Notes on Montesquieu The Roots of Government and Politics 2019 By Dr Peter Critchley Critchley, P. 2019., Notes on Montesquieu: The Roots of Government and Politics [e-book] Available through: Academia website <http://mmu.academia.edu/PeterCritchley/Papers Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 1 Scale and Virtue in Government ........................................................................................ 2 Virtue and character construction: .................................................................................... 3 Montesquieu's political sociology ..................................................................................... 5 Government, Liberty, and Law ........................................................................................... 7 Transcendent norms, standards and values or ethical and cultural relativism? ...... 11 Laws and the Spirit of the Laws ....................................................................................... 16 The Concept of Law – beyond absolutism and relativism ............................................ 23 Montesquieu on social and political affairs .................................................................... 30 The Range of Montesquieu’s truths................................................................................. 35 Transcendent Standards ................................................................................................... 41 The French Connection and the Liberal Enlightenment ............................................... 46 Introduction I've been reading Montesquieu, taking notes and making comments on his political philosophy, for future use. In order to get to the essence of a philosopher, I always think of Iris Murdoch's question in The Sovereignty of the Good (1985) as to what said philosopher is afraid of. Montesquieu's fear is stiff, inflexible, and repressive government rationalizing its misrule by way of false fixities. That and tyrannical government that contravenes true freedom, true authority and authenticity. Scale and Virtue in Government I'll plunge right into the texts I have unearthed from my notes. I like what Montesquieu writes about scale and virtue in government: “It is natural for a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise it cannot long subsist. In an extensive republic there are men of large fortunes, and consequently of less moderation. .. “The public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen; abuses have less extent, and, of course, are less protected. “A large empire supposes a despotic authority in the person who governs. It is necessary that the quickness of the prince's resolutions should supply the distance of the places they are sent to; that fear should prevent the remissness of the distant governor or magistrate; that the law should be derived from a single person, and should shift continually, according to the accidents which incessantly multiply in a state in proportion to its extent. “If it be, therefore, the natural property of small states to be governed as a republic, of middling ones to be subject to a monarch, and of large empires to be swayed by a despotic prince; the consequence is, that in order to preserve the principles of the established government, the state must be supported in the extent it has acquired, and that the spirit of this state will alter in proportion as it contracts or extends its limits.” (Extracts from Spirit of the Laws Book VIII, chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 16, 17, 19, 20.) Montesquieu more or less explicitly relates political regime and social type, arriving at what Max Weber would have described as three ideal types: the ancient city-state, of small dimensions, governed as republic, democracy, or aristocracy; the ideal type of European monarchy, legal and moderate, whose essence is the differentiation of ranks; and finally, the ideal type of Asiatic despotism, a state of vast dimensions under the absolute power of a single man, where religion is the sole restraint on the sovereigns' whims and equality is restored, but only as an equality of universal powerlessness. Montesquieu's valuable idea is the connexion he established between the form of government and the style of interpersonal relations. Social life depends on the way in which power is exercised by the government, and vice versa. Such an idea amounts to a political sociology focused on forms of government. As such, it raises some critical questions: To what extent are we able to conceptually separate political regimes from the social and historical contexts in which they are embodied? From my own interest in 'rational freedom,' I would need clarity as to whether for Montesquieu there are transcendent standards or whether all things are relative, customary, and conventional. Montesquieu clearly states the problem. Whether he has a solution is another matter. Has anyone ever provided a conclusive answer to this question? If they have, why do we have to keep asking the same question? I don't see Montesquieu as a relativist, I see him as relativising certain false fixities to expose their conventional character. Returning to scale and virtue: Virtue and character construction: In describing virtue as the characteristic political motive of republics, Montesquieu does not imply that it cannot be found in monarchies but that it is a motive that is indispensable to republics since, he argues republican institutions simply cannot function as they ought unless citizens have virtue. Montesquieu is thus an advocate of a civic republicanism. Whilst the honour and fear that characterize monarchies are also motives for action in republics, they are not characteristic of republic; not honour and fear but virtue explains what keeps republican institutions properly functioning. Aristocratic republics require virtue less than democracies since they have corporate interests to guard against the unprivileged classes, which serve to bind the privileged closer together. Moderation is essential to aristocracies or otherwise the masses will rise against them. Against this, democracy is peculiarly dependent on virtue and cannot survive unless respect for law is inculcated in the population at large, is therefore general rather than particular, with the result that loyalty to the whole community stronger than loyalty to any class or person inside it: “Virtue is love of the republic, it is a sentiment and not a matter of knowledge [une suite de connaissances]. . . . When once the people have good maxims, they keep hold of them longer than what are called the polite classes [les honnetes gens]. It is rare that corruption begins with them. They often derive from the slenderness of their understandings a stronger attachment to what is established.” In Montesquieu's conception, then, virtue comprises the loyalties and sentiments which individuals acquire in a certain type of society simply by growing up inside it and learning to do what is required of them for society to function properly. They learn to behave and to feel as they ought to do if the society is to survive and prosper. The point is that to do this, individuals do not have to understand that society. By virtue in a republic, Montesquieu means public spirit. In monarchies, the place of virtue in a republic is assumed by honour, which is a lively sense of what is due to oneself. Honour can inspire actions for the common good, but they are done less for the sake of that good than for the sake of glory or self-esteem or from loyalty to the prince. There can be a good deal of virtue or public spirit in monarchies, but it is not characteristic of monarchy. Monarchies can survive without much by way of virtue, so long as there is a lively sense of honour among the classes from which the monarch draws his officials and the officers of his army. It seems that Montesquieu the political scientist – leaving aside Montesquieu's moral and political commitments as a man - conceived of the balance of social power and the condition of Liberty only on the model of an aristocratic society. He believed that good governments were moderate and that such moderation was impossible unless power were checked by power and no citizen stood in fear of any other citizen. The nobles could have a sense of security only if their rights came to be guaranteed by the political organization. And only if the nobles felt secure could monarch and people feel equally secure. Montesquieu's idea of social balance is thus definitely linked to an aristocratic society. But the burning question is whether Montesquieu's conception of the conditions of liberty and of moderation also apply outside of the aristocratic model he presumed as the context within which he wrote. Here we see the radical implications of Montesquieu's relativising approach with regard to the institutions and laws of time and place, which leave us free to extend principles in order to justify alternate political and social order. We can, therefore, imagine a social metamorphosis which could come to re-order the differentiation of ranks and orders. But does Montesquieu encourage us to imagine a society that is without ranks or orders as such, a state that is without a plurality of powers, and a polity that, at the same time, would be moderate and whose citizens would be free? Can we envisage a democratic regime, in which the sovereignty belongs to all, as a moderate and free government? It seems to me that the positive answer to that question depends upon character construction and the attainment of virtue as a general condition. Montesquieu maintained a fundamental distinction between the power of the people and the liberty of the citizens, implying that when the people are sovereign, the security of the citizens and moderation in the exercise of power disappears. To avoid that conclusion involves taking character and virtue as well as questions of scale seriously so as to overcome that dualism. Montesquieu's political sociology In fine, beyond the particular aristocratic conception of the balance of social powers and the cooperation of political powers he presented, Montesquieu enunciated the following as a general principle: the condition for respect of the laws and security of the citizens is that power be limited and no power be unlimited. That is what I regard as the essential theme of what might be called Montesquieu's political sociology. Some quotes on this: “Virtue in a republic is a most simple thing. It is a love of the republic. It is an immediate and spontaneous feeling, not a consequence of reflection and knowledge. It is a sentiment that may be felt by the meanest as well as by the highest person in the state. . . . A love of the republic is a love of... equality. It is likewise a love of frugality. Since all men ought here to enjoy the same happiness and the same advantages, they should consequently taste the same pleasures and form the same hopes, which cannot be expected but from a general frugality. The love of equality limits ambition to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to our country than the rest of our fellow-citizens. They cannot all render her equal services, but they all ought to serve her with equal alacrity.” Montesquieu's central thesis was the relativity of law, and the view that laws and constitutions were less significant than the spirit behind them and the desire to operate them well or badly. His approach is relativistic, in that there was no one solution or regime applicable to all countries, that there was more than one way of being civilized, that the regime of a country depended on tune, physical conditions, climate and traditions of each country, and had to be judged by its adaptation to those conditions. The spirit of an institution or law was understood by examining it in all its interrelations. Therefore, the informing spirit of different political systems would be different: in democracy, it would be virtue; in aristocracy it would be moderation; in monarchy, honour; and in despotism, fear. All laws would be derived from these principles. As an architectonic thinker, I am interested in the architectonics at work in Montesquieu’s work. I am also interested in the hints at the musical model contained in his work: “The government of a kingdom requires a certain harmony like music, and just proportions like architecture. "The presiding mind, the genius that governs the State, is he who, doing nothing, causes all to be done; who meditates, contrives, looks forward to the future, and back to the past; who sees relative proportions, arranges all things in order, and provides for remote contingencies; who keeps himself in perpetual exercise