Norman Hampson

Will and Circumstance

Just as his complex mind could hold in balance the dangers of change and the obligation to pursue ideal goals, he conceived of political liberty, not as some static Utopia, but as a kind of well-managed see-saw. It was not to be identified with republicanism (he maintained that the English, like the Dutch, would be less free if they did not have a king), but with moderate government. He defined liberty in terms of personal security rather than a share in political power—an opinion he was later to modify—and he was sceptical about over-indulgence in politics. 'I do not attach much value to the delights of furious disputation about affairs of state, to the endless repetition of liberty and the privilege of hating half of one's fellow-creatures.' This somewhat modest conception of freedom was far from implying that he considered free states to be the rule. On the contrary, he thought despotism the normal consequence of human passions and moderate government was 'a masterpiece of legislation that chance produces very rarely and men rarely allow prudence to create.' If there was much to fear from change there was also much that needed changing.

He consistently refused to identify himself with the self-interest of one particular society. 'If I knew of anything useful to my own nation that would be ruinous to another, I should not propose it to my prince, since I am a man before I am a Frenchman, or rather, I am a man by necessity and a Frenchman by chance.' Well before the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, he believed that international prosperity was indivisible. 'All nations are connected and pass on their good or evil fortune to each other. I am not making an oratorical statement, I am merely telling the truth: the prosperity of the universe will always be conducive to our own and, as Marcus Aurelius said, "What is useless to the swarm is useless to the bee."'

Finally, and perhaps most endearingly, coming from a political philosopher: 'Great God, how can we possibly be always right and the others always wrong?'

With the temper of Montesquieu's mind and thought once established, as it emerged in his earlier writings, it becomes easier to find one's way through the profound, but complex and sometimes contradictory insights of De l'esprit des lois. His life's work—he liked to say that he spent twenty years over it—was conceived, not so much as a study of the laws that regulate political societies, as of the principles behind those laws. Book I, which was presumably added at a relatively late date, tried to sum up the argument. Montesquieu's definition of laws led him straight into an argument about determinism. Laws were 'necessary relationships, derived from the nature of things'. This seemed to leave little room for free-will, but he was not the man to put all his money on one horse, in a race of such importance. Intelligent beings were subject to three kinds of law: the universal laws of matter; equally universal moral laws, anterior to society and independent of human volition; regulations which they made for their own benefit. There was nothing they could do about the first of these. The second and third imposed obligations, in their own interest, which they had a duty to observe but also the freedom to violate. While it might be rational for such beings always to observe laws conducive to their own good, in practice they broke them all the time, either from ignorance or in order to assert their freedom. From the outset, therefore, he found himself confronted by necessity, universal moral obligations and the consequences of free social actions. The last of these posed further problems. The character of a people was shaped by a multiplicity of influences: physical geography, the nature of the economy, religion, wealth, population, trade, habits and manners. Peoples were therefore different from each other and individuals were born into a society in which they would be conditioned by a variety of social influences. Some of these, such as climate, were imposed by the physical environment. Many, however, were the product of the collective activity of previous generations. As the present helped to shape the future, the effects of social conditioning on this generation became the causes of the conditioning of the next, and cause and effect were two aspects of the same thing. Laws, moreover, could not be considered in isolation. The effect of any law (in the sense of a political enactment) would depend on its relationship to existing laws, to the traditions of a society, the intentions of the legislator and the particular sphere of activity (religion, politics, the family etc.) to which it applied. This was a splendid example of Montesquieu's simultaneous awareness of the complexity of life and the equally irresistible claims of a number of logically incompatible arguments. He probably found it very reassuring; if it made for ambiguity and a fair amount of self-contradiction, it kept both his feet on the ground. He had, after all, written in his notebook, 'Men have rarely been more grossly deceived than when they have tried to reduce human feelings to a system, and the least lifelike picture of man is unquestionably to be found in books, which are an accumulation of general propositions that are almost always wrong.' As in the Lettres Persanes, his personal preference was for laws that respected the pre-existing nature of society rather than the reforming will of some legislator. 'The form of government most in conformity with nature is that whose particular dispositions most accurately reflect the character of a people.' This was to emerge in more detail as the argument of his book unfolded, but not for a considerable time.

Book II looks like the beginning of the original work. It was reassuringly straightforward: an essay in comparative government, without any normative implications. All states were divided into three types—republics, monarchies and despotisms—in accordance with three predominant types of political obligation. The republic rested on vertu, the total dedication of its citizens to the welfare of the community; monarchies were based on honour, the pursuit by the individual of distinctions that were awarded only in return for service to the ruler; despotism was maintained by fear. Montesquieu recognised that all three types of motivation existed in any society, but he claimed that one of them was the 'principle' that governed the operation of each particular regime.

He then went on to discuss the kind of institutions appropriate to each. As always, the republics he had primarily in mind were those of the classical world and once again he half-succumbed to the temptation to present them in Utopian terms. Although he himself was to discard this view as his book unfolded, it was taken up by others—and most notably by Rousseau—and exercised so powerful an influence on eighteenth-century French thought that it deserves consideration in some detail. The characteristics of such a republic were the communal ownership of property, religion, isolation from corrupting foreign influences, the abolition of money and the conduct of trade by the state. Since vertu was a matter of sentiment rather than instruction, it could be found equally at all levels of society and was likely to prove more resistant to corruption among the poor than among their social superiors. Love of country was conducive to la bonte des moeurs and virtuous habits in turn reinforced love of country. Morals and politics, in other words, were inseparable. Republicanism also implied frugality although Montesquieu (who did not share Rousseau's contempt for Athens) was prepared to make an exception in the case of trading communities, on the ground that commerce, by its very nature, encouraged sobriety and moderation. The republic was also characterised by the extreme subordination of the young to the old, of children to fathers and of citizens to magistrates. It did not, however, require the equal division of the land amongst all the inhabitants (the loi agraire that was to be something of a turnip-ghost during the French Revolution). Everything was seen from the viewpoint of society rather than from that of the individual and Montesquieu commended what was alleged to have been the Samnite practice of allowing young men, in order of merit, to take their pick of the local girls, a custom, one would have thought, more inclined to promote vertu among the men than among the women. Since republican government was only suitable for city-states, republics would need to join in federal leagues for their protection.

As always, Montesquieu was not quite sure whether such a state of affairs had ever existed and, if it had, whether it had any relevance to the world of his time. He contrasted ancient peoples who 'performed the kind of deeds we no longer see, which astonish our puny souls,' with contemporary statesmen who 'speak only of manufactures, trade, finance, wealth and luxury' and deplored the 'sediment and corruption of modern times.' So far as the present was concerned, he had his doubts about the viability of a society that depended on the continual self-abnegation of its citizens—'always a very painful thing'—and he did not see how any modern state could exist without money. He believed that love of frugality could exist only where equality and frugality had first been created by political action, but he did not go into the question of how a legislator was to overturn the existing mores of a community and bring into being a society dedicated to the most unnatural pursuit of such uncomfortable virtues.