In the non-Straussian secondary literature on Montesquieu (the Straussians are a story for another day), it is well agreed that Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws presented an ‘immense theoretical revolution’ (to borrow a phrase of Althusser’s in reference to Marx) – his discovery of ‘laws’ pertaining the human world, similar to, but different from the physical, material laws discovered by the natural sciences (Newton, Boyle, etc), lead to nothing short of the discovery of the possibility of a social science. (And, we will see, the word social is eminently correct in this regard – for Montesquieu represents nothing less than the discovery of the social itself.)
Commenting on Montesquieu is a time-honoured French passtime: Comte was the first to credit Montesquieu with the discovery of sociology; Durkheim, in his Latin thesis (or, his minor thesis to accompany the more significant Division of Labour in Society, in completion of his Doctorat D’etat) echoed Comte, “In that brilliant group of writers [he's referring to the French Enlightenment], Montesquieu occupies a place apart [a place apart from no less than D'Alembart, Holbach, Voltaire, Rousseau, Madame de Stahl, Helvetius, de Tracey, and Condorcet]. It was he, who, in The Spirit of the Laws, laid down the principles of the new science [despite Durkheim’s choice of words, there is no evidence that Montesquieu had read Bacon, however.” Continues Durkheim, “Before social science could begin to exist, it had to be assigned a defined subject matter.” According to Durkheim, this is exactly what Montesquieu accomplished. Althusser, also in his own minor thesis, echoes Durkheim and Comte, but changing the inflection somewhat, “It is a received truth that Montesquieu is the founder of political science. Auguste Comte said it, Durkheim repeated it and no one has seriously disputed their judgement.” (Like the Straussians, the difference between a social and a political science is a topic for another day – the (unrecognized) dispute between, on the one hand, Althusser (political science) and, on the other hand, Comte and Durkheim (sociology or social science) is, in a sense, constitutive of Montesquieu’s importance.) In addition to these formal works, Aron and Foucault lectured on Montesquieu – although the latter more obliquely than the former – at the College de France in the mid-seventies.
While doing injustice to the distinction made between Durkheim and Althusser – that is, the social versus the political – we can see the contours of Montesquieu’s subsequent reception. On the one hand, Montesquieu is interpreted as a founder, if not the founder, of social science and, thus, sociology, who, in addition to specifying the object of sociology (i.e., the social) also contributed via his theoretical or methodological revolution to the sociology of knowledge. Today, if he is taught at all to aspiring sociologists, it is as a historical figure who contributed to the theoretical and methodological development of the social sciences. On the other hand, Montesquieu is interpreted as a founder of another sort: of none less than the American Republic via what has subsequently been called the ‘theory of checks and balances,’ but is more accurately called the mixed constitution or mixed regime. Incidentally, in the case of the first interpretation, one notes the centrality of the first book (“On Laws in General”) where Montesquieu lays out his epistemology and ontology and, in the case of the second interpretation, one notes the centrality of a single chapter, the sixth chapter of book eleven, “On the consitution of England,” which is also the single longest chapter in the book. (In the current edition comprising seven hundred and thirty-three pages, the chapter on the mixed constitution is ten pages long – a book written in the style of the eighteenth century.)
The point of this digression on the reception of Montesquieu is an effort to point back to a serious and reasonable request made by Montesquieu in the preface: “I ask a favor that I fear will not be granted; it is that one not judge by a moment’s reading the work of twenty years, that one approve or condemn the book as a whole and not some few sentences of it.” I fear – and I believe this to be a reasonable fear – that Montesquieu has possibly never had this fair hearing. The goal in my reading of his book is to, as he puts in the next sentence, “If one wants to seek the design of the author, one can find it only in the design of the work.”
