The Spirit of Laws

In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils, in an enlightened age, one trembles even while doing the greatest goods.”

Montesquieu lived in an era of modern history now commonly referred to as the Age of Enlightenment, so named because many intellectuals and scholars of 18th-century Europe believed they were living in a time of great enlightenment. Montesquieu, a proponent of this enlightenment, understands the caution imperative in his academic endeavors, and puts forth his ideas not as certainties or eternal truths, but rather as tentative conclusions based on years of dedicated research. It is in this sense that Montesquieu “trembles” even as he embarks on a masterful political treatise.

“It is better to say that the government most in conformity with nature is the one whose particular arrangement best relates to the disposition of the people for whom it is established.”

One of Montesquieu’s fundamental beliefs is that government should be tailored to the people governed. While he does believe there are ideal types of government, he does not believe that there is a “one size fits all” solution. Understanding the peculiar nature of the peoples one governs is imperative, as are the cultural, geographical, and historical conditions that influence them.

“I assume three definitions, or rather, three facts: one, republican government is that in which the people as a body, or only a part of the people, have sovereign power; monarchical government is that in which one alone governs, but fixed by established laws; whereas, in despotic government, one alone, without law and without rule, draws everything along by his will and his caprices.”

Montesquieu defines the three ideal forms of government around which he structures the whole treatise: Republics, monarchies, and despotic governments. In other words, it is not that all real governments fit easily into one of these three molds, but they all tend toward these ideal types. Each of these governments has a different principle of action: virtue, honor, and fear, respectively.

“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. When that virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it, and avarice enters them all. Desires change their objects: that which one used to love, one loves no longer. One was free under the laws, one wants to be free against them. Each citizen is like a slave who has escaped from his master’s house.”

Montesquieu describes the degeneracy from a virtuous republic—like the small republics of ancient Greece—to the self-interested and commercial life of the modern monarchical citizen. As virtue fades, it is replaced by ambition and greed. Instead of viewing the laws as ways of cultivating virtue, citizens begin to see them merely as restraints on their unlimited personal freedom.

“It is in republican government that the full power of education is needed. Fear in despotic governments arises of itself from threats and chastisements; honor in monarchies is favored by the passions and favors them in turn; but political virtue is a renunciation of oneself, which is always a very painful thing.”

Throughout Part 1, Montesquieu delineates numerous differences in the needs of the ideal types of government. In his discussion of education, he focuses on republics because their citizens require the most formal education. Republics, requiring virtue, need a citizenry that works to subsume their own interests to the common good. The love of frugality and equality is not necessarily inborn; it requires diligent education. It requires a learned dedication to the homeland.

“There must be censors in a republic where the principle of government is virtue. It is not only crimes that destroy virtue, but also negligence, mistakes, a certain slackness in the love of the homeland, dangerous examples, the seeds of corruption, that which does not run counter to the laws but eludes them, that which does not destroy them but weakens them: all these should be corrected by censors.”

Montesquieu’s views on censorship might challenge contemporary attitudes on the same subject. Though contemporary republics generally have lax censorship laws, Montesquieu recommends against this. Since virtue is key to the republic, its citizens require censors to prevent and expunge problematic art, literature, etc. from public discourse. In monarchies, though, this is not as necessary. In monarchies, a person’s sense of honor provides a natural self-censorship. Ironically, Montesquieu’s book was placed on the Roman Catholic Church’s index of banned books.

“Men are all equal in a republican government; they are equal in despotic government; in the former, it is because they are everything; in the latter, it is because they are nothing.”

The virtue of a republic tends toward equality through a love of the equality of all men. All are lifted through the general impulse to self-improvement and devotion to the state. The equality under a despot, though, is precisely opposed to this. In such a case, all subjects are equally trampled by the power of the prince. No one is permanently safe under the despot. The greatest inequality exists in the monarchy because honor requires distinctions of rank. This is just another manifestation of the myriad differences in the kinds of government.

“There are two kinds of corruption: one, when the people do not observe the laws, the other, when they are corrupted by the laws; the latter is an incurable ill because it lies in the remedy itself.”

Montesquieu relays an essential insight into statecraft: The laws should not corrupt those under them. When the laws serve to degenerate the virtue of the citizen, this is opposite of their purpose, which is to foster virtue. Not only do the laws fail when they corrupt the citizens, but they fail so miserably as to produce an “incurable” rise in viciousness, which in turn will only undermine the republic.

