Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe: An Interpretation of "The Spirit of the Laws"

MONTESQUIEU AND THE DESPOTIC IDEAS OF EUROPE

MONTESQUIEU AND THE DESPOTIC IDEAS OF EUROPE

An Interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws

VICKIE B. SULLIVAN

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2017 by The University of Chicago

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Published 2017

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48291-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-48307-8 (e-book)

DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226483078.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sullivan, Vickie B., author.

Title: Montesquieu and the despotic ideas of Europe : an interpretation of the Spirit of the laws / Vickie B. Sullivan.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016058491 | ISBN 9780226482910 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780226483078 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, 1689–1755. De l’esprit des lois. | Despotism—Europe. | Despotism—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Political science—Philosophy. | Christianity and politics—Europe. | Machiavelli, Niccolò, 1469–1527. | Hobbes, Thomas, 1588–1679. | Plato. | Aristotle.

Classification: LCC JC179.M753 S95 2017 | DDC 321.9094—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058491

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

To the outstanding undergraduate students of Tufts University with whom I have studied Montesquieu

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

A Note on Citations

Introduction

Part I.  The Ideas of Montesquieu’s Modern European Predecessors

1.  The Greatness of Machiavelli and the Despotic Disease of His Politics—Both Princely and Republican

2.  Montesquieu’s Attack on the Political Errors of Hobbes

Part II.  Christian Ideas

3.  Religious Ideas and the Force of Christian Ones in Modern Europe

4.  The Ideas of Early Christianity, Their Absorption in Roman Law, and Their Abusive Reverberations in Modern Europe

Part III.  The Ideas of the Ancient Legislators

5.  Montesquieu’s Opposition to Plato’s Belles Idées and Their Diffusion

6.  Aristotle’s Manner of Thinking and the Deleterious Use of His Ideas

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The ideas for this book took root and developed over the course of several years in seminars on the political thought of Montesquieu, which I have had the privilege of teaching at Tufts University. I am deeply appreciative of the engagement and acumen of the wonderful undergraduate students who populated these seminars, and it is therefore to them that I have dedicated it. I cannot imagine a more joyful engagement with the power of ideas than that which these students offered me. I thank in particular those students who, after completing my seminar on Montesquieu’s political thought, participated the following semester in an informal reading group on the less studied books of The Spirit of the Laws: Scott Dodds, Nathaniel Gilmore, Lisa Gilson, Vivian Haime, Michael Hawley, Justin Kanter, and Anna Maria Melachrinou. Also deserving of particular mention are the outstanding research assistants who have assisted me in the completion of this book: Nathaniel Gilmore, Michael Hawley, Zachary Shufro, Alexander Trubowitz, and Cody Valdes. When their contributions to my argument surpass what an acknowledgment here alone can convey, I express my particular debts in my notes. Justin Race was a perceptive interlocutor before the idea of the book had taken root. Nathaniel Gilmore and Katherine Balch have gone on to become my collaborators on other projects on Montesquieu.

My colleagues in the Department of Political Science at Tufts have also been extremely generous with their time and advice: Robert Devigne, Ioannis Evrigenis, Malik Mufti, and Dennis Rasmussen. Their trenchant criticisms challenged me and improved my argument. Catherine and Michael Zuckert of Notre Dame University were always extremely generous with their time and advice, for which I am grateful. I would also like to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers of the University of Chicago Press and to John Tryneski for his support and sage advice.

Researchers could not ask for more enthusiastic and helpful librarians than those at Tisch Library at Tufts. I wish also to acknowledge the Boston Athenæum for providing me access to its Rare Books Collection.

History of Political Thought allowed me to reprint material in chapter 1 that originally appeared in an article, and material contained in chapter 3 is reprinted courtesy of University of Notre Dame Press.

Finally, my daughters, Joan and Anne, supported me in ways too many to name and always displayed good humor mixed with indulgent bemusement regarding my fascination with this elusive thinker.

