Great Minds - Montesquieu and the Beginnings of Political Science

[Music] montesquieu's spirit of the laws is one of the characteristic products of the french enlightenment and it's a milestone in the development of social science montesquieu is one of the most interesting one of the wittiest writers of enlightenment social theory and he himself was an aristocrat he had a rather conservative somewhat pessimistic view of human nature and he's also something of a skeptic in his outlook upon science and upon society and upon human nature we have to think about the context in which montesquieu is writing in order to really comprehend what his project is and what he's trying to accomplish he's writing in the first part of the 18th century and he's trying to figure out in a purely naturalistic way how human societies work what makes human governments run and what sort of political arrangements are good for people under what circumstances now the reason why montesquieu is concerned with these issues is because the rise of modern natural science fundamentally changed the conception of human nature and of human society characteristic of western thought once newtonian mechanics and the advances that made it possible such as bacon's work or galileo's work become widely influential in intellectual circles our conceptions of society our conceptions of morals our conceptions of government cannot remain unchanged in other words there's a sort of link a seamless web between the elements in intellectual life and when a fundamental change like the rise of modern natural science occurs we cannot anticipate that it will be without consequences for the rest of our thinking what montesquieu represents is the first grudging attempt or if not grudging the first groping attempt to create a social science modeled upon our natural science which compares in a purely naturalistic way the different kinds of governments that actually do occur in the world this represents a fundamental break with the tradition of ancient political theory here's why think about something like plato's republic plato's republic attempts to create an ideal state a perfect government full of perfect people and it tries to find out and inquire into the sort of necessities for such a government the kind of education the kind of politics the kind of morals all the things that go into creating an ideal state an ideal society now plato himself admits that no such society ever exists here in the world the good point about it is is that it allows us to criticize the societies that we do actually find the bad part about it is is that is a utopian in the pejorative sense of the term there is nothing like plato's republic here in the world and it has a limited degree of utility for us when we wish to analyze the governments that we actually do find here in the world montesquieu wishes to take an alternative approach to political theory instead of setting up an ideal paradigm for the good society the good government montesquieu is going to look empirically at the governments that actually do exist in the early part of the 18th century and also the government cities that have existed historically he's going to take political history as a kind of empirical database for his would-be political science and he wants to talk about the way governments are rather than the way governments ought to be and this movement from an ideal government to real actual governments is very much in keeping with the development of modern natural science if we want to know the boiling point of water in a purely physical scientific way we look at it we don't idealize about it we actually examine the way water works in the regular practical world montesquieu wants to do something analogous to that for governments instead of talking about some ideal government he's going to talk about real governments so he looks through all of political history he wrote a book on the decline and greatness of the romans he wrote a number of other books in political science but the most important one that he writes is called the spirit of the laws and montesquieu's attempt here is to analyze all the different kinds of governments that do exist in practice and practice is the central concept here practicality the way the world really works is montesquieu's prime concern and prime consideration now in the spirit of the laws he tries to analyze the various kinds of government that actually do exist and he's rather skeptical and relativistic about it he holds on to certain normative elements in political science but the primary emphasis on skepticism is a rather relativistic perspective now in terms of montesquieu's immediate practical goals he's living in france the beginning part of the 18th century under an absolute monarch the king of france claims to rule by divine right which is an ancient and rather archaic conception of political legitimacy and in prac regardless of what the theory behind the french monarchy is in practice montesquiou believes it often turns out to be an unenlightened despotism that the prerogatives and the activities of the french monarch exceed what he ought to do that his behavior is an infringement upon certain rights of both the aristocracy and the people and his prime practical concern is figuring out how to impose limitations on government without undermining the possibility of political authority altogether so montesquieu is living under a divine under a divine right monarch and he has great reservations about divine right monarchy and his way of inquiring into both the particular circumstances of france and of the circumstances of all political societies is this comparative rather skeptical method now it took montesquieu some 20 years to write the spirit of the laws and over that time he did a great deal of traveling he spent several years living in england he lived in paris he lived in various italian cities he moved around the world quite a bit and he's an extremely cosmopolitan figure very witty very well read accepted into the best social circles remember that he lives in a time of aristocracy and he is himself a baron so it's very easy for him to move from one place to another to be accepted into the most influential political circles so he gets