Because this is the first public presentation of this work, I’m a bit anxious and, generally, I’m not fond of conferences. I find the format more than a little restrictive – fifteen to twenty minutes to talk about something you’ve been working on for months or even years, on a panel with people potentially talking about completely different topics, and the tendency for a single paper to end up monopolizing the discussion.

More to the point, I’m not sure if it is possible to do what I want to do in my allotted time: I had planned to discuss the “savage” in relation to Hobbes and the “barbarian” in relation to Montesquieu pointing to how this “political anthropology” paves the way to the creation of the state. However, I’m not sure I can expect my audience (how arrogant I am: this is a conference at 9:00 AM – presenters, their friends and a few stragglers at most, right?) to be familiar with Hobbes and Montesquieu – including the secondary literature! – to appreciate what it is I am trying to do. The other option, then, is to go to the complete opposite extreme and abstract from the historical context thus focusing on formal definitions, which is rather dry and ends up losing sight of the argument itself.

The Third Estate learnt its lesson from the nobility quite well: in that most bourgeois of nations, the United States, which was never plagued in any significant way with a hereditary monarchy and, at best, an absent king (who was quickly dispatched with anyway), the Library of Congress has developed the most comprehensive system for library cataloguing: it is the one used in all universities in North America. If the a researcher, such as myself, was interested in books about a particular subject, we would type our inquiry, in my case “absolutism,” and request the catalogue to retrieve all titles with the subject of absolutism – for instance, Perry Anderson’s Lineages of the Absolutist State. The problem, however, is that the cataloguing system does not recognize “absolutism.” Instead, it suggests that the researcher “See: Despotism.” Worse, “Despotism” is a residual category that contains titles on tyranny – ancient and modern – and totalitarianism. The residual category “Despotism” is, really, “anything un- or anti-democratic.”

But, I’m rather unsatisfied with it. Regarding the first term, these people were understood to have advanced and developed a body of thought called the these nobiliaire – which is to say, I think, they identified with ‘nobility’ more than ‘aristocracy.’ The question here turns on the difference between ‘noble’ and ‘best.’ Further, the these nobiliare designate a particular aspect of their thought and not that thought in its entirety. Regarding the second term, the degree to which their thought is ‘political’ in our understanding of the term is somewhat questionable. Operating at the tail-end of the Old Regime, the political structure of France had not yet made a clean break with the theologico-political and was still under absolutist rule. The political as an autonomous domain of thought (if not action) had not yet developed. To this extent it would be just as correct – and just as wrong – to use the word ‘social,’ which was also in the process of taking on new conceptual significations. And, regarding the third term, it isn’t clear exactly what sort of intellectual production they were involved in: was it philosophical? theoretical? or merely thought? At different points different terms are correct – or, at least, adequate.

Althusser’s comment notwithstanding, I’m tempted to locate ‘class struggle in thought’ at the theoretical rather than the philosophical level, if only because there is a sense of ‘eternity’ and ‘truth’ in philosophy that is lacking in theory, which is more ‘historical.’ Theory, unlike philosophy, seems more related to historicism. If I’m committed to the word ‘theory,’ I’m still left uncertain with respect to the designation of the field: the political or the social? While I’m certain we see the emergence of separate domains that could be called ‘the social’ and ‘the political’ in our present sense of the terms, the concepts weren’t elaborated by them as such. For instance, they distinguish themselves as ‘race’ against the ‘society’ (more like ‘association’ in our sense) and ‘nation’ (but not yet designating “the French”) of the other Estates.

For what it is worth, the historians – and their the only ones really interested in these people – seem to use the term ‘political thought’ without ‘noble’ or ‘aristocratic’ prepended to it. But, that could merely be a consequence of the average historian’s aversion to theory and philosophy.

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.

• Books I – XIX [html] [pdf]
• Books XX – XXXI [html] [pdf]
• Complete Text [html] [pdf]

1750 – Defense of the Spirit of the Laws [html] [pdf]
1754 – “An Essay on Taste” [html]

Post-humous:
“Familiar Letters” [html]

Unknown dates:
“Of the Pleasures of the Soul” [html]
“Lysimachus” [html]

Commentaries on The Spirit of the Laws:
Destutt de Tracey “A Commentary and Review of Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws” [html] [trans: Thomas Jefferson]
Helvetius “On Perusing the Manuscript of The Spirit of the Laws” [html] [trans: Thomas Jefferson]
Condorcet “Observations on the Twenty-Ninth Book of The Spirit of the Laws” [html] [trans: Thomas Jefferson]
D’Alembert “The Analysis of The Spirit of the Laws” [html] [pdf]

Other Significant Texts:
D’Alembert “A Eulogium on President Montesquieu” [html]