A NOTE ON CITATIONS

References to The Spirit of the Laws in both English and French will appear in the text. The English translation of Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone will be cited by book, chapter, and page number. Quotations from the two-volume Pléiade edition will be indicated by OC and followed by volume and page number.

Introduction

Le mal est venu de cette idée.

—Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois

The prodigious amount of learning that Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws exhibits is almost inhuman. His commentary reveals his knowledge of ancient and modern histories, the accounts of travelers to the Indies, Africa, China, Turkey, Japan, Persia, Mongolia, Russia, and the Americas, digests of laws, religious treatises, Greek tragedy, and ancient geographical records, for example. He remarks on the beliefs among the people of Pegu and the practices of the Garamantes. The first line of his preface refers rather immodestly to this voluminous learning by mentioning in passing the infinite number of things in this book (pr., xliii). Although Montesquieu unabashedly announces the vast attainment of knowledge he places on display in the work, he is seemingly modest in his aspirations for its critical impact. Montesquieu declares of his purpose: I do not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever (pr., xliv). With this declaration, he seems not to want to improve the human world let alone to remake it, but rather to document and to transmit its immense variety.¹ Moreover, it must be said that Montesquieu in this work is no crusader; he proceeds not by vociferously deeming some practices and laws unjust and others just. Nor does he provide his readers with the specific criteria by which to judge when their governments are illegitimate and, hence, when citizens have legitimate grounds for resistance. His approach to the political world is different in these regards from both that of the Christian natural law tradition and that of John Locke’s appeal to natural rights, for example.²

Despite Montesquieu’s avowed respect for the folkways of all human beings, there is one aspect of his presentation of the political world that he depicts with such horrifying brutality that no reader can miss his intense disdain for it, and that is the form of government he terms despotism. On his depiction, it is a hateful form that elevates one alone to govern without any restraints and hence according to the ruler’s arbitrary caprices. The despot of The Spirit of the Laws is an utterly contemptible figure, enthralled by private pleasures, who nevertheless absorbs all of the power in the state, making sure that all government officials and functionaries owe their authority to no other source than his will alone. This type of government beats down the spirits of those whom it rules so as to terrify all who might oppose it. It is violently oppressive, often murderously so.³

Moreover, Montesquieu is famous for overtly associating despotism with Asia and the Middle East—Turkey, China, Persia, and Japan, for example—and not with Europe. A contemporary scholar on this basis might be inclined to term Montesquieu an Orientalist, one who gazes at exotic foreign cultures in order to exert control over these distant peoples both in thought and in reality. On such an understanding, Montesquieu turns his gaze to the East in order to glean its pathologies, to stigmatize them, and to assert the superiority of the far more mild politics of Christian Europe.⁴ Viewed from this perspective, his work offers a sharp divide between the violent and despotic East and the moderate and free West, and he himself is neither quite as neutral nor as culturally sensitive as he is sometimes depicted.

Thus, a deep contradiction exists in the literature on Montesquieu, a contradiction that has a legitimate and perplexing basis in his great work, The Spirit of the Laws. On the one hand, it is possible to understand him, as many readers have, as dispassionately neutral and objective and thus reticent to cast disparaging judgments on the peoples of the world and their laws and mores. Faced with the vast diversity of human laws, institutions, manners, and mores, he offers no universal standard for right action and just laws. On the other hand, it is possible to understand his work’s horrifying depiction of despotism, which he forcefully associates with the retrograde East and not the enlightened West, as anything but impartial. Stated in these terms, he would appear to write to applaud the West and to condemn the East.

Both assessments of Montesquieu contain important but incomplete insights into his purposes in his masterwork. He does, in fact, appreciate the diversity of the particular institutions, laws, mores, and manners of the various peoples of the world, many of which, he observes, seem absurd to outsiders who have not been so acculturated. For example, the king of Pegu laughed himself to incapacity when he discovered from his Venetian visitor that there was no king in his homeland, Montesquieu reports without so laughing (19.2, 309). The Spanish justified their enslavement of the natives of the Americas based on their scorn for these people’s habits of smoking tobacco, not trimming their beards, and considering crabs, snails, crickets, and grasshoppers as produce fit for human consumption (15.3, 248–49). Montesquieu does not so scorn the natives, although ultimately he does scorn the Spanish for their inhumanity, as we shall see.