to wrestle with fortune, as the swimmer struggles with a torrent; and whose mind is night and day upon the stretch, that, anticipating all events, nothing may be left to chance.” Government, Liberty, and Law Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied. They should be adapted in such a manner to the people for whom they are framed that it should be a great chance if those of one nation suit another. They should be in relation to the nature and principle of each government: whether they form it, as may be said of politic laws; or whether they support it, as in the case of civil institutions. “It is in a republican government that the whole power of education is required. The fear of despotic governments naturally arises of itself amidst threats and punishments; the honor of monarchies is favored by the passions, and favors them in its turn; but virtue is a self-renunciation, which is ever arduous and painful. "This virtue may be defined as the love of the laws and of our country. As such love requires a constant preference of public to private interest, it is the source of all private virtues; for they are nothing more than this very preference itself. “This love is peculiar to democracies. In these alone the gov-; ernment is intrusted to private citizens. Now, a government is like every thing else: to preserve it we must love it. ... A love of the republic in a democracy is a love of the democracy; as the latter is that of equality. A love of the democracy is likewise that of frugality. Since every individual ought here to enjoy the same happiness and the same advantages, they should consequently taste the same pleasures and form the same hopes, which cannot be expected but from a general frugality. The love of equality in a democracy limits ambition to the sole desire, to the sole happiness, of doing greater services to ] our country than the rest of our fellow-citizens. . . . ... The good sense and happiness of individuals depend greatly upon the mediocrity of their abilities and fortunes. Therefore, as a republic, where the laws have placed many in a middling station, is composed of wise men, it will be wisely governed; as it is composed of happy men, it will be extremely happy. "... In monarchies and despotic governments, nobody aims at equality; this does not so much as enter their thoughts; they all aspire to superiority. People of the very lowest condition desire to emerge from their obscurity, only to lord it over their fellow-subjects. It is the same with respect to frugality. To love it, we must practise and enjoy it. ... A true maxim it is, therefore, that in order to love equality and frugality in a republic, these virtues must have been pre-viously established by law. As equality of fortunes supports frugality, so the latter maintains the former. These things, though in themselves different, are of such a nature as to be unable to subsist separately; they reciprocally act upon each other; if one withdraws itself from a democracy, the other surely follows it. True is it that when a democracy is founded on commerce, private people may acquire vast riches without a corruption of morals. This is because the spirit of commerce is naturally attended with that of frugality, economy, moderation, labor, prudence, tranquillity, order, and rule. So long as this spirit sub-sists, the riches it produces have no bad effect. The mischief is, when excessive wealth destroys the spirit of commerce, then it is that the inconveniences of inequality begin to be felt. . (Extracts from Book II, chapter 1; Book III, chapters 1, 3-7, 9; Book V, chapters 3-5, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14.) This is an important view on liberty, it looks forward to the 'rational freedom' of Rousseau: “It is true that in democracies the people seem to act as they please; but political liberty does not consist in an un-limited freedom. In governments, that is, in societies directed by laws, liberty can consist only in the power of doing what we ought to will, and in not being constrained to do what we ought not to will. “We must have continually present to our minds the differ­ence between independence and liberty. Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit, and if a citizen could do what they forbid he would be no longer possessed of liberty, be-cause all his fellow-citizens would have the same power.” Free competition = a mutual self-cancellation that leads in time to a mutual selfannihilation. Unlimited individual freedom and rationality generates the collective external constraint of collective unfreedom and irrationality. “Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate govern-ments; and even in these it is not always found. It is there only when there is no abuse of power. But constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go. Is it not strange, though true, to say that virtue itself has need of limits?” “To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. A govern-ment may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits.” “The political liberty of the subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety. In order to have this liberty, it is requisite the government be so con-stituted as one man need not be afraid of another.” I would ask whether this is possible on the basis of Hobbes' “war of all against all.” Is any government able to govern when social relations are inherently war-like? Montesquieu argues for the separation of powers here. Important, but perhaps missing the point in presuming the very social relations and assumptions and motives attendant upon them that need to be changed: “Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not sepa-rated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be ex-posed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression. There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of exe-cuting the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of indi-viduals. Similar to Burke, Montesquieu is for representatives and against delegates: “The people ought to have no share in the government but for the choosing of representatives, which is within their reach. For though few can tell the exact degree of men's capacities, yet there are none but are capable of knowing in general whether the person they choose is better qualified than most of his neighbours.” Montesquieu is impossible to summarize without distortion. He presented The Spirit of the Laws as a finished work, and we know that he spent a long time in writing it. And yet it has much less coherence and less unity than even Pascal's Pensées. The Pensées at least have the makings of a book, although never made into a book; they are pieces brought together by a builder of genius who never completed his building: Pascal knew how to his thoughts fitted together within a coherent and elegant whole. What Montesquieu gives us is a vast and shapeless building that consists of countless small rooms into which he has placed objects and things abundantly collected and assiduously retained over many years. But he was more than a collector of facts and opinions, he had a plan and a purpose, an end in view, even if he didn't quite say exactly what that was. So we call him a pioneer of political sociology, a social scientist, who had important things to say on society and government, economics, climate, customs. Transcendent norms, standards and values or ethical and cultural relativism? Having analysed and compared innumerable constitutions with Aristotelian patience and all the exactitude of a lawyer, Montesquieu affirmed that all positive laws within communities were made with direct reference to particular environments. They were closely bound up with what he described as 'nature'. This he expanded into the sum total of their economic, social and political background. Positive laws varied with the climate, political institutions, quality of the land, customs, commerce and manners of a people. They were in fact the product of environment. Their nature was variable and their essential characteristic adaptability. Montesquieu was feeling after a definition of law which would give it flexibility and elasticity as opposed to the set forms revered in the France of his day, where change was anathema to a society honeycombed with traditional privileges. All positive laws were related to nature, and the law of nature was human reason. Thus the necessary changes made in the expres-sion of laws within a given society must conform to reason; they must be rational adaptations to environmental conditions. The state was not, to Montesquieu, the result of a contract between its members. It was the product of its environment and obeyed the law of nature, which was the law of the universe, subject always to growth and decay. So the nature of the state became in his eyes organic not conventional. There was no such conflict in Montesquieu's mind between man and nature: man was a part of nature whose chief characteristic was reason. The state was a natural growth subject to the law of change; its chief responsibility was to remain flexible and ever ready to adapt itself to any changes in its environment. Certain elements in the environment were necessarily static, such as climate. Montesquieu's view is interesting and perceptive in its implication of transcendent standards in the underlying relation between the accidental character of surface events and the essential underpinnings: “it is not that apparent accidents may be explained by underlying causes, but that one can organize the diversity of manners, customs, and ideas into a small number of types. Between the infinite variety of customs and the absolute unity of an ideal society, we must discover an inter-mediate term, namely, a small number of social types.” I don't see Montesquieu as a relativist so much as a relativiser with a concern to expose false fixities and frozen essences – rationalizations that have rendered laws, institutions, codes and customs stiff and inflexible (his target is the regime of Louis XV in his day). The preface to The Spirit of the Laws clearly expresses this essential idea: “I have first of all considered mankind, and the result of my thoughts has been, that amidst such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy.” That statement implies that the diversity of laws may be explained, with the laws that are particular to each society in time and place being determined by certain causes which sometimes operate without individuals being aware of them. He proceeds along these lines: “I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases follow naturally from them; that the histories of all nations are only consequences of them; and that every particular law is connected with another law, or depends on some other of a more general extent.” I'm interested in the affirmation of transcendent standards as against conventionalism and relativism. I think the passages above make it possible to apprehend the diversity of customs in two ways: 1) by ascertaining the causes underlying the particular laws which may be observed in a given case; 2) by discovering the principles or models which form an intermediate level between the meaningless diversity evinced by accidents at the surface level of appearance and a scheme which is universally valid. By revealing the underlying causes which have determined the general direction of events development is rendered intelligible. By organizing it within the compass of a small number of types or concepts, diversity is made intelligible. We need to identify the conceptual tool which Montesquieu used to replace a meaningless diversity with a rationally intelligible order. That's the question asked by commentators on Montesquieu: What is the plan of The Spirit of the Laws? Does the book present us with an intelligible order? Does Montesquieu have a principle and purpose? Or is Montesquieu a mere value-free scientist or sociologist simply presenting a collection of facts and observations on certain aspects of historical reality? Montesquieu the scientist makes certain justifications of the institutions of slavery. When value judgments are allowed, he passionately denounced slavery. There are three main divisions of The Spirit of the Laws, establishing some kind of order out of the heterogeneity. I will follow Raymond Aron's summary here: First of all, there are the first thirteen books, which develop the well-known theory of the three types of government. These are concerned with what should be called political sociology: an attempt to reduce the diversity of forms of government to a few types, each of these being defined at the same time by its nature and its origin. The second part, from Book