Introduction
How can a regime be constituted to provide security and liberty without becoming despotic?Footnote 1 This is the central question of The Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu declares, “Political liberty is found only in moderate governments … [But] any man who has power is led to abuse it … So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things.”Footnote 2 Many readers therefore take Montesquieu to be a pioneer of political modernity, a Machiavellian redirecting political thought away from classical questions of the health of the soul and towards institutional design with his account of the separation of powers. Judith Shklar has praised the stern realism of his maxims that “even virtue has need of limits” and “great men who are moderate are rare,” seeing SL’s politics as aiming at preventing the worst evils rather than aspiring to the highest goods.Footnote 3 The resulting “liberalism of fear” limits cruelty and secures a minimally decent foundation.Footnote 4 Another interpretive tradition, led by Pierre Manent and Thomas Pangle, laments this lowering of the horizons as an attempt to do without virtue in politics.Footnote 5 Against these readings, I hold that Montesquieu retains and adapts central principles of ancient and medieval political thought. This should prompt us to reconsider how creatively the American Federalists read the man they called “the celebrated Montesquieu” in asserting that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”Footnote 6 In effect, they transposed his theory for a moderate and balanced monarchy represented by competing estates into their new federal, commercial republic. The crux of the issue is the underlying account of representation: do the elements of government represent distinct interests in society, or are they only institutional means to aggregate and channel individual wills? John Adams develops a more classical republicanism aligned with Montesquieu’s account of the British Constitution, while Hamilton and Madison as Publius opt for the individualist account of representation given the lack of a hereditary aristocracy in America. Although this transposition reflects Montesquieu’s own principle that political forms should be adapted to each people’s context, their decision to jettison corporate representation has obscured class dynamics and even the threat of oligarchy in American politics.
This article deepens our understanding of American constitutionalism by recovering a picture of Montesquieu as a thinker of the ancien régime whose assumptions challenge rather than confirm contemporary republicanism, drawing on the Persian Letters and the Pensées to supplement The Spirit of the Laws. Although the confederated commercial republics that Montesquieu describes in SL IX.1–3 have become the dominant regime type in our world, he suggests that the prospects for liberty may be better in a moderate monarchy in which power is devolved to the aristocracy. His analysis of the political passions entails that the love of gain is an insufficient substitute for the love of honor, implying a new potential for despotism from a little-considered source. Montesquieu treats commercial society not as a distinct type of regime but as a mode that can be expressed in any moderate government. Sketching the logic of Montesquieu’s account of the pursuit of gain that characterizes commerce and the pursuit of honor that constitutes monarchies reveals the striking parallels between them. The two systems share features of an invisible-hand account: manifold actors pursuing their own goals achieve a common good without intending it directly.
But in a move that surprises contemporary readers, Montesquieu holds that aristocratic honor is historically and logically prior to commerce as a check on despotism. The transition from the mixed-regime thinking of Montesquieu into the modern republicanism of Publius implies the substitution of one elite (mercantile and professional) for another (landed, martial, and aristocratic). Leo Strauss and Bernard Manin both describe how this irony arose out of the tension between the eighteenth-century doctrines of natural rights and popular sovereignty: in an effort to protect individuals from majority tyranny, popular sovereignty was combined with government by elites. These elites would be primarily distinguished by their success in enriching themselves, a motivation assumed to be shared by all, as opposed to the honor motive, which only a few feel. This combination entails a delicate paradox: that representation be in principle by population but in practice correlate significantly with class.Footnote 7
Montesquieu’s prescience entails that the rising merchant class will need to imitate some of the virtues of the old nobility if they are to play their role well. Montesquieu envisions more than one type of despotism: in addition to the blatant terror of one man that he associates with Persia and China, there is the soft despotism of indolence and isolation that he believes threatens contemporary European societies.Footnote 8 This reading clarifies Montesquieu’s relative assessment of the countries of his day. He portrays ancien régime France, where honor still holds sway, as both temporally and normatively between the despotic imperium of Spain and the atomized polity-as-enterprise of the Netherlands.Footnote 9 Though England, “a nation where the republic hides under the form of monarchy,” has often been understood to be Montesquieu’s best actual regime, he finds some prospects for long-term liberty better in France.Footnote 10
After first sketching Montesquieu’s argument for the moderating role of honor within monarchies, this article considers Montesquieu’s claim that commerce can play a role parallel to that of honor in countering despotism. The comparison raises the question: are these two forces really equivalent in strength? SL suggests that commerce is in a sense parasitical. To do its work, commerce requires a regime of honor to be already in place, and it cannot generate new mores of liberty to replace those of honor. It may perhaps eventually undermine them. Montesquieu’s surprisingly positive case for honor is not only of historical interest for understanding the ancien régime but it should move us to reflect on the human passion for distinction which tends to manifest itself in all societies. This Montesquieu is less meliorist, less liberal, and less Anglophilic than he has been seen in America.Footnote 11 I then draw the conclusion that Montesquieu’s concern with organizing psychic and social conflict unsettles the assumption that the Federalist Constitution simply reflects Montesquieu’s vision. In a political moment where fears of oligarchy have again come to the fore in America, raising the question whether the constitutional structures are adequate to constrain elite power, John Adams’s more literal reading of Montesquieu illuminates while Publius obscures.
The play of honor
While Montesquieu gives neither a clear view of the best regime nor an account of objective virtue in accordance with human nature, he does describe a psychology of regimes that recalls the Platonic analogy between city and soul. Each regime has both a nature, “which makes it what it is,” and a principle, “which makes it act,” located in “the human passions that set it in motion.”Footnote 12 In other words, each political form acquires its distinctive content through the psychology it both depends on and fosters in turn in those who live under it. In a move reminiscent of Plato’s categorizing of regimes according to what each holds in honor, Montesquieu first names the regimes according to the good that motivates each.Footnote 13 Monarchy seeks honor, aristocracy seeks moderation, democracy seeks equality, and despotism seeks fear. Montesquieu grounds the stability and the success of regimes in their ability to incite the necessary kind of passion in their subjects. His theory does not simply take individuals’ preferences as given and work to align them as much as possible but recognizes that the regime shapes what its subjects desire. Montesquieu’s vision of the separation of powers is also not merely institutional, nor is it based on a unitary general will. It depends on what he calls “the Gothic constitution,” the society of orders, in which each branch of government corresponds to an estate, as in medieval and early modern French and English political development.
