Past Masters
General Editor Keith Thomas
Montesquieu
Past Masters
nthony Kenny
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Judith N. Shklar
Montesquieu
Oxford
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OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1987
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© fudih N. Shklar 1987
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Bitish Libray Cataloguing in Publication Data
Shklar, Juih N.
Montesquieu.-(Past masters).
1. Montesquieu, Chales de Secondat,
baron de
I. Title II. Seies
194 B2097
ISBN -19-287649-X
ISBN -19-287648-1 Pbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Shklar, Judih N.
Montesquieu. (Past masters)
Bibliogaphy: p. Includes index.
1. Montesquieu, Charles de Seconat, baron de,
1689-1755-Citicism and intepretation. 2. Montesquieu,
Charles de Secondat, baon de, 1689-1755. De l'esprit
des lois. I. Title. II. Seies.
PQ2012.S53 1987 320.5' 092' 4 87-5785
ISBN -19-287649-X
ISBN -19-287648-1 (pbk.)
Set by Grove Gaphics
Pinted in Grat Bitain by
Biddles Ltd.
Guildford and King's Lynn
For John
Rawls
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my daughter Ruth for helping me with both
the content and the style of this book, and to my friends
Stanley Hoffmann and Stephen Holmes for their criticisms
and encouragement . I also want to thank Humaira Ahmed
for helping me prepare the manuscript . This book is based
on the Carlyle Lectures that I gave in Oxford in 1 9 8 6 and
I am much indebted to the Carlyle Tust for their invitation
and support .
Oxford
November 1 9 8 6
Contents
Abbreviations
viii
1
The making of a polymath
2
The Persian Letters: how others see us
3
Philosophical history :
the rise and decline of the Romans
1
29
49
4
The Spirit of the Laws: constraint and liberty
5
The Spirit of the Laws: necessity and freedom
6
The father of constitutions
Further reading 127
Index
132
111
67
93
Abbreviations
0. C. stands for .uvres completes de Montesquieu, edited
by nre Masson ( Paris, Les Editions Nagel, 1 95-5).
References to The Persian Letters r e to the individual
letters and are given in lower-case Roman numerals .
Romans refers to Consideations sur les causes de la
grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence, in 0. C. , vol . I .
All references t o i t are t o page numbers .
Spirit refers to L 'Esprit des lois, in 0.C., vol . I . References
are to books, given in upper-case Roman numerals,
followed by chapters in Arabic numbers .
Pensees are numbered as they appear in O. C. , vol . II.
1
The making of a polymath
Charles-Louis de Secondat , the future Baron de Montes­
quieu, was born on 19 January 1689 at the chateau of La
Brede, near Bordeaux, into a family of magistrates, soldiers,
and ecclesiastics . His reat-grandfather had been a
Protestant in the service of Henri IV, who had rewarded
him by raising his property, Montesquieu, to a barony. His
heirs returned to Catholicism and continued to prosper .
Both of Charles-Louis ' s grandfathers were presidents of the
parlemen t at B ordeaux, and his oldest uncle inherited that
office . Charles-Louis ' s father, Jacques de Secondat , became
a soldier and the boy's other paternal uncles and aunts
entered the Church . When he was in his thirties Jacques de
Secondat left the army to return home and marry Marie­
Francoise de Pesnel, an heiress of a very old noble family,
who brought him the estate of La Brede as part of her
dowry . They had four surviving children, two sons and two
daughters . Charles-Louis, the eldest, was 7 years old when
his mother died in childbirth . Her widowed husband wrote
a brief but moving account of her character for their
children . She had the mind of an astute man of business, he
told them, and had no taste for trivialitie s . Her love for her
children was exceptional and she was intensely religious .
These , clearly, were the qualities most admired in a
provincial noblewoman . Her eldest son inherited her
property and the title of Baron de la Brede, and eventually
he too was to marry a devout woman, who managed his
business affairs very capably while he was away in Paris or
travelling abroad . His brother and two sisters entered the
Church .