to talk politics across europe which is a great advantage and of course he has the money in the leisure which allow him to sit and reflect and spend 20 years working on something like the spirit of the laws now for those of you who have read it the spirit of the laws can be a rather intimidating book a rather formidable book it has a lot to do with the fact that it was written over the period of 20 years it is an ill organized book it is very different from something like hobbes leviathan which is organized with a beautiful bach-like precision the spirit of the laws rambles and moves from one topic to another never completely stays on one theme and is full of certain tensions and contradictions which montesquieu himself never really reconciled now in the spirit of the laws what montesquiou does is something like this he adopts a naturalistic rather scientific perspective on political history and what he finds with this is this that there are basically three different kinds of government and that these different kinds of government are characteristic of different climatic and geographic arrangements in other words there is an element of contingency to human government some governments are appropriate to small areas with relatively poor people other governments are appropriate to large territorial areas with a great deal of wealth other arrangements of wealth climate geography justify and create the necessity for different kinds of government so instead of being something like plato specifying what the one best government is montesquiou adopts the position of a social scientist saying that well different governments work with different degrees of success under different circumstances a very practical this worldly approach to political science now according to montesquieu there are three different kinds of governments which are distinguished by the kinds of geographic and climatic arrangements that make them possible and also they're distinguished by the spirit behind the laws characteristic of each kind of government there is a different notion of value there is a different conception of virtue characteristic of each of the societies each of the social structures each of the governments which he finds in practical empirical investigation of political science the first sort of government here that he finds is monarchy he happens to be living under a monarchy so it would be hard for him to miss that it makes a certain amount of sense and in the process of inquiring into monarchy he concludes that monarchies are best suited to large areas that must be kept under one centralized administration it's also suited to areas that don't have any natural boundaries since an area like that is going to be expansive by nature or a country that is in a large flat plain is likely to be expansionist by nature it is likely to be hard to control it is likely to be both wealthy and highly populated the only way of effectively administering such a government would be through a monarchy looking back in history if we were to look at something like oh i don't know the history of russia well anything as big as russia and as spread out as russia simply could not be a democracy or could not be a republic it's just too big geography and climate make that impossible so he'll account for the development of something like the tsar in russia by referring to the climate and geography of russia saying that that's what makes sense there similarly when montesquieu looks at something like the history of china he says the reason why china has had an emperor and dynasties of emperors for the last 30 centuries or so is that there's something about the place the geographic area china and the climate of china and all the naturalistic facts of life about living in china which make this kind of government the appropriate kind of government the kind that works monarchy is natural to certain areas the chances of dispensing with monarchy of moving to some other alternative is simply non-existent in a place like russia or china it can't be done another example of something like this would be something like the islamic world it's too big too spread out too flat and open to incursion from the outside for it to be a republic for it to be an aristocracy for it to be something like that only something like centralized political administration will work given those circumstances makes a certain amount of sense it's in some respects it's a very plausible argument a second kind of government that montesquieu recognizes is called despotism and he dislikes despotism despotism is the rule essentially without law one man that has complete control over society whose word is carried out in every detail who rules without political legitimacy and without any restraint on his power montesquieu very clearly dislikes this i think reading between the lines that he is talking about the king of france every once in a while but since he intended to keep his head on his shoulders he decided to phrase it as if it were a possibility that might happen somewhere else some of the time an intelligent idea he's not the only political scientist to have done this in history all right so he lived to be a ripe old age actually finished his 20-year project of writing the book and he did so because he knew how to dissimulate the problem with despotism is that instead of having honor as its main principle which is the case of monarchy and monarchy what makes society run what makes society cohere what makes all the institutions and laws and usages of a monarchic society work is the fact that people are actuated by the principle of honor that the intrinsic hierarchy that's established between people makes honor the main focus of activity the hierarchies that are created within a monarchy the showing of honor to the monarch all the laws and institutions revolve around that now let's compare that to the question of despotism in despotism the principle that makes the government work is not honor but fear this harks back to machiavelli or enter hobbs those of you that remember those lectures will note that fear is the central element in what montesquiou views as a degenerate form of government despotism now there's a problem here there are plenty of examples of