The Spirit of the Laws is often cited among the founding works of political liberalism. Émile Faguet, Isaiah Berlin, Raymond Aron, Thomas Pangle,
Pierre Manent, Bernard Manin and Lucien Jaume all regard Montesquieu as one of the fathers, together with Locke, of modern
liberalism.
1 According to this reading, the quintessence of Montesquieu’s philosophy lies in his insistence on the ‘distribution of powers’
as a necessary condition of political liberty. ‘[I]t has eternally been observed’, he writes, ‘that any man who has power
is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits’. Thus, ‘power must check power by the arrangement of things’.
2 A free constitution is a system where rival ambitions oppose but do not destroy one another. Montesquieu’s critique of despotism
also appears to support his liberal credentials. After all, it was Montesquieu who gave the despotic
regime its philosophical dignity, characterizing it as one in which man, overwhelmed by fear, is reduced to blind obedience
in the face of power. Where there is despotism there is no law, no economic growth and no social bonds; for the individual
subjugated to the governors’ whims, there is only violence and torment. Arguing that despotism had caused ‘infinite ills’
to human nature, Montesquieu used it as a powerful foil.
The liberal interpretation of Montesquieu, however, extends even beyond this. For when faced with despotism, he does not seem
to think that republicanism is the answer. At first glance this claim may seem contradictory. After all,
The Spirit of the Laws insists on the need for republican virtue. The people’s participation in power demands the ‘continual sacrifice of oneself’,
‘one’s interests’ and the abandonment of a large part of citizens’ private lives and personal safety, all in the name of virtue.
3 The equality and frugality required by virtue entail the renunciation of the self and of its pleasures, a ‘painful’ task
that only the perpetual constraint of customs can make possible.
4 The corruption of men, finally, can only be avoided, in ancient cities, by the maintenance of a martial discipline.
5 However, according to Leo Strauss’s disciples, Thomas Pangle and Pierre Manent, the ‘secret design’ and real purpose of
The Spirit of the Laws is to criticize classical republicanism and to praise the paradigmatic modern liberal regime, the commercial English republic,
which they say Montesquieu thought to be better adapted to human nature.
6 In their view, Montesquieu’s liberalism is not only based on the defence of a system of laws and counter-powers capable of
protecting the inhabitants of a nation from coercive political power and ensuring the rights of citizens. It is also centred
on customs, and rests on the concealed praise of modern England and the defence of its ‘spirit of commerce’. By this reading,
it is the blossoming of economic interest, to a far greater extent than republican civic virtue, that ensures the main objectives
of the state: peace, prosperity and liberty.
But what, precisely, can be said of Montesquieu’s liberalism? The use of the concept implies a retrospective reading of the
work and always runs the risk of projecting onto it the ideological choices of its interpreters. Dating from the early nineteenth
century, the notion of liberalism is obviously foreign to Montesquieu, and he cannot be as comfortably included in this school
of thought as Benjamin Constant or Alexis de Tocqueville, whom his work inspired.
7 ‘Liberalism before liberalism’ is a protean phenomenon, and it is certainly better to speak of a
constellation of ideas than of a rigorous definition of the concept.
8 However, as long as a conventional definition can be agreed upon (that classical liberalism is a belief in limited government,
the protection of individual rights and the positive effects of interest in the absence of virtue), it is legitimate to question
Montesquieu’s membership in the liberal ‘tradition’.
9 It is therefore the interpretation of a liberal Montesquieu, an interpretation equally shared by liberal and non-liberal
thinkers (Straussians, republicans), that I would like to reassess here. Questioning the meaning of liberty, as well as the
presence of a theory of
doux commerce and the ‘invisible hand’, in
The Spirit of the Laws will help to determine the accuracy of the liberal interpretation, and at the same time highlight the masking effects it
produces.
The liberal reading of Montesquieu often refers to his vision of the constitution of England and the distribution of the state’s
powers.
10 Without
necessarily emphasizing his violent denunciation of religious intolerance, his diatribe against the Inquisition, or his early
denunciation of slavery, the liberal interpretation insists that the definition of liberty developed in
The Spirit of the Laws breaks with the republican topos.
11 Autonomy and participation in power do not equate to political liberty.
12 The liberty of the people is not the power of the people, but rather dependence on the laws, and security under the laws.
With his skilful and subtle style, Montesquieu, it is argued, expresses his preference for the representative and mercantile
‘liberal republic’, such as one finds in eighteenth-century England. This endorsement comes at the expense of both the ‘participatory
republic’ of the ancients and the monarchy, crippled by the vestiges of feudalism.
