Montesquieu
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Portrait by an anonymous artist, 1728
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| Born | 18 January 1689
Château de la Brède, La Brède, Aquitaine, France
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| Died | 10 February 1755 (aged 66)
Paris, France
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| Era | 18th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Enlightenment Classical liberalism |
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; 18 January 1689 – 10 February 1755), generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher.
He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world. He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word "despotism" in the political lexicon. His anonymously published The Spirit of the Laws in 1748, which was received well in both Great Britain and the American colonies, influenced the Founding Fathers in drafting the United States Constitution.
Biography
Château de la Brède
Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south of Bordeaux.
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. 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. His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. The next year, he married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, who eventually bore him three children. 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.
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.
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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 1721 Persian Letters, 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 Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. 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 The Spirit – 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). According to one political scientist,
he 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. 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"
reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their
new national government required a clearly defined and balanced
separation of powers.
Lettres familières à divers amis d'Italie, 1767
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, 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.
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". 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." 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.
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.
His famous articulation of the theory of the separation of powers is found in The Spirit of the Laws:
«IN every government there are three sorts of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law.» «By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other, simply, the executive power of the state.»
— The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI
Montesquieu argues that each Power should only exercise its own functions, it was quite explicit here:
«When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner.»
«Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.»
«There would be an end of every thing, were the same man, or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.»
— The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI
If the legislative branch appoints the executive and judicial powers,
as Montesquieu indicated, there will be no separation or division of
its powers, since the power to appoint carries with it the power to
revoke.
«The executive power ought to be in the hands of a monarch, because this branch of government, having need of dispatch, is better administered by one than by many: on the other hand, whatever depends on the legislative power, is oftentimes better regulated by many than by a single person.» «But, if there were no monarch, and the executive power should be committed to a certain number of persons, selected from the legislative body, there would be an end of liberty, by reason the two powers would be united; as the same persons would sometimes possess, and would be always able to possess, a share in both.»
— The Spirit of the Laws, Book XI
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 Robespierre.
Montesquieu advocated reform of slavery in The Spirit of the Laws. As part of his advocacy he presented a satirical hypothetical list of arguments for slavery.
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)."
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.
Philip M. Parker in his book Physioeconomics
endorses Montesquieu's theory and argues that much of the economic
variation between countries is explained by the physiological effect of
different climates.
From a sociological perspective Louis Althusser, in his analysis of Montesquieu's revolution in method,
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
- Memoirs and discourses at the Academy of Bordeaux (1718–1721): including discourses on echoes, on the renal glands, on weight of bodies, on transparency of bodies and on natural history.
- Spicilège (Gleanings, 1715 onward)
- Système des idées (System of Ideas, 1716)
- Lettres persanes (Persian Letters, 1721)
- Le Temple de Gnide (The Temple of Gnidos, a prose poem; 1725)
- Histoire véritable (True History, a reverie; c. 1723–c. 1738)
- Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline, 1734) at Gallica
- Arsace et Isménie (Arsace and Isménie, a novel; 1742)
- De l'esprit des lois ((On) The Spirit of the Laws, 1748) (volume 1 and volume 2 from Gallica)
- La défense de «L'Esprit des lois» (In Defence of "The Spirit of the Laws", 1750)
- Essai sur le goût (Essay on Taste, pub. 1757)
- Mes Pensées (My Thoughts, 1720–1755)
A definitive edition of Montesquieu's works is being published by the
Société Montesquieu. It is planned to total 22 volumes, of which (at
February 2018) half have appeared.