despotism in the world and there are plenty of examples of such despotisms being actuated by fear you can't imagine a despotism that got by without the use of fear if you don't terrorize the people it's very hard to see how a despot will maintain himself in control here's the difficulty for montesquieu on the one hand he wants to be a purely descriptive social scientist he wants to look at the data of political history he wants to look at the societies that are excellent around him and he wants to report on his findings that's the descriptive element in montesquieu's project yet the tone of voice that he uses the choice of words that he uses when he describes despotism can leave you with no question but that montesquiou thinks despotism is a degenerate and evil form of government the difficulty is how will we recognize this normative element in montesquieu's thinking with the purely descriptive social scientific element that we also see in his project to be honest he never completely reconciles this tension there's an element of montesquieu which is clearly moralistic he dislikes despotism he thinks that a government whose main spirit is that this is the spirit of terror or the spirit of fear is a degenerate and evil set of institutions which ought to be gotten rid of on the other hand what grounds could there be in a purely descriptive social science for saying that any one of the extant governments was any better than the others despotisms work in some places some of the time what extra set of ideas what agenda is he bringing to this that allows him to make these moral judgments and then try and gloss them over as if they were matters of social scientific fact i think that montesquieu is still wedded to the earlier tradition of natural law that comes out of aquinas on his deathbed montesquieu made a deathbed conversion to catholicism he got the last rights and you get the impression that like it or not one way or another there's the echoes of christian morality the echoes of the christian conception of political order somehow sub-terrain built in a subterranean way into this theory so it never completely achieves its goal of becoming a dispassionate and morally neutral description of society the discussion of despotism can leave no doubt that he thinks despotism and evil now there's one more form of government and one more characteristic spirit that montesquieu discusses and he breaks this kind of government down into two parts the kind of government he's talking about as the third alternative is called a republic and he sees two kinds of republics aristocracies and democracies and here by democracy of course we don't mean what we may mean today by democracy he means having a government in which all none or these some non-nobles can participate more more than likely what he has in mind is something like the english system where people with certain property requirements are able to exercise the franchise it's still going to be limited to people to men it'll still be limited to people that have a certain degree of stake in society but what he means by democracy is going to be a government which allows some degree of representation which allows some degree of input from the actual common people now for democracy a democratic republic the actuating spirit is going to be virtue without virtue in montesquieu's sense democracy will very quickly break up internal social cohesion will fall apart and what you will have is the kind of disorder that sets the stage for the rise of despotism so democracies tend to do well in small isolated areas mountainous countries where there are only a few people and where there are natural geographic barriers to invasion obviously what montesquiou has in mind here is switzerland the canton system of switzerland right which has a relatively democratic structure and he thinks that the key here of making a democracy work is the fact that switzerland or countries like switzerland are small they are isolated they are hard to invade and the barrenness of the soil makes everyone more or less at a level of economic equality you don't have the enormous disparities in wealth that you find in something like france or italy countries that are wealthier because of the the wealth that comes from their soil in switzerland the barrenness the rockiness of the soil means that everyone is going to have to work for a living that there will be a sufficient sustenance for everyone but they're going to be very few people who are enormously wealthy this rough equality of economic status leads to a sort of hearty individualism right he was very influential in the ideology of the american republic right jefferson's idea of the yeoman farmer is largely derived from montesquieu's q and he thinks that in democracy if this virtue is a spirit which permeates the people who exercise the franchise and permeates the government itself that it is possible to run a democracy very efficiently and that it is possible for human felicity to develop there that it is a potentially good set of governmental rules england a place that montesquieu admires enormously is another example of a something of what he would mean by a democracy england in the early 18th century is probably not what we would mean by democracy but compared to the other political arrangements that we find in europe in the early part of the 18th century it's reasonable to describe this as a democratic system now the advantage that england has it's not the fact that it's surrounded by mountains the geographic advantage that england has is the fact that it's an island and he thinks that that is essentially determinative of its political history and because it's a relatively small population an island which is isolated from other potential invasions from other potentially dangerous cultural trends he thinks that england is another circumstance like switzerland where it is possible to create a government based upon participation by the people and still have it allow it to have that virtue which makes such a government possible anytime that a democratic system of government loses the spirit of its laws when it loses its virtue then decline sets in then we get the breakup into factions the loss of social cohesion potentially