XIV through Book XVIII, is devoted to material or physical causes, that is, to the influence of soil and climate on human beings, their manners, and their institutions. The third part, from Book XX to Book XXVI, takes up one by one the influence of social causes -trade, currency, population, religion - on manners, customs, and laws. These three parts thus seem to be (a) a sociology of politics and then a sociological survey of the material and moral causes which influence social organization. Besides these three main divisions, there remain the last books of The Spirit of the Laws which, devoted to an investigation of Roman feudal legislation, represent historical illustrations; and there is Book XXIX, which is difficult to relate to one of the large divisions, devoted as it is to the question of how laws should be written. This book may be regarded as a pragmatic elaboration of the conclusions deduced from scientific investigation. There is, lastly, one book which is difficult to classify in this troverall design. It is Book XIX, dealing with the general spirit of a nation - its morals and customs. It is not concerned with a particular cause or with the political aspect of institutions, but with what might be called the unifying principle of the social, entity. This book is especially important, for it is a transition or link between the political sociology of the first part of The Spirit of the Laws and the other two parts, which examine material and spiritual causes. Any synthetic conception of society that Montesquieu held can be found in Book XIX, Chapter 4, where he presents this definition of the general spirit of a nation: “Mankind is influenced by various causes: by climate, by religion, by laws, by maxims of government, by precedents, morals, and customs; whence is formed a general spirit of nations. “In proportion as, in every country, any one of these causes acts with more force, the others in the same degree are weakened. Nature and climate rule almost alone over the savages; customs govern the Chinese; the laws tyrannize in Japan; morals had formerly all their influence in Sparta; maxims of government, and the ancient simplicity of manners once prevailed at Rome.” The general spirit, then, is not a partial cause comparable to the others, but a product of the totality of various physical, social, and moral causes. But it is a product which enables us to understand what constitutes the originality and unity of a given collectivity. There is a general spirit of France, a general spirit of England and so on. We can proceed from the diversity of causes to the unity of the general spirit without the latter coming to exclude or suppress the former. The general spirit, then, is not a ruling, all-powerful cause which would extinguish all particular causes but is, rather, that quality which a given collectivity acquires over a period of time as a result of the variety of influences exerted on it. Montesquieu added another proposition, namely, that in the course of history a particular cause may gradually become predominant. He formulated a theory that in archaic societies the predominance of physical factors is more compelling than in more complex societies. Montesquieu would probably have agreed that in the case of ancient nations like France or England, the influence of such physical factors as climate or soil is weak in comparison with the influence of moral causes. The theory of the general spirit leads from the sociology of politics to the sociology of the social entity. As a matter of fact, the general spirit of a nation is closely related to Montesquieu's 'principle' of government. The principle is the sentiment which sustains a political regime, and this sentiment is in turn closely related to a nation's way of life as expressed by its institutions. What Montesquieu called the general spirit of a nation is akin to the 'culture' of a nation, that is, a certain mode of life and human relations which is less a cause than a result of the totality of physical and moral influences which have shaped the collectivity down through the ages. Laws and the Spirit of the Laws To modern minds influenced by the philosophy of Kant and by logic as it is taught in our universities, the word law has two meanings. Law is., first of all, a command of the legislator, an order issued by a qualified authority, which compels us to do this or not to do that. Let us call this first meaning the law-as-command and go on to say that this positive law, the law of the legislator, differs from manners and customs in that it is explicitly formulated, while the obligations or prohibitions of custom are not elaborated or codified, nor do they generally carry the same type of official sanction. Secondly, law can be taken to mean a causal relation between a determinant and an effect. For example, if we assert that slavery is a necessary consequence of a certain climate, we have a causal law which establishes a permanent relationship between a geographical milieu of a fixed type and a particular social institution. Montesquieu makes a distinction between laws and the spirit of the laws. In the passage from the end of Chapter 3 of Book I, he makes it clear that he is discussing the law, as distinct from the former: “They should be in relation to the climate of each country, to the quality of its soil, to its situation and extent, to the principal occupation of the natives, whether husbandmen, huntsmen, or shepherds: they should have relation to the degree of liberty which the constitution will bear; to the religion of the inhabitants, to their inclinations, riches, numbers, commerce, manners, and customs. In fine, they have relations to each other, as also to their origin, to the intent of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are established; in all of which different lights they ought to be considered. This is what I have undertaken to perform in the following work. These relations I shall examine, since all these together constitute what I call the Spirit of Laws.” Montesquieu was thus seeking the causal laws which account for laws-ascommands. According to this passage, the spirit of the laws is precisely the totality of the relations of the laws-as-commands of various human societies with the factors capable of influencing or determining them. In accordance with this sense, then, the spirit of the laws refers to the totality of causal relations accounting for the laws-ascommands. But since we, as well as Montesquieu, use the word law in these two senses, there is a considerable likelihood of misunderstanding. If Montesquieu's thought could merely be reduced to the above formulas, interpretation would be easy, for the laws-as-commands would be our object of study, and the causal relations would explain the laws-as-commands. If this interpretation were correct, then Montesquieu could be criticized as adhering to a deterministic philosophy of law, observing the diversity of legislation and explain it in terms of the multiplicity of influences at work on human groups. Passages which suggest some such notion can be found in Montesquieu. In the Preface, Montesquieu writes: “I write not to censure anything established in any country whatsoever. Every nation will here find the reasons on which its maxims are founded; and this will be the natural inference, that to propose alterations belongs only to those who are so happy as to be born with a genius capable of penetrating the entire constitution of a state.” And even more clearly: “Could I succeed so as to afford new reasons to every man to love his prince, his country, his laws; new reasons to render him more sensible in every nation and government of the blessings he enjoys, I should think myself the most happy of mortals.” These passages from the Preface to The Spirit of the Laws could be explained by consideration of expedience. But it is entirely possible that Montesquieu could have been just as strictly conservative as his philosophy was strictly determinist. If we assume that a collectivity's institutions are inevitably determined by a body of circumstances, then it is easy to draw the conclusion that these institutions are the best ones possible in a particular time and place. That leaves it to us to answer the metaphysical question as to whether this is in the best or the worst of all possible worlds. How does that old philosophical joke against Leibniz go? All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds; and everything in it is a necessary evil. Philosophers must be great company on a winter's night. I digress. Many passages in which Montesquieu gives advice to legislators don't contradict the determinist philosophy adumbrated above. Once you have demonstrated that legislation is of the spirit of a nation, then it is logical to conclude that you must adapt your laws-as-commands to the spirit of the nation. The chapter on the spirit of the French nation (XIX, 5) thus concludes with the advice: “Allow it to do the most frivolous things seriously, and gaily those things most serious.” Once you have reduced a regime to its nature and principle, then it is a relatively easy matter to show what laws are suitable to the regime. Thus, if a republic is based on human equality, then the logical conclusion is that the laws governing education or economics must promote the sense of equality or prevent the accumulation of large fortunes. Determinist philosophy is not incompatible with the giving of advice; but the advice must take the form of conditional or hypothetical imperatives. The legislator assumes a given set of circumstances and works out the regulations necessary to uphold the form of government suited to those circumstances or to promote the kind of prosperity a nation can possess in those circumstances. This kind of advice is on the order of what Levy-Bruhl would have called "rational art'; it is derived from science; it unfolds the pragmatic consequences of a scientific sociology. I don't care for that view. And I don't care for philosopher kings, however great the knowledge they may claim. I'm more interested in virtue and character, which is where I began – something that restores agency and respects autonomy. I don't care for value-free science, observation and explanation, either. I'm interested in those aspects which imply an ideal or a principle at work in Montesquieu. There are very many passages in The Spirit of the Laws in which Montesquieu offered not pragmatic advice based on a determinist science or epistemology to the legislator, but explicitly moral condemnations of specific institutions. These very much imply irreducible norms and values. The most familiar, and justly celebrated passages, are those in Book XV in which Montesquieu condemns slavery. We could also cite Chapter 13 of Book XXV, where Montesquieu launches a passionate and eloquent protest against the Inquisition. The chapter is entitled 'A most humble Remonstrance to the Inquisitors of Spain and Portugal' and is an eloquent protest against the Inquisition. Montesquieu does, then, eschew the guise of value free scientist to express freely his moral indignation against particular forms of social and political organization. There is a distinction here between Montesquieu the moralist and Montesquieu the sociologist. As a pioneer social scientist, concerned only to observe facts, Montesquieu justified slavery, when it is plain that he was revolted. That's the problem of a positivism that divorces fact and value, sees truth and knowledge only in terms of empirical claims, and reduces morality merely to a series of value judgements. After all, in Chapter 8 of Book XV Montesquieu writes: “I know not whether this article be dictated by my understanding or by my heart. Possibly there is not that climate upon earth where the most laborious services might not with proper encouragement be performed by free men. Bad laws having made lazy men, etc.” When Montesquieu was involved in defence or condemnation, he forgot that he was writing a book on sociology. The distinction fails by trying to fit Montesquieu to the narrow parameters of the modern fact-value dualism. There is no such distinction between Montesquieu the moralist and Montesquieu the social scientist. To uphold a distinction between Montesquieu the man and Montesquieu the scientist contradicts some of the most fundamental passages - those found in the first book of The Spirit of the Laws - where Montesquieu was constructing a theory of the various kinds of laws. Montesquieu is a pioneer of social science, value-free positivism, and empiricism, but never lost sight of ethics. I place him easily among the pioneers of sociology who sought to revalue and revitalize conservative themes of authority, community, the sacred, and status in an age of rapid change. The extent to which the conservative criticism of developments associated with the emergence of the modern world anticipated the key themes of a later sociological critique are apparent. With this big difference: the conservative criticism was based upon moral commitments that were made explicit, whereas those committed to the scientific study of society and social development rendered their moral commitments implicit, in time shedding them altogether in claims of academic neutrality. As I shall argue, though, those commitments to certain moral values and ideals are there, nonetheless, certainly in the work of the pioneers, driving their concern to analyze and understand. I make this point in order to make it clear that the moral purpose that Montesquieu brought to his analyses is not as scientifically illegitimate as it may seem from a dryly academic social scientific perspective. I would emphasize the extent to which Montesquieu wrote as an ethicist, defending the clear moral purpose that he brought to his analyses and histories. In strict academic terms this may be considered illegitimate. But the truth is that Montesquieu has more in common with pioneer social thinkers than with those in their footsteps who came happily to wear the positivist blinkers and straightjackets. As Nisbet points out, ‘major ideas in the social sciences invariably have roots in moral aspiration. However abstract the ideas may eventually become, however neutral they may come to seem to scientists and theorists, they do not ever really divest themselves of their moral origins.’ Montesquieu expressed a number of moral concerns within an overt academic objectivity and neutrality, although he continued to insist on the scientific status of his work all the same. In this, he has more in common with the classical social thinkers than with their acolytes with their pretensions to value-free, dispassionate science. The ideas of the pioneer thinkers of social science ‘did not arise out of the simple and morally uncommitted reasonings of pure science.’ "There is no detraction from scientific greatness when we emphasize that such men as Weber and Durkheim were working with intellectual materials— values, concepts, and theories—that could never have come into their possession apart from persisting moral conflicts in the nineteenth century. Each of the ideas makes its first appearance in the undisguised, unambiguous terms of moral affirmation. Community begins as a moral value; only gradually does the secularization of this concept become apparent in sociological thought in the century. Precisely the same is true of alienation, authority, status, and the others. The moral texture of these ideas is never wholly lost. Even in the scientific writings of Weber and Durkheim, a full century after these ideas had made their first appearance, the moral element remains vivid. The great sociologists never ceased to be moral philosophers." Nisbet The Quest for Community 1970 ch 1 Montesquieu never ceased to be a moral philosopher. He retained the central, driving, orienting moral purpose in a way that is quite distinct from those who suppress value commitments in order to claim scientific status. The words which Robert Nisbet applied to Georg Simmel, the most imaginative and intuitive of all the great sociologists, apply also to Montesquieu: His treatments of fear, love, conventionality, power, and friendship show the mind of the artist-essayist, and it is no distortion of values to place him with such masters as Montaigne and Bacon. Remove the artist's vision from the treatments of the stranger, the dyad, and the role of secrecy, and you have removed all that gives life. In Simmel there is that wonderful tension between the esthetically concrete and the philosophically general that always lies in greatness. It is the esthetic element in Simmel's work that makes impossible the full absorption of his sociological substance by anonymous, systematic theory. One must go back to Simmel himself for the real insight. As with Darwin and Freud, it will always be possible to derive something of importance from the man directly that cannot be gleaned from impersonal statements in social theory. Nisbet 1970 ch 1 For all of his systematic qualities, Montesquieu’s great work identifies him as an artist-ethicist-essayist as well as a pioneer sociologist. Behind the analysis there is a need to be alive to the ethical and aesthetic core of his thought, a vital essence that escapes rationalization, systematization, and sterilization. Identifying the world as a lived reality and experience, Montesquieu’s accent on the ineliminably and irreducibly human element serves to distinguish a genuine sociology from the natural sciences. With Montesquieu, we are dealing with the world as something more than fact, a world that involves issues and concerns of qualitative significance. In adopting a normative philosophical anthropology in this way we are able to take a critical view of a modern society which, in Weber’s words, proceeds ‘without regard to persons.’ Whilst an objective ‘scientific’ view of society and its institutions and structures is indeed possible, it lacks any human or moral point; it would merely be a rationalization of a systematic inhumanism. I would simply ask, in retrospect, how many of the works of these decades of sociology and social science stack up against those of Montesquieu? Always, there is something to learn from returning to Montesquieu and reading him in the raw, directly, following his trail of thought. The man gathered and examined facts with a purpose, which is something that can’t quite be said of the great works of the academy. Such a view may well be unfair to the likes of Talcott Parsons, but it is striking the extent to which Parsons’ work on Weber shed Weber’s own normative philosophical anthropology, thereby losing the critical edge. There are many dry and dense texts of ‘social science’ that now seem so obviously sterile in their effects. Again, it is Robert Nisbet who, from a conservative standpoint, makes the point most clearly: It is important to keep in mind, if only as a prophylaxis against vulgar scientism, that not one of the ideas we are concerned with came into being as a consequence of what we are today pleased to call "problem solving" thought. Without exception, each of these ideas is a result of thought processes— imagination, vision, intuition—that bear as much relation to the artist as to the scientist. If I seem to stress this point it is only because we are living in an age when well-meaning and eloquent teachers of sociology, and of other social sciences as well, all too often insist that what is scientific (and therefore important!) in their discipline is the consequence solely of problemdefining, problem-solving thought. Plainly, these men were not working with finite and ordered problems in front of them. They were not problem-solving at all. Each was, with deep intuition, with profound imaginative grasp, reacting to the world around him, even as does the artist, and, also like the artist, objectifying internal and only partly conscious, states of mind. Nisbet "The Quest for Community" 1970 ch 1 The Concept of Law – beyond absolutism and relativism As the title of his masterpiece indicates, Montesquieu's central subject is law. Law is the cornerstone which renders the whole work intelligible, forming into a unity what would otherwise be a heterogeneous collection of facts and observations on a diversity of subjects: education, history, political forms, economics (Montesquieu is no mean economist), climate and geography (Montesquieu is a pioneer of political and social ecology), the feudal system, British parliamentary practice, and anything else that came within the reach of his long arms. The concept of law is the most important, most interesting, and most difficult part of the work. Understand Montesquieu's concerns here and the rest of his work will fall into place. The dispute between absolutists and relativists is most evident in the field of moral, political, and social relations. The relativist emphasizes the great diversity of laws, customs, moral codes, and types of government which can be observed in different times and places, showing the dependence of all these different types upon varying physical and social conditions in differing parts of the world. There are no absolute or common principles, then, only accidents of history and geography. The relativist thus denies the existence of absolute common principle shared across time and place. The absolutist, by way of contrast, claims to discern the underlying the unity in all things. Since the existence of actual diversity is evident and cannot be denied, the absolutist is obliged to affirm the existence of a 'real' or 'ideal' moral code and type of government underlying and underpinning such diversity, holding it to be absolutely valid in all times and places, the 'best' for all humankind everywhere. Plato thus acknowledged that the Athenians, the Spartans, and the Persians had different customs, different kinds of government, with each judging their own to be the best, seeking to impose it on the others. He maintained, however, that these particular types were all mere approximations of the ideal form, the absolutely best regime "stored up in heaven," from which all these different actuals approximated and deviated and in accordance with which they could be appraised, criticized, challenged and changed to bring more into conformity. There are problems with both positions when they are expressed at extremes. The principal problem confronting the relativist is the impossibility of making comparisons between the different moral codes or types of government. Between the Athenians, the Spartans, and the Persians, the strict relativist cannot say which way is better, since there is no standard by which differing political regimes and moral codes may be compared. It's a practical problem, too, since these regimes and codes are usually in competition with one another, involving them in a war in which one side seeks victory over another. For the relativist, there can be no more disputing about morals and politics than there is about taste. That's a sophist world of subjective preference, a world in which contests are decided by force. Justice, as Thrasymachus put it, is merely the interests of the strongest. The problem for the relativist is that human beings do dispute morals and politics, and do seek to resolve apparently irresolvable problems. In fact, they dispute about morals and politics more than anything else, and the intractable nature of the problem in relativist and sophist terms leaves war as the only possible 'resolution.' A strict relativist will have nothing to say in judging the relative merits of The Bible and Mein Kampf. The absolutist has no problem in making comparative evaluations and judgments, affirming the existence of an absolute law or code which is conceived to be the best. The problem, however, lies in knowing specifically what this absolute code is. If it exists, then we must by now have come to know it. The problem is that, throughout history, the absolutists have been as diverse in their views and numbers as have the relativists, at once invalidating the idea of a singular absolute, at least as it has come to be manifested in time and place. This is where Montesquieu is so effective, revealing the extent to which absolutists have tended to assume and articulate the prevailing code of their own social and historical setting as being final for all individuals in all times and places. Montesquieu's 'relativism,' then, is concerned to undermine frozen absolutes, false fixities, rationalizations of specific institutions, false naturalizations of social and historical products. Montesquieu thus seeks to reconcile the two extreme positions of relativism and absolutism, showing both to be untenable. He holds certain universal principles but sees them as manifested as an organic growth in time and place. How this works can be seen by reference to natural phenomena. As on the social realm of culture and custom, there is a great diversity on the surface of nature— an infinitely various and always changing world of sight, sound, and touch. Underlying that surface, however, there is another world of law —the "laws of nature" — pertaining to the ordered, necessary relations in which all these natural objects really stand to one another. Taking all the various complex factors of different environments into account, we can say that the apple's relation to the earth on to which it falls and the earth's relation to the sun