13 The Spirit of the Laws is deemed to hold up the
English model as the one best suited to human nature, the one that best guarantees the security of the individual, and the one that best
satisfies the primordial desire for preservation. Republican autonomy gives way to a
negative liberty, defined as independence within a sphere protected by the law, guaranteed by the distribution of powers within a representative
system, and enabling the unfettered development of ‘private’ behaviour. The spirit of Montesquieu’s liberalism, understood
as the praise of liberty under the law combined with the praise of commerce, is thus held up by his commentators as a clear
choice in favour of modernity.
Though appealing, this reading must be carefully scrutinized. Which liberty does Montesquieu in fact defend? Chapter 2 of
Book
XI begins with a sceptical-sounding enumeration of definitions, expressing the diversity of opinion on the matter:
No word has received more different significations and has struck so many minds in so many ways as has
liberty. Some have taken it for the ease of removing the one to whom they had given tyrannical power; some, for the faculty of electing
the one whom they were to obey; others, for the right to be armed and to be able to use violence; yet others, for the privilege
of being governed only by a man of their own nation, or by their own laws [Cicero]. For a certain people [the Muscovites]
liberty has long been the usage of wearing a long beard. Men have
given this name to one form of government and have excluded the others. Those who had tasted republican government put it
in this government; those who had enjoyed monarchical government placed it in monarchy [the Cappadocians].
14
In the civil state, man is the measure of liberty, which he interprets according to his passions, beliefs and customs: ‘In
short, each has given the name of liberty to the government that was consistent with his customs or his inclinations.’
15 But in place of this rhapsody, Montesquieu does not propose a simple and single definition of political liberty, which he
distinguishes from philosophical liberty.
16 He does not define liberty as either licence or independence, but as liberty under the law: ‘Liberty is the right to do everything
the laws permit.’
17 Citizens are ‘really free’ when they are ‘subject only to the power of the law’.
18 According to Montesquieu, it is necessary to distinguish between the political laws, which protect the constitution (Book
XI) and the civil laws, which protect the citizen (Book
XII). This distinction is crucial: ‘It can happen that the constitution is free and that the subject is not’, and inversely.
19 It may be that the power of the judiciary is separate and well placed – which is the ‘masterpiece of legislation’ of a free
society – but that it rules according to iniquitous laws.
20 However, the freedom of the citizen is based on the justice of the criminal procedure and on the presumption of innocence:
‘When the innocence of the citizens is not secure, neither is liberty.’
21 In order to preserve moderation, one man must therefore be protected from arbitrary laws as much as from arbitrary powers.
This implies the strict limitation of ‘lese-majesty’ and protecting freedom of opinion. It is here that Montesquieu comes
closest to a theory of individual rights, with his argument that, ‘[t]he knowledge already acquired in some countries and
yet to be acquired in others, concerning the surest rules one can observe in criminal judgements, is of more concern to mankind
than anything else in the world’; and moreover that ‘[l]iberty can be founded only on the practice of this knowledge’.
22 Against despotism’s extreme methods,
Montesquieu supports a moderate use of the power to punish: great care in the designation of crimes is necessary, alongside
a range of sanctions, which are, to the extent possible, sparing in their severity.
23This is the meaning, for Montesquieu, of liberty under the law. Such a definition, insisting upon a strict non-identity between
the power of the people and the liberty of the people, is indeed contrary to the ‘republican tradition’ which founds political
liberty on the collective exercise of power and on civic participation.
24 The liberty invoked by
The Spirit of the Laws is undoubtedly conceived as obedience to the law which one has given oneself, be it in ancient popular regimes or in contemporary
England. Montesquieu writes, ‘[a]s, in a free state, every man, considered to have a free soul, should be governed by himself,
the people as a body should have legislative power’.
25 And yet the ‘spirit of liberty’ may also exist in the constitutions of monarchies.
26Nevertheless, it is at this point that the liberal readings of Montesquieu, however different they may be, stumble. For it
is in appearance only that Montesquieu shares the Lockean definition of liberty as liberty under the law.
27 Montesquieu insists on the subjective perception that men have of their liberty. Liberty is not security but ‘the opinion
one has of one’s security’.