Despite his respect and appreciation for the diversity of cultures, Montesquieu does engage in a critical project with the hope of ameliorating some of the extremely cruel practices of political and religious authorities. It should be noted that in his preface to the work, immediately after he declares that he does not write to censure that which is established in any country whatsoever, he concludes that changes can be proposed only by those who are born fortunate enough to fathom by a stroke of genius the whole of a state’s constitution (pr., xliv). That is a very high standard, indeed, but nevertheless Montesquieu envisions the possibility of change and improvement, however careful and circumspect.⁵

Critical Engagement with the East and the West

As one commentator notes, "The Spirit of the Laws is less a joyful celebration of human cultural creativity than it is a melancholy commentary on man’s remarkably creative inhumanity to man."⁶ Indeed, Montesquieu presents, throughout the work, a vast multitude of perpetrators of violent inhumanity. The high court of ancient Athens sent a child to death for putting out the eyes of a bird (5.19, 71). The Bactrians had their elders eaten by dogs and the Carthaginians sacrificed their children (10.5, 142). Medieval kings of England tortured the Jews of their realm in order to appropriate their wealth (21.20, 388). Emperor Tiberius had the executioner rape young girls so as to evade the law that declared that girls who were not nubile could not be put to death (12.14, 200). Japanese officials sought to punish a young woman who participated in a romantic intrigue as well as another who did not reveal the other’s involvement by shutting them both in a box studded with nails until they died (12.17, 202). Magistrates in the East exposed women to elephants trained for an abominable kind of punishment (12.14, 200). French officials break highway robbers on the wheel (6.12, 84–85).⁷ The Portuguese Inquisition in Montesquieu’s own time burned a young Jewish woman for heresy (25.13). Montesquieu draws these examples of cruel acts, most vengeful acts of punishment, from modern as well as ancient times, from the West as well as the East.

In cataloguing these atrocities, Montesquieu rarely denounces or condemns. Most of these instances of extreme inhumanity he presents in dry reportage, without comment and without feeling, and in them those readers who are struck by his stalwart objectivity find striking textual support for his apparent lack of a critical project. But in a few noteworthy instances, Montesquieu allows his own assessment and his own distress to burst through his generally neutral approach, thus allowing his readers to catch a glimpse of his own mourning for the victims of human cruelty. In these instances, he is not neutral and surely means to instruct his readers on the proper stance toward such atrocities. For example, he terms the extermination of the Mexicans at the hands of the Spanish "one of the greatest wounds [plaies] mankind [le genre humain] has yet received" (4.6, 37; OC 2: 269; see also 10.4, 142). In order to hold America, [Spain] did what despotism itself does not do; it destroyed the inhabitants (8.18, 125).⁸ Having gazed so long and so widely at cruelty, he has familiarized himself with the greatest wounds to humanity that can be known, and he stigmatizes the Spanish as having committed one of the greatest. When recounting how Japanese magistrates, in punishing crimes, compelled mothers and sons to engage in an activity he declares he cannot name, his narration breaks off as he admits that he cannot go on, as the unnamed punishment made even nature tremble (12.14, 201). He thus allows his reader to perceive his anguish. In addition, he writes in opposition to torture, claiming that these cruel techniques are unnecessary for criminal investigations. He corroborates his claims by noting that a state that eschews torture meets with no drawbacks. Turning then to the practices of the ancient republics, he glimpses the agonies of their slaves: I was going to say that slaves among the Greeks and Romans. . . . But I hear the voice of nature crying out against me (6.17, 93).⁹ He raises the topic only to curtail his discussion. Nature cries out against these practices, and his ensuing silence on the matter makes a dramatic point regarding his own need to obey nature’s voice even if the torturers of the slaves did not.¹⁰ When reflecting on such extreme examples of humanity’s inhumanity—in modern times as well as in ancient, in Europe as well as in Asia—he intently displays a level of emotion that reveals him to be sharply critical of the perpetrators.¹¹