Montesquieu defines monarchy as depending on a subordinate nobility, but the nobles are not merely creatures of the monarch; they retain their own power bases and thus a degree of independence.Footnote 14 These preeminent subjects form an ordered hierarchy and aspire to win positions of greater honor for themselves within it.Footnote 15 By contrast, rule by one over an undifferentiated mass is despotism.Footnote 16 This definition sounds like a description of the kind of polity Montesquieu happened to live in, rather than a generalizable theory of the nature of regimes. But he embraces this contingency. The “Gothic government” that happened to arise in the tribal monarchies that conquered the ruins of the Roman Empire was a mixed and balanced regime.Footnote 17 His verdict on this system is glowing: “The civil liberty of the people, the prerogatives of the nobility and of the clergy, and the power of the kings, were in such concert that there has never been, I believe, a government on earth as well tempered as that of each part of Europe during that time that this government continued to exist.”Footnote 18 Montesquieu claims that Aristotle could not have theorized what he has experienced: “The ancients, who did not know of the distribution of the three powers in the government of one alone, could not achieve a correct idea of monarchy.”Footnote 19 Here familiar terms from the liberal–constitutionalist account of the division of powers (“civil liberty,” “prerogatives,” and “power”) are founded upon the more alien pre-1789 idea of a society with distinct orders, comprising the one, the few, and the many (“the king,” “the nobility and the clergy,” and “the people”). In this system, each subject occupies a social role and shares a rank with others, meaning that the ruled are never entirely reduced to weak and dispersed individuals helpless before the power of the centralized state.
If society in a monarchy is complex and differentiated, it follows that monarchy’s psychological principle is the love of honor.Footnote 20 Honor’s nature “is to demand preferences and distinctions,” yet this cannot apply as properly to an aristocratic republic without a monarch.Footnote 21 Montesquieu implies that the competition benefits from having one set above the competitors to define their relative rewards and maintain a consistent standard of what is honorable, although the nobles cannot be made and unmade by the king. This vertical orientation, fueling selfish ambition, contrasts sharply with the democratic republic’s horizontal egalitarianism, in which each citizen feels himself to be a small but integral part of the whole to which he contributes wholeheartedly.Footnote 22 Montesquieu denies that true virtue can exist in monarchies, but honor provides its simulacrum. Honor “can inspire the finest actions; joined with the force of the laws, it can lead to the goal of government as does virtue itself.”Footnote 23 Under its sway, “each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests.”Footnote 24
This honor-seeking initiative on the part of the king’s aristocratic subjects works in two directions at once: it both enables the king’s will to be efficiently executed and checks the arbitrary exercise of his power.Footnote 25 Whereas despotism squanders resources in coercing unwilling subjects into complying with the sovereign’s commands and then in monitoring them to ensure the commands are fulfilled, the nobles under a monarchy can police themselves by their norms of honor and shame. The goal is to foster an internalization of norms so that order does not need be imposed from without. Montesquieu prefers to task these psychological dynamics with ordering the regime and upholding its liberty rather than relying entirely on legal coercion. The laws will not enforce themselves, so the rule of law requires at least some free subjects who have so internalized its principles that they may risk their lives to see them actualized. Montesquieu illustrates his point with a case of healthy resistance within monarchy. Honor generally demands obedience to the king. But, at the risk of losing his legitimacy, “the prince should never prescribe an action that dishonors us because it would make us incapable of serving him.”Footnote 26 The essence of the king’s role is to be the arbiter of honor, so undermining honor undermines himself. This safeguard has thwarted some of the worst attempted abuses in French history, because vassals had enough independence from the Crown that they could simply refuse orders they considered beneath them. The Viscount d’Orte could refuse Charles IX’s order to massacre Huguenots at Bayonne after St Bartholomew’s Eve because it was dishonorable. By using this case, Montesquieu makes clear that he does not take honor to be a purely amoral shadow of social convention; at least in France it is attached to showing mercy to the innocent.Footnote 27
Montesquieu describes a further institutional benefit to having a personal chain of command in which orders stem from the monarch, the source of honor, to be obeyed by honor-seeking subjects. Because even delegated powers within the state are wielded personally, monarchical governance has salutary delays that create occasions for reflection and contestation: “What would have become of the finest monarchy in the world if the magistrates, by their slowness, their complaints, and their prayers, had not checked the course of even the virtues of its kings?”Footnote 28 The logic of possessiveness means that these offices, once obtained, are jealously defended. SL V.11 invokes Cicero’s theory of the Roman tribunate and compares the nobles in a well-ordered monarchy to the tribunes. Of course, these were plebeian in origin, but the parallel is that they functioned as “intermediate dependent powers” meditating between the rulers and the ruled, tempering the conflict of the orders and mixing the regime. Instead of reform coming through revolutionary violence, “temperings are proposed, agreements are reached, corrections are made; the laws become vigorous again and make themselves heard.”Footnote 29 Through these extralegal mores, law is upheld, and through these individual lusts for honor, something like concern for the public weal arises.Footnote 30
Doux commerce as honor’s understudy
Montesquieu’s reflections on whether commerce can protect liberty pre-date his mature pronouncements in The Spirit of the Laws by almost three decades. Early in the Persian Letters, Mirza asks Uzbek to explain how he understands justice.Footnote 31 En route to Europe, Uzbek responds with a parable in a series of letters. His prefatory remark is that “there are certain truths for which it is not enough to be persuaded, but which one must also be made to feel. Such are the truths of morality.”Footnote 32 He illustrates his point by describing a petit peuple, the “Troglodytes,” who knew “no principles of equity or justice” and were subjected to a harsh, foreign king.Footnote 33 After successfully revolting against him, they opted to have no common government but a radically individualist society, in which “each would look solely to his own interests, without consulting those of others.”Footnote 34 This commercial-sounding maxim gives rise to the worst crimes: murder, rape, and theft. Even in their subsistence economy, the Troglodytes price gouge mercilessly in business deals. Soon they suffer from a deadly plague, and the only doctor capable of curing their disease knows from bitter experience that the Troglodytes will not pay him for saving them, so he condemns them: “You do not deserve to occupy a place on earth, because you have no humanity, and the rules of equity are to you unknown.”Footnote 35
The story of the Troglodytes then shifts from parable against greed to pastoral idyll. The surviving remnant give the nation rebirth, and they “worked with a common solicitude for the common interest,” and “led a happy and tranquil life” characterized by a herding economy, reverence for marriage and family life, and deep religious piety.Footnote 36 They were content because “Nature provided for their desires no less than their needs.”Footnote 37 They gave presents rather than sought their own advantage, and “regarded themselves as a single family.”Footnote 38 Here private property is unknown. Although without aggressive designs on their neighbors, the Troglodytes can show great solidarity in a defensive war, giving their lives for each other eagerly. Having sketched this virtuous classical republic, Montesquieu suggests that it requires a small population and territory. Uzbek goes on to say that the Troglodytes decided to elect a king, “since the people grew larger every day.”Footnote 39 The most just man among them, elected, laments they are relinquishing freedom to become subjects: “Having no chief, you have to be virtuous in spite of yourselves … you prefer to submit to a prince and obey his laws, which are less rigid than your morals.” The formal state apparatus of monarchy allows for cooperation without personal virtue; the king-elect warns of “ambition,” “riches,” and “unmanly voluptuousness” in the new regime. Commerce and monarchy go together; self-interest may replace virtue, but it is a lawful regime with real prosperity, not the anarchy that once destroyed the Troglodytes.