round which it spins are identically the same and expressible in terms of the law of inverse squares. Thus, in the field of natural phenomena there is real unity, real order, in the midst of change and diversity. Montesquieu makes this point explicitly: "These [the laws of nature] are a fixed and invariable relation. Between bodies in relative motion, movement is received, increased, diminished, or lost, according to the relation of the quantity of matter and velocity. Each diversity is uniformity, each change is constancy." (Book I, chapter I). Montesquieu argues that the same relationship between diversity and uni-formity holds also in the sphere of the moral and political behaviour of individuals, that the relation that holds in the behaviour of inanimate bodies holds also in animate bodies. There are, therefore, certain fundamental patterns of behaviour—certain basic relations—which, although they may not appear on the surface of human conduct, nevertheless give order to what would otherwise be, and which seem at the level of appearance to be, chaotically diverse opinions and customs. Since this is so, then the indefinitely various actual behaviour patterns, conventions, customs, types of moral code, and forms of government which we observe at different times in different parts of the world are capable of being explained in terms of the different kinds of environment, climate, etc., in which these different societies have lived. This is the basic assumption of Montesquieu's work. Montesquieu undertook the immense task of (1) determining the basic underlying uniformities of existence (2) identifying the factors which produce the actual, observed diversity. (3) Showing how these differences are produced, making it possible for statesmen and legislators to control them with a view to making each different type of government as complete an exemplification of the ideal as it is possible for it to be. (SL I, i, and preface.). “If Laws, in the widest possible connotation, are any necessary relations arising from a thing's nature. In this sense all beings have their laws: the Deity His laws, the material world its laws, the intelligences superior to man their laws, the beasts their laws, man his laws. . . I have first of all examined mankind. My conclusion is that, despite such an infinite diversity of laws and manners, they were not solely conducted by the caprice of fancy. I have laid down the first principles, and have found that the particular cases follow naturally from them; that the histories of all nations are only consequences of them; and that every particular law is connected with another law, or depends on some other of a more general extent. Every nation will here find an explanation of its maxims. From this we may naturally infer that to propose alterations belongs only to those who are so happy as to be born with a genius capable of penetrating the entire constitution of a state. . . .” It is clear, then, that a 'law' for Montesquieu is any relation between one thing and some other thing. We need to understand clearly that Montesquieu conceived the words 'relation' and 'law' as synonymous. Montesquieu is a relational and holistic thinker who understands the entire world in all its parts to be, through and through, ordered and regular in its behaviour. This order and regularity is not merely accidental or arbitrary but is rational through and through. In other words, Montesquieu proposes the kind of order like that of, for instance, the number series, in that it is intelligible to, and can therefore be grasped and understood by, the rational human mind. There is, of course, a difference between animate and inanimate nature, between physical causes and moral causes, and Montesquieu elaborated upon the difference: “Men, like the rest of nature, stand in ordered, necessary relations to one another. But law in human behaviour is more complicated because men are self-conscious and possess will. This means (i) that they do not always and, as it were, automatically follow die pattern established for human behaviour, as plants, for instance, follow the pattern established for plant behaviour. In other words, men, unlike the rest of nature, are free to modify, or altogether reject, behaviour patterns which in the lower creatures and in inanimate nature are fixed and necessary. Hence (2), men require to be ordered by another kind of pattern. They require another kind of restraint, and this, being self-conscious, they are able to give themselves. In a word, the behaviour of men is complicated by the presence of law in another, but analogous, sense. They are also subject to 'law' in the sense, not of fixed behaviour patterns, but of rules, given by some man or assembly or established by custom, which they must follow, subject to certain penalties for failure to do so. In a word, religion, ethics, and politics appear in man alone of all creation. They appear in him because they are necessary to compensate for the presence in him of intelligence and will, which he alone possesses.” (SL I, i.). “The intelligent world is far from being so well governed as the physical. For though the former has also its laws, which of their own nature are invariable, it does not conform so exactly as does the physical world. This is because particular intelligent beings are limited by their nature, and consequently are liable to error; and also because their nature requires them to be free agents. Hence they do not steadily conform to the laws of their nature. Indeed they frequently infringe even those of their own instituting. Whether brutes be governed by the general laws of motion, or by a particular movement, we cannot determine. Be that as it may, ... it is by the allurement of pleasure that every individual preserves its own life, as it is also by the same attraction that the species is maintained. Animals have natural laws, because diey are united by sensation; but they do not have positive laws, because they lack knowledge. However, they do not invariably conform to their natural laws. These are better observed by vegetables, that have neither understanding nor sense. . . . Man, as a physical being, is, like other bodies, governed by invariable laws. As an intelligent being, he incessantly transgresses the laws established by God, and changes those of his own instituting.... Though a limited being, and subject, like all finite intelligences, to ignorance and error, he is left to his own direction. ... As a sensible creature, he is subject to a thousand impetuous passions. Such a being might every instant forget his Creator. God has therefore reminded him of his duty by the laws of religion. Such a being is liable every moment to forget himself; philosophy has provided against this by the laws of morality. Formed to live in society, he might forget his fellow creatures; legislators have therefore by political and civil laws confined him to his duty.” Thus, alongside natural law (in the sense of biological nature, and not the natural law tradition which is nature seen through the eyes of reason) there is what Montesquieu calls 'positive' law in the sphere of human affairs. This is human-made law. This 'positive' law varies naturally among different peoples living in different times and places in the same way that rose bushes and oak-trees vary in their growth in different parts of the earth. In contradistinction to an absolutist who assumes that one type of government and one code of law applicable to all human beings men in all places and at all times, Montesquieu recognizes the differences in the natures and capacities of different human beings, making different types of law, different manners and customs, essential. He did not, at the same time, adopt the equally fallacious relativistic position of merely reporting and recording those differences. Montesquieu steered a middle course between the twin reefs of absolutism and relativism; not only is Montesquieu's view perfectly compatible with a belief in an absolute criterion, he himself affirms a belief in such principles and standards. Montesquieu continually draws attention to the difference between what law in time and place actually is and what that law ought to be. He not only believed comparison to be possible, he employed the 'ought to be' as a critical stick and measure with respect to empirical institutions. The mere fact that some code has been decreed or established by an authority, becoming in time a part of the mores and customs of a people may make this code law, but it does not make it right. Montesquieu explicitly states the difference between what is merely de facto and what is de jure in The Spirit of the Laws (Spirit of the Laws, I, I.) Montesquieu does not subordinate the 'ought' to the 'is,' holding that something isn't right simply on account of being existent and established: “Particular intelligent beings may have laws made by themselves. .But they are also subject to laws which they have not made. Before there were intelligent beings, they were possible. They therefore had possible relations, and consequently possible laws. Before laws were made, there were relations of possible justice. To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is as absurd as to say that the radii of a circle are made equal by the act of drawing the circle. We must therefore acknowledge relations of justice antecedent to the positive laws by which they are established: as for instance, if human societies existed, it would be right to conform to their laws; if there were intelligent beings that had received a benefit of another being, they ought to show their gratitude; if one intelligent being had created another intelligent being, the latter ought to continue in its original state of dependence; if one intelligent being injures another, it deserves a retaliation; and so on.” With respect to the doctrine of the separation of powers, I shall make a brief comment. Montesquieu had discerned a powerful truth with respect to the modern state: nothing but power can put a brake on power. Montesquieu understood that no mere sentiment, tradition, convention or ideology was strong enough to hold such power in. It is a powerful insight into the modern condition of politics, but begs the question of the nature of politics in the modern world. As with modern liberalism, Montesquieu can do no more than offer checks and regulations to stake down an alien, and potentially malign, power. I'd like to know more about how power has been so corrupted through the abstracting tendencies of modern social relations. Montesquieu on social and political affairs Montesquieu's importance does not lie in any specific discoveries, nor in any formula or dogma he supplies. His achievement is diffused. The Spirit of the Laws is one of the most rewarding of all books on politics. It is so not merely on account of its close reasoning and considerable formal unity, but even moreso on account of digressions. Montesquieu held that those who know how to use digression were like people with long arms: 'they can reach further.' Montesquieu offers an almost continuous series of enlightening and incisive obiter dicta on a hundred themes and more. Open his book at any page and you will find a theory of punishment which anticipates Beccaria; he proceeds to show how brutal punishments serve only to brutalize the public, and how bad laws can make bad citizens. You will discover his view that the law must presume human beings to be better than they are. And he leaves you pondering the questions further. Whilst he offers no naïve optimism, his realism is far from pessimistic and cynical. Open him at random and you will be surprised at the incisive nature of his thoughts. He anticipates the ideas of full employment and of the Welfare State: “A man is not poor because he possesses nothing but because he is out of work . . . The artisan who has given his children his skill for their inheritance has left them a fortune which is multiplied in proportion to their number. The case is not the same with him who has ten acres of land to live on and divides them among his children.” That opens up a trail of thought which Montesquieu is unafraid to follow: “The state owes to every citizen an assured subsistence, proper nourishment, suitable clothing, and a mode of life not incompatible with health. ... Wealth in a state implies large-scale industry. With such numerous branches of trade, it is inevitable that there will always be some which are depressed and in which the workers are in temporary need. Whenever this happens the state must provide them with immediate help - whether it be to prevent the people from suffering, or whether it be to prevent them from revolting.” Does