civil war and despotism the soul of a government is its spirit when it loses that characteristic spirit the government itself crumbles and we fall back into one assumes the state of nature or something like that now another kind of what montesquiou describes as a republic is an aristocracy montesquieu is an aristocrat he can't have failed to notice the significance of having a title in france during the asean regime right i mean you can't miss the importance of that so what montesquieu says is that it's also possible to have a republic based upon aristocracy based upon a hereditary aristocracy a landed aristocracy some elite group of people who represent a privileged segment of society under an aristocratic form of government the characteristic spirit of the laws the characteristic virtue or the characteristic quality which the laws need to have is not virtue which is what we need in a democracy it's not honor which is what we need in a monarchy it's moderation moderation is the is the spirit of aristocratic laws now what he means by that is something quite interesting it's not what plato means by moderation right organizing your soul and having the reasoning part run your desires all that kind of thing that's not what he has in mind what montesquieu means by moderation is that the segments of society will naturally break up into the one the few and the many this is a holdover from aristotelian political theory in other words montesquieu in some respects or occasionally because it's kind of a loose and somewhat ill-organized book in some cases seems to think that society does break up naturally into the one the few and the many and if you stop and think about the kind of governments he's sketching out here you can clearly see his debt to aristotle when he talks about monarchy we have the rule of the one when we talk about democracy in a republic we talk about rule of the many when we talk about an aristocratic republic we're talking about rule of the few now in an aristocratic republic the reason why moderation is the spirit of aristocratic laws is because what we're looking for in an aristocracy is a kind of newtonian balance of the elements of society if we have a strong and vigorous and moderate aristocracy as a dominant element in the government they will play the people off against the monarch in such a way as to create human felicity as to prevent tyranny from emerging to prevent the government from becoming oppressive such a government can sustain itself and can create the conditions for human happiness only in so far as this moderation is created insofar as the aristocracy has a certain pride of place which makes it prevent incursions by the king into the prerogatives of the aristocrats and makes and prevents the rising of the people to a level which would abolish these hierarchies between the one the few and the many so in other words the reason why moderation is the key spirit of an aristocratic society is because that's what preserves this kind of newtonian equilibrium between the natural elements in society so for a monarchy we need a certain kind of a certain kind of geography and a certain kind of people and a certain kind of wealth and a certain kind of social structure and in order to make that last in order to make that work to prevent it from lapsing over into into despotism what we need is a particular kind of spirit accompanying those institutions and laws that spirit is honor in order to make a democracy work what we need is a particular kind of geography what we need is a particular kind of people a particular kind of economy and social structure and in addition we need a particular kind of spirit actuating the the laws and institutions of such a society that spirit is virtue as soon as a democratic people loses its virtue you end up with something like a rome during the time of bread and circuses the people become debauched and they are willing to trade their suffrage away for various kinds of evil activities or evil uh compensations virtue the unwillingness to succumb to the lures of the flesh the unwillingness to sell one's vote pride in the maintenance of a free and independent and roughly equal society that's necessary to a democracy according to montesquieu aristocracy we have to have moderation we have to have the desire to keep a kind of newtonian equilibrium and also the insistence that the distinctions between the one the few and the many are natural and good for human beings many observers writers on the history of philosophy have made the observation that montesquieu is in some respects out of step with the french enlightenment because he is not as much an advocate of the rights of man freedom equality the whole program of the french revolution as later writers like rousseau or voltaire the reason why is that montesquieu represents a somewhat more skeptical more uh restrained and conservative trend in enlightenment thought he comes a little bit earlier than some of the other writers of the french enlightenment and in that respect he's a path-breaking social scientist that is trying in some respects to connect this normative element in his political science with this skeptical empirical element right and the spirit of the law says that there are a number of possible good governments this is a big change from the tradition of ancient political philosophy there is one best government in plato's republic the ideal state polity for aristotle is an ideal kind of government or an excellent kind of government montessori is willing to be to some degree skeptical he's willing to be in somebody open-handed about good governments he thinks they're good aristocracies he thinks that they're good monarchies and he thinks they're good democracies it depends on the kind of place that you that you're in and the kind of people you're dealing with which can possibly be brought into practice the only government that he seems to consistently oppose is despotism and i'll talk a little bit about the remedies for despotism at the end of the lecture but there's some further considerations here about how to connect this tradition of social science this normative and this empirical kind of trend in mont in montesquieu's thinking and what we get here is the idea that human government is a combination of human nature and arbitrary accidental contingent circumstances let me steal an example from david hume just to make this clear and then because montesquieu although he's light years away from hume in some of his tendencies human montesquiou do scare do share a sort of skeptical approach to knowledge right they're very empirical in some respects hume says that morals are natural to people in the following sense that you see people create moral judgments and moral systems all over the world it seems to be built right into people as a kind of an instinct and he makes the comparison to birds birds of the same species build their nests in more or less the same way all over the world it's clear that nest building for birds is strictly strictly a kind of instinct they don't make their choices they have to build these nests they're built that way we find in human moral systems the fact that everyone does or all societies do create moral systems do create in montesquieu's sense political systems but that unlike birds we vary our moral systems we vary our political systems to suit the place and the time that we happen to be in we don't make all our nests in the same way if we happen to be born in a very cold climate in the arctic circle where people hunt seals you'll find that the kind of houses we build for ourselves are made of snow if we find ourselves in the tropics where there is no snow you'll find that we build houses but they're built of something else well there's something analogous going on in montesquieu's conception of government if you happen to be in a place where there's a tremendous amount of scarcity and if you're living in the arctic circle and you have certain conditions of society a small number of people with rough equality you're going to create one particular kind of political system and one particular set of laws characteristic of that system if you find yourself in the tropics if you find yourself on an island if you find yourself on a vast plane of steps you may under those circumstances build yourself a different kind of house or in this case build yourself a different kind of political system the building of political systems is like the building of nests in birds it's built right into the human being all of us people have a kind of instinct to create political order we are social animals yet under certain contingent circumstances geography climate the number of people we have around us things like that the political traditions we are born into well we have to make adjustments for that so the political system we find among the eskimos is likely to be different from the political system we find from we find among the englishmen and for exactly the same reasons both the englishman and the eskimos have an instinct to create political order because we are social animals yet the different circumstances that they find themselves in make different kinds of government or different kinds of moral order or different kinds of of housing appropriate for different circumstances right so there's a there's a kind of what i might call objective relativism here which is a strange combination of terms but bear with me for a second i would say that montesquieu is a relativist insofar as he believes that human government that our laws and our governmental institutions have to be altered to suit the circumstances that we're in it would be impossible to govern the roman empire as a democracy we just couldn't get all those people together it's impossible it would be impossible to do that kind of thing given the wrong uh geographic or climatic circumstances yet even though given various circle uh climate or geographic circumstances there is something constant within human nature that makes us all create governments that makes us all create moral systems so we have this kind of tension between the two they vary in their details but basically we all have a common set of needs i think this is where he derives his condemnation of despotism i believe that he sees that as a threat to political order and that's something that a degenerate that a political order can degenerate into eventually so in every case the reason why it's so important to keep the spirit of the laws that you happen to have is because a constant threat hanging over any political organization is that it may lapse back into despotism the difficulty here is how to reconcile these two contradictory tendencies i don't think it's possible i don't think montesquieu ever did in that respect he's a kind of halfway house between the secular social science characteristic of the enlightenment and the essentially theistic social science or the theistic political science characteristic of the middle ages and of the ancient political tradition so in both cases or we in this case we have montesquieu as a kind of halfway house some commentator on montesquieu once said that he was something like the bacon of social science and that adam smith had the honor coming a generation or two later of being sort of the newton of social science it's a gradual groping towards the conception of human society which is on the one hand skeptical of the claims of divine origin skeptical claims that there are that there's only one good kind of government on the other hand it still maintains a normative element it doesn't go for a complete straightforward normative view the relativism that he holds says that yes there may be differences in how we punish murder or how we punish theft but i believe he'll hold that there is objectively a necessity for punishing theft in every society or punishing murder in every society so that is how our governments will differ there will be a part that corresponds to human nature okay and that will be the same across societies on the other hand they will differ in the way they actually implement these necessary laws and in the way these necessary laws connect with the actual accidental circumstances around them now it may sound odd that such a skeptical thinker as montesquiou would have practical and concrete recommendations for changing the governments around him in other words he thinks that there are some things that every good government ought to do and the most important of