Montesquieu ends the published story there, without indicating whether the Troglodytes benefited from exchanging a pastoral republic for a commercial monarchy. But the Pensées extend the story. The first, reluctant king died of grief and was mourned. In an interim regime, the people substitute imitation of the king for their former personal virtue: “Since you did not want to govern us by your laws, we will conduct ourselves by your examples.”Footnote 40 Only during the second king’s reign do the Troglodytes collectively decide to “establish commerce and the arts.” This king, too, warns them about debasing themselves for wealth, but one of the assembly replies that “education” is “the basis on which your people’s virtue is founded … Change that education, and whoever was not bold enough to be a criminal will soon blush at being virtuous.” This Troglodyte points to the possibility of a kind of moderate, commercial virtue, reinforced by the right social practices that can “stigmatize both avarice and prodigality.” The king’s reply affirms this possibility, but also adds a warning: as king, he must be distinguished according to whatever is praiseworthy in the realm. If the people continue to praise virtue, they can respect him for being preeminent in virtue. But if they come to value money, the king will have to distinguish himself by creating an oppressive system of taxation. His positive promise is, “If you are virtuous, I will be; if I am virtuous, you will be.”
The Troglodytes’ example suggests that neither a society of pure self-interest—the way of life of the first Troglodytes, who effectively die of greed—nor a society of pastoral innocence and collective property offers a durable recipe for happiness.Footnote 41 While erecting a monarchy yields clear gains in power and comfort, the prospect is bittersweet for the Troglodytes, since it may involve giving up on the pursuit of personal virtue. Ryan Hanley observes that Montesquieu’s parable contains an invitation to choose. At the time of the Persian Letters, the collapse of John Law’s system of public finance has made possible either a renewed commercial ethic or a reinforcement of royal despotism, so that the French “stand in the same precarious state as the Troglodytes at the moment of the election of their king.”Footnote 42 Commerce can be compatible with liberty if political distinction is still accorded to virtue, but it will become a new avenue to despotism if wealth is the only thing honored. Montesquieu seems to have thought that the most despotic aspect of Louis XV was his endorsement of Law’s system, inflaming greed in the investors by playing on their imaginations.Footnote 43 Montesquieu’s own prescription seems to be closest to that of the Troglodyte king: the right education and social mores can attribute honor correctly, preventing wealth from corrupting the people and even permitting commerce to support good government.Footnote 44
The Spirit of the Laws develops this Troglodyte thesis. Despotic regimes are incompatible with commerce; the despot’s whims make property vulnerable and cripple capital investment, as SL V.13 and XX.4 make clear. But all moderate regimes can engage in commerce to some degree, even as the acquisitive, restless psychology of the pursuit of wealth and the inequalities it produces pose potential threats to all three: monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. Montesquieu distinguishes two different forms of commerce—economy commerce, which befits a democratic republic, and luxury commerce, appropriate to modern monarchies.Footnote 45 Commerce apparently can cultivate self-restraint in a republic for a time, but it risks becoming a victim of its own success.Footnote 46 The decisive factor is whether the whole population can be energized for production without being inflamed for consumption. Montesquieu elaborates the distinction in SL XX.4, where he says that “in government by one alone, [commerce] is ordinarily founded on luxury,” because the nobility consumes luxury goods to demonstrate their status, whereas “in government by many, it is more often founded on economy,” because popular participation in commerce instills habits of frugality.