that express an authentic proto-socialist concern with social welfare? Or a sage conservative appreciation that if you do not give the people reform from above, they will give you revolution from below (as Conservative MP Quintin Hogg put it in 1946)? If it extends the public good by bringing about a broad equality, does it matter? Montesquieu is an aristocrat who never forgot that he was brother to the poor. I don’t think that that is such a bad thing. The formulation has Montesquieu's characteristic ambivalence, a man who seemed to favour aristocracy and yet argued for civic republicanism and democracy. Open the book at yet another place and you will find Montesquieu eviscerating the folly of an armaments-race and of excessive spending on defence: “A new disease is spreading over Europe; it has seized upon our princes and induces them to maintain an inordinate number of soldiers. The disease is attended by complications and it inevitably becomes contagious; for, as soon as one state increases what it calls its forces, the others immediately increase theirs; so that nothing is gained except mutual ruination. Each sovereign keeps mobilized all the divisions he would need if his subjects were threatened with extermination. And the name of 'peace' is given to this condition in which all compete against all. Thus Europe is rendered so bankrupt that, if private individuals found themselves in the situation of the three wealthiest powers of this part of the world, they would not have enough to live on. We remain poor though we have the wealth and commerce of the whole world; and soon, by dint of going in for soldiers, we shall all be nothing but soldiers. We shall in fact be like the Tartars. The greater princes, not content with buying up the troops of lesser powers, are looking everywhere for more alliances to pay for - almost always a sure means of throwing away their money. The result of such a state of affairs is the perpetual increase of taxation. And what prevents the finding of any remedy is that the state no longer relies on its income but wages war with its capital. It is no unheard-of thing for a government to mortgage its securities even in time of peace and to employ — for bringing about its own ruin - what are called extraordinary measures - measures indeed so extraordinary that they could hardly have entered the dreams of the wildest young spendthrift.” The world still hasn't unravelled the mad logic of war and the arms race, not least because it has never overcome Hobbes' 'war of all against all' within nations let alone between nations. In a passage of Les Lettres Persianes, Montesquieu is even more grimly prophetic: “Ever since the invention of gunpowder ... I continually tremble in case men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.” In another place, Montesquieu anticipates Rousseau's moralizing of the political community. I won't say “state,” lest it invite misunderstanding: Rousseau wrote for the small city-republic like Geneva, not the abstract centralising modern state, what Marx criticizes as 'the abstraction of the political state' as a 'modern product.' Liberal critics of 'totalitarianism' forever misunderstand this point. Montesquieu writes that 'Liberty consists only in the power to do what we ought to will, and in not being made to do what we ought not to will.' That still implies an ‘ought to be,’ a transcendent ideal or norm, to which the will is to conform. What is right or good is not merely a product of will, whether democratic will or the subjective preference of individuals. Rousseau's great insight here, in his concept of ‘the general will’ (which liberals seem to have a congenital incapacity to understand), is to combine both transcendent standards – that which ought to be willed – and active consent on the part of the individuals composing the demos: the true and the good cannot just be given, still less asserted by institutional force, but must be consciously known and willed. That's the key point I continually try to develop. That brings me to my own theme of 'rational freedom.' By 'liberty,' Montesquieu did not mean the anarchy of individuals and a world of subjective choice. Such a hing is not liberty but the mere licence of individualism. Montesquieu's liberty was a rational and relational notion, desirable since individual human beings are reasonable beings, and ought to be treated as such. Even if individuals were not always reasonable, and frequently err, trusting them with liberty is the best means of inducing rationality within and among them. Further, Montesquieu argues, individuals ‘only do well what they do freely.’ Montesquieu is at his best in being both ironic and compassionate at the same time. No wonder Voltaire expressed jealousy of him, since he was very much Montesquieu's inferior in this respect. The Spirit of the Laws contains a powerful chapter on the burning of little Jewish girls by the Inquisition. He calls it 'the most futile passage ever written. When one tries to prove things so self-evident, one is certain to be unconvincing.' You need to appreciate the man's subtle use of irony. To persecute Judaism, he continues, is to persecute “the pardonable error of supposing that God still loves what He once loved in the past.” If the Inquisitors find it impossible to be truly Christian, then at least let them behave like human beings, “guided only by the faint light of justice which Nature has given us.” They have little excuse, since they “live in an age in which the light of Nature is brighter than it has ever been before.” But if posterity is ever tempted to think of eighteenth-century Europeans as civilized,' You', cries Montesquieu to the Inquisitors, 'will be cited to prove that they were barbarous.' Montesquieu has a passage, perhaps even more trenchant, on Negro slavery. He pretends, with mordant sarcasm, to defend it: “The peoples of Europe, having exterminated the peoples of America, were bound to enslave those of Africa. How else could they have brought such vast areas under cultivation? [Again] . .. sugar would be far too dear if the plant producing it was not cultivated by slaves. [Besides] ... it is virtually impossible to feel compassion for people who are black from head to foot and who have such flattened noses. [And] ... how could it have come into the mind of God, who is a very wise being, to put a soul, still less a good soul, into an all-black body? It is so natural to regard colour as constituting the essence of being human that the Asiatics, who manufacture eunuchs, always deprive negroes of any kinship they may have with ourselves - in a yet more signal fashion. We can test the importance of colour in the skin by reference to that of hair which among the Egyptians (the best philosophers of the world) was a matter of such great moment that they always put to death any red-headed men who fell into their hands. One proof that , negroes lack all common sense is that they attach more value to a glass necklace than to the gold which, among civilized peoples, is of such enormous consequence. It is impossible for us to suppose such creatures to be men because, if we did so, it would begin to be doubtful whether we ourselves can be Christians. Petty minds exaggerate excessively the injustice inflicted on the Africans; for, if it were such as they describe, 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 the cause of mercy and humanity?” Montesquieu never forgot that he was “brother to the poor.” If there is anything to be said for what remains of the rational individualism and natural reasonableness of the eighteenth-century liberal 'enlightenment' - which I criticize in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality - then it is here. That tradition has fallen out of fashion often because it is so little understood on account of being read at secondhand. Like Montesquieu. The Range of Montesquieu’s truths Montesquieu has been read at extremes, hailed as a forerunner both of conservatives like Burke and revolutionaries like Robespierre. Once presented as a systematic philosopher, a pioneer social scientist, he is now more often praised as someone who distrusted the universal application of any formula or system and who placed the accent on the intricacies and complexities of social realities. That he had a keen eye for social and even, more especially cultural and ethical relativity is clear enough. Whether his concern here expresses a consistent radical relativism is much less clear. Montesquieu has enjoyed a reputation as a pioneer and even inventor of political sociology and social science, which has opened him to the criticism of such as Durkheim for having failed to be properly systematic and scientific. He has also been criticised for being both too little and too much of a materialist and too little and too much of a determinist. He can be inconsistent and inaccurate, he is difficult to pin down in summary. He is no strict empiricist and mixes the descriptive and the prescriptive; he has been criticised for basing his sociology on unstated metaphysical assumptions that would appear to contradict his method; he has also been criticised for making sociological observations in a purely anecdotal, almost frivolous manner, to point a moral or adorn a tale. People who make that criticism seem unable to appreciate irony. Such criticisms go back a long way. Dr Johnson observed that whenever Montesquieu 'wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice of Japan or of some other distant country. To support polygamy he tells you of the island of Formosa, where there are ten women born for one man.' Macaulay likewise was dismissive, writing that, 'If nothing established by authentic testimony can be racked or chipped to suit his Procrustean hypothesis, he puts up with some monstrous fable about Siam, or Bantam, or Japan, told by writers compared with whom Lucian and Gulliver were veracious, liars by a double right, as travellers and as Jesuits.' Montesquieu was doing much more than this. In The Spirit of the Laws (1748), he taught that for reasons of tradition, nature, and culture there is more than one way of being civilized and that human institutions can vary and should vary: that circumstances alter cases, and different climates and traditions require different modes of government. Since 'nature' and 'reason' are not singular they do not always and everywhere demand the same laws and the same reforms, so that a country's laws need to be en rapport with the local traditions. Yet Montesquieu was no mere empiricist or ethical and cultural relativist. He did not abandon all belief in the universal, self-evident truths of 'nature' and of 'reason' and gives expression to such truths at several points in his writing. Some of this reasoning can be lazy, with nature and reason as background assumptions rather than being properly articulated through defensible propositions. He was thus apt to say that an aristocracy is hereditary 'by nature.' But a lot of his judgements strike us as perfectly defensible, as when he writes that slavery is intrinsically bad 'in its nature', or that torture 'is not by its own nature necessary.' When, in the manner of dispassionate social scientist, he proposes the possible utility of torture to a despot, he recoils with the exclamation: 'I hear the voice of Nature crying out against me.' Nor is Montesquieu prepared to concede that what is just or unjust is simply what the laws of any given state decree. He therefore holds a principle of justice that is, as I would put it, transcendent, that is, holds to a standard that is outside of the relativism of time and place. Montesquieu's acute awareness of social, ethical, and cultural relativity, then, has a purpose other than a radical relativism. He is relativizing social and historical institutions, laws, and practices to show that they are not fixed in nature and are hence subject to human controversy, challenge and alteration. He nevertheless retains some kind of normative ideal, by reference to nature and reason. (Montesquieu's views of which being suitably complicated rather than simple). To say so was 'to say that, until someone has drawn a circle, its radii are not all equal'. Montesquieu was critical of Venice, the only complete republic he had seen; but 'republican virtue' remained for him an axiom, on a priori grounds and because he read of it in Plutarch. Which is to say that Montesquieu had standards which cannot be reduced to empirical fact in time and place. Montesquieu's axioms and laws of nature are thus half-way between the descriptive and the prescriptive, he does not adhere to the philosophical convention of not deriving an 'ought' from an 'is.' (And I'm not sure