28 It is a form of ‘tranquillity of spirit’, which is the opposite of despotic fear:
The men who enjoy the government of which I have spoken [England] are like fish that swim freely in the sea. Those who live
in a monarchy or a wise and moderate aristocracy seem to be in large nets, in which they are caught, but believe themselves
free. But those who live in purely despotic states are in nets so tight that they feel caught before all else.
29
Montesquieu thus repeatedly alludes to the
feeling men have of their liberty, and not an abstract consciousness. Concerning taxes, for example, he argues that ‘[d]uties on
commodities are the ones the least felt by the people’.
30 Yet the value of the duty must nonetheless be proportionate to that of the merchandise, for otherwise ‘the prince removes
the illusion’ from his subjects ‘which makes them feel every bit of their
servitude’.
31 Other expressions also seem to suggest that liberty stems from government manipulation, aimed at putting to rest the subjects’
potential resistance. According to Montesquieu, ‘In our monarchies, all felicity lies in the people’s opinion of the gentleness
of government. An unskilful minister always wants to tell you that you are slaves. But, if that were so, he should seek to
keep it from being known.’
32Therefore, one must wonder whether Montesquieu is concerned with defending real liberty, or if,
in fine, the illusion of liberty is sufficient. Should we distinguish between real liberty, in virtue of which the feeling of security
is justified by a genuine protection of rights, and a liberty of opinion, the same way that real tyranny is opposed to the
‘tyranny of opinion’?
33 Book
XIX of
The Spirit of the Laws, which defends soft and moderate political action, supports such an approach: ‘There are two sorts of tyranny: a real one,
which consists in the violence of the government, and one of opinion, which is felt when those who govern establish things
that run counter to a nation’s way of thinking.’
34 In this second instance, liberty is experienced when a people are free to follow their traditions and customs: it no longer
concerns the
subject of law but the
subject of customs, according to which a belief in one’s liberty depends on the preservation of one’s customs. As such, according to Montesquieu,
a people like the Romans ‘felt tyranny more vividly when a buffoon was driven out than when all their laws were taken from
them’.
35 Does it then follow that the art of politics is an art of manipulation designed to make men
believe that they are free – or, further still, to have them consent to their servitude? If this were the case, the liberal interpretation
would have to make way for a Machiavellian interpretation of Montesquieu.
In reality things are more complex and these two interpretations must be rejected together. Montesquieu is neither a liberal
looking to edify a universal theory of the protection of individuals’ rights in opposition to state sovereignty nor a Machiavellian
seeking to defend an illusory liberty that the art of governing should cunningly preserve. On the one hand,
The Spirit of the Laws does not confer on institutions alone the responsibility for protecting men against the abuse of power. Montesquieu rules
out any purely constitutional defence of liberty. In England itself, only civic vigilance enables the nation to escape servitude:
through the
confrontation of parties and factions, it is
jealousy of liberty which, accompanied by an irrational fear of abuses of power, preserves liberty.
36 If there is a claim to be made for Montesquieu’s liberalism, it is therefore a liberalism of ‘counter-powers’ supported by
customs, rather than a liberalism of rights.
37 The only universal natural laws are those of
natural defence and
natural modesty, which give rise to negative prescriptions (avoid corporal or sexual punishments). As such, all liberty must be considered
in concrete practice, and the only principles that can be laid down to protect it must be formal ones (distribution of powers,
presumption of innocence, strict qualification of crimes, etc.). On the other hand, Montesquieu is not strictly Machiavellian
either. It is not the objective of
The Spirit of the Laws to reflect on the conditions of the manipulation of men, and to thereby enable governors to maintain their power. Rather,
its purpose is to theorize the conditions of moderation, for the benefit of peoples as much as that of princes or magistrates.
Montesquieu is anti-Machiavellian on Machiavelli’s ground – that of concretely situated power relations. The crucial concept
of his philosophy, the one that enables an understanding of his struggle against Machiavellianism as well as against absolutism,
is the concept of
moderation: ‘I say it, and it seems to me that I have written this work only to prove it: the spirit of moderation should be that of
the legislator; the political good, like the moral good, is always found between two limits.’
38This defence of the spirit of moderation clarifies the status of the
English model, the cornerstone of the liberal interpretation. To what extent is it a model? Just as the love of equality in democracies
can be corrupted into the love of extreme equality (refusal of all hierarchy) and slide into tyranny, so too can the love
of liberty degenerate into the ‘delirium of liberty’. In certain aspects, extreme liberty is similar to absolute government:
partisan divisions enslave public opinion.