The Most Important Knowledge

When depicting humanity’s inhumanity, in all times and in all parts of the globe, Montesquieu focuses primarily on the acts of political entities on their populaces. Excessively cruel punishments are a particular interest of his, therefore, and his treatment of them extends far beyond books 6 and 12, his two books explicitly devoted to criminal judgments and penalties. Indeed, he touches on accusations, judgments, penalties, and punishments in every one of the thirty-one books of the work other than book 9, devoted to defensive force. The topic of taxes, for example, occasions his reflection that tax fraud should not be punished with extravagant penalties like those inflicted for the greatest crimes. Too harsh a response to a minor infraction, he explains, removes all proportion in penalties, and as a result, people whom one could not consider wicked are punished like scoundrels, which is the thing in the world most contrary to the spirit of moderate government (13.8, 218). His concern with governments’ inhumane treatment of citizens permeates almost all the recesses of this massive work containing an infinite number of things.

Montesquieu’s interest in criminal judgments and penalties surely derives from the immense significance that he ascribes to them—a significance that he insists cannot be overestimated. In the second chapter of book 12, entitled On the liberty of the citizen, he declares: The knowledge already acquired in some countries and yet to be acquired in others, concerning the surest rules one can observe in criminal judgments, is of more concern to mankind than anything else in the world (12.2, 188). This statement is strikingly significant on several different levels.

First, Montesquieu declares that criminal procedure is the most important knowledge for human beings to acquire. As Aurelian Craiutu, who highlights the Frenchman’s moderation, points out, his use of the superlative is striking because Montesquieu was notoriously reluctant to make bold generalizations.¹² Second, he gives this particular superlative a vast range by failing to limit its application. He does not say, for example, that this is the most important knowledge related to politics or to political philosophy; he says it is the most important knowledge simply.¹³ Third, he declares that there is specific knowledge regarding criminal judgments to be had. Because he posits a specific knowledge, he is far from affirming, in this particular regard, the multiplicities of approaches revealed by the infinite variety of cultures as all equally valid. He posits something that appears far less flexible and far less particular: a correct way and an incorrect way of proceeding in criminal matters. From this recognition directly follows another—namely, his statement assumes a potential ranking among states on the basis of their attainment of this knowledge. Some have attained it, others have not, and still others have attained it imperfectly. His treatment of the use of witnesses during trials offers examples of specific nations in the second and third categories. Unidentified states have laws that send a man to his death on the deposition of a single witness, and that, therefore, are fatal to liberty. The ancient Romans and Greeks improved on this approach by adding the requirement of another witness for a conviction. The French, however, add the requirement of two additional voices. The French have improved on the practice of the ancients on the basis of this most important knowledge. The Greeks claimed that their usage had been established by the gods, but ours was, he declares (12.3, 189). Human ingenuity can supply the answers to this most important of issues, and he ranks nations according to their attainment of them. The laws of the Greeks, he judges, do not deserve the status this ancient people accorded them. Only the best laws earn the designation divine in Montesquieu’s view.

Therefore, Montesquieu acknowledges the possibility of improvement and reform on the basis of this knowledge. Indeed, he explicitly identifies an improvement in the use of witnesses in criminal trials that occurred in Europe from the time of the ancients to his own. But, of course, that is very gradual change. In addition, he holds out no hope for the success of the sudden imposition of new practices on a society, even if based on such benign knowledge. He himself points out how hateful the criminal procedure of the Romans was to the Germans, his barbarian forebears, who had utterly no experience with courts and the pleadings of lawyers (19.2, 308–9). These invaders from the north were a people far down in his ranking of the attainment of the most important knowledge and their conquerors far more advanced. As important as the knowledge that the Romans had attained was, the imposition of the Roman methods on the Germans could be described as a form a tyranny, a tyranny of opinion, which is felt when those who govern establish things that run counter to a nation’s way of thinking (19.3, 309).¹⁴ Therefore, he is most circumspect in suggesting change. In a different context, he speaks of the dangers of great change and suggests that the drawbacks that one foresees are often less dangerous than those one cannot foresee (21.23, 397).

