"The Setting of Part III of De l’esprit des lois," presented at the Cincinnati Romance Language and Literature Conference, University of Cincinnati (May 12, 1983)
by Gordon Welty
Wright State University
Dayton, OH, 45435 USA
L’esprit des Lois, c’est la propriete -N. Linquet
The structure of Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois has been the object of much scholarly discussion. Some have simply denied that the work possesses unity. For instance, Carl Becker has stated of De l’esprit des lois that "everynoe has noted the fact that it is not systematic" and goes so far as to call Montesquieu’s great work "a book of disconnected reflections – a book of essays really." /1/ We respectfully disagree with Professor Becker, for reasons we will sketch. This is one aspect of setting, the aspect of form: How are the six parts of De l’esprit des lois situated within the overall structure of the work.
Montesquieu’s analysis of slavery in De l’esprit des lois was a nodal point in European intellectual and political thought. Yet it has received little attention since Russell Jameson’s Montesquieu et l’esclavage (1911). This involves another aspect of setting, that of content. Because Part III of De l’esprit des lois incorporates Montesquieu’s discussion of slavery in particular, and more generally addresses the setting of human action in society. Recent scholarship has greatly advanced our understanding of the unity and structure of Montesquieu’s work, and this permits as well as demands a reconsideration of the topic.
From the time of Aristotle if not archaic Theognis, the Greek, the Roman, the Medieval and finally the Renaissance anthropological conceptions of man presupposed his natural location, his unity in time and space. The exemplar of this was the citizen (polites) and his private property in land (ousia). The "man of substance" (kalos kagathos) was the autarchic landholder. Less substantial men may have possessed moveable property, may have pursued a trade, etc. But they were not typically afforded full citizenship in classical Greece. Finally, the insubstantial were the propertyless, scarcely better than slaves./2/
This is not the occasion to trace the lineage or the full significance of this conception, this world-view if you will; suffice it to say that this ubiquitous doctrine of natural law cannot be understood apart from this anthropology, this fetishization of the land. Aristotle’s doctrine of proportional justice presupposes it; Aquinas’ frequent reference to the medieval polis is, in this light, somewhat less of an anachronism, since the polis can be understood less as a historically specific institution than as the idea of the polity of these men of substance.
By the eighteenth century this anthropological conception was waning in the face of newer forms of property. These were industrial forms whereby the man of substance would come to be the nineteenth century’s "captain of industry."
Both the older conception and the emerging world-view were forms of individualism./3/ Where the individual of the older world-view was conceived as a predicate of the land, the individual of the newer conception was conceived as the nexus of social relations.
The emerging world-view tended to relational rather than predicative, whether finding expression in the dialectical relations of Hegel’s Enzykopaedie or in the positive relations of Comte’s Systeme. Early intimations of these new world views can be found in Le Nevue de Rameau of Diderot, in Rousseau’s First and Second Discourse, or in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois (1748).
In Montesquieu we find not only intimations of that relational mode of thought which we have come to recognize as peculiarly modern, but peculiarly modern topics as well. We need only mention Montesquieu's concern for the inhumanity of chattel slavery and the problem of the status of women, themes which we again find fully linked in the mid-nineteenth century in the thought of, say, the Grimke sisters of South Carolina and now in our contemporary writers./4/
While it has been suggested by Becker and others that Montesquieu's De l'esprit des Lois is amorphous, recent scholarship has established the integrity of this text. At the level of the totality, the work has six parts. The initial two parts delineate the several forms (especes) of government (cf. l964, Books II-VII). The locus of these forms is public space; their competence, public action. Much of Montesquieu's discussion in these two parts addresses the location, permeability, and significance of the boundary between this public space and what is as yet only implicitly personal space (cf. also Hegel, l952, # 273). Public space is the irreducible sphere of action which is necessary for the maintenance of the community; it includes the classical economists' space of collective goods, etc.
Next, Part III delineates the space for social action of civil society; this is constituted not only by climate, but by terrain and instruments (i.e. the various forms of slavery) as well. As the locus of civil society, this is a privatized space although this is only implicitly so in Montesquieu's thought; finally, this is a space which finds its specification under the several regimes discussed in Part I. We examine this space in some detail in the next section of this essay. Parts IV and V of De l'esprit des Lois consider commerce and religion, respectively. The concluding Part VI alone appears to consist of appended materials.
