Montesquieu

This article is about the French philosopher. For other uses, see Montesquieu (disambiguation).

Montesquieu

A painting of Montesquieu
Born 18 January 1689
Château de la Brède, La Brède, Aquitaine, France
Died 10 February 1755 (aged 66)
Paris, France
Era 18th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Enlightenment
Main interests
 Political Philosophy
Notable ideas
 Separation of state powers: executive, legislative, judicial; classification of systems of government based on their principles

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (/ˈmɒntɨskjuː/;[1] French: [mɔ̃tɛskjø]; 18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He did more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon.[2]

Biography

Château de la Brède

Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in the southwest of France, 25 km south of Bordeaux.[3] His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family.[4] After the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711.[5] His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu.[6] He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. In 1715 he married Jeanne de Lartigue, a Protestant, who eventually bore him three children.[7] The Baron died in 1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of Président à Mortier in the Bordeaux Parliament.[8]

Montesquieu's early life occurred at a time of significant governmental change. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu; he would refer to them repeatedly in his work.

The title page of the first volume of Montesquieu's De l'Esprit des loix (1st ed., 1748)

Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved literary success with the publication of his Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721), a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society. He next published Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, 1734), considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. De l'Esprit des Lois (The Spirit of the Laws) was originally published anonymously in 1748. The book quickly rose to influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. The Catholic Church banned l'Esprit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works – in 1751 and included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe, especially Britain.

Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty (though not of American independence). Political scientist Donald Lutz found that Montesquieu was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible.[9] Following the American revolution, Montesquieu's work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the "Father of the Constitution". Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another"[10] reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers.

Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and 18 months in England where he became a freemason, admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster,[11] before resettling in France. He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in the Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris.

Philosophy of history

Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual persons and events. He expounded the view in Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence that each historical event was driven by a principal movement:

It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another. There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents.[12]

In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar and Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen in their place. The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man.

Political views

Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus, of anthropology, as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology".[13] According to social anthropologist D. F. Pocock, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions."[14] Montesquieu's political anthropology gave rise to his theories on government. When Catherine the Great wrote her Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Assembly she had created to clarify the existing Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, although she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.[15]

Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes (or trias politica, a term he coined): the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the commons. Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either singly or in combination. This was a radical idea because it completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: the clergy, the aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-General, thereby erasing the last vestige of a feudalistic structure.

Likewise, there were three main forms of government, each supported by a social "principle": monarchies (free governments headed by a hereditary figure, e.g. king, queen, emperor), which rely on the principle of honor; republics (free governments headed by popularly elected leaders), which rely on the principle of virtue; and despotisms (enslaved governments headed by dictators), which rely on fear. The free governments are dependent on fragile constitutional arrangements. Montesquieu devotes four chapters of The Spirit of the Laws to a discussion of England, a contemporary free government, where liberty was sustained by a balance of powers. Montesquieu worried that in France the intermediate powers (i.e., the nobility) which moderated the power of the prince were being eroded. These ideas of the control of power were often used in the thinking of Maximilien de Robespierre.

Montesquieu was somewhat ahead of his time in advocating major reform of slavery in The Spirit of the Laws. As part of his advocacy he presented a satirical hypothetical list of arguments for slavery, which has been open to contextomy. However, like many of his generation, Montesquieu also held a number of views that might today be judged controversial. He firmly accepted the role of a hereditary aristocracy and the value of primogeniture, and while he endorsed the idea that a woman could head a state, he held that she could not be effective as the head of a family.

While addressing French readers of his General Theory, John Maynard Keynes described Montesquieu as "the real French equivalent of Adam Smith, the greatest of your economists, head and shoulders above the physiocrats in penetration, clear-headedness and good sense (which are the qualities an economist should have)."[16]

Meteorological climate theory

Another example of Montesquieu's anthropological thinking, outlined in The Spirit of the Laws and hinted at in Persian Letters, is his meteorological climate theory, which holds that climate may substantially influence the nature of man and his society. By placing an emphasis on environmental influences as a material condition of life, Montesquieu prefigured modern anthropology's concern with the impact of material conditions, such as available energy sources, organized production systems, and technologies, on the growth of complex socio-cultural systems.