In keeping with the practices of the time, Charles-Louis
was put out to nurse, and spent the first three years of his
life in the family of a miller. That is where he learned to
1
Mon tesquieu
speak and he apparently never lost the local accent . Until
he was 1 1 he was tutored at home with two cousins and
then the three boys were sent to a famous school at Juilly
run by the Congregation of the Oratory . It was said to be a
modern establishment : geography, science, mathematics,
French, and French history were taught along with the
usual classical subj ects . Greek was not stressed . Jacques de
Secondat gave both his sons an expensive education. The
younger one, Jean-Baptiste, also went to Juilly and then to
the Sorbonne before assuming his ecclesiastical duties .
Charles-Louis entered the University of Bordeaux to study
law, receiving his degree in 1 708, and then went to Paris for
more legal training . He later said that his father had made
him undertake these studies, but he seems to have been a
willing and very diligent pupil. There are six large note­
books filled with notes in his hand on Roman, French, and
local law, as well as on cases that he had attended while he
was n Pari s . He was being prepared for a career as a high
magistrate, s ince his uncle had no surviving sons and would
therefore leave his title and office to his eldest nephew .
State offices were a form of property, and as such were
meant to stay in families. The ecclesiastical uncle also
resigned his benefice in favour of Jean-Baptiste, his younger
nephew. Even with these expectations the two boys
received an unusually good education. Most of the new
magistrates knew almost no law, because the university
required no examinations and the parlement's own
qualifying test was a joke. All one needed to become a
magistrate was to belong to a good family, and to be rich
and Catholic .
When his father died in 1 7 1 3 Montesquieu returned
home, took possession of his estates, and, as was expected
of him, looked around for a wife . Two years later he and
Jeanne de Lartigue were married in a very quiet ceremony .
She came from a suitable family, but was a practising
Calvinist and continued to adhere to her faith in spite of the
real dangers and disabilities that this involved. We know
2
The makin $ of a polymath
n othing more about her, except that she was the mother of
Montesquieu ' s children - a son and two daughters . There
are good reasons for believing that Montesquieu was not a
faithful husband .
Until he published his novel, The Persian Letters, in
1 72 1 , Montesquieu' s conduct seems to have been entirely
conventional for a man of his class and fortune . He had
inherited his uncle' s office in 1 7 1 6, and as he had not yet
reached the required age to assume it, he had to ask for a
special dispensation which was granted, as usual, for a fee .
He was now a fairly wealthy man. His uncle had left him
some valuable property and the office of presiden t a motier
was a considerable investmen t . Like most of the local
nobility he was keenly interested in developing his estates .
For a provincial city Bordeaux was a lively and com­
mercially extremely active place . It was unusually
cosmopolitan because the wine trade brought a lot of
foreign businessmen to the city . There had once been a
large Protestant population which had suffered horribly
during the religious wars, and whose remnants were in
constant danger during Louis XIV ' s persecutions . At the
time of the Fronde the notables of the region had joined in
the rebellion, but by the eighteenth century calm had
returned to Bordeaux . Its nobility fell into three groups.
The old 'nobility of the sword' were neither rich nor
distinguished and lived in sleepy little towns . There was a
small group of newly ennobled local magistrates, who
played a significant part in local politics but not in the
social hierarchy of the city . The people who really mattered
economically and socially belonged to the ' nobility of the
robe ' , like Montesquieu . They held all the high offices and
owned most of the land. Almost all the vineyards were in
their possession and they constantly increased them at the
expense of their tenants, who were driven off the best land .
These noblemen were, moreover, not only growers, but
were actively involved in every aspect of the wine trade .
Many also invested in the export and import trades
3
Mon tesquieu
including the slave traffic, without loss of social standing .
They were generally far less interested in their feudal dues
than in expanding the market for their produce and in
increasing their commercially valuable holdings . Their
relations with the government in Paris were as a result
often acrimonious, since they resisted any effort to raise
taxes on vineyards, to limit production, or to protect small
growers . Montesquieu was an active member of this
commercial aristocracy, and indeed wrote a pamphlet
against the government ' s plans to regulate the local
vineyards. Whatever these members of the French
aristocracy may have been, they were not poor, indolent, or
dull.