Let us give an illustration of Montesquieu's relational thought. In Book XXVI, which amounts to an overview which may have been intended as an Introduction to the entire volume, Montesquieu distinguishes divine law from human (positive) law. He indicates the object of his concern in this volume to be the positive law (cf. also l964, Book XXIV, l). Thus, one of the traditional subjects, the divinity, of which positive law and social institutions were understood to be predicates, was excluded from Montesquieu's discourse.
In that same Book, Montesquieu distinguishes several types of positive law, including the law of nations (le droit des gens) which interrelates sovereigns as peers (i.e. relates them "horizontally"), the political law (le droit politique) which hierarchially (i.e. "vertically") interrelates governors and their governed, the civil law (le droit civil) which horizontally interrelates the several units of the governed, and finally the domestic law (le droit domestique) which interrelates the members of each family or household. This relational conception of the space of law can be displayed as follows.
[Figure I]
In Book II, Montesquieu presents his famous taxonomy of forms (especes) of government, at the level of discourse of le droit politique. Much of the remainder of Parts I and II of his work can be understood in terms of the correlatives of this taxonomy, at the other levels of discourse (e.g. the status of women is discussed at le droit domestique level). In Book III, he indicates the motive which corresponds to each form. Montesquieu's taxonomy and the corresponding motives can be displayed as follows.
[Figure II ]
The elements of this taxonomy are "concrete types" (e.g. historical China, historical Rome, etc.) As Professor Meek has judiciously pointed out of the eighteenth century thinkers, including of course Montesquieu, "their desire to make theories and generalizations correspond with the historical facts (so far as this was humanly possible) amounted to something of a passion."/5/ By contrast, the Procrustean methodologies of French and English Positivism, Germanic Neo-Kantianism, etc. were quite ready to complement the deficiencies of their radical phenomenalism by the artifice of the "ideal typology" which makes up in fiction (the "ideal type") what is lacking in fact./6/ In general, Comtean Positivism or Cassirer's Neo-Kantianism can appropriate Montesquieu's "concrete types" and his social taxonomies to their own ideal typical thought only by wilfully ignoring this elementary distinction./7/ In particular, such appropriation also flies in the face of Montesquieu's explicit disclaimers against ideal typification, such as "On n'est pas toujours oblig de prendre les voies extrmes" (l964, Book V, 7).
Thus, on the one hand, Montesquieu's taxonomy which locates the species in terms of "moderation," etc., is not an "ideal typology" in the Comtean positivistic sense, although the attempts of such Positivists as E. Durkheim and Althusser to identify with Montesquieu are understandable. On the other hand, Montesquieu's taxonomy anticipates later evolutionary conceptions of society, e.g. that of Hegel's Philosophy of History of l820 in so far as despotism is represented as the species closest to the state of nature and the republican forms as the most developed forms./8/ This anticipation is reflected in Montesquieu's increasingly dialectical representation of the forms.
Despotism, to begin with, is mechanically conceived. The despot is straightforwardly juxtaposed to the subjects in an antagonistic tension. Montesquieu then turns from the despotic form of government and represents the monarchial form in its dialectics of exteriority. The king, the nobility, and the subjects constitute a triad and are dynamically interrelated through the formation and dissolution of coalitions. In modern game theoretic terms, the despotic form is a sum-zero two-person game: if one party wins, the other loses. The monarchial form is a cooperative n-person game: there is no fixed amount of welfare to be distributed; through appropriate cooperative arrangements, the welfare of all can be increased./9/ Moreover, there are no fixed alliances in those cooperative endeavors in the monarchy; through shifting alliances the distribution of welfare can enhance the relative benefit to this and then that element of the triad.
Consider then the republican forms. These are represented in the fully dialectical analysis of the complex totality of internal and external relations. The citizenry and the constitution make up the res publica. The legislating citizens (the thesis, if you will) effect the Law (the antithesis), generating the law-abiding citizenry (the synthesis) who love their country and its "living" laws.
Two theoretical points follow from this analysis. First, the "natural" territorial size of the country is inversely related to the increasingly dialectical composition of these forms (cf. l964, Book VIII, 20). As social interaction intensifies from despotism to the democratic republic, the potential territorial extension of the country declines.