that the author of this convention, David Hume, did consistently, either, and I'm not sure Hume's intentions were the same as those of his acolytes.). Montesquieu's writing can be condemned by the dry philosophic mind as being packed with logical absurdities. I would call them saving inconsistencies that sagely reject the dualism of the 'is' and the 'ought,' the dualism of fact and value that continues to disable modern thought and society so that as knowledge increases understanding diminishes and the motivational economy narrows. In many places Montesquieu comes near to making an 'ought' statement follow from an 'is.' His statements can appear self-validating and tautological, presuming the very thing that stands in need of proof. He seems to know that nothing worthy of proof is capable of being proven. Human beings do in fact pursue certain aims; therefore it is right for them to do so. The 'done thing' is done because it should be done. Man is in fact born free and reasonable; therefore we ought to see that he remains so. Logically, such statements amount to nothing. But they are motivational. Montesquieu steers the middle course between is and ought, between fact and theory, between particular and general. He took his stand on the real ground of society, nature, and culture, life as lived experience. He sought after general rules, and was serious in his commitment to found a new science of society. But he did not approach facts with a view to preformed general rules of his own, but dwelt on exception and complication, hence his reputation as a relativist. I think that reputation gives a very misleading impression of his purpose and achievement, and exposes him to easy dismissal. Montesquieu was no doctrinaire and was concerned to avoid over-simplification by reference to general principles and laws. He affirmed the existence of absolutes, arguing that justice, equality, and liberty were inherently and necessarily good, but he was concerned most of all to demonstrate that the roads leading to these goods could and should be manifold and winding. For Montesquieu, then, the fundamental problem in ethics was less the ontological and metaphysical statement of abstract principle – with Hume, he seemed to consider it philosophically intractable - than to is to account for the remarkable extent to which there was both agreement and disagreement with respect to ethical questions, both in contemporary society and over the course of history. Some think Plato has all the answers, others think it is Aristotle … Montesquieu affirmed the existence of truths that were fixed and knowable but he considered it not only dangerous and inhumane to eradicate long-standing error through an ethical and philosophical austerity, but more than likely impossible. If human beings are by nature free, then they must have the freedom to be wrong as well as right. Such is the nature of moral freedom. Strict instruction coercing choice here is an infringement of that moral freedom, even if we could suppose the instructors to be all-wise and all-knowing. Montesquieu permitted no such supposition. He knew well that the easiest way to advance and impose truth was by means of despotism, a despotism all the more despotic in being based on unanswerable philosophical or scientific reason; he also knew it to be the most pernicious of all ways. Montesquieu knew well the defence that despotism could be benevolent but that it remained no less a despotism for that, and therefore hateful in being a denial of freedom and reason on the part of individuals. Montesquieu was not prepared to sacrifice liberty to the advancement of truth through all-too fallible human institutions. He affirmed liberty without illusion. He was concerned to underline the risks, the sacrifices, the agonizing choices, the potential for error, the probability of failure and frustration in the search for delicate and difficult equilibria, the social and political elasticity, the inevitable delays, the necessary compromises, and the acceptance of give and take that the reality of liberty involves. The temper of politics is judicious, as Aristotle understood. If truth is your overriding concern, then philosopher-kings as despots will do fine. Montesquieu puts his faith in liberty, founded on the belief, deep-seated in the eighteenth-century, in natural reasonableness. That faith holds that private interests would, unhindered, ultimately harmonize and that, through the benevolent dispensation of Nature, individuals would be decent and honest in the mass despite being rogues or frauds individually. (That's a view of rational individualism which I criticize in “Morality and Modernity.”) As a sociologist Montesquieu takes a middle way between the particular and the general. He is not concerned with what some individual ruler is able to do for individual subjects, nor with some abstract conception of 'Man.' His concern lies with groups of actual individuals, life as lived in actual society and not 'Society' as an abstract entity; he is concerned with individuals as they are made by varying and changing environments (cultural and natural) and institutions. He thus sought to discover the permanent laws governing such changes. In this endeavour, Montesquieu sought to eliminate mere contingency so as to find a way of making government accident-proof. There is an immense erudition and careful scholarship invested in the composition of The Spirit of the Laws. The wealth of detail at times threatens to submerge the main design of the work, and the book is often repetitious, inconsistent, and plain inaccurate. Many of the conclusions that Montesquieu drew have been invalidated in time, revealing his subject to be even more complex than even he had realized. Such is the nature of scholarship, to which Montesquieu made a pioneering contribution. No work is flawless. The Spirit of the Laws is a monument to sound scholarship. Any corrections of Montesquieu here have come by way of Montesquieu's own method. Montesquieu understood that sound political inquiry should have an empirical basis, and to this end he developed a technique of investigation which was suited specifically to its subject, rather than one taken from theology, logic, or mathematics. The enduring importance of Montesquieu therefore lies less in his specific observations on politics, society, and culture than in his contribution to the development of methodology in political and social studies. I'll immediately qualify that statement by saying that his specific observations are impossible to distinguish from his methodology. The point is that Montesquieu is not primarily a political philosopher. He expresses with force and clarity the great liberal and humanitarian ideals of the century, and fits easily with Locke before him and Rousseau after him. Great attention also focuses on the major contribution he made to the development of constitutional practice. But his major achievement lies in field of method rather than theory. Montesquieu was concerned to show that human institutions, customs, and laws vary widely in time and place, and that they vary, too, with respect to certain physical conditions like climate and soil. He therefore understood that an investigation of all such relations will throw light both on the nature of human institutions and on possibilities for their alteration and improvement. Hence my claim that Montesquieu is not a radical relativist but a relativizer (a relativizer who affirmed universal principles and standards, however much he saw them as being unfolded or unfolding in particular times and places, through practice, experience, an organic growth). Montesquieu, then, delivered the lesson that human institutions do not descend on individuals in society from up on high, from an abstract transcendent source, divine, Platonic, or otherwise, but that they have a natural cultural and historical growth, like any plant. He therefore defines an institution as a specific set of determining relations which unites a group of individuals and, from there, groups of individuals, and which, in joining all together, gives individuals a certain character and societies a certain culture. Each individual is thus moulded by and in and, even, for (as a process of socialization) the various institutions of which he is a member. Individuals and their institutions and societies may therefore be studied in their various modifications and transformations, in the same way that the different modifications and transformations which a rose-bush or an oak-tree undergoes in different environmental conditions may be studied by the botanist. After Montesquieu, politics could no longer be restricted to the study of what sort of code of laws, what sort of formal constitution, is 'best.' Any ancient concern with politics as the search for the 'best regime,' (which we will find in Plato and Aristotle) has to be tempered by the study of human society and the individuals composing it as a natural growth (which Aristotle well understood). Politics in the ancient conception is understood as creative human self-actualization. Montesquieu adds his own spin to this ancient conception, seeing politics as an integral and organic part of the whole nexus of human relations. Aristotle referred to Politeia to describe the constitution of a polity in the most expansive of senses, embracing culture and mores beyond mere physical laws and institutions. Montesquieu described formal, statute law as "positive law,” seeing such law as the highly articulate and conscious expression of much more basic and fundamental mores. For Montesquieu, political 'science,' as the study of government, is meaningless in abstraction from the study of these patterns, or habits, of behaviour. It is an aspect of a much larger study which comprises geography, religion, economics, history, psychology, physiology, anthropology. If Montesquieu is a pioneer of social science – he is – then he is a pioneer in the distinctive sense of founding not merely a science but a “social” science. That comes with a voice that tempers simplistic notions of – and impositions of – truth. It comes with a moral voice. Transcendent Standards This brings me to something of particular interest to me – the existence of transcendent standards and principles in Montesquieu’s work. Is Montesquieu a relativist and conventionalist who denies transcendent truths? I would say not, recognizing that this depends on how we define the transcendent. In the first chapter of Book I, Montesquieu states explicitly that there are relations of justice and injustice which are anterior to positive laws: “We must therefore acknowledge relations of justice antecedent to the positive law by which they are established.” And then there is this comment: “To say that there is nothing just or unjust but what is commanded or forbidden by positive laws, is the same as saying that before the describing of a circle all the radii were not equal.” In fine, these statements show clearly that Montesquieu believed in relations of equity, in principles of justice, which are universally valid and are antecedent to positive law. Hence my view that Montesquieu is not a strict relativist but a relativizer with respect to false fixities in existing laws, institutions, codes and culture. That begs the question as to the precise nature of these relations of equity. Montesquieu explains these relations briefly: “These relations of justice antecedent to the positive law are, for instance, if human societies existed, it would be right to conform to their laws; if there were intelligent beings that had received a benefit of another being, they ought to show their gratitude; if one intelligent being had created another intelligent being, the latter ought to continue in its original state of dependence; if one intelligent being injures another, it deserves a retaliation, and so on.” This enumeration of the relations of justice antecedent to positive law may not be systematic but can be analysed into two concepts: human equality and reciprocity. These antecedent laws of reason, these supreme laws, are thus based on the natural equality of men and on the obligations of reciprocity which proceed from this fundamental equality. These antecedent laws are not causal laws and therefore must be laws-as-commands. However, in Montesquieu's view, they are laws-ascommands that do not originate in the will of the individual legislators but, rather, are consubstantial with nature or with human reason. That implies the existence of a third kind of law. This is where, in my view, Montesquieu does affirm transcendent standards against conventional standards conferred by particular institutions in time and place. Beyond