The Spirit of the Laws can be divided into its thematic parts as follows:
- Book 1 – ontological/epistemological foundation
- Books 2-8 – the political regimes
- Books 9-13 – civil and political laws
- Books 14-18 – general laws
- Book 19 – mores
- Books 20-22 – economic laws
- Books 23-25 – religious laws
- Books 26-31 – the laws specific to the ‘history and revolutions’ of the French monarchy
It is worth noting that the final five books comprise roughly thirty percent of the entire book and, with the exception of obscure specialists, are not ever read. The most commonly read parts are books one to thirteen, with particular emphasis on the first book and chapter six of the eleventh book. While people gratuitously refer to The Spirit of the Laws being placed on the Index, these same people who hope to, no doubt, point to their own radicality in pointing to the book’s radicality nonetheless fail to even open the controversial pages…
Ending, for now, with some things to keep in mind: despite Montesquieu’s influence on the American Founding Fathers, Montesquieu was not and cannot be read as a democrat; his preferred regime was monarchy. As a noble (aristocrat, although the more commonly used word in reference to his social class, is incorrect given his typology of regimes), Montesquieu argued against both the Romanists (for instance, Dubos) and the Germanists (for instance, Boulainvilliers). That is, he was against both the absolutism of the Romanists (who modelled the position of the King on the position of the Roman Emperor) and against the warrior kingship of the Germanists (who modelled the position of the king as first among equals, but only on the battlefield). In a sense, Montesquieu’s preferred regime was a modernized feudalism. Like most in the eighteenth century, Montesquieu was deeply interested in the population of France: on the one hand, he believed that relative to ancient times, the absolute population of Europe was smaller than it had been and, on the other hand, that the population was continuing to decline. This, as it were, is the secret to the discover of biopolitics – something Foucault misses entirely. Finally, on account of both his perceived atheism and material determinism (the word used back then to refer to the conjunction of these two was ‘Spinozism’), The Spirit of the Laws was censored.
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engaging post!
I don’t know anything about this historical stuff, so it is very interesting to read. I understand this is from your diss work, but I hope you put more up.
I am intrigued by your reference to Foucault and biopolitics. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault talks about ‘discipline’ as an anatomo-politics of the human body, and ‘regulatory controls’ as a biopolitics of the population. It seems as if you are using a slightly different definition of biopolitics to Foucault (or at least my understanding!), like one defined more in terms of the socio-political reception or sovereign incorporation of populations, rather than my understanding of Foucault’s biopolitics as the governance of life (of populations) on a kind of bureaucratic, modernist level. Could you say some more about this? I am understanding your position correctly?
Thanks, Glen.
I’ll put up occasional commentaries as I work through Montesquieu again – something on his concept of laws and another bit on his attack on the scala natura, The Great Chain of Being. (That is, Book 1 – which is only about seven pages long.) I’m looking forward to getting to the neglected stuff – the economics, the arguments on the role of geograpraphy on political regimes and passions, and, best of all, the long historical part on French feudalism.
The oblique reference to Foucault is from ‘Society Must Be Defended’ where he first publically discusses biopolitics (as you know, the final lectures of SMBD and HSI are nearly identical – but with some significant differences). You might recall that the problematic of SMBD is the idea of race – especially a non-biologized, historical understanding of race. Here he’s referring to the myths that peoples tell about one another, with a special interest in what Nietzsche called the blonde beast: the fearsome Frankish warrior-lord – the image embraced by the Germanists, especially Boulainvilliers.
What Foucault is getting at here is that the mythological conception of race (Franks, Gauls, Saxons, Visigoths, etc, etc) was not biologized until a particular time, although it was nonetheless understand as descent. Like Arendt, Foucault locates the birth of modern racism and modern biopolitics in a mutation in this imaginary: mythical (although real) races become biological races. The problem of race becomes mapped onto the problem of population – you’ll recall that population as a problem is an old problem. From our perspective, someone like Malthus could hardly be considered modern!