Second, Montesquieu has established a rudimentary distinction between public space and personal space in Part I of his great work. These spaces variously interrelate: under despotism, the severely privatized "public" space wholly interpenetrates the personal space of the subjects. The "immoderate" consequences of such circumstances, e.g. general slavery, are appalling to Montesquieu. He traces them all back to the despot's proprietorship of all the land; there is no land in freehold in the despotism (l964, Book V, 14; Bk. VI, l; also Bk. XIV, 6). Individual proprietorship of land was promoted by the thinkers of the Enlightenment, allegedly against Asiatic despotism. It was actually promoted, however, as a bastion of personal space against the centralizing tendencies of European absolutism on the one hand and those of maturing capitalism on the other. This defense of proprietorship is the correlative of Montesquieu's other and more famous bastion against centralization, the "intermediate powers."
Montesquieu continues to the effect that the interpenetration of "public" into personal space is lessened under the several "moderate" regimes, reaching a minimum in the democratic republic where the property of the citizen is inviolable and where, in matters of civil law, the "public" comes to be treated just like an individual citizen (cf. also l964, Book XXVI, l5).
Thus, Montesquieu's very representation of the forms of government in Parts I and II reflects the decline of the predicative and the rise of the relational mode of social thought. This changing world-view included, of necessity, changes of the several aspects or moments of the world-view itself. Particularly germane to Montesquieu's concern were the moments of agent and patient, location and time, etc.; that is the fundamental characteristics or "forms of being" of collective and individual human activity which had been recognized, for instance, by the classical dramatists. By Montesquieu's time, however, those characteristics could no longer be conceived in the limiting, "classical" sense of the Aristotelian dramatic unities, the sense of Sir Philip Sidney in the Apologie for Poetrie of l595, Pierre Cornielle in Des Trois unitis, and Nicolas Boileau in L'Art poetique of l674. The decline of the classical anthropological conception of man in the face of new forms of property had already been reflected in Elizabethan drama, in the tragedies of Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare, in their disregard for the dramatic unities, in their undeniable dramatic success. Just as this came to be recognized in severteenth and eighteenth century France, so the relational characterizations of human activity tended to sublate the Aristotelian limitations.
In the next section, we consider in some detail Part III of Montesquieu's De l'esprit des lois. This attention is warranted, first, to dispel the frequently repeated charge that Montesquieu was simply a "climatologist" and, second, to highlight that he delineates the space of social action of civil society in this part his work, a conception of space which is quite important for the history of social thought. This space is conditioned by circumstances of climate, terrain, instruments, etc. on the one hand, as well as by the "Lois" of the several species of government on the other.
In Part III, Montesquieu sets the stage for his discussion of two of the most general of human activities. In our contemporary parlance these have been called "universal" social processes./10/ These are commercial and religious activities, treated extensively in Parts IV and V, respectively. Montesquieu sets this stage in terms of the passive (or "natural") elements of the social order: the soil, the instruments, and the climate. These are scenery and stage-props, if you will, of the drama of human activity. Prominent among the instruments of human activity are the three forms of slavery: chattel slavery, domestic slavery, and political slavery.
The initial Book of Part III discusses climate. This is a venerable topic, having been discussed by Hippocrates in his Peri aeros (l6, 23) and by Aristotle, in his Politics (l327 b 24 ff), both of whom observed peoples of cold climates to be spirited but lacking in intelligence, those of Asia to be intelligent but lacking in spirit, etc./11/ Montesquieu himself had already written on this topic in his "Essai sur les causes..." (which remained unpublished until l892).
The next three Books of Part III discuss the three forms of slavery. While these three books nominally refer to the relationships of slavery to climate, their titles are somewhat misleading in this regard. Book XV, on Civil Slavery (our "chattel slavery"), makes little reference to the effects of climate, and then only as an "Other Origin of Slavery" (Chapter 7), preceded by Chapter 6 on the "True Origin of Slavery." This slight mention of climate was perhaps due to Montesquieu's recognition of the wide geographical and climatic incidence of chattel slavery in the eighteenth century. Directly to our argument, Montesquieu states that human passivity is the basis of chattel slavery (l964, Book XV, 7-8). Montesquieu condemned this form of slavery in no uncertain terms (l964, Book XV, l); in his Pensees, he reiterated this condemnation: "Slavery is against natural law because all men are born free and independent" (l964, # l935; cf. also Jameson, l971). Only a reading as ideologically distorted as Sanche de Gramont's can misconstrue Montesquieu's irony in this book; irony moreover which is stylistically characteristic of the Enlightenment./12/
Finally, Montesquieu proposes an alternative to chattel slavery: "machines" (l964, Book XV, 8). On the one hand, Adam Smith interpreted this passage as indicating that chattel slavery was less efficient than formally free labor (Wealth of Nations, l937:648). On the other hand, such a proposal is inexplicable on a reading like de Gramont's; at the same time, it reinforces our argument that slaves were understood by Montesquieu to have been stereotyped as the equivalent of instruments, as stage-props.
In Book XVI, on Domestic Slavery, Montesquieu does highlight the role of climate in the incidence of polygamy and other patriarchal excesses. Even so, he proposes alternatve explanations of domestic slavery (what we would call "the oppression of women"), such as the correspondence between this form and Asiatic despotism./13/ As his contemporary, David Hume had put it, "in many nations, the female sex are reduced to slavery..." (1964:191). To this extent, Montesquieu's concern for the status of women portends another peculiarly modern theme. Humanity cannot be free so long as women are domestic slaves.
Now Montesquieu was no feminist. He affirmed domestic patriarchy (l964, Book VIII, l7) and the restriction of women from the public to the private sphere (l964, Book XVI, l0). To our point, Montesquieu holds that the natural passivity of women, their modesty, reserve, etc., is reinforced or complemented by domestic slavery (l964, Book XVI, l2). This is a venerable theme which finds echoes even today in the ego-psychoanalytic conceptions of the "inner space" of the woman and the "outer space" of the man (Erickson, l965). But it is not just Montesquieu's understanding of human and feminine nature which appears dated; there are aspects of social structure which evade his insight as well. For instance, although he notices the difference between matrilineality and patrilineality (l964, Book V, 5), he gives no indication of understanding the difference between matrilineal and patrilineal descent systems, as attested by his clumsy discussion of the Salic law of inheritance (l964, Book XVIII, 22). In all this, Montesquieu was very much a man of his age. Recall Rousseau's anti-feminism in Emile, or Hume's l740 discussion of "chastity and modesty."/14/ And the ethnological understanding of descent systems would wait a century and more for Lewis Henry Morgan's Ancient Society./15/ It is to Montesquieu's credit that he acknowledges that the abolition of child bridehood, adolescent motherhood, etc., naturally would introduce a "kind of equality among the two sexes" (l964, Book XVI, 2).
In Book XVII, Montesquieu examines the relationship of Political Slavery ("la servitude politique," i.e. general slavery) to climatic conditions. This discussion most directly echoes those of Hippocrates and Aristotle already noted. Montesquieu suggests that his own contribution here is the recognition of the effects of the gradual change of the climate from southern to northern Europe, when compared to the extremes of the Asiatic climates. The former contributes to political stability; the latter to instability, conquest, and enslavement (l964, Book XVII, 3). But by Chapter 6 of the same Book, Montesquieu is already introducing "une nouvelle cause physique" of general slavery, viz the topography, the lay of the land.
He extends these observations in Book XVIII, on the Nature of the Terrain (including soil fertility, topography, etc.), and points to the distractions to which farmers are susceptible, immersed as they are in their agricultural pursuits which again lead to human passivity and thereby to political slavery. It seems that Montesquieu has provided here an early articulation of the "Distraction Thesis" associated with Georg Simmel's well-known "Metropolis and Mental Life" (l950:409-424).
Thus we see the dual significance of the causes physiques for human action in Montesquieu's great work. They are directly and indirectly significant. On the one hand, the natural setting, including climate and terrain, directly influences human action. On the other hand, as some humans become enslaved due to their passivity, they come to be incorporated in the rule of nature. Nature indirectly influences human action through these instruments.
We shall make but a few comments on Book XVIII since its content and its influence have been addressed by Professor Meek. In Chapter 8, Montesquieu correlates the complexity of a society's laws with its mode of subsistence: a hunting society has laws of the least complexity (properly mores rather than laws: cf. l964, Book XVIII, l3); a pastoral society evidences greater complexity than an agricultural society; a commercial society has laws of the greatest complexity. In Chapter l0, he similarly correlates the size of a population with that society's mode of subsistence. In Chapter 11, he contrasts the status of savagery of the hunters with the status of barbarism of the pastoralists. In Chapter l5, he contrasts both of these to that of the cultivators, who begin to utilize money, and begin to exhibit social inequality.
These correlations of modes of subsistence and societal characteristics are suggestive of the historical materialism of Marx and Engels a century later./16/ They are not, however, symptomatic of Montesquieu's own discussion of commerce in Part IV. Once he has set the stage in Part III for human activity, his discussion of political economy in Part IV returns to the more pedestrian level of the eighteenth century precursors of Adam Smith. He does make several insightful but hardly systemic observations; at one place Montesquieu comments that a people imbued with the spirit of commerce will finally commoditize everything (l964, Book XX, 2). But this allusion to what would come to be seen as the societal distortions arising in privatized space remains a lonely observation in Montesquieu, most likely just an off-hand comment of a pre-capitalist social thinker.