The parlemen t of Bordeaux, run by the nobility of the
robe, had a stormy history of constant conflict with the
Crown and its chief administrative representative, the
intendant of the province . They also quarrelled with the
city council . Their main responsibilities were judicial, but
they had enough administrative functions to exacerbate
these cronic disputes. The parlements were also still
expected to register royal decrees and had the right to
address remonstrances to the king, but these privileges had
ceased to be meaningful, since the king and his ministers
regularly disregarded them . As gestures they only permitted
the parlements to maintain the fiction that they were the
guardians of the ancient French constitution.
Internally the parlement of Bordeaux was organized in a
strict hierarchy. At the top was the president, who was
appointed by the king and who both represented the Crown
in the parlement and spoke for the parlement as a whole to
the rest of the official world. Right below him were nine
presiden ts a mortier ( so called because of the hats they
wore ) , who acted for him in his absence. Montesquieu was
a member of this group . B elow them were four lesser
presidents and eighty-four councillor s . With the exception
of the presidency every one of these offices could be bought,
sold, leased, or inherited. The price depended on the
4
The making of a polmath
prestige of the office, which was its main attraction, since
the financial returns on the investment were meagre,
coming mostly out of the fees paid by plaintiffs . The work
was, however, not demanding. Barely six months a year
were spent in listening to cases, and litigants were not well
served. Justice was slow and uncertain . A great deal of time
and energy was consumed by internal bickering, mainly
about points of precedence, which the men of the robe took
very seriously . Their judicial work was conducted in five
specialized chambers . Montesquieu presided over the
Tounelle, the criminal division, throughout the eleven
years of his presidency. There he administered sinister
prisons in which the accused were held while they awaited
trial, and took part in the infliction of torture, which was
a normal part of criminal investigations . He also meted
out the usual punishments of execution, deportation to
criminal colonies, and service in the galleys . We do not
know what he thought about these practices while he was
engaged in them, but when he later pleaded for the reform
of the criminal law and an end to torture and brutal
punishments, he spoke with the voice of someone who had
a direct knowledge of these subjects .
Montesquieu does not seem t o have been on the best
of terms with his colleagues in the parlement. He was
frequently absent and got into arguments about work
loads . Boredom may have troubled him too . Procedure
particularly eluded him, which annoyed him because he
had noticed that even very stupid people could remember
its rules easily. On the positive side, his standards of
judicial conduct were high, and he claimed that on the
whole he had lived up to them . We certainly know that
even as a young man Montesquieu knew a lot of law, more
probably than most of the other magistrates, but his
interest °in it was obviously scholarly, not practical . His
correspondence indeed makes it clear that the Academie of
Bordeaux, far more than its parlemen t, was the real centre
of his social and intellectual life .
5
Mon tesquieu
Local academies were appearing in many towns in France
at the time, and Bordeaux' s learned society was neither
unique nor particularly distinguished, except for having
Montesquieu as its leading member. Voltaire ' s unkind
remark, that provincial academies were like nice girls who
never caused anyone to talk about them, was perfectly true .
The Academie of Bordeaux had begun as an iformal
literay and musical society, but when Montesquieu was
elected to it in 1 7 1 6 it had already received a royal patent
and had also turned its attention to the natural sciences.
Montesquieu heartily approved of that move, since he
thought that such a body could do nothing worthwhile for
literature but might well make useful contributions to
science . To that end he endowed a prize for anatomy, the
noble patron of the Academie, the due de Force, having
already provided one for physics . There were nine full
members when he joined, all local notables, and some of
them remained his best as well as his oldest friends . He was
to be the director of the Academie for four terms and he
continued to take a genuine interest in its affairs long after
he had ceased to attend its meetings . At one time he had
hoped that the intellectual life of the provinces would not
be inferior to that of Paris, but in fact no single work of
distinction emerged from the Academie of Bordeaux, and in
retrospect one sees that creativity may not have been the
real purpose of its sessions . They served to introduce the
local elites to the totally new world of modern science .
The organization of the Academie was a mirror of the
social structure of Bordeaux . Its regular, or ' ordinary' ,
members were all notables of the parlement. Below them
were a larger number of associates and then aspirants, each
lower down in the social ladder, but they were often
intellectually quite distinguished . Most of the members
were genuinely enthusiastic amateur scientists, well read
and even learned in .s ome cases. They took their reports to
their fellow members very seriously, and gave out prizes
only after careful deliberations . In his capacity as director
6
The making of a polmah
Montesquieu was obliged to make summaries of and report
on all the papers submitted for these prize competitions .
