greatness and Decline. In 1748, he published his most famous work, one that he claims took him twenty years and that was to greatly influence the American Founders: the Spirit of the Laws. He died in 1755.

Themes
The influence of the Spirit of the Laws on the Founding generation that crafted the U.S. Constitution has secured for Montesquieu enduring relevance for those who want to understand the Founding Era and the Constitution. In this sprawling work, Montesquieu divides the types of government into republics, monarchies, and despotisms, each of which has its animating principle (virtue, honor, and fear). This contrasts with Aristotle’s categorization of polity, aristocracy, and monarchy, each of which has a corrupted form, democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny, respectively. Montesquieu argued that liberty can be best protected by the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers, which finds expression in the three branches of the U.S. government. Among many other notable ideas in this work, he argued that laws should be crafted to accord with a people’s religion, climate, habits, wealth, and other social and economic factors. Against earlier natural law theorists, such as Grotius and Pufendorf, he argued that war did not justify slavery.

In the prior century, Pascal had made a name for himself in taking on the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters. Several decades later in Persian Letters, Montesquieu used a similar rhetorical setup to satirize Parisan and French life, including religion, social practices, and the monarchy of Louis XIV from the perspective of two Persian travelers, Uzbek and Rica. The Letters show Montesquieu’s willingness to at least somewhat relativize European practices, if only to make points consistent with his own social and political class.

In the Considerations, Montesquieu takes up a theme that would later make Edward Gibbon famous. One of his arguments in this work is that the maxims that made Rome an empire out of a republic were inadequate to keep the empire. He also argued that chance doesn’t rule events; there are underlying causes that can be discovered.

Reading
Our reading for this month is Montesquieu: Selected Political Writings, about 242 pages. The book includes short selections from the Letters (the stories of the Troglodytes and Uzbek’s management of his seraglio) and Considerations and substantial selections from the Spirit of the Laws touching on principles of the three governments, political liberty, the relationship between laws and climate, slavery, and other topics. Please also read the introduction.

Optional

• Baron de Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Montesquieu, Britannica
• Montesquieu and the Separation of Powers, the Online Library of Liberty