Through luxury commerce, the nobility’s quest for status becomes socially beneficial. Montesquieu’s France had a hereditary aristocracy, but since aristocratic privileges were viewed as offices of the state, many, especially those of the noblesse de robe, could be purchased from the Crown, attached as they were to functions like tax collection or postmaster-generalcy. In 1789, on the eve of the Revolution, two-thirds of noble titles had been created in the past two hundred years and fully one-quarter between 1700 and 1789.Footnote 47 Montesquieu commends the flexibility of this system because it allowed new money gained through commerce to join the quest for honor: “When nobility can be acquired with silver, it greatly encourages traders in a position to attain it.”Footnote 48 This attempt to reconcile the virtues of apparently competing ways of life is typical of Montesquieu’s nuance. Paul Cheney characterizes Montesquieu’s view of commerce as that it can bring “compensatory virtues” capable of reinforcing “moderation and tranquility” in politics.Footnote 49 But commerce’s own tendencies to excess must be checked by prudent political and social measures. In democratic republics, “the key to maintaining the spirit of commerce was first to ensure that the poor can work, and second that even the comparatively well off must work by subjecting them to egalitarian inheritance practices.”Footnote 50 In monarchies, the powerful must be prevented from sapping commercial dynamism with their privileges. SL XX.19–20 condemns gaming the tax system to subsidize favored enterprises and the granting of inefficient monopolies. And because “it is against the spirit of monarchy for the nobility to engage in commerce,” Montesquieu attributes the erosion of the British Crown in part to the aristocracy’s entry into trade.Footnote 51 Overall, he hoped to see a delicate, one-sided osmosis in French society: for rising merchants to assimilate to the nobility without the nobles becoming more like them. Cheney portrays this as a virtuous cycle in which economic motives are harnessed to the nobler passion of seeking honor, while still retaining the social benefits and wealth creation of commercial productivity.Footnote 52 Montesquieu seems to be describing this ideal version of French society when he refers to a “lively, pleasant, playful” nation with “a certain point of honor” in SL XIX.5: the bourgeois virtues oriented to producing higher goods.Footnote 53
This vision of French political economy explains why Montesquieu believes that luxury commerce conduces to political harmony and liberty in a monarchy. In aiming to reconcile opposed interests between the different orders of the state and within the nobility, it resembles the classical republican theory of the mixed regime. Yet since selfish motives suffice, it also shares a defining feature of a liberal, Mandevillian theory of channeling private greed towards the common wealth.Footnote 54 Montesquieu does not sit comfortably within the liberal tradition because of his insistence on archaic aristocratic mores, even as he acknowledges that commerce has value and that its psychology resembles that of honor. In XIX.27, during his discussion of England’s freedom, Montesquieu identifies an “ardor for enriching and distinguishing oneself” in this quintessentially commercial society. Wealth, like honor, can apparently also establish a hierarchy among subjects, resist leveling, and create scope for individual initiative. Spector addresses this possibility, asking whether Shklar and others have been right to consider Montesquieu a father of liberalism.Footnote 55 Here he decisively sides with the moderns, even though he maintains a classical attention to the health of the soul.Footnote 56 Commerce has gone beyond Christianity to cause a further epochal change and render older restraints on the passions less necessary by harmonizing interest.Footnote 57
Whereas the first three parts of SL discuss honor almost entirely in terms of its domestic effects within a monarchical regime, Books XX and XXI introduce commerce as an international force, encompassing the globe and blurring boundaries between states. Commerce increases contact between peoples and thus tolerance for different customs; it renders trading nations more mutually dependent and thus makes war self-defeating.Footnote 58 Once assets are mobile, wealth can weaken despotic regimes by exiting them, obliging princes to curb their greed. For Spector, the interdependency that exchange fosters is “favourable not just to prosperity, but to peace and to political liberty.”Footnote 59 Robert Howse adds that commerce cultivates international reciprocity because it fosters “dependency on others for meeting one’s natural human needs—the needs based in comfortable and secure self-preservation.”Footnote 60
But the beneficial effect of international commerce that most directly serves the domestic political end of moderate government is an accidental result of a financial innovation. SL XXI.20 focuses on the development of letters of exchange during the Middle Ages by Jewish merchants fleeing royal oppression and expropriation.Footnote 61 Once real wealth became fungible, convertible into symbolic value recognizable in other states, “commerce was able to avoid violence and maintain itself everywhere, for the richest trader had only invisible goods, which could be sent everywhere and leave no trace anywhere.” This taught states the lesson that arbitrary abuses of power were self-defeating, for “only goodness of government brings prosperity.” Catherine Larrère reads this story as of a piece with the “decentering” of the state from its authoritative position in Books I–VIII to the peripheral and even negative role it plays in XX–XXII, and in the later books Montesquieu does often substitute peoples for states as his units of analysis.Footnote 62 Howse links this move to Montesquieu’s advocacy of confederations as a means of combining the liberty of small republics with the security of large monarchies in IX.1–3. He claims that Montesquieu is suggesting that this commerce fosters cosmopolitan norms and makes transnational sovereignty in a republican federation increasingly possible and desirable.Footnote 63 Although Montesquieu does prescribe relationships of mutual dependency as the best check on despotic power, because the ruler truly relies on his vassal, the features of this hierarchical honor-based reciprocity do not entirely translate to the more egalitarian, transient, and transactional reciprocity of the commercial market. Being too dedicated to peace and comfort risks introducing new threats of despotism, as the story of the Troglodytes indicates.
The balance sheet: commerce versus honor
Montesquieu makes clear that commerce is in certain key respects a less valuable motivating passion than honor. While commerce gentles international affairs, it does not penetrate deeply enough into the soul to be truly the principle of a regime. In SL XX.1, Montesquieu acknowledges the justice of Plato’s claim that “commerce corrupts pure mores,” saying that it does unleash disordered appetites in the individual, but also asserts that at the level of a whole society commerce “polishes and softens barbarous mores.” Yet softness can be excessive. While commerce’s beneficial effects operate over vast distances and over the long run, its transactionalism can dissolve friendships and erode decency. Montesquieu points to the case of Holland, where the commercial spirit is ubiquitous: “If the spirit of commerce unites nations, it does not unite individuals.”Footnote 64 Whereas Howse equates the international amity commerce brings to interpersonal friendship, Larrère acknowledges that Montesquieu’s argument addresses both “the universal force of commerce making for dispersion” and “the local attachments of men.”Footnote 65 To strengthen those local attachments, Montesquieu repeatedly relates his praises of economic growth to the improved conditions it brings about for the poor: while commerce does make rich and poor rise together, it does so invisibly and the observer who otherwise sees only inequality needs reminding by a trained analyst that total wealth is growing.
But commerce remains too individual to cultivate unity. Spector rightly concludes that the “liberal interpretation” of Montesquieu “cannot account for the formation of social ties … neither the cohesion of society nor the refinement of customs stems from instrumental rationality” as practiced in the marketplace.Footnote 66 And even the safety valve of letters of exchange cannot itself create moderate government but can only reward it. Capital can only flow away from despotic regimes if a less despotic government already exists elsewhere. Commerce thus can reinforce freedom but not create it. For Albert Hirschman, Montesquieu not only represents the progenitor of the doux-commerce thesis, but also is one of the first articulators of the “self-undermining thesis.”Footnote 67 It seems that on this view the crucial task of refining customs, fostering social cohesion, and guarding against absolute power in a large, modern state must fall to the principle of honor.