For his personal development , and ultimately that of
France, it is significant that there was a certain tension in
these arrangements which was at least potentially
radicalizing . While the inner life of the Academie was
rigidly hierarchical and traditional, no attention at all was
paid to the social standing of the scientists who sent papers
to it . They were judged entirely on their intellectual merits .
One way to deal with this mixture of social exclusion and
intellectual openness in a society in which everyone was
meant to serve the same ends, was to stress the social
usefulness of the Academie ' s work. Its members were
serving the public good by encouraging the sciences and by
promoting morally and socially useful studies . The notion
of social utility is, however, not without its ambiguities
either . For as a measure of social worth it bears no intrinsic
relation to ancestry and hereditary social standing. Like
scientific accomplishment it is wholly a matter of personal
achievements, not of family rank . Both science and utility,
moreover, look to the future and not to the pas t . Results,
not origins, matter. As patrons of science the full acade­
micians stood on a shaky bridge between the social habit s
of a caste society and their new values o f individual
achievement and utility . That science stood outside the
prevailing constraints of social hierarchies and political
authority was a doctrine that Descrtes had already
promoted, and its acceptance by the provincial academies
all over France was one of his major legacies . The very
nature of their enormous admiration for Descartes, how­
ever, also had its ethical complexities . Montesquieu read a
paper to the Academie that was very revealing in this
respect . He began by praising Descartes ' s system as
immortal, grand in its simplicity and in the perfection of its
proofs. Descartes had been the master of the critical
method and had dispelled the errors of the old philosophy .
Nevertheless, he had been proved wrong on many particular
7
Mon tesquieu
points and future generations would surely go far beyond
him. This did not, however, in any way diminish his glory;
on the contrary, it only showed that he had forged the
arms which were turned against his errors . He had taught
all posterity to accept nothing on trust, even his own
philosophy . This was a very new view of human greatness .
Great men used to be praised for living up to the example
of their illustrious ancestors or to a classical, static model
of a noble character. Human greatness was now to be found
in the future benefits of a life ' s work and it was a matter of
utility . Scientists were dignified by their contribution to an
ever-changing, collectively augmented body of knowledge ,
and it was very much to their credit if they helped their
successors to prove them wrong . To be self-effacing in this
way had nothing to do with personal modesty . It was a
new, dynamic vision of human greatness . These ideas were
being promoted with particular energy by Fontenelle, the
permanent secretary of the Academie des Sciences in Paris,
whom Montesquieu had met there . This inherently
dynamic and radical ethic cannot have been easily absorbed
by the provincial academicians and it jostled uneasily side
by side with their inherited social beliefs . Montesquieu
only very gradually abandoned the more traditional out­
look, and for years these two irreconcilable attitudes
competed for his moral allegiance . His chronic state of
doubt and sense of the multiplicity and diversity of human
beliefs surely owed something to the clash of ethical
commitments in his own mind .
Montesquieu not only wrote comments on the work of
contestants for the Academie; he read works of his own
before it and also made himself the spokesman of its ethical
aspirations . When in 1725 he presented 'A Discourse on the
Motives which Ought to Encourage us to Pursue the
Sciences ' , he had already come to his most fundamental
and enduring conviction : that science is our best moral
medicine. Science cures us of destructive prejudices and
prevents their recurrence . It also makes us happy, because
'8
The making of a polymath
we are bound to feel a profound self-satisfaction as we
improve the quality of our minds and become more and
more intelligent . We are, moreover, naturally moved by
curiosity and it calls us to the pursuit of science. Not
only does science make us individually more rational, it
also makes us useful as we contribute our brick to the
building of a great intellectual edifice, which is gratifying .
The social and economic usefulness of the sciences is
another incentive to engage in research. It will generate
new commodities, more commerce, navigation, and other
sources of wealth. Medicine, navigation, astronomy, and
geography had already benefited from the work of
scientists, and would continue to do so. Who would not
want to join them in efforts that left mankind so much
better off than before? Finally, ignorance was dangerous .
