History of Political Philosophy by Leo Strauss & Joseph Cropsey

Author:Leo Strauss & Joseph Cropsey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University Of Chicago Press, Chicago

MONTESQUIEU

1689–1755

Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, was born and died in France. His most famous writings are The Persian Letters (1721), Considerations on the Greatness and Decline of the Romans (1734), and The Spirit of the Laws (1748).

1. INTRODUCTION

Montesquieu’s mature teaching must be gathered primarily from The Spirit of the Laws, as he himself indicates in its preface. His other writings ought therefore to be related to this one. Yet its thirty-one books seem lacking in over-all plan or coherence, from which the inference has been drawn that Montesquieu was not a systematic philosopher and had no mature teaching in the strict sense. The preface, however, contains a manifest claim that the work as a whole has a design and is based on long-meditated principle. Thus the design, and hence a systematic teaching, either does not exist, or it exists in an unapparent manner. If we are compelled to choose, we prefer assuming that the writer’s clear reference to the existence of a design is more authoritative than any reader’s denial that the design exists. Montesquieu strongly suggests that the design is not immediately apparent when he speaks of the need to look for it. The Spirit of the Laws is therefore an obscure work. One important reason for disguising unorthodox views was the possibility of reprisals by Church and State. But d’Alembert’s Eulogy of Montesquieu, written shortly after the latter’s death, explains the obscurity more broadly. According to d’Alembert, Montesquieu sought to instruct both the wise and the unwise in such a way as to keep from the unwise important truths the direct statement of which could do needless harm. Apparent disorder and obscurity were instruments of this purpose. Montesquieu himself tells us that his principles can be discovered by reflecting upon the details; our task, then, is to approach the whole and its principles through the parts and details.

The philosophy introduced in the preface and Book I has a double aim: to comprehend the diversity of human laws and mores (unwritten laws), and to assist wise government everywhere. The first is theoretical, the second practical, and their connection arises from within the problem of “law” itself. In his famous opening formulation, Montesquieu defines laws, in the most extensive sense, as the necessary relations deriving from the nature of things. Laws are relations; they exist objectively and by necessity. They “govern” the action of all things—of God on the world, of bodies on each other, and so on. This universal lawfulness is the background against which human law must be viewed. But the term “law” is equivocal: in human enactments it implies a law maker, a promulgation of the law to those who are to obey it, and law enforcement, with attendant sanctions. Then do laws “govern” all things in the universe exactly as they may govern human beings? The classic exposition for the affirmative had been St. Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of law in the Summa Theologica. Human enactment or positive law was understood in terms of its connection with eternal law, natural law, and revealed law.

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