“As far as the sky is from the earth, so far is the true spirit of equality from the spirit of extreme equality.”

Montesquieu writes that the principle of democracy is the equality of its citizens. This equality should not be confused with an “extreme” equality, which has a different spirit altogether. The principle of equality seeks the equality of citizenship and subservience to the homeland, while the principle of extreme equality seeks equal outcomes for all people. When these two are confused, and extreme equality takes hold in the republic, democracy is abandoned for the tyranny of a single despot who arises out of the clamor or everyone’s attempt to grab equal power.

“No word has received more different significations and has struck 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, of by their own laws. For a certain people liberty has long been the usage of wearing a long beard.”

Montesquieu must address the myriad historical interpretations of “liberty” before he elaborates his own definition. The interpretations are so diverse that Montesquieu must firmly clarify his concept, lest the audience misunderstand him. Within any given society, political liberty consists, at minimum, in the right to do whatever is not explicitly forbidden by the law.

“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. Liberty can be founded only on the practice of this knowledge, and in a state that had the best possible laws in regard to it, a man against whom proceedings had been brought and who was to be hung the next day would be freer than is a pasha in Turkey.”

Montesquieu boldly claims that knowledge of criminal law is more important for human affairs than anything else. The liberty of the citizenry is necessarily founded on the institution of well-informed criminal justice. This is so crucial that a convicted felon in a country of liberty is freer than the emperor of a despotic nation: The convict is, at least, bound by the law.

“If it is true that the character of the spirit and the passions of the heart are extremely different in the various climates, laws should be relative to the differences in these passions and to the difference in these characters.”

Montesquieu does not believe in a universal approach to governance. It is evident, in his view, that people’s characters differ between climates, and the law ought to be tailored to the benefit of its people. Therefore, laws should be designed differently, and the laws of different nations may very well work toward opposed ends.

“It is impossible for us to assume that these people are men because if we assumed they were men one would begin to believe that we ourselves were not Christians. Petty spirits exaggerate too much the injustice done to the Africans. For, if it were as they say, would it not have occurred to the princes of Europe, who make so many useless agreements with one another, to make a general one in favor of mercy and pity?”

While Montesquieu’s condemnation of slavery isn’t unalloyed, Book 15 presents his derisive, ironical evaluation of the institution. Specifically, he lists some of the popular “justifications” for slavery—but instead of presenting these justifications through the veneer of euphemism or intellectualized code (as slavery proponents would do), Montesquieu denudes the rationale of such language and exposes it for what it is: hypocritical nonsense. This quotation shows a defense of African enslavement that partially rests on the assumption that good Christians, like the Europeans, could not possibly treat human beings as badly as the colonists must treat their slaves; therefore, the enslaved must be subhuman. In addition to its essential absurdity, this justification ultimately conveys that it is right to deny the Africans’ humanity because doing so preserves Europeans’ cherished self-image as moral people.

“In Asia there reigns a spirit of servitude that has never left it, and in all the histories of this country it is not possible to find a single trait marking a free soul; one will never see there anything but the heroism of servitude.”

This passage presents one of Montesquieu’s many sweeping generalizations about an enormous group of people. He writes that despotism is the natural government in Asian countries because centuries of despotic rule have produced people who are naturally so servile that no spirit of liberty can persist therein. Note that Montesquieu never traveled to Asia.

“The barrenness of the land makes men industrious, sober, inured to work, courageous, and fit for war; they must procure for themselves what the terrain refuses them. The fertility of a country gives, along with ease, softness and a certain love for the preservation of life.” 

Montesquieu believes geography and climate can have an extraordinary effect on the spirit of a people and, subsequently, their laws and mores. Where the land is impoverished, he finds peoples that have grown strong and vital, and he thus assumes that these peoples’ virtues directly result from their natural environment. While Montesquieu exemplifies Enlightenment thought, 21st-century scientists would find many of his empirical claims unscientific. For example, in this instance, even if Montesquieu had robust empirical data suggesting geography-based variation in peoples’ temperaments, he conflates correlation with causation. Nevertheless, his generally inductive analysis likely has some roots in the Newtonian “rules of reasoning,” published in the 1687 Principia. These rules influenced natural philosophy through the next century.