the positive laws decreed by various societies and beyond the causal laws which establish the relations among these positive laws and the influences which operate upon them, there must be laws-as-commands which are universally valid, whose legislator is unknown unless it be God himself, which Montesquieu seems to imply, although he does not spell this out. Bear in mind the republican wariness of universal principles and abstract reasoning. Burke warns of the "multitude of misfortunes" that can be traced to "considering certain general maxims without attending to circumstances, to time, to places, to conjectures and to actors"; for, he concludes, "if we do not attend scrupulously to these, the medicine of today becomes the poison of tomorrow." Burke is often quoted against what Oakeshott called “rationalism in politics,” as though such criticisms applied against the likes of Rousseau. Not so. See David Cameron's comparative study "The Social Thought of Rousseau and Burke", which shows the extent to which Rousseau affirmed the mores, customs, and organic culture that Burke claims for the conservative mind against rationalists in politics. Rousseau was not an abstractor and neither was he a detractor, his transcendent truths are embedded, innate, and incarnate. I would argue the same for Montesquieu, with both he and Rousseau showing how it is possible to argue for universal principles whilst seeing them not as abstract and ahistorical but as incarnated in time and place through customs, mores, and social practices. This is the central problem in understanding Montesquieu. Some argue that these natural laws, as laws of universally valid reason, actually warrant no place in Montesquieu's own thought. He clearly relativizes standards according to time and place, rendering notions of transcendent truths something extraneous. It is considered that Montesquieu must have retained and expressed such standards out of either caution or habit. Aron points out here: “revolutionaries always being in some respect more conservative than they think they are.” And often far more conservative than people who style themselves conservative, I would add. If they are serious about constituting the law and order of a viable society, I'd say, as against Trotskyite notions of a permanent revolution that implodes on itself, (which sounds like the libertarianism of free markets, once we shed belief in natural harmony and reasonableness, which thinkers of the 18C shared, another time for that one, I covered it in "Morality and Modernity"). What is meaningful in Montesquieu is the sociological analysis of positive law, the application of determinism to social nature. Aron identifies three elements in the logic of Montesquieu's thought: the observation of the diversity of positive laws, the analysis of this diversity in terms of multiple causes, and finally the practical advice offered to the legislator as a result of the scientific exposition of the laws. In this sense, Montesquieu would be a true positivist sociologist who tells individuals why they live in a certain way. The sociologist understands other individuals better than they understand themselves, because he discovers the causes behind the particular form that collective life assumes in different climates and ages; thus he is in a position to help the different societies live in accordance with their own nature, i.e. in accordance with their form of government, their climate, the spirit of the nation. I'm leery of such notions. It is a schema premised upon an epistemological and environmental determinism. There is no place in this schema for the universal laws of human reason or human nature. There is no place either for autonomy and agency on the part of individuals. If this were a true representation of Montesquieu's thought, then it stands in complete contradiction to the moral import of the first chapter of Book I of The Spirit of the Laws. That first chapter, and the ethic it contains, would be of no importance, a mere survival in Montesquieu's thought of a traditional way of thinking, one that affirms transcendent standards, standards which make moral condemnation of particular institutions and laws and practices in time and place possible and necessary. I don't think such an interpretation can be sustained, given that it flagrantly contradicts Montesquieu's most passionate writing with respect to equality and justice. He affirms those principles as transcendent standards. Has anyone ever carried such a determinist philosophy of laws to conclusion? Or relativism? I doubt that they have, because I doubt that such a thing is possible. Should determinism and relativism be carried fully to conclusion then we would be able to say nothing of universal validity in evaluating the merits and demerits between a republic and a despotism. Since Montesquieu clearly despised despotism, a radical relativism cannot be an adequate expression of his position. What, then, is Montesquieu's philosophy? Aron explains it thus: The solution Montesquieu offered is as follows. In the first chapter of Book I, he suggested a sort of hierarchy of beings, from inorganic nature to man. Each kind of being is subject to laws. In the case of matter, these laws are purely and simply causal laws; they are inevitable laws which cannot be violated. When we come to living matter, the laws are also causal laws, but they are of a more complex nature. Finally, when we arrive at man, these laws since, as Montesquieu said, they apply to an intelligent being can be violated, because with intelligence comes freedom. The laws relative to human behaviour are no longer in the category of inescapable causality. Montesquieu raises many interesting questions: The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a Republican Form of Government. [United States Constitution, Article IV, Section 4] Is this Republican? In an extensive republic the public good is sacrificed to a thousand private views; it is subordinate to exceptions, and depends on accidents. In a small one, the interest of the public is more obvious, better understood, and more within the reach of every citizen. [Montesquieu] Is this within reach? Keeping citizens apart has become the first maxim of modern politics. - Rousseau] Why is there a need to keep citizens apart? Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strengths and to act in unison with each other. - James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 51 (1788)] But what, then, becomes of the Republic? This reliance [upon the people] cannot deceive us, as long as we remain virtuous, and I think we shall be so, as long as agriculture is our principal object, which will be the case, while there remains vacant lands in any part of America. [Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, December 20, 1787] Vacant lands? And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893) Are there no new places? In politics "the place" is a mental habitat, an intellectual and moral landscape. To know clearly, perhaps even for the first time, the defective philosophic premises of our nation should not mean loving the nation less. . . . Because a nation is, to some extent, a state of mind, knowing a nation in a new way makes the nation into a new place. George Will, Statecraft as Soulcraft (1983) The French Connection and the Liberal Enlightenment If we are going to criticize liberal enlightenment, then we should study it first hand not second hand mediated by lesser lights. I still criticize notions of rational individualism and natural reasonableness in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality (to which this paper properly belongs https://www.academia.edu/42323782/The_Quest_for_Belonging_Meaning_and_Morality_Morality _and_Modernity_2020) but insights and achievements need to be recognized in this tradition, and retained, enriched, and deepened if we come to move out of it. I argue that this is precisely what we need to do, doing from the left what Patrick Deneen has been doing from the conservative right with Why Liberalism Failed, meeting somewhere on the reconstituted common ground, which currently exists nowhere. I argue for convergence on a reconfigured centre ground. I criticize liberalism not just on political grounds but most of all on ontological and metaphysical grounds. But my position is post-liberal, not illiberal. Montesquieu's liberalism is one that I like, in that it recognizes particularisms, customs, mores and accents organic growth. I am interested in the reasons why Tocqueville read Rousseau every day, despite disagreeing with much he wrote. I would link Montesquieu to Rousseau, and then to Tocqueville and his emphasis on the ‘habits of the heart’ and intermediary associations; Comte, who saw the implications of Nietzsche's ‘death of God’ before Nietzsche even said it, and sought a remedy in a secular or Positivist version of Catholicism. I don't think that that solution works, or could ever work, for reasons I give in The Quest for Belonging, Meaning, and Morality. But I praise the effort, and would seek to revalue what is of worth in Comte. From here, I would move to Durkheim. I see him as offering a moral reorganisation and reordering of society through a tripartite structure of civil society, offering, as with Tocqueville, an associationalism that brings atomised individuals together, an ethics buttressed by social practices, and a state that genuinely embodies and articulates the universal interest. To my Hegelian ears, this always sounded like an update of Hegel's system of the ethical life (Sittlichkeit), and therefore offers something of a response to Marx’s critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the state. I would also underscore the importance of Le Play for his emphasis on family, work, and place. Reclus is also worthy of a place here, for his insights into society as a self-governing ecology. That's my French connection. In The Quest for Belonging I specialized in the German heavyweights, who philosophically formidable, but who can be politically quite worrying. There's a danger in stating a problem to be so intractable as to leave us in a cul-de-sac prone to desperate measures. If that's too much, I'd say I have Rousseau in hand, that Tocqueville is well worth studying in depth, and that Emile Durkheim is one to read in depth. Chris Hedges seems to have discovered Durkheim, which is a good thing. Durkheim saw the anomie of modern society and sought to remedy it. He integrates ethics and social solidarity. I would also put a strong word in for Jacques Maritain, who was a great influence on Alasdair MacIntyre (although he loathes Rousseau and Kant). I try to integrate the good features of all, a work of creative synthesis. MacIntyre speaks highly of Rousseau as something who was classes about the Enlightenment materialists, and I would also argue that Kant still has something to offer against MacIntyre’s critique. I mix it all up in a blend of my own. In my past work I have had to distinguish Marx's alienation from Durkheim's anomie, given that a few people had tended to conflate the two. I rightly noted that Durkheim's concern with normlessness was a moral notion, and that Marx's notion concerned power, its alienation and its restitution. More than a few marxists here are a little overly sensitive, and more than a little nervous of ethics. I think Durkheim was onto something that Marx, and certainly marxists, underestimated – the moral dimension. Marx buried his ethic, concealed it behind false claims to 'science,' and it did his normative commitments no good whatsoever. Such self-abnegation invited a moral and metaphysical wasteland, and Marx need not have done that. I make the morals and metaphysics explicit. I strongly agree with R.H. Tawney and E.F. Schumacher that metaphysical reconstruction is key to genuine and enduring social transformation. I have specialized in Karl Marx and Max Weber but have neglected Durkheim, quite scandalously. I reject his notion of the state as a moral regulation, seeing it as a surrogate socialism that changes nothing, only seeks to regulate existing diremptive relations. That inner corruption in society cannot ultimately be remedied but needs to be eradicated. I'll stand by Marx's view here on the abstraction of the modern state. But maybe I'm wrong and Durkheim's renewal of the Hegelian Sittlichkeit is right, proposing a multilayered and morally ordered solidaristic society based on an interimbrication of institutions and associations as against notions of communism that quickly become abstract and bureaucratic for want of genuine communities of practice. It comes back yet again to how we constitute a polity. It's a tough question.