Nevertheless, Montesquieu does not for these compelling considerations give up on the promise of the transmission of knowledge and the countering of prejudices. He affirms at the beginning of the work how important it is that the people be enlightened and continues that the prejudices of magistrates began as the prejudices of the nation (pr., xliv). Shortly thereafter he proclaims his personal ambition to initiate a change of sorts in the current state of things. He declares: I would consider myself the happiest of mortals if I could make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices,¹⁵ noting that he terms prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself. Human beings are so flexible and so quick to adapt themselves in society to the thoughts and impressions of others that they are capable of losing even the feeling of their own nature when it is concealed from them (pr., xliv–xlv).

Thus, in the face of the infinite diversity of laws and mores and the extreme flexibility of human beings (pr., xliii), Montesquieu identifies the most important knowledge available to human beings, and his Spirit of the Laws transmits it. Although he uses European countries as examples of the progress that can be made with respect to this most important knowledge, he also shows Europe’s regress, as various European countries, as we have already seen in the catalog of cruelties above, have in the past committed cruelties—even atrocities—and continue to do so in his own time.¹⁶ Indeed, immediately after recounting the ridiculous justification given by the Spanish for enslaving the natives of America, he declares: Knowledge makes men gentle, and reason inclines toward humanity; only prejudices cause these to be renounced (15.3, 249). His dispersion of knowledge in these matters could have a beneficial effect.

Despotism, East and West

Despotism is a constant threat to the implementation of Montesquieu’s most important knowledge. Consequently the unmasking of despotism, wherever it lurks, is a central focus of Montesquieu’s political project.¹⁷ He needs to unmask it because it is a vastly more expansive and insidious phenomenon than a brief consideration of his treatment of the regimes of the East would suggest. Sharon Krause remarks that in Montesquieu’s view, despotism permeates, or threatens to permeate, the West as well as the East.¹⁸

Not only are there despotic governments in the political world his work describes, Montesquieu also shows how the alternative forms of government can manifest despotic tendencies. He frequently applies the terms tyranny and tyrant to designate those who overthrow a republic, particularly a democracy,¹⁹ but the author also frequently uses the term tyranny to denote a government’s violent actions against its own subjects (19.3, 309). Despotism, in particular, produces just such tyrannical actions, and he notes in one place that tyranny is never a new thing in those sorts of states (25.11, 488). Nevertheless, other types of governments are vulnerable to just those sorts of violent actions. In fact, he warns that republics can be susceptible to a particular type of violent tyranny, as we shall see in the first chapter (12.18, 202–3; OC 2: 447). In addition, a senate might make tyrannical laws in order to execute them tyrannically (11.6, 157). Similarly, he discerns arbitrary and absolute power within regimes that are not designated as despotisms. He warns that if the legislative and the judicial power are joined in any regime whatsoever, then "the power [le pouvoir] over the life and liberty of the citizens would be arbitrary [arbitraire]" (11.6, 157; OC 2: 397). As to absolute power, he identifies it, as we shall also see, in the republics that Plato described: "Plato’s law was formed along the lines of the institutions of the Lacedaemonians, where the orders of the magistrate were completely absolute [totalement absolus]" (29.9, 606; OC 2: 870). He issues a warning, in fact, that he clearly means to resonate in Europe of the dangers of such tendencies in all monarchies: "Thus princes who have wanted to make themselves despotic [despotiques] have always begun by uniting in their person all the magistracies, and many kings of Europe have begun by uniting all the great posts of their state" (11.6, 158; OC 2: 398). Therefore, he shows that various forms of government can share some of the salient and lamentable characteristics of despotism: violent tyranny, arbitrariness, and absolutism.

