- Length
- 800 pagesCohler, Miller and Stone, The Spirit of the Laws, Cambridge, 1989
- Reading
- DemandingReadable with attention; assumes no other book
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
The Spirit of the Laws
Twenty years of comparative research into why different peoples have different laws, which concluded that they mostly should. Its account of separated powers checking one another was read by the men who wrote the American constitution more attentively than any other book of political theory.
- Date
- 1748
- Author
- Montesquieu
- Region
- Bordeaux and Paris
- Language
- French
- 1750 English, Thomas Nugent Public domain; the version the American founders used Attested
- 1989 English, Cohler, Miller and Stone The scholarly standard; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 97 years
On the Index within three years, read by every constitution-maker of the following century, and cited more often in the American founding debates than any other modern author.
What the book says
Thirty-one books arguing that laws are not arbitrary and are not universal either - they stand in intelligible relations to the conditions of the people who have them. Montesquieu begins by classifying governments not by who rules but by what animates them: republics run on virtue, meaning the citizens' willingness to prefer the common good; monarchies on honour, meaning each rank's attachment to its own standing; and despotisms on fear, which is what is left when neither of the others is present. Each has laws suited to it and is destroyed by laws suited to another. He then asks what shapes the whole - climate, terrain, the size of the territory, commerce, religion, manners - and argues that a legislator works with this material rather than against it. The book's most consequential chapter examines England, and describes a constitution in which the power to make laws, the power to execute them and the power to judge are held separately, so that power checks power; whether he is describing England or inventing it has been argued ever since. Late books attack slavery, torture and religious persecution, sometimes by irony sharp enough that readers still disagree about the tone.
What it argues
That a law is intelligible only in relation to everything else about the society that has it, and that the business of political science is to map those relations. This makes Montesquieu a relativist about institutions and not about ends: he is perfectly willing to say that despotism is bad everywhere, and that torture, slavery and persecution are indefensible, while insisting that the arrangements which secure liberty in one place will not transplant unaltered to another. Liberty itself he defines carefully - not doing what one wants, but the tranquillity of mind that comes from being safe, which requires that no one holding power be able to use it without meeting another power. Hence the separation, and hence the emphasis on intermediate bodies, independent courts and settled law.
What it answered
Leviathan 1651Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes on the state of nature, and the whole tradition of deriving political conclusions from a single premise about human nature. His method is the opposite: gather an enormous quantity of comparative material from history, travel accounts and law codes, and look for patterns. He is also answering, quietly, the French absolutism he lived under - the praise of intermediate powers and independent magistrates is an argument for institutions the crown had been eroding, made by a man who had himself been a president of a provincial parlement.
What answered it
Rousseau, who admired him and rejected the conclusion that liberty is secured by balancing powers rather than by the general will. Hume disputed the climate theory. Voltaire mocked the errors. The nineteenth century found the sociology congenial and the constitutional theory obvious. The sharpest modern objection is to the England chapter: it describes a separation of powers that eighteenth-century England did not have, and its influence is therefore the influence of an idealisation, which is a strange kind of success.
How it argues
By comparison and accumulation, in very short chapters - some of them a paragraph - which makes the book easy to sample and hard to follow as a whole. Montesquieu's evidence is drawn from everywhere available to him, including travellers' reports of no reliability whatever, and the climate theory is the place where this shows worst. What survives the bad evidence is the method: treat institutions as adapted to conditions, compare widely, and look for the principle animating a system rather than its formal description.
The moment
France under Louis XV, with Montesquieu a nobleman of the robe who had sold his judicial office and spent three years travelling - Italy, Hungary, and eighteen months in England, which supplied the constitutional chapter. He wrote anonymously and expected trouble, and got it: the Sorbonne examined the book, the Jansenists and the Jesuits attacked it from opposite directions, and Rome put it on the Index in 1751.
How it travelled
Into constitutions, faster than almost any book here. Nugent's English translation appeared within two years, and the separation of powers passed through it into the American state constitutions, the federal convention and the Federalist Papers, where Montesquieu is the most cited modern authority. The French revolutionaries used him too, in the opposite direction. Its later career is quieter: as constitutional theory became a professional field, the book became a source rather than a text.
The strongest objection
That the climate theory is not a peripheral embarrassment but shows what is wrong with the method. Montesquieu explains differences in law and temperament by heat and cold, using evidence he could not check and generalisations about whole peoples that the following century turned into something worse. The problem is structural: a method that explains institutions by conditions has no principle limiting which conditions count, and no way of distinguishing an adaptation from an injustice that has become customary. He knows this well enough to condemn slavery in a chapter of savage irony, but the condemnation comes from outside his own framework rather than from within it.
Why read it
In pieces. Books one to eight on the three kinds of government and their principles, book eleven chapter six on the English constitution, and the chapters on slavery and on the climate - the last as a caution rather than a lesson. The very short chapters make it unusually easy to read a little at a time and unusually hard to hold in one view.
- First printed
- 1748
- First in English
- 1750
- Digitised
- Yes
Published anonymously and revised by Montesquieu until his death in 1755; the posthumous editions incorporate his final corrections. The Persian Letters of 1721, a satire in epistolary form, is the other work he is read for.
Nugent's 1750 English is public domain and was the version the American founders used. The Cambridge translation of 1989 is the scholarly standard and is in copyright.
Where it stands
Live in two forms. Separation of powers and checks and balances are the working vocabulary of constitutional design worldwide, and Montesquieu is credited whether or not he is read. Academically he is read as a founder of comparative politics and of the sociology of law, with the climate theory treated as the price of the method.
On quoting this book
The French is public domain and Nugent's English is too, but that version is loose at the points most often quoted and the accurate translation is in copyright. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the England chapter describes a real constitution or an ideal type is the standing dispute, and the answer bears on how his influence should be understood. How seriously the climate theory should be taken as part of the argument, rather than as period furniture, is argued. The tone of the chapter on slavery - irony or exposition - has been misread in both directions. And whether Montesquieu is a defender of aristocratic privilege dressing itself as constitutional theory, or a genuine constitutionalist who happened to be a nobleman, is a question about motive that the text supports either way.