He goes so far as to assert that certain climates are superior to others, the temperate climate of France being ideal. His view is that people living in very warm countries are "too hot-tempered", while those in northern countries are "icy" or "stiff". The climate of middle Europe is therefore optimal. On this point, Montesquieu may well have been influenced by a similar pronouncement in The Histories of Herodotus, where he makes a distinction between the "ideal" temperate climate of Greece as opposed to the overly cold climate of Scythia and the overly warm climate of Egypt. This was a common belief at the time, and can also be found within the medical writings of Herodotus' times, including the "On Airs, Waters, Places" of the Hippocratic corpus. One can find a similar statement in Germania by Tacitus, one of Montesquieu's favorite authors.

From a sociological perspective Louis Althusser, in his analysis of Montesquieu's revolution in method,[17] alluded to the seminal character of anthropology's inclusion of material factors, such as climate, in the explanation of social dynamics and political forms. Examples of certain climatic and geographical factors giving rise to increasingly complex social systems include those that were conducive to the rise of agriculture and the domestication of wild plants and animals.

List of principal works

See also

References

Notes

  1. ↑ "Montesquieu". Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  2. ↑ Boesche 1990, p. 1.
  3. ↑ Bordeaux – Google Maps
  4. ↑ Sorel, A. Montesquieu. London, George Routledge & Sons, 1887 (Ulan Press reprint, 2011), p. 10. ASIN: B00A5TMPHC
  5. ↑ Sorel (1887), p. 11.
  6. ↑ Sore (1887), p. 12.
  7. ↑ Sorel (1887), pp. 11-12.
  8. ↑ Sorel (1887), pp. 12-13.
  9. ↑ Lutz 1984.
  10. ↑ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book 11, Chapter 6, "Of the Constitution of England." Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library, Retrieved 1 August 2012
  11. ↑ Berman 2012, p. 150.
  12. ↑ Montesquieu (1734), Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, The Free Press, retrieved 30 November 2011 Ch. XVIII.
  13. ↑ Balandier 1970, p. 3.
  14. ↑ Pocock 1961, p. 9.
    Tomaselli 2006, p. 9, similarly describes it as "among the most intellectually challenging and inspired contributions to political theory in the eighteenth century. [… It] set the tone and form of modern social and political thought."
  15. ↑ Ransel 1975, p. 179.
  16. ↑ See the preface to the French edition of Keynes' General Theory.
    See also Devletoglou 1963.
  17. ↑ Althusser 1972.

Bibliography

Articles and chapters

Boesche, Roger (1990). "Fearing Monarchs and Merchants: Montesquieu's Two Theories of Despotism". The Western Political Quarterly 43 (4): 741–761. doi:10.1177/106591299004300405. JSTOR 448734.
Devletoglou, Nicos E. (1963). "Montesquieu and the Wealth of Nations". The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science 29 (1): 1–25. JSTOR 139366.
Lutz, Donald S. (1984). "The Relative Influence of European Writers on Late Eighteenth-Century American Political Thought". American Political Science Review 78 (1): 189–197. doi:10.2307/1961257. JSTOR 1961257.
Person, James Jr., ed., "Montesquieu" (excerpts from chap. 8). in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800 (Gale Publishing: 1988), vol. 7, pp. 350–352.
Tomaselli, Sylvana. "The spirit of nations". In Mark Goldie and Robert Wokler, eds., The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). pp. 9–39.

Books

Althusser, Louis, Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Marx (London and New York, NY: New Left Books, 1972).
Auden, W. H.; Kronenberger, Louis, The Viking Book of Aphorisms (New York, NY: Viking Press, 1966).
Balandier, Georges, Political Anthropology (London: Allen Lane, 1970).
Berman, Ric (2012), The Foundations of Modern Freemasonry: The Grand Architects—Political Change and the Scientific Enlightenment, 1714–1740 (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press, 2012).
Pangle, Thomas, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973).
Pocock, D. F., Social Anthropology (London and New York, NY: Sheed and Ward, 1961).
Ransel, David L., The Politics of Catherinian Russia: The Panin Party (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
Schaub, Diana J., Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu's 'Persian Letters' (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995).
Shackleton, Robert, Montesquieu; a Critical Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961).
Shklar, Judith, Montesquieu (Oxford Past Masters series). (Oxford and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Spurlin, Paul M., Montesquieu in America, 1760–1801 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1941; reprint, New York: Octagon Books, 1961).

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