Despotic practices, Montesquieu shows, infiltrate institutions, religions, and cultures that are not themselves, by definition, fully formed despotisms.²⁰ These practices work to centralize power; they inflict vengeful retaliation; they deny people the right to self-defense; they counter the life-affirming effects of commerce; they terrorize people, making souls atrocious; and they kill guilty and innocents alike. Thus, they constantly contravene the tenets of what he terms the most important knowledge. Despotism, in fact, lurks in Europe where few seek it, a careful reading of his master work suggests. The despotic practices may not always produce fully formed despotisms, but wherever such practices are accepted and implemented they produce unfortunate and unnecessary victims.

Behind the despotic practices of Europe are the various philosophical and religious ideas, emanating from the lands of Europe, that are themselves despotic. When put into practice these ideas leave cruel, even bloody, consequences in their wake. Indeed, when he uses the formulation idées despotiques in the work, he refers to the deplorable punishments that such ideas inspire (OC 2: 330; 6.20, 94).²¹ These cruel ideas are embedded in the very mindset of Europe, a careful reading of his masterwork shows. In some cases, hoary philosophical authorities articulate and advocate for such ideas. Remaining ensconced in revered sources, they can wait for centuries to be rediscovered and revived. In other cases, religious doctrines and teachers have promulgated ideas that induce human beings to commit earthly outrages for the sake of heavenly salvation. In still other cases, Montesquieu’s more recent predecessors, thinking that they could correct such abuses, introduced their own abuses in the form of despotic ideas that advocated for a superlatively powerful and terrifying political response. Thus, in some cases even the European ideas that ostensibly oppose despotic ideas are themselves despotic. Montesquieu warns of just such a result: One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself (pr., xliv). In this manner, the despotic ideas of Europe possess both longevity and geographical range, and therefore remain a constant threat.²²

At one point, Montesquieu even considers the possibility that Europe could be subjected not only to despotic practices that emanate from despotic ideas but to despotism itself: But if, by a long abuse of power or by a great conquest, despotism became established at a certain time, neither mores nor climate would hold firm, and in this fine part of the world, human nature would suffer, at least for a while, the insults heaped upon it in the other three (8.8, 118). Alain Grosrichard argues that of the two possibilities, only the first was in earnest at the time when Montesquieu was writing, since he was thinking of the ‘lengthy abuse of power’ of Louis XIV and the corruption of the constitutive principles of the French monarchy which was exacerbated after his death.²³ But the second possibility—that of a great conquest—was not so very distant a possibility. The same king’s territorial ambitions had presented Europe in the early part of the eighteenth century with the possibility of just such a despotic conquest, but one that emanated not from the East.²⁴ Montesquieu thus indicates that despotism itself is a threat not merely on Europe’s eastern flank but also resides at its very heart. As events unfolded after his death, Montesquieu’s assessment of Europe’s continuing susceptibility to despotism proved to be remarkably and regrettably prescient. From 1789 to 1989, despotism wound its way through Europe, emerging with particularly virulent intensity at salient points: with the Terror perpetrated by the Committee of Public Safety and with the concentration and extermination camps of the Nazis as well as with the Ministry for State Security in East Germany. One could descry it also in the twentieth century in the Spain of Francisco Franco and in the Italy of Benito Mussolini. No one who merely glances at this history can deny the enduring need for the lesson that Montesquieu endeavored to teach in The Spirit of the Laws—that the West, as well as the East, is susceptible to despotism. An examination of Montesquieu’s critical scrutiny of despotic practices embedded in the European mindset can only serve to make all people more alive to the ever-present threat of despotism in the political condition.²⁵