I’ll take a moment here to point out – but I’m not ready to develop the point at length – that population is an extremely confused category in Foucault’s thought. See Bruce Curtis’ article in the Canadian Journal of Sociology called “The Impossible Discovery.” Or, again, see Brett Neilson’s recent work on the demos and the census.
But, I promise, I’ll address the question in more detail when I get to the relevant chapters in about two hundred pages.
Great post. I think I had a similar view, though I haven’t studied Montesquieu in great detail. I have done a fair amount of work on Hume though, and find similar sorts of divisions, which render him divided in the secondary literature. Looking forward to the posts…
Oh, and I forgot, where do you think Wollin’s book, Between Two Worlds, falls in the debate? I picked it up at a remainder store, but haven’t read it yet.
Well, for one, Wolin’s book is about Tocqueville! Although I recall he makes occasional comparison to Montesquieu, which, I think, is essentially correct: the world was rapidly changing before their eyes and the nobility was rapidly becoming useless, superfluous, unnecessary, obsolete and expendable. Montesquieu’s fear was that despotism was the way of the future and Tocqueville knew that democracy was the future, including the danger of new tyrannies that went along with democracy. In either case, the future was dangerous to the nobleman. Their response was classically liberal – moderation, please! – but not, it should definitely be noted, ‘liberal democratic.’ Wolin’s book on Tocqueville is certainly the best thing he did since Vision in Politics – his comments on Foucault, for instance, were a disgrace.
Oh, my bad, I just took a quick glance and my memory served me wrong! Any suggestions for the contemporary scholarship on Montesquieu? I’m fairly familiar with the Straussians, having been taught by one for a few years, but other than that, I’m not well-informed on the Montesquieu literature.
O tempura! O morays!
(Psst! Spelling!)
I have not read SMBD! Well not until getting a copy today. I had been meaning to get a copy for ages and your comments here have finally (eventually) pushed me into getting it.
The first thing that has struck me is Foucault’s brief definition of the archaeological project explicitly in terms of subjagated ‘minor’ knowledges. I spend about 4 pages of my diss setting up an argument that considers Foucault’s method as a ‘minor science’ (ala ATP) and the singularities of a phylum being those of the archive-phylum. Now the task I have set myself in my diss has been much much easier. Crazy shit!!!!!
Anyway, when I get to the bit about biopolitics I write something more over on my blog. I am curious to know more about the ‘biologification’ of race as it seems apparent that other bodies of knowledge have very weird measures of the scientific discourse and mythical appreciations of not only ostensibly biological ‘signs’, but technological ‘signs’ too. That is, there is a racialisation of technology that extends the significatory work of biology in racist discourse into the technological realm.
I agree ‘population’ seems to have had different inflections in Foucault’s discourse across the texts I have read and in secondary texts commenting on Foucault’s work. Along the same lines, I think my reading of ‘population’ in terms of what D&G call ‘machinic enslavement’ shall be even more perverse.
The conjunction, then, of minor knowledges and biopolitics should prove interesting to you. SMBD begins – as most of his lectures seem to – with a brief summary and repositioning of his project from the perspective of the current course stating, “Well, what I’ve been interested in all along, it seems, minor knowledges – minor in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense.” And he says, “Well, I’ve been working through power for a while now. I wonder if its technologies can be thought in a minor key, so to speak.” He finally concludes, “Well, yes, of course, if we look at, on the one hand, the history of the theoretical constructions of the origin of society which try to contain force by law and, on the other hand, dissidents within those societies who think they have been given the shaft by laws they don’t understand.” What begins as a mythical history – tracing of origins to Trojans or the forests of Germany – ends up as an attack on royal power and royal science. The attack, of course, ends up being captured by the state and redeployed by royal science and royal power as biopolitics.
It’s worth noting that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, makes a similar argument suggesting – as does Foucault – that Boulainvilliers can be credited with inventing the conditions that lead to modern biopolitical racism, as opposed to the older estate racism of the medieval and early modern periods.
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