Finally, in Book XIX, Montesquieu completes Part III with his famous discussion of l'esprit general. The general spirit (in modern parlance, the "culture") of a nation is a resultant of the influences of climate, religion, laws, governmental regulations, mores, etc. As one of these influences is greater in its effect, so the others are less. Nations are characterized by the "predominant moment" of the general spirit. Thus climate predominates in peoples in the state of savagery; custom predominates in China; morality predominates in Sparta; simplicity of manners, in Rome (l964, Book XIX, 4). These conceptions were extended and systemized in the Volksgeist of Hegel's Philosophy of History. There can be no question of this filiation in light of Hegel's own acknowledgement of the significance of Montesquieu's thought in his l802 essay on Natural Law/17/. Georg Lukcs has commented of this filiation that "it is clear enough that the affinity is purely one of [totalistic] method, although, having said that, the parallel is far-reaching enough."/18/ While Montesquieu presented only the elements of the Volksgeist, and only some of them, Hegel would consider the full dialectical interrelationship of all these moments of the movement of history.
Now Montesquieu has completed setting the stage for Part IV of De l'esprit des lois which treats of political economy, and Part V, which treats of religion. He has examined the interrelationship of the passive or "natural" elements of society and human action: the climate, the terrain, the various instrumentalities of servile humans. While he criticized slavery in no uncertain terms, the feasibility of mass emancipation, or of slave revolt, would await the next century (e.g. Santo Domingo). He has further examined the resultant of all these elements, the general spirit of a nation, and how this general spirit reacts on human action. Thus we see the place of Part III in Montesquieu’s great work.
NOTES
1. Carl L. Becker The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers New Haven: Yale UP (1932), p. 113. All references in the text to Montesquieu are to his Oeuvres compl�tes, Paris : �ditions du Seuil (1964).
2. G.E.M. de Ste.Croix The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World, Ithaca: Cornell UP (1981)
3. This distinction is obscured in Goran Therborn Science, Class, and Society, London: NLB (1976), esp. pp. 119-124.
4. Cf. Gerda Lerner, The Grimk� Sisters from South Carolina, NY: Schocken Books (1971); also Angela Davis Women, Race, and Class NY: Random House Vintage (1982)
5. Ronald L. Meek Social Science and the Noble Savage Cambridge: Cambridge UP (1976), p. 236
6. Auguste Comte Systeme de politique positive, Paris: Carilian-Goeury et Dalmont [3rd ed. Paris:Larousse (1890-1895)] Tome Premiere, Ch. V; Max Weber, "Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy," in E. Shils (ed) The Methodology of the Social Sciences Glencoe, IL: Free Press (1949).
7. Cf. Louis Althusser Politics and History London: NLB (1972), pp. 43-44; Ernst Cassirer The Philosophy of Enlightenment Princeton: Princeton UP ((1951), p. 210.
8. Cf. Emile Durkheim Montesquieu and Rousseau Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press (1960); cf. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, translated with notes by T. M. Knox. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1952).
9. On two- and n-person games, see Morton D. Davis Game Theory NY: Basic Books (1970).
10. Cf. George Herbert Mead Mind, Self, and Society Chicago: University of Chicago Press (1934), pp. 281 ff.
11. See G.E.R. Lloyd Classical Quarterly, Vol. 25 (1975)
12. Sanche de Gramont The French NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons (1969), p. 119
13. David Hume Enquiries Oxford: Clarendon Press (1964), p. 191 suggests that "in many nations, the female sex are reduced to like slavery..."
14. Cf. David Hume "Of Chastity and Modesty," A Treatise of Human Nature Oxford: Clarendon Press (1888), pp. 570-573.
15. See Elizabeth Fee "The Sexual Politics of Victorian Anthropology," in M.S. Hartman and L. Banner (eds) Clio’s Consciousness Raised, NY: Harper and Row (1974), pp. 86-102; also Rosalind Coward Patriarchal Precedents London: RKP (1983).
16. See K. Marx and F. Engels "The German Ideology," Collected Works, NY: International Publishers (1975), Vol. 5, esp. pp. 31-36.
17. G.W.F. Hegel Natural Law Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press (1975), pp. 128-129.
18. Georg Lukacs TheYoung Hegel London: Merlin Press (1975), p. 373.