Montesquieu’s attention to the various manifestations of European despotism certainly undermines the characterization of Montesquieu as an Orientalist. Montesquieu may have both understood that some of his European readers harbored a fearful fascination with foreign peoples and played on their fascination by explicitly associating the East with despotism. He could then use that depiction of Eastern despotism as a means to criticize Western institutions such as the Catholic Church and the French monarchy, for example.²⁶ He bridges these two parts of the globe by suggesting more commonalities between the two regions than many of his contemporaries would have readily acknowledged. In his private notebook, in fact, he links the East and the West together on the very basis of their mutual susceptibility to despotism: The world no longer has that cheerful air that it had in Greek and Roman times. Religion was mild and always in accord with nature. Great gaiety in the ritual was joined to complete independence in the doctrine. . . . Today, Mohammedanism and Christianity, made solely for the afterlife, are annihilating all that. And while religion is afflicting us, despotism—spread out everywhere—is overwhelming us.²⁷ Thus whereas Edward Said posits that Europeans with their Orientalizing gaze discern a gulf between Europe and the Orient, Christianity and Islam, Montesquieu sees them as unified.²⁸ A careful scrutiny of Montesquieu’s masterwork shows that he subjects European teachings and practices to a subtle, but nevertheless scathing, scrutiny. If he associates the East with despotism, so too does he ultimately associate it with the West. His scrutiny of despotism, in all its permutations, results in an exposé of the human condition simply.²⁹

Montesquieu’s critical approach that links the West and the East together is nowhere more evident in The Spirit of the Laws than in his withering criticism of the Portuguese Inquisition. Even when writing about such an egregious case of cruelty he reveals his reticence to engage European condemnable practices directly as he does not speak in his own voice but instead uses the literary device of merely conveying the letter of a Jewish man outraged by the Inquisition’s burning of a young Jewish woman for heresy. Montesquieu has his Jewish character charge that when these apparent paragons of pious Christianity undertake to avenge their God through such merciless flames, they are no different from the Muslims who force belief at the point of a sword. Therefore, these particular practices of the Christians are one means by which despotic practices, informed by despotic ideas, emerge in Europe, Montesquieu suggests. Indeed, the Jewish letter writer points out that the Christians employ both the sword and fire against their perceived enemies: ‘you have afflicted with iron and fire those who are in the quite pardonable error of believing that god still loves that which he loved’ (25.13, 490). As his examination of the diversity of laws and peoples unfolds, he demonstrates that not only is the East subjected to despotism but so too is the West. We are they and they are we, and all are victims or potential victims of the despotic tendencies inherent in political thought and practice.

The Importance of Thinkers and Their Ideas

Some of the despotic ideas of Europe emerge from the continent’s great thinkers, Montesquieu contends. He indicates that he regards writers on politics as important political actors, and possibly the most important actors. In the chapter he entitles On legislators, he names five such rarified beings—none of them founders of cities or states, but rather all of them authors: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas More, Niccolò Machiavelli, and James Harrington. The inclusion of Thomas More and James Harrington in Montesquieu’s group of legislators suggests that one of his intentions in this chapter is to reflect on those writers who explicitly offer ideal regimes or imaginary states (29.19, 618). More wrote Utopia and Harrington Oceana, and these authors can be said, therefore, to have offered legislation in a literary form. A reading of Plato’s Laws and Republic and books 7 and 8 of Aristotle’s Politics as imaginary republics would further corroborate such a conclusion.

On an initial consideration, Machiavelli’s explicit rejection of imaginary republics and principalities in The Prince might suggest that he rests uneasily in this group, but the Florentine’s avowed reason for rejecting such states actually establishes the appropriateness of Montesquieu’s inclusion of him in a group of writers who endeavored to influence the practice of politics. The Florentine explains that to take one’s guidance from how one should live rather than from how one does live is to find one’s ruin rather than one’s preservation. By speaking of the deleterious consequences of imaginary regimes on politics—that is, of the effusions of the pens of thinkers—Machiavelli indicates that they have a very real impact on the world; the works of imagination of the classical and Christian traditions have produced real political—and problematic—effects. By going to the effectual truth of the thing rather than to the imagination of it, Machiavelli too endeavors to have an effect on politics—specifically, to correct the politics of his predecessors.³⁰

