The Spirit of Laws

In Books 2-3 of Part 1, Montesquieu distinguishes three basic types of government and the ideal fundamental guiding principles of each. The three basic types are republican, monarchical, and despotic. The principles by which they operate are virtue, honor, and fear, respectively.

Book 2 considers the laws, including their prescriptions of sovereignty, relative to the three forms of government. Determining who the sovereignty is or should be is a common trope in most Enlightenment-era political theory, and Montesquieu is no exception. The Enlightenment’s preoccupation with political sovereignty derives, in part, from the era’s emergent humanistic philosophies; reason and the human intellect increasingly replaced tradition and religion as sources of both governance and transcendence. Naturally, sovereignty that is based on human reason and rational discourse accords well with the idea of popular sovereignty—or a self-governed people—and this informs part of Montesquieu’s favorable attitude toward republics, which is evident throughout the text (the word “republic” comes from the Latin res publica, translating literally to “a thing of the people”).

In his discussion of sovereignty, Montesquieu begins with the republican form, which he divides into two kinds: democracy and aristocracy. In any republic, sovereignty resides in the populace. In a democracy specifically, “the people as a body have sovereign power” (10), whereas in an aristocracy only a fraction of these people are considered sovereign. Montesquieu notes that the right to vote is fundamental to a republic; this is due to the representational element of elected officials, i.e., the vote secures a proper representative for the people, as this is part of self-government. Montesquieu thus writes that care should be taken to implement the most suitable voting process, and he believes that votes should be cast publicly, not privately. Although Montesquieu writes that “a people having sovereign power should do for itself all it can do well” (11), he also realizes that there is not too much actual governance that a people, with their limited capacity, can do well. Therefore, some governance needs to be left to ministers of the government; most citizens should not be elected officials because they are not competent for those positions. In a pure democracy, “people alone should make laws” (14), and elected officials of the senate should enact them.

It is clear that Montesquieu favors democracy to aristocracy as the ultimate form of republican government. A good aristocratic government is more democratic than it is monarchical, meaning that a larger portion of the populous has a share in governance: “The best aristocracy,” he writes, “is one in which the part of the people having no share in the power is so small and so poor that the dominant part has no interest in oppressing it” (17). Aristocracies should take great care not to concentrate power in the hands of the few. It is therefore important that elected officials should serve very limited terms.

In the monarchy, it is the monarch, or prince, who holds all the political power. Notwithstanding, the prince’s governance is only possible given a bureaucratic structure of “intermediate, subordinate, and dependent powers” (17). Montesquieu is primarily thinking of the class of nobles, but also of the clergy, etc. (Montesquieu was, himself, a member of the French nobility). One thing that separates the institution of monarchy from despotism is that a monarchy has a “depository of laws” (19): When a prince makes laws, depository officials keep those laws and invoke them when the prince forgets them. There is thus accountability with the monarchical sovereignty, while the despot, unchecked, faces no such burden. Montesquieu believes that a despot’s lack of this depository relates to the strength of religions in despotic states. Despotic rulers will be lazy, and their functionaries will rule in their place.

In Book 3, Montesquieu notes the difference between the nature of the government (as described in the previous book) and that government’s animating principles. The nature of the government is the structure of its members, and the principle is “the human passions that set it in motion” (21). In a republic, virtue is the principle. This is necessary in both democracies and aristocracies, though it is more pronounced in a democracy. He contrasts the virtue of the ancient Greeks, especially the Athenians, against the avarice of contemporary humanity. (Montesquieu frequently references classical antiquity as a political touchstone, and he often invokes Roman legal and political institutions for both their systemic advantages and pitfalls).

Virtue is not a principle of the monarchical form of government, which is not to say that virtue is excluded. Honor is the principle of the monarchy. According to Montesquieu, honor is “the prejudice of each person and each condition” (26). When conjoined with decent laws, honor can lead to good government. Honor goes hand in hand with a nobility and is prefaced on the importance of “preferences and distinctions” (27). Montesquieu writes, “it is true that the honor that guides all the parts of the state is a false honor” (27). Practically speaking, this is not a problem, because it leads to the same political results as true honor. Montesquieu does not develop this point further, but it suggests, albeit covertly, his preference for the “true” virtue of democracy.

In the despotic state, honor is not only unknown but outright dangerous. Virtue, too, is irrelevant to the despotic state, whose principle is fear. One of the only ways of limiting the caprice of the despot is through the spirit of religion, whose dogma is not subject to the despot’s rule.

Notably, in each of the three fundamental types of government, the principle of action is based on human temperament. Montesquieu’s model suggests that the form of government inspires the governed human soul to embrace a particular disposition, whether that be toward virtue, honor, or fear. In this regard, Montesquieu is a forerunner of the sociological understanding of human behavior, as Émile Durkheim noted.