“Even liberty has appeared intolerable to people who were not accustomed to enjoying it. Thus is pure air sometimes harmful to those who have lived in swampy countries”

Montesquieu eloquently makes the point that republican governments wherein liberty is always instituted (to some degree) cannot be imposed on people more familiar with despotic rule. In such a case, the instituted liberties may deeply conflict with the people’s mores. Governance should provide the appropriate degree of liberty for citizens’ social constitution. Republics are not universally desirable.

“The customs of a slave people are a part of their servitude; those of a free people are a part of their liberty.”

Liberty and servitude are not only directly imposed via the institutions that dispense the law. This liberty and/or servitude is also produced and reinforced by the customs of a people. Since a people’s mores are so integral to their overall character, liberty and servitude cannot be altered through simple legislature. That is only one part of a complex process.

“In extremely absolute monarchies, historians betray the truth because they do not have the liberty to tell it; in extremely free states, they betray truth because of their very liberty for, as it always produces divisions, each one becomes as much the slave of the prejudices of his faction as he would be of a despot.”

Montesquieu implicitly makes a case for limited liberty, at least insofar as the truth of historical reports is to be valued. While freedom of speech is necessary to liberate the historian from fear of monarchical penalties, excessive freedoms are counterproductive because people will form factious schools of thought: Individual historians will then become too indebted to their faction to honestly, and independently, produce truthful history.

“There are two sorts of poor peoples: some are made so by the harshness of the government, and these people are capable of almost no virtue because their poverty is a part of their servitude; the others are poor only because they have disdained or because they did not know the comforts of life, and these last can do great things because this poverty is a part of their liberty.”

The merits of those in poverty cannot be judged at face value, nor are they always the results of individual character. In brutal, despotic governments, such people are not poor by choice. They have no virtue, according to Montesquieu, in part because they do not have the opportunity to become virtuous. In free states, wherein liberty is greatly developed, some people freely choose their poverty. Those people might have great virtue.

“Commerce, sometimes destroyed by conquerors, sometimes hampered by monarchs, wanders across the earth, flees from where it is oppressed, and remains where it is left to breathe: it reigns today where one used to see only deserted places, seas, and rocks; there where it used to reign are now only deserted places.”

Montesquieu argues that the success of commerce is tied to its own sort of liberty. War and oppression restrict commerce. Various governments throughout history have had significantly different approaches to commerce. The author believes that commerce will always thrive in the centers of global and regional power that are most hospitable to its development. It will abandon others.

“At first, the Spanish considered the newly discovered lands as objects of conquest; peoples more refined than they saw them as objects of commerce and as such directed their attention to them. Many people acted so wisely that they granted empire to trading companies who, governing these distant states only for trade, made a great secondary power without encumbering the principal state.”

In his discussion of European commerce during the colonial era, through which he lived, Montesquieu makes a distinction between traditional imperial conquest and economic expansion through exclusive trade with a colony. Whereas nations like Spain simply subjugated the population and stole its wealth, others, like England, were more economically savvy: They set up trading companies, like the East India Company, that amassed incredible economic power. Montesquieu shows that the spirit of commerce required a different form of domination than traditional conquest.

“In commercial countries where many people have only their art, the state is often obliged to provide for the needs of the old, the sick, and the orphaned. A state with a good police draws upon the arts themselves for this sustenance; it gives some the work of which they are capable, and it teaches others to work, which already makes work. A few alms given to a naked man in the streets does not fulfill the obligations of the state, which owes all the citizens an assured sustenance, nourishment, suitable clothing, and a kind of life which is not contrary to health.”

As opposed to the laissez-faire economic model, Montesquieu writes that commercial states have an active obligation to take care of their citizens’ basic needs. It is a matter not of charity but of political virtue. Every citizen is owed material basics. The best way to provide this is to teach people a craft (or profession) so that they can sustain themselves and their families.

“Just as one can judge among shadows those that are the least dark, and among abysses, those that are the least deep, so among the false religions can one seek the ones that are the most in conformity with the good of society, the ones that, though they do not have the effect of leading men to the felicities of the next life, can most contribute to their happiness in this one.”

Montesquieu begins his study of world religions (and their relationship to the spirit of the laws) by clarifying that he is not evaluating the veracity of any religious doctrines. Montesquieu is a Christian in a Christian nation, but he understands that some religions might be more suitable, politically speaking, for other populations. The practical effects of a belief system are relevant for political theory. The philosophy of Stoicism, for instance, produced great effects on ancient Rome.