Like Machiavelli, Montesquieu does not take the written word as proffering only airy and inconsequential ideas. For example, Montesquieu repeatedly treats Plato the philosopher as a founder in The Spirit of the Laws and associates him with the practices and aspirations of the ancient republics: The laws of Crete were the originals for the laws of Lacedaemonia, and Plato’s laws were their correction (4.6, 36); [t]he laws of Minos, Lycurgus, and Plato all start from the same assumption (4.7, 38); and the institutions of Plato are only the perfection of the laws of Lycurgus (7.16, 111). Montesquieu thus treats in an indistinguishable manner two mythological founders of cities and one philosophical writer in their shared purpose of founding the very regimes that exemplify in his estimation the distinctive approach to politics of antiquity. In his Pensées, he corroborates his distinctive understanding of Plato’s intention: I am not among those who regard Plato’s Republic as an ideal and purely imaginary thing, whose execution would be impossible. My reason is that Lycurgus’s Republic seems to be [just] as difficult of execution as Plato’s, and yet it was so well executed that it lasted as long as any republic we know of in its force and splendor.³¹ Political writers can themselves offer a key form of legislation.³²

Although Montesquieu indicates that he regards these writers as particularly influential when he designates them legislators, his peculiar treatment of them does not flatter them. Indeed, he is sharply critical, impugning both their motives and their objectivity. Their laws derive from very personal and questionable sources; their laws derive, he accuses, from their prejudices and passions. Montesquieu attributes, for instance, the character of Aristotle’s thought to his jealousy of Plato and his passion for Alexander; that of Plato’s to his indignation at the tyranny of the people of Athens; and that of Machiavelli’s to his too fulsome regard for his idol, Duke Valentino—that is, for the impetuous ruthlessness of the ambitious murderer Cesare Borgia whom he lauds in The Prince (29.19, 618).

By way of explanation of how their partiality fundamentally affected their work, Montesquieu declares that the laws always encounter the passions and the prejudices of the legislator. In speaking of legislators, he continues rather cryptically that "sometimes they [elles] pass through and are colored [teignent]; sometimes they [elles] remain there and are incorporated." The feminine plural pronoun refers to the laws, and he gives two alternative outcomes to what can happen to them in their encounter with the passions and the prejudices of the legislator. One possibility is that like light passing through stained glass, the laws emerge with the tint of the legislator’s passions and prejudices.³³ The other possibility is that the laws do not emerge at all but rather are completely subsumed by this encounter so that they are incorporated—they become themselves expressions of the legislator’s passions and prejudices (29.19, 618).

Although Montesquieu appears to agree with Machiavelli on the harmfulness of the ideas of previous thinkers, he is in the historical position to include Machiavelli in that group of previous writers—both significant and harmful—and he does.³⁴ As legislators, these thinkers are responsible for producing real effects on human life. Machiavelli may not offer an ideal state—an imaginary state—but he has, nevertheless, promulgated despotic ideas.

Because Montesquieu fails to treat More at all and Harrington at any length in the remainder of the work, these two writers will not enter into my analysis of the book. He does, however, engage with Plato, Aristotle, and Machiavelli at some length elsewhere in The Spirit of the Laws, and this book devotes a chapter to his treatment of each of them. This book also devotes a chapter to his assessment of the political thought of Hobbes, whom Montesquieu fails to name in this chapter but with whom he engages in the work, both directly and indirectly. Not only philosophers are responsible for propounding ideas, but also religious thinkers. In one place, he notes that religious ideas have led human beings into errors (26.14, 508). Christianity is the European religion, and he treats it extensively throughout the work. He examines the effect it exerts on the Europeans of his own times, as well as on its first converts over a millennium earlier. He traces how some of the religion’s first laws continue to affect the lives of Christians in his own century.

Specifically, this book will examine Montesquieu’s scrutiny of the despotic ideas of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as of Christianity. He finds such deleterious consequences, for example, in brutal Machiavellianism;