The Spirit of the Laws therefore repeatedly emphasizes the role of the social apparatus of rank, distinction, and birth in fostering honor. In SL V.9, Montesquieu says that the laws of a monarchy “must work to sustain that nobility for whom honor is, so to speak, both child and father” and to “render it hereditary.” There he also says that “the laws must favor all the commerce that the constitution of this government can allow,” implying that commerce can be carried to excess. In Montesquieu’s typology of actually existing regimes, Holland represents a characteristic excess of commerce, and Spain a characteristic excess of monarchy. Each is disordered in its own way: the Dutch lack social bonds, and the Spanish have succumbed to despotism. England and France occupy the middle ground. If Montesquieu’s comments on England were uniformly positive, that would imply an endorsement of commercial society. But the portrait of England is ambivalent. SL XI.6 describes an executive monarchy with a real legislative veto, both features of the traditional English Constitution that fell into disuse as the office of the prime minister grew in prominence after the Hanoverian succession thirty years before the publication of The Spirit of the Laws, meaning that the England praised is a carefully crafted construct. And both XI.6 and the account of English mores in XIX.27 include serious warnings against the hegemony of commerce alongside their praise of liberty. Despite suggesting that in England commerce may reward true excellence—“Men would scarcely be judged there by frivolous talents or attributes, but by real qualities, and of these there are only two, wealth and personal merit”—XIX.27 concludes with a description of the English as, like the Dutch, “a withdrawn people, each of whom thought alone.” Here it seems that the mercenary tutor of commerce has already done irrevocable damage as a social solvent.Footnote 68
Montesquieu therefore teaches that the French Constitution of his day, with its venality and purchased offices, has a better chance than the British one of developing the balance between seeking glory and seeking wealth that a modern regime requires to preserve liberty. Spector’s verdict is that English social arrangements do not constitute “a model to be universalized,” and Sharon Krause dubs “the security of English liberties uncertain” because of “the increasingly undifferentiated quality of English society and the predominance of material interest and irreverence in English character.”Footnote 69 After the Revolution’s acceleration of the centralizing policies of the monarchy that had long preceded 1789, it would, of course, be harder to argue that the French nobility could play a crucial mediating role between the one and the many to preserve local liberty.Footnote 70 But Montesquieu’s analysis of honor cannot be confined to the bygone world of the ancien régime. Montesquieu was himself aware of the contingency of the institutions he defended, and the creative reading his works received from the American Federalists brought his insights into the era of popular sovereignty.
American applications of Montesquieu
Montesquieu’s teaching on honor is addressed to commercial societies that seek freedom. Many polities—not least the United States—understand themselves this way today, aspiring to preserve both wealth and liberty. Boesche’s account captures one of the structuring dualities of The Spirit of the Laws: Montesquieu feared the blatant despotism that a monarchy could become through imperial aggression, but he also feared the soft, enervating despotism that would overtake a society devoid of courage, loyal to nothing but moneymaking.Footnote 71 At first Montesquieu calls fear the principle of despotism, but he then says that under despotism “one can decide to act only in anticipation of the comforts of life.”Footnote 72 Fear is a frontal assault on freedom, but greed subverts it, leaving subjects unwilling to risk their lives and property to defend it. Dominance by a central power, as long as its actions were sufficiently predictable, could actually be attractive to merchants. From this perspective, commerce is not just deficient as compared with honor, but it may actually come to serve despotism. This balance sheet of commerce’s assets and liabilities ought to prompt consideration of the consequences of honor’s weakness in modern regimes.
Although Montesquieu’s account of the British separation of powers presupposes corporate representation and the honor motive, the American Framers transposed his theory to represent an aggregation of individuals channeling preferences through a complex superstructure of institutions. In a letter on the weakness of the Articles of Confederation, George Washington acknowledges that “Philosophers and wise men” have asked “whether foreign Commerce is of real advantage to any Country” because of “the luxury, effeminacy, and corruptions” it brings, even as he says that America cannot but be commercial.Footnote 73 Several of the key Federalist protagonists at the Constitutional Convention entertained Montesquieuian ideas of compensating for the destructive effects of mere commercial self-interest with the honor motive.Footnote 74 Madison, in his essay on the “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” makes the second great desideratum for good government (after the prevention of factional tyranny) “such a process of elections as will most certainly extract from the mass of the Society the purest and noblest characters which it contains.”Footnote 75 Having identified the three key motivations of candidates for office as “ambition,” “personal interest,” and the “public good,” Madison indicates that the last is too weak on its own, suggesting that the remedy might involve channeling ambition toward the public good. In his 2 June 1787 speech against a salary for the president, Benjamin Franklin adduces the sale of offices in France as evidence that “that the pleasure of doing good & serving their Country and the respect such conduct entitles them to, are sufficient motives with some minds to give up a great portion of their time to the public, without the mean inducement of pecuniary satisfaction.”Footnote 76 In other words, not only do some ambitious, wealthy Frenchmen not expect to get rich from public office, but they actually give up their earned wealth in order to secure office. This echoes Montesquieu’s argument for the sale of offices as fostering a virtuous fusion of commercial and aristocratic motivations.
But the three different authors of the Federalist Papers seem to have agreed to put aside Montesquieuian considerations about an explicit role for class-based honor in politics when they made their case to the voters of New York for “reconciling the advantages of monarchy with those of republicanism.”Footnote 77 In Federalist #35 on the federal tax power, Hamilton dismisses any suggestion of explicit representation of economic interests or professions in Congress, that “the idea of an actual representation of all classes of the people by persons of each class is altogether visionary.” Hamilton goes on to identify three economic elements as politically relevant: commerce, the landed interest, and the learned professions. The first in effect will form a unified bloc despite its many internal divisions because “artisans and manufacturers will commonly be disposed to bestow their votes upon merchants.”Footnote 78 Tradesmen will lack ambition to hold office themselves, conscious that “their habits in life have not been such as to give them those acquired endowments” necessary for legislative rhetoric and deliberation.Footnote 79 The second group, comprising landholders “from the wealthiest landlord to the poorest tenant,” will also share a common interest, particularly in low property taxes, and so “their votes will fall upon those in whom they have the most confidence.”Footnote 80 The third, and perhaps most interesting, element consists of lawyers, clergymen, and doctors. Hamilton thinks that they, by contrast with the other two, “truly form no distinct interest in society,” and that they will “feel a neutrality between the different branches of industry” and so “be likely to prove an impartial arbiter between them.”Footnote 81 Implicitly, then, the representatives whom #10 says elections will elevate to “refine and enlarge the public views” will largely be drawn from the learned professions. Their education and their lack of economic bias are meant to ensure superior ability to govern.