his contributions is the idea of the division of powers now locked to some extent pioneered the idea of division of powers and hobbes explicitly says that the division of powers is a terrible idea it leads to civil war so montesquieu is actually in some respects a pioneer in this idea let me see if i can explain it as it develops historically hob says outright that to divide sovereignty is to set the stage for civil war and the lapse back into the state of nature the war of all against all that's the kind of thing that we have a rational obligation to avoid that's the worst of all human circumstances now locke points out that the division of powers in society doesn't necessarily lead to civil war and in fact can be framed in such a way as it maintains a sort of equilibrium between the various interests in society and it's this equilibrium which makes possible human felicity because it makes possible liberty liberty is one of the key questions in luck we must not submit to arbitrary authority and what makes liberty possible what makes civil rights possible is the fact that all governmental power is not stuck into one sovereign the way hobbes would like it it's rather dispersed among several competing entities and it's this competition and mutual supervision that makes the freedom of the individual possible now montesquieu for all the skepticism for all his urbane cosmopolitan relativism greatly admired english government he spent several years in england while he was writing the spirit of the laws and he takes english liberty in many passages in the spirit of the laws as being some sort of high point in the development of political life it doesn't square very well with the relativism doesn't square very well with the the comparative project that he's engaged in but he can't hold back his admiration for the fact that england has the as freedom of religion religious toleration which he thinks a very good thing england has the right of freedom of expression at least in a limited extent england has at least the division of powers because he thinks that's how the english government in practice works which makes it possible for free inquiry free thought to happen he thinks this is necessary to human felicity implicitly here what we have is a criticism of french absolutism right he's very careful not to put that back in the section on absolutism but when he talks about liberty he always talks about it in the most approving terms the way in which we establish liberty is the same as it is the same as he believes it actually empirically works in england we give a certain degree of power to the house of lords we give a certain degree of power to the house of commons and we keep the one we keep the monarch around so that we can create a kind of equilibrium between them and it's this equilibrium this division of powers which makes possible what he calls english liberty the rights of the individual now the difference between montesquieu and locke and the way in which montesquieu is an extension of lock is a kind of an elaboration perhaps an improvement of lock is that lock divides powers into the legislative the executive and the federative which essentially is the part of the government that deals with foreign affairs things like treaties and making a war and stuff like that montesquieu makes a different division when he divide when he goes to the division of powers in the government he goes for the legislative the executive and the judicial and you must have heard of this before we're in washington right and the reason why you've heard of this is that montesquieu was extremely influential among the founding fathers guys like james madison and uh john adams and hamilton and all the guys all the political theorists who are most influential in the formulation of the american constitution and the creation of the american government were saturated in in lock and also very heavily influenced by montesquieu now it's kind of a difficult thing to reconcile since there's so many contradictions in montesquieu you may imagine they had all kinds of difficulties in making him work just as a practical political theory but what they were most concerned with is creating a government in which montesquieu's conception of the balance of powers was written in and in addition those of you who are familiar with the federalist papers right the papers written by jay and hamilton in order to justify and explain and get people to approve of the new constitution they talk constantly about the fact that liberty will be preserved by creating a balance of powers and at the same time this will not be an invitation to social disorder because these the government will be sufficiently powerful to maintain that equilibrium by maintaining that equilibrium we create the best possible conditions for human felicity now we have a difficulty montesquieu says that republics have to be small montesquieu says that it would be nice if a republican if a republic was an island and when we look at america east of the appalachians from georgia to maine or georgia to massachusetts we do not find a little area we find a really huge area or especially for the early for the middle part of the 18th century quite a huge area and it's not an island either it's exposed potentially to invasion montesquieu in other words would think very unlikely the project of turning the eastern seaboard of the united states into a republic so the first or at least some parts of the federalist papers are homage to montesquieu saying yes we will meet all of montesquieu's prescriptions we think he's a very sapient political writer and we'll try and incorporate his insights and then at the same time they have to turn around and say incidentally we suspect well that can't quite say suspect we know or we have good reason to believe montesquieu is wrong you can't say suspect in campaign literature you have to say we're absolutely certain of it all right so they said we're quite certain that mituskew was wrong about the small geographical extent of republics it will actually work in this republic you need not worry about the fact that factions will emerge you need not worry about the potential for civil war you need not worry that the people that we elect into the government will be so far from us that we can't control them we think that by and this is where federalist 10 comes in that different parties or different factions will break up and maintain a sort of equilibrium between them right that's in a way an answer to montesquieu's objection to the project or would-be objection to the project of creating a republic in a large geographic area now montesquieu is perhaps or one of the one of the more important and less cited writers that influence the development of american government that's his practical significance he had a somewhat conservative and somewhat pessimistic view of human nature he thought that there were limits to the degree to which we could impose one conception of government one idealization of government on the different societies in the world fortunately for us he was sufficiently skeptical so that he didn't talk very much about the founding of new societies so that the founding fathers the people that wrote the federalist papers could get away with dubious extrapolations from montesquieu that's in some respects the strong point of their their borrowings from him by separating the powers he did they did in fact create a system which maintains equilibrium for the most part is fairly resistant to civil war it has most of the qualities that montesquieu ascribed to it all right the only diff the only thing that monsta had not anticipated is the fact that it is possible for new things to happen and this is in some respects the the difficulties with an empirical method in social science it allows you it gives you good grounds for believing that what has happened in the past and what is happening in there in other parts of the world that we can expect something roughly like that to happen under similar circumstances now the problem is that sometimes as in the case of the founding fathers in america we're faced with unique circumstances circumstances that haven't been encountered before for example a series of colonies breaking away trying to form an enlightened government trying to form a government in which virtue will be maintained and which the balance of powers will guarantee individual liberty but across a wide geographic expanse here they're forced to take a leap of faith to take their chances with it fortunately for us it works out in closing there's something worth thinking about those of you who are interested in the history of the american revolution and particularly the ideology behind the formation of the american government you will find in the writings of the founding fathers a constant almost obsessive reference and re-reference to virtue political virtue we have to hold on to our virtue uh if you read something like bernard bailen's ideological origins of the american revolution or any of the federalist papers themselves the loss of virtue the fact that the english government has become corrupt the fact that this corruption is now seeping over across the atlantic into the sort of government that we have and that this is a threat to our rights a threat to our liberties a threat to human felicity that has to be nipped in the bud that's in some respects what the ideology of the american revolution and the ideology of the american constitution is all about the fact that if we are to maintain our felicity we also must put together the appropriate sort of government but taking a page from montesquieu's book if we wish to have a republican government if we wish to have a democratic element in our political life and if we wish to maintain uh an appropriate rather than a despotic sort of government we have to maintain virtue it means frugality it means a rough equality and it means a wide transmission and distribution of property which prevents anyone from becoming impoverished to the point where they would sell their vote where they would prostitute the franchise and thus open the door to tyranny this in some respects is a kind of anticipation of thomas jefferson's idealization of the yeoman farmer what thomas jefferson says and one of the most influential of the founding fathers even though he wasn't actually around for the construction of the constitution the idea that individual huma uh that individual citizens ought to have enough property to make themselves independent which will maintain their political virtue which will keep them fiercely devoted to liberty to freedom and to a rough kind of equality not a total equality in the platonic sense but a rough equality based upon the amount of work that one does that virtue is absolutely necessary to the maintenance of a republic so when the federalist party talks about the rise of democracy and the super abundance of popular feeling and what a danger that is to public virtue they are not merely mouthing a reactionary objection to the fact that their position in society is being threatened they are really going back to the best political theory that they're familiar with they're going back to the tradition of enlightened political theory that comes from montesquieu who demonstrates more than adequately that certain kinds of virtue certain a certain spirit to the law of a democracy is necessary and without it we can anticipate caesarism the descendant despotism and the breakup of what is potentially a noble experiment and what they think to be the best kind of government so when you read or if you do read the history of the united states the origins of the constitution and the development of american revolutionary ideology keep in the back of your mind the fact that montesquieu is well known to all the writers that are involved with this well known to all the members of the constitutional convention and well known to the people who put together american federalism and who whose hearts were broken by the decline of the quasi-aristocratic elements in federalist politics

Channel: Michael Sugrue

Views: 6,675

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Sugrue, Dr. Michael Sugrue, Lecture, History, Philosophy, Western Culture, Western Intellectual Tradition, Western Literary Tradition, Author, Literature, Great Minds, Montesquieu, Political Science

Id: OTFbLA1JDIU

Length: 41min 48sec (2508 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 06 2020