Who would care to suffer the fate of the hapless American
Indians, who lacked the technology to defend themselves
against the murderous atttacks of the Spaniards? This was
a perfect summary of the aspirations of the provincial
academicians and it validated their procedures and
activities, at least in their own eyes . The Academie had
certainly a more than purely intellectual value for
Montesquieu . He saw it as a ' temple ' of peace in a world
that was too often at war. It was the one place where
criticism had replaced violence .
Sometimes Montesquieu entertained great ambitions for
the Academie . He once even proposed that it undertake an
enormously difficult natural history of the ancient and
modem world . These proposals came to nothing, but they
reveal the extent of Montesquieu' s scientific hopes. Like
other members he reported on papers and discussed subjects
which he understood only poorly, such as the causes of the
echo, the weight of bodies and their transparency,
meteorological questions and anatomical observations, but
the information he acquired in the process was evidently
important and even inspiring to him . Without the
proceedings of the provincial academies he, his fellow
9
Montesquieu
members, and others like them all over France would not
have known nearly as much about scientific thinking and
work . Irresistibly they were being pulled into the modern
age. On the whole, although Montesquieu was occupied
with its affairs to the end of his days, the Academie of
Bordeaux probably did much more for him than he did for
it .
Great though his hopes and admiration for science were,
Montesquieu was not always optimistic about its future .
Like many of his contemporaries, he feared that the great
age of discoveries was over. That did not, of course,
diminish the moral dignity of science or its social use­
fulness, but it was a very real worry . nd it may well have
been justified by the lack of any proress in the life sciences
in the first half of the eighteenth century . After a prolonged
period rich in spectacular but futile speculations and
disputes, they seemed to have reached a dead end. Medicine
was in a particularly unpromising state. No intelligent
person believed that physicians could cure any diseases .
B iology was overrun with amateurs who engaged in random
observations and whose sense of evidence was poor or
wholly non-existent . Montesquieu was in these respects no
more competent than other gentlemanly laymen. He
owned several microscopes and looked at the organs of
various animals through them, and then wrote up what he
thought he had seen . His reading was eclectic, and he
disliked and knew nothing about mathematics and physics .
So while he knew many of the leading scientists of his day
well, no one ever suggested that he be elected to the highly
professional Academie des Sciences. Nevertheless, when
Buffon was asked to list the greatest men, he named Bacon,
Newton, Leibniz, Montesquieu, and, modestly, himself.
This was not an isolated judgement . In his eulogy of
Montesquieu, the mathematician d' Alembert was to speak
of him as 'a Newton in his science ' , and the Swiss botanist
Charles Bonnet made the same comparison . The cele­
brated biologist Maupertuis spoke of him in similar
10
The making of a polmah
term s . These men of science had some reservations about
one or another aspect of Montesquieu' s writings, but they all
saw him as one of their own , and for good reasons . He spoke
in their vocabulary and he shared many of their most
pressing intellec tual perplexities . Among these was the
transition, not yet wholly complete, from theology to an
entirely natural science of man. This was especially urgent
in the movement from Descartes ' s metaphysical dualism of
soul and body to a naturalistic human psychology grounded
in physiology . Instead of body and soul, and the moral and
physical determinants of behaviour as effects of the divine
will, biologists wanted to talk only of the natural causes of
human development and dysfunction. They kept the old
terms, but emptied them as much as possible of any
supenatural implications . The language of causality in
general had to be altered as well . The words remained the
same, but their meaning was changed . General and
occasional causes were no longer modes of God ' s creative
activity, but now referred to natural causes, some of which
were enduring while others were mere accidents . In the
scholarly medical literature especially, these terms were
applied to the deep causes of diseases as contrasted to their
surface symptoms . In a comment on a medical paper by one
of the members of the Academie, Montesquieu specifically
praised the author for seeking out the general causes of
diseases rather than just discussing particular cases .
Eventually he was to make the new language of natural
causality the focus of his proj ect as a political historian. It
was this part of his work that drew the admiration of the
natural scientists . He had, one of them wrote in a letter,
discovered the laws of the mental world as Newton had
found those of the material universe, and it was a
comparable achievement .