Later papers on the Senate and the presidency as devices to elevate “characters preeminent for ability and virtue” do nuance this optimistic view of class dynamics, conceding that one of the chief disadvantages of unstable and inconsistent legislation is “the unreasonable advantage it gives to the sagacious, the enterprising and the moneyed few over the industrious and uninformed mass of the people.”Footnote 82 Here the mercantile class comes in for particular suspicion that is not applied to landowners or to liberally educated professionals. But Publius views the landed interest not as a body with a collective political duty but as an economic interest concerned with the cost of land and its productivity. American landowners represent neither the noble’s passion for honor which can resist despotism from above nor the merchant’s enervating acquiescence to it from below.
Yet honor is present in the Federalist; Publius, of course, builds on the achievement of men who pledged “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor.”Footnote 83 Publius ascribes honor not to a particular order or class of society, but to office holders or office seekers.Footnote 84 Madison’s claim in #51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition” concerns the love of glory in government officials. The way to prevent concentration of power in any one branch “consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others” (#51, added emphasis). A judge, senator, or president lacking in the desire for honor would actually be incapable of fulfilling the office well. But in the Federalist, unlike in Montesquieu, the sovereign who is capable of bestowing honor is the people, rather than the monarch. Hamilton advocates for presidential executive power as efficacious, not as a fons honorum: “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.”Footnote 85 Arguing for the possibility of reelection, #71 says, “It is a general principle of human nature that a man will be interested in whatever he possesses, in proportion to the firmness or precariousness of the tenure by which he holds it … This remark is not less applicable to a political privilege, or honor, or trust, than to any article of ordinary property.” The president should take his office seriously and not exploit his position for private gain because he desires honor from the people. America also strives for collective honor. Even if America lacks aristocrats who seek honor for their family name, America herself has a name that can be burnished or tarnished by the actions of her representatives before the watching world. Advocating for the Senate’s role in foreign policy, Madison states that “to merit” and “to obtain [the world’s] respect and confidence,” American proposals “should appear to other nations as the offspring of a wise and honorable policy.”Footnote 86 This is the positive aspect: an honorable foreign policy will accrue honor. Jay raises the negative consideration: a disunited America incapable of paying back its debts would win only shame from foreign powers: “What a poor, pitiful failure will America make in their eyes! How liable would she become not only to their contempt, but to their outrage.”Footnote 87 Here accruing honor conduces to security.
Therefore, although they follow Montesquieu very closely on the federative republic, the American Federalists deliberately depart from him on honor and representation. Their theory of divided and limited government attempts to transpose Montesquieu’s counsel for a moderate monarchy into a commercial republic. The result is that the government’s branches reflect elements of the classic mixed regime—with a monarchical presidency, aristocratic Senate and judiciary, and a democratic House of Representatives—but detached from social orders. The constitutional architecture forms a kind of plumbing system that channels the undifferentiated water of the popular will into a series of pipes that spin a complex and often competing set of turbines. Federalist #51 itself suggests this plumbing metaphor, saying that each branch must be as independent of the others as possible, so that “all the appointments for the supreme executive, legislative, and judicial magistracies should be drawn from the same fountain of authority, the people, through channels having no communication whatever with one another” (original emphasis). Does the hydraulic constitutional apparatus have within itself the resources to address the deeper questions that reading Montesquieu in their commercial republic today raises? State capture by corporate oligarchs, demagogues inflaming mobs to cement executive power, or a hopeless legislative deadlock provoked by legislators seeking honor only from their fellow partisans all seem no longer potential but actual.
Adams versus Madison
John Adams stands out as the eighteenth-century American reader of Montesquieu most attuned to the causes of division between elites and people.Footnote 88 He had a lifelong interest in Montesquieu, apparent from his annotations as a twenty-three-year-old on a freshly published copy of Nugent’s translation up until his late letters.Footnote 89 These early annotations reflect particular interest in Books III, VIII, and XI, stressing passages on republican virtue and the fearful character of despotism, and noting Montesquieu’s myriad historical examples.Footnote 90 Later, especially during the War of Independence, Adams’s mentions of Montesquieu focus on the relationship between the dynamics of regimes and the movements of the soul more than on institutional design.Footnote 91 John Adams, in January 1776, affirms the causal link between the regime and culture—“It is the Form of Government, which gives the decisive Colour to the Manners of the People, more than any other Thing”—but also saw social conditions as influencing the success or failure of the regime. America’s commercial nature created vulnerabilities:
Virtue and Simplicity of Manners, are indispensably necessary in a Republic, among all orders and Degrees of Men. But there is So much Rascallity, so much Venality and Corruption, so much Avarice and Ambition, such a Rage for Profit and Commerce among all Ranks and Degrees of Men even in America, that I sometimes doubt whether there is public Virtue enough to support a Republic.Footnote 92
In March 1776, Adams dismisses Montesquieu’s claim that fear is the basis of despotic government because it “is so sordid and brutal a Passion that it cannot properly be called a Principle.” He affirms honor’s real but limited value, hoping to cabin its influence in America. “Honour, is a Principle which ought to be Sacred: But … Honour at most is but a Part of Virtue, and therefore a feebler Basis of Government.”Footnote 93 Adams’s Thoughts on Government notes that “the possible combinations of the powers of society, are capable of innumerable variation” and argues against concentrating all power in one assembly.Footnote 94 In two 1783 letters to Abigail from Paris, Adams invokes The Spirit of the Laws’ analysis of honor to complain that Congress was undermining his own honor in the eyes of the French court.Footnote 95
During the ratification debates and Washington’s first term, Adams shows a new interest in Montesquieu on constitutional design. He criticizes readings of Montesquieu that interpret him as prescribing a full separation of powers in all the officers: “His doctrine of a Seperation of the Executive from the Legislative is very just and very important, if confined to the Departments but is much otherwise, when extended to all the Individuals. Seperation is necessary, only So far as to Secure the Independence of each.”Footnote 96 Also in the summer of 1789, Adams included Montesquieu in a catalog of “Legislators” who had sought a “Guardian of the Laws” and averred that “Every Project has been found to be no better, than committing the Lamb to the Custody of the Wolf, excepting that one, which is called A ballance of Power.”Footnote 97 He also ranks his work with Montesquieu’s, reporting “Compliments [on his Defence of the Constitutions] that the Science of Government has not been so much improved Since the Writings of Montesquieu.”Footnote 98 Jonathan Green has shown that even between the Defence of the Constitutions and the Discourses on Davila, penned in 1790 during the French Revolution, Adams became more Montesquieuian, concerned with whether “a nation’s legal constitution matches the organic constitution of its citizens,” granting it the prerequisites for republican liberty.Footnote 99 He therefore joined the effort to distinguish national characters and to identify France’s “ancient constitution.”