39 Furthermore, the liberty that the English enjoy is in essence precarious and does not necessarily lead to the happiness of
the people.
40 Not only does extreme liberty not satisfy
all conditions of the political good, but the English pay the price for their fanatical individualism – one of the reasons
for their suicidal tendencies.
41 The ‘free nation’ is therefore not a model to be universalized, for this would run counter to Montesquieu’s concern for suitability
to particular circumstances.
42 The theory of ‘the general spirit’ of peoples leads to a conception of liberty pluralized according to customs. Moderation,
which requires a ‘masterpiece of legislation’ to balance the powers, makes political liberty possible.
43 In this respect, there is no ‘best regime’ capable of revealing its quintessence, just a ‘mirror’ in which the principles
of liberty appear, and where liberty is the ‘direct purpose’ of the constitution.
44 There is no best in politics, only a plurality of relative goods, dependent on the situation: ‘Human laws enact about the
good; religion, about the best. The good can have another object because there are several goods, but the best is one alone
and can, therefore, never change.’
45 Against all perfectionism, Montesquieu sets out the plural conditions of liberty. He sees man as a being of beliefs and passions,
and it is his ways of thinking and of acting that form the fabric of his liberty – which is in no way the abstract liberty
of a disembodied subject.
There is, however, a different way of considering the question of Montesquieu’s liberalism in
The Spirit of the Laws. When reflecting on the modern period, Montesquieu highlights the importance of gentleness (
douceur). And it is in terms of this central notion that the advantage of
modern over ancient times is expressed, be it in the politics of conquest or in relation to manners and customs.
46 But where does the apparent gentleness of modernity come from? According to Montesquieu, it proceeds from multiple factors.
Christianity, by its contribution to political law and to the law of the nations, also has its part to play.
47 Provided the normative regimes are well separated (by distinguishing, in particular, civil law from religious law), Christianity
can moderate the power of princes and temper their cruelty. But, for the most part, the gentleness of the moderns proceeds,
in Montesquieu’s eyes, from commerce. Gentleness, linked to the rapid expansion of the economy and the pre-eminence of self-interest,
replaces the regulatory function of virtue: ‘The political men of Greece who lived under popular government recognized no
other force to sustain it than virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufacturing, commerce, finance, wealth, and even
luxury.’
48This would be another justification of Montesquieu’s liberalism: in order to produce peace and liberty, modernity has no need
of virtue.
49 The liberal, Straussian and republican interpretations all converge here:
50 in each case, the theory of
doux commerce is a key element of the argumentation which seeks to found political liberty and social ties on economic trade relations.
51 Montesquieu underlines the moral and political
effects of self-
interest, which he qualifies, in the
Persian Letters, as ‘the greatest monarch upon earth’.
52 In the absence of virtue, the selfish love of profit reinforces the security of people and goods.
First, commerce is gentle in that it ‘cures destructive prejudices’, thus lessening the barbarity towards other peoples. Thanks
to navigation, nations encounter each other and compare themselves, causing the spirit of tolerance to flourish. It is therefore
‘an almost general rule that everywhere there are gentle mores, there is commerce and that everywhere there is commerce, there
are gentle mores’.
53 Second, commerce is gentle in that its effects – the ‘spirit’ or dispositions that it favours – lead naturally to peace,
since predatory behaviour is replaced by negotiation. Commerce thus ‘unites’ nations, each of which satisfies its own interests
– all the more so because they can only satisfy themselves on the basis of a genuine reciprocity.
54 Commerce is gentle, finally, in that it tames civil violence. Within nations, the development of certain instruments of commerce
and finance condemns to powerlessness the ‘great acts of authority’ of which princes, through persecution and plundering,
were culpable. The invention by Jewish traders of the bill of exchange enabled commerce to escape sovereignty’s formidable
grasp and, thanks to the globalization of financial flows, allows people to protect themselves and therefore to strengthen
liberty as the opinion one has of one’s security.
55 In this way, and as already underlined by A. O. Hirschman, the desire for profit acquires a new dignity. Avarice becomes
the salutary remedy for the disorder of passions (in particular princely ones) that moral injunctions were unable to regulate.
At a time when the heroic love of glory was being replaced by the lure of gains, ostentation by utility, and prestige by profit,
Montesquieu highlighted the beneficial effects of economic interest: the proliferation of exchange (material, cultural) and
the rise in relations of interdependence are favourable not just to prosperity, but to peace and to political liberty.
56However, the liberal reading of Montesquieu risks, here again, omitting the subtleties and nuances of his work. Not only should
his admiration for the greatness of the ancients not be underestimated, but his ambivalence with regard to the effects of
commercial society should also not be overlooked.
57 The two are linked: Greece and Rome provide examples of noble motives, compared to the baseness of modern ambition and greed;
friendship, the foundation of social ties, stands in sharp contrast to contemporary individualism, itself associated with
‘lowly interest, which is exactly the animal instinct of all men’.
58 Commerce, by encouraging individuals to turn to their private interests, harms the expression of virtues and ‘corrupts pure
mores’.
59 Far from being a characteristic of a free regime, self-centred behaviour thrives in despotic states, where, without honour
or virtue, ‘one can decide to act only in anticipation of the comforts of life’.
60 Only despotism can reduce passion to its simplest expression – rewards are translated into money and sanctions into corporal
punishment – abolishing, in this reign of the material and quantitative, the social and political dimension of man. Furthermore,
although commerce can pacify customs between men of foreign lands, it cannot be credited with a beneficial role in the refinement
of manners or the formation of social ties. Virtue is not the only quality to suffer from the deployment of self-interest;
sociability, politeness and the improvement of taste also seem incompatible with the spirit of calculation and ‘exact justice’
associated with the desire for profit. This is Montesquieu’s assessment of Holland, where all services, even those requested
by ‘humanity’, are for sale. But it is just as much his opinion of England. During his stay there, Montesquieu noted that
social atomism and the absence of politeness were the rule. He notes, ‘the English are almost only ever united by ties of
hatred and the hope of revenge’ and ‘the English are busy; they do not have the time to be polite’.
61 Similarly, in the ‘commercial society’ described by
The Spirit of the Laws, where ‘many people …
would not worry about pleasing anyone’, the refinement of manners is excluded. Commercial society is governed by that which
is useful rather than agreeable, by work not laziness, solitude not sociability, debauchery not gallantry, strength not grace.
62In
The Spirit of the Laws, economic ties play, in this regard, a contradictory role: the principle of association, i.e. self-interest, is also a principle
of dissociation. At a time when wealth was becoming the very substance of power – to the point where ‘nothing in history is
comparable to it’ – modern states could not rely on economic interest to improve culture and maintain social ties.
63 When Montesquieu commands the legislator to ‘let be’ (
laissez-faire) a nation’s nature, it is not to England that he refers, but to the nation of a ‘sociable humour’, i.e. France, governed
by honour, luxury and politeness.
64
However, the liberal interpretation of Montesquieu could still find more fertile ground elsewhere.
The Spirit of the Laws also contains a traditional motif of liberalism, that of the ‘invisible hand’. The famous idea appears in
The Spirit of the Laws: ‘each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests’.
65 Where passions and interests spontaneously contribute to prosperity and liberty, the art of politics seems redundant. While
the republic may require a reorientation of passions, the monarchy, in Montesquieu’s eyes, is less demanding:
In monarchies, policy accomplishes great things with as little virtue as it can, just as in the finest machines art employs
as few motions, forces, and wheels as possible. The state continues to exist independently of love of the homeland, desire
for true glory, self-renunciation, sacrifice of one’s dearest interests, and all those heroic virtues we find in the ancients
and know only by hearsay.
66
It would nonetheless be unwise to project the paradigm of Adam Smith’s
Wealth of Nations onto
The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu’s ‘invisible hand’ relies on
honour, not self-interest:
You could say that it is like the system of the universe, where there is a force constantly repelling all bodies from the
centre and a force of gravitation attracting them to it. Honour makes all the parts of the body politic move; its very action
binds them, and each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests.
67
In
The Spirit of the Laws, the dominant passion of monarchies enables modern politics to do ‘great things with as little virtue as it can’ and to avoid
the unconditional obedience that characterizes despotism.
68 The motivation behind action is a matter of honour and not of interest in the strictest sense, i.e. it includes an interest
in prestige and social recognition, and not simply an interest in goods. The motivation for great acts in modern monarchies
cannot be reduced to the desire for profit; it carries with it a symbolic and public dimension, in virtue of which the individual
can define himself according to his code, as well as the reputation which he hopes to obtain. Montesquieu notably brings into
play the possibility of resistance, governed by honour, to abuses of power. This resistance can be ‘false’ (irrational, arbitrary,
even barbaric) but still ‘useful to the public’ (enabling society as a whole to benefit from a spirit of rebellion when confronted
with abuses of power).
69 Publicly defending their status and eager to prove they are worthy of their rank, great men offer resistance to vile actions,
involuntarily producing political liberty.
70Finally, concerning economic matters, Montesquieu certainly seems to subscribe to the liberal critique of mercantile practices.
71 Regarding commerce as an exchange generally beneficial to the various parties, he renounces the bellicose vision of the economy
advocated by Colbert, who argued for customs and the naval fleet to be enlisted in the goal of establishing commercial hegemony.
Book
XX of
The Spirit of the Laws considers competitive trade not as a zero-sum game (the gain of one is the loss of the other), but rather as a place of reciprocal
advantages. As Montesquieu also argues in
Mes pensées, the riches of some create openings for others:
A state that ruins others ruins itself, and, if it neglects common prosperity, it will neglect its own. The reason is clear.
A bankrupt state cannot trade with others; nor can others trade with it. This is not keenly felt, since one only ever feels
the harm caused by the loss of current commerce. All nations are linked together and their troubles and goods pass between
them.
This is not a declamation; I am telling a truth: the prosperity of the universe will always contribute to our own. And, as
Mark Anthony said: ‘what is not useful to the swarm, is not useful to the bee’.
72
However, this critique of mercantile practices in no way implies that the state should abstain from all regulation. The freedom
of commerce is not that of the traders. It is certainly not the case that ‘liberty of commerce is … a faculty granted to traders
to do what they want’, irrespective of the law and beyond all state regulation. Rather, ‘it is in countries of liberty that
the trader finds innumerable obstacles; the laws never thwart him less than in countries of servitude’.
73 In Montesquieu’s eyes, economic and demographic regulation remain necessary not only in republics, which must maintain equality
and frugality by a strict regulation of property, but also in modern monarchies, where the state must look after its interests
while guaranteeing the conditions of a decent life for all: ‘A few alms given to a naked man in the streets does not fulfil
the obligations of the state, which owes to all the citizens an assured subsistence, nourishment, suitable clothing, and a
kind of life which is not contrary to health.’
74 Contrary to the liberal interpretation, in which the political must not intervene in the self-regulation of the market, it
is not simply a matter of laissez-faire: in wealthy countries where the development of commerce and manufacturers generates
chronic recessions, the government finds itself invested with important duties. There is nothing analogous, in this theory,
to the singular liberalism of the Physiocrats, who argued for a ‘natural right’ to property (which Montesquieu, for his part,
rejects) and made a case for a spontaneous harmony of private interests.
75
Was Montesquieu a liberal? The historiographical problem is inseparable from the philosophical question.
76 However, despite the strong theses which lead historians to include
The Spirit of the Laws among the classics of liberalism – the critique of despotism and mercantilism, the theory of the distribution and balance
of powers, the praise of social and political
pluralism, and the defence of a ‘merchant humanism’ which extols the advantages of commerce – one must also acknowledge the
illusions of perspective and the masking effects produced by the liberal reading. Isolating certain familiar themes in a retrospective
approach, it neglects the complexity of an author who seeks not only to offer an explanation for all existing institutions,
but also to evaluate their effects, both beneficial and harmful.
The question of the
English model is in this regard crucial. In
The Spirit of the Laws, England is not a model to be universalized, but a privileged paradigm of the distribution of powers favourable to political
liberty. The Anglophile in Montesquieu, though real, must not be overestimated.
77 For an apostle of moderation to describe English liberty as ‘extreme’ is not to sing its praise. Montesquieu’s prudence is
not only due to his subtle writing style:
I do not claim hereby to disparage other governments, or to say that this extreme political liberty should humble those who
have only a moderate one. How could I say that, I who believe that the excess even of reason is not always desirable and that
men almost always accommodate themselves better to middles than to extremities?
78
In the end, the liberal interpretation cannot account for the formation of social ties. In The Spirit of the Laws, neither the cohesion of society nor the refinement of customs stems from instrumental rationality. Both proceed from a sociability
founded on politeness, which is the effect of pride and not enlightened interest. Finally, the liberal reading does not manage
to expose in all their complexity the relations between economics and politics. Montesquieu neither defends the individual
conceived as a rights-holder, nor advocates the minimal state. Rather, he argues that moderation, like liberty, presupposes
a ‘masterpiece of legislation’ and prudence in order to reconcile, in practice, the power of the state and the liberty of
the people.
Translated from French by Michael Breslin