If it is absurd to claim that Montesquieu was a serious
natural scientist, he nevertheless learned from the
biologists, and especially from medical texts, what he
needed to know in order to develop a science of man as a
11
Mon tesquieu
social being . The very core of his political theory depended
on ideas about the ways in which the physical environ­
ment, especially the climate, impinges upon human
character and political institutions, and he built it from the
first out of materials he had gathered in his reading of the
works of physicians . It was they who gave his mind its
particular cast . Like them he wanted to develop a science
capable of identifying and describing the course of diseases,
except that he was looking not at physical illnesses but at
social collapse and the deadly condition of despotism . On
the road to his life ' s work he had therefore to learn how to
think scientifically about the functions and failures of the
human body, or ' our machine ' , as he and his favourite
authors called it. On the whole he tended to favour the
' vitalists' among the physicians, those who believed that
the body was in a constant state of ' ferment', or chemical
interaction between its liquid substances, or ' humours ' .
When an imbalance occurred between these, disease set in .
In keeping with this outlook, Montesquieu sided with the
more radical ' epigenecists ' in the raging argument about
human generation . The orthodox theory of reproduction in
the early eighteenth century was ' preformation', that is,
that either the male sperm or the female ovum contained
a ' gem' which was a minuscule but complete human
being. Contact between the two sexes merely started its
growth off, but God had already created all mankind once
and for all time . A few distinguished biologists, however,
rejected this theory in favour of the notion that male and
female fluids stimulated by heat fortuitously combined to
form an embryo . The chief merit of this view was that it
dispensed with divine intervention altogether, and also
accounted adequately for the fact that children inherit the
characteristics of both parents . Preformationists thought
that intra-uterine influences accounted for that . The
environment in fact played an enormous part in both these
theories, because both believed in the heritability of social
characteristics. Epigenesis, however, also made great and
12
The making of a polymath
genuine biological changes seem possible . Montesquieu
actually believed that new plant and animal species
might appear on earth as a result of different mixtures of
liquids .
Montesquieu at times thought that the 'absent God ' ,
mentioned in the Bible, was completely irresponsible ,
since He had abandoned us with nothing but a blind faith
to guide us . In fact, he also thought that God had created
and withdrawn from the world, and had been replaced by a
spontaneous, self-generating, and self-maintaining nature .
It was a notion that had not only a scientific but also an
aesthetic appeal for him . He wanted to think of nature as
dynamic and ever-changing . ' Everything is animated,
everything is organized ' , he wrote in his notebook, and
among nature ' s marvels none was more stunning than the
human body . ' When one observes the immutable laws that
are followed in this little empire, and considers these
numberless parts that all work together for the common
good, these animal spirits so imperious and yet so obedient,
these movements so submissive and yet so free at times;
this will that commands like a queen, and obeys like a
slave, these well-regulated periods, this machine so simple
in its actions and so complex in its springs; this constant
renewal of energy and life; this miracle of reproduction and
generation, and always new relief for new needs : what
a grand idea of wisdom and economy!' Here is nature ' s
masterpiece . Nature is creative, self-regenerating, admir­
able, beautiful, exciting, and even lovable . To contemplate
and understand it is the most edifying activity open to us .
It allows us to participate in an expansive and transforming
experience . Far from condemning us to an Epicurean
melancholy, the rise and fall of whole species merely
reveals the endless fecundity of God ' s original design . That
may be why, rather late in life, Montesquieu wrote to
Bishop Warburton that to attack revealed religion was
merely to dispute some particular doctrine, but that to
reject natural religion was to assault religion as such, which
13
Montesquieu
could be socially dangerous and contrary to our natural
sentiments .
The interaction between mind and body was a part of
every physiological controversy of the time . It was also of
the umost interest to moral and political philosophy . Both
sides of the generation controversy, for instance, explained
birth defects as the result of something that had upset the
mother during pregnancy . Behind all these disputes stood
Descartes ' s unbridgeable dualism . Montesquieu tended to
join those scientists who modified Descartes with a notion
of two souls, one rational, the other sensitive. The latter
controls the ' animal spirits ' which stimulate the body ' s
motions and carry the messages o f the senses t o the mind .
The ' humours ' also impinge upon the sensitive soul and
through them so does the entire physical environment ,
especially the climate . Indeed, the entire life-style of a
patient affects his case and gives it a personal character, be­
cause physical and moral causes are inextricably combined
in both human health and illness . The most important
change in usage here was to turn from body and soul to the
physical and moral causes of conduct, thus bypassing the
Cartesian and religious soul altogether . Montesquieu at
once appreciated this intellectual strategy, though he was
not a radical materialist . To be sure he was sometimes
tempted to follow the most materialist medical writers who
claimed that the soul was composed of infinitely small
particles and that human beings could be fully understood
in terms of extension and motion . More generally he
rejected this proposition because it did not sufficiently
distinguish men from animals . Montesquieu ' s real interest
in the relations between mind and body simply was not
philosophical . What he wanted to know was how physical
and moral causes affected the development of the
characters of individuals and groups over long periods of
time and how they changed . Like the medical writers, he
needed a theoy that would explain the causes of both well­
being and suffering, not speculations about the essence of
14
The maing of a polmath
the soul . In this as in so many other ways he joined the
culture of the life scientists, though for purposes of his
own . He certainly believed, as Hippocrates had, that a
knowledge of medicine was an essential part of a good
education .
Montesquieu' s personal communications to the
Academie were not on scientific subjects, but on history
and political theory . He was remarkably constant in his
intellectual interests . Most of his earliest jottings and
essays were to reappear in a more developed form in his
mature works . The library at La Brede and his own and his
secretaries ' notes show him to have been an avid reader
throughout his life . In addition to the sciences, he was a
careful reader of the ancient and modern historians and
philosophers . (Plutarch was a special favourite. J He kept up
with current literature in all its genres and was particularly
interested in the reports of travellers . Geography and
ethnography obviously fascinated him . Among modem
authors, Descartes was a real presence, but the Essays of
Montaigne left the deepest recognizable traces on many
of his pages, and Montesquieu' s contemporaries were quick
to recognize the affinity . Above all, he simply loved
information, and he was a tireless collector of bits and
pieces of fact , such as clippings from the English and Dutch
newspapers, which he filed away . All this reading at first
inspired reflections which were quite conventional, as
indeed he seemed to be in his early years in Bordeaux . It was
not until he was over 30 years old that the originality of his
mind suddenly found expression in a sensational novel .
Among his earliest literary plans was a treatise on duties,
in imitation of C icero ' s Offices, but he gave it up because
it seemed too vague. He continued to admire Cicero ' s
character and religious rationalism, but did not choose to
copy him . The most substantial part of the work on duties
remaining is a section on the politiques, that is, statesmen
who tended to be Machiavellian opportunist s . Montesquieu
did not object to them on moral grounds, but he found them
15
Montesquieu
intellectually shallow . They cudely overestimated the
possibility of predicting and planning for the future . The
real causes of significant historical events lie far in the past
and are too obscure for us to be able either to promote or to
avert them . Thus Charles I of England was certainly an
unusually incompetent ruler, but no degree of intelligence
could have prevented the storm that engulfed him, because
its origins went back to the policies of the first Tudors .
Montesquieu was inclined to agree with Thucydides that
mediocrities make the best statesmen, because they are
not likely to enter upon bold and ruinous adventures .
Machiavelli and his heirs were too prone t o take unwise
risks . Montesquieu' s moral tone was subdued in this case,
but it became more strident in an essay on sincerity, also
written for the Academie . To practise a false politeness in
private life, he noted, deprives us of the possibility of
genuine friendship; but his real target was public flattery at
the royal court. This was an enduring object of his loathing .
A sincere man at court would be like a free man among
slaves. Clearly Montesquieu was a fairly disaffected
aristocrat throughout his life . Among these moral essays
there is one on reputations, which reveals Montesquieu ' s
early interest in social change. Reputations, he observed,
are entirely dependent upon the values of a given time and
place . If one longs for fame, one must know exactly what
the spirit of one ' s age happens to be at that moment .
Finally, he tried his hand at writing double lives in the
manner of Plutarch, but that seems to have been a casual
diversion.
The most substantial essays of Montesquieu ' s Bordeaux
years were on public finance and universal monarchy, and
both touched upon one of the central political preoc­
cupations of his life : the structure of empires generally and
the futility and danger of wars of imperial conquest
particularly. One of these papers , on the wealth or, to be
exact, the impoverishment of Spain, was to become a part
of The Spirit of the Laws in virtually unaltered form . In
16