The 1786–7 Defence of the Constitutions represents Adams’s most thorough account of political principles. Even though his engagement with Montesquieu would continue to develop after this work, the Defence distills Adams’s Montesquieuian quest for moderate government. Adams offers an ambitious history and diagnosis of all past efforts to build republics through the paradigm of the one, the few, and the many. The influential few, whether formally titled or not, can corrupt republics in multiple directions. They have deceived or suborned the many into yielding them power (as at Geneva), or they could undermine the executive authority of the one (as in the case of the Polish liberum veto).Footnote 100 Adams holds it to be naive to think that elections provide enough of an accountability mechanism to control representatives. Assuming that the passionate loyalties stirred up in an election campaign could suddenly give way to a skeptical, scrutinizing attitude once the candidates take office “rested on the contradictory expectations that the people would be deferential one moment and vigilant the next,” able “to set aside their admiration and affection for their elected representatives.”Footnote 101 Adams’s suspicion of elites therefore does not lead him to be sanguine about the virtue or prudence of the many.
How, then, does Adams hope to counterbalance the threat that elites pose without overcorrecting? Echoing Federalist #51 but staying closer to the original context of SL XI.4, he writes that “orders of men, watching and balancing each other, are the only security; power must be opposed to power, and interest to interest.”Footnote 102 To that end, he proposed elite “ostracism” into a distinct organ, proposing a Senate to both represent and confine the natural aristocracy: “The rich, the well-born, and the able, acquire an influence among the people that will soon be too much for simple honesty and plain sense, in a house of representatives. The most illustrious of them must, therefore, be separated from the mass, and placed by themselves in a senate.”Footnote 103 Adams here proposes a kind of quarantine, more humane than the Athenian custom of censuring potential tyrants by exile. By defining and publicly recognizing the privileges of these aristocrats, Adams believes they can be curbed, rendering the system more honest than one where the wealthy exercise an unacknowledged influence behind the scenes. He justifies this senatorial solution not only negatively, as a way of containing aristocrats’ influence and preventing them from carrying popular elections by their charisma, but also as a way of rendering their qualities useful to the people. In a very Montesquieuian move, he aims to achieve this by appealing to their desire for honor. Thinking particularly of repeated instances of a member winning promotion from the Commons to the Lords, Adams writes that the British Constitution shows how “the senate becomes the great object of ambition; and the richest and the most sagacious wish to merit an advancement to it by services to the public in the house.”Footnote 104 As a result of these well-aligned incentives, “When [the ambitious one] has attained the object of his wishes, you may still hope for the benefits of his exertions, without dreading his passions.”Footnote 105 This is not just bridling the great but harnessing them, because the lowly have need of the talents, intellect, and ambition for honor of the great. Adams’s entire constitutional theory in fact depends upon this idea of honor as a natural motive, duly rewarded by formalities that dignify offices. The executive therefore must be not just powerful enough to restrain elites, but also visibly awe-inspiring.
Although the Defence makes several overt criticisms of Montesquieu, both questioning his bona fides as a republican (“[Turgot’s] countryman Montesquieu, who will scarcely be denominated a republican writer …”) and accusing him of having plagiarized Machiavelli, the entire argument builds on Montesquieu’s account of representation.Footnote 106 Adams’s prescription for the United States relies on Montesquieu’s interpretation of the British Constitution as a mixed regime based on a society of orders; he copies the essential passage, the first third of SL XI.6, verbatim into the Defence.Footnote 107 The entire Defence of the Constitutions responds to Turgot’s provocation that Americans have preserved too much of the English aristocratic ways by retaining bicameral legislatures and strong executives. Yet Adams concludes the first section of his sprawling book by noting that American constitutions do not represent social orders: “In America, there are different orders of offices, but none of men. Out of office, all men are of the same species, and of one blood; there is neither a greater nor a lesser nobility.”Footnote 108 Adams is not simply celebrating this similitude; he suggests that the apparent lack of orders has the consequence of obscuring the inescapable reality of elite–popular tension in politics. America’s character—an agrarian society extended across a vast territory—has thus far tamped down this dynamic, yet class conflict will become apparent as the country grows and prospers. The first volume, published in January 1787 in time for the Constitutional Convention, concludes with this verdict: “All nations, under all governments, must have parties; the great secret is to control them. There are but two ways, either by a monarchy and standing army, or by a balance in the constitution.”Footnote 109 This balance would require acknowledging the orders, giving them each a recognized and circumscribed place in government, and channeling their particular interests towards the common good.
In the ratification-era debates about constitutionalism, Madison gave the most thorough defense of Publius’s position against Adams. Federalist #51 (published on 8 February 1788 with knowledge of at least parts of the Defence of the Constitutions), concedes that parties are perennial and must be restrained, but Madison takes the possible solutions to be quite different. “To guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part” can be accomplished either by “creating a will in the community independent of the majority,” the monarchical solution, or by multiplying and dividing interests across the federal system and a large territory, which Madison prefers as congruent with “the republican cause.”Footnote 110 Madison worries more about royal tyranny and popular willfulness than about elite ambition.Footnote 111 He returns to the question in a series of 1792 essays for the National Gazette, the Party Press essays.Footnote 112 One essay stages a dialogue entitled “Who Are the Best Keepers of the People’s Liberties” to mock Adams for his interest in establishing a one and a few independent of the people.
Anti-Republican: … The more you make government independent and hostile towards the people, the better security you provide for their rights and interests. Hence the wisdom of the theory, which, after limiting the share of the people to a third of the government, and lessening the influence of that share by the mode and term of delegating it, establishes two grand hereditary orders, with feelings, habits, interests, and prerogatives all inveterately hostile to the rights and interests of the people, yet by a mysterious operation all combining to fortify the people in both.
Republican: … But mysteries belong to religion, not to government; to the ways of the Almighty, not to the works of man.Footnote 113
Madison is quick to dismiss the idea that a more complex unity of different and apparently opposed elements can be more truly unified and to the benefit of each element than a simple unity, relegating the category of mystery only to those supernatural secrets which “the dimness of human sight” has not yet penetrated. But the unity of a human being, a composite of many organs sharing a common good, exemplifies precisely the kind of coordination Adams called for.Footnote 114 Although Lamberti has called Madison “Montesquieu’s best disciple,” Adams’s accounts of complex unity and representation are certainly closer to Montesquieu’s than Madison’s functionalist transposition is.Footnote 115 Although America lacked the ingredients for hereditary orders, and despite the great success of the Madisonian system over time, Adams’s more orthodox Montesquieuianism continues to provide insight into the promise and peril of America.
For Adams goes even further than Montesquieu’s apparent conventionalism about honor to insist that an element of hierarchy arises in every society and so every regime must find a way to channel it well. The Discourses on Davila conclude with a meditation on the significance of “emulation,” which “God and nature have implanted in the human heart for the wisest and best purposes.”Footnote 116 If “emulation between individuals, and rivalries among families never can be prevented,” then those individuals and families “ought not to be prevented [from emulating one another], but directed to virtue, and then stimulated and encouraged by generous applause and honorable rewards.”Footnote 117 In his late correspondence with Thomas Jefferson, Adams repeats that the distinction between an identifiable few and many is inscribed in “the Constitution of human nature.”Footnote 118 He defines these few more subtly than simply as the wealthy or the owners of large estates. They are also not the “natural aristocracy” in Jefferson’s sense, meaning those in fact talented or virtuous, because family name, beauty, and talent are persistent sources of inequality.Footnote 119 Even ambition is not evenly distributed among human beings, with some hungering more than others to distinguish themselves and win glory. Thus there is inevitably something called “aristocratical influence” among those able to draw the eye, and ultimately to command the votes, of others.Footnote 120 This emphasis on the good and bad of mimesis, or what Adams calls “emulation,” develops the implications of Montesquieu’s theory of honor further than Montesquieu himself goes. If Adams is right that human nature is a constant, and that there is “no special providence for Americans,” we should not be surprised to see the desire for distinction recurring in American politics as competing elite factions vie to win the trust of the people.Footnote 121
Conclusion: competing Montesquieuian lenses on the American present
Adams and Publius offer alternative American receptions of Montesquieu’s constitutionalism. While both accept Montesquieu’s call for countervailing powers to balance one another, they diverge on whether these competing powers represent competing groupings in society or are simply an artificial division drawn from a society essentially uniform. Madison, Hamilton, and Jay did not read Montesquieu badly, but made use of him for their own purposes at the risk of minimizing his core psychosocial insights. Since the Senate set aside for great estates that Adams seemed to call for would have been alien to the American commercial republic with its many small landholders, Publius’s creative transposition may have been fitting.Footnote 122 Montesquieu himself licenses such a creative adaptation: “The government most in conformity with nature is the one whose particular arrangement best relates to the disposition of the people for whom it is established.”Footnote 123 He does not make his prescriptions for liberty in France dependent on having a legislative upper house to represent the nobility, as he commended in England. Instead of pinning his hopes for moderation on the Estates General, Montesquieu points to the parlements as the true bastions of aristocratic liberty within the French constitutional tradition.Footnote 124
But Adams’s understanding of the spirit of Montesquieu remains instructive: it enables a deeper analysis of historical and contemporary American class dynamics than does Hamilton’s. The nineteenth-century explosion of industry, the twentieth-century rise of white-collar professions, and the continuing rise of the information economy have rendered Hamilton’s assumption that economic interests will converge doubtful. Montesquieu was aware that commerce needed legal, moral, and cultural constraints to prevent its becoming despotic; the author of SL II.4’s condemnation of John Law (as “one of greatest promoters of despotisms”) and SL XV.1’s mockery of slavery (“It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave”) would have been slow to believe that a financial disincentive would suffice to end the ownership of human beings.Footnote 125 Furthermore, Adams’s theory serves not only to put us on our guard about the potential for elites to corrupt the republic into oligarchy. It also allows us, with Montesquieu, to reflect on the potentially positive role that elites’ quest for honor can play.Footnote 126 If Adams and Montesquieu are right, then the desire to be distinguished and the admiration for distinction in others are both indelible. For Montesquieu does not teach that seeking honor is entirely vainglorious or arbitrary: The Pensées insist that the desire for honor is “imprinted on our souls” by “the greatest of all workmen,” God, and enjoins his son that that “noble ambition is a sentiment useful to society when it is well directed.”Footnote 127 Adams similarly warns Jefferson that a purely rational meritocracy of intellect is impossible, because “Birth Fortune, Figure, Eloquence, Science learning, Craft Cunning, or even his Character for good fellowship and a bon vivant” are just a few of the qualities that incline others to follow where one leads.Footnote 128 Montesquieu’s world assumed an explicit hierarchy of honors. Even in our democratic world, where hierarchy is suspect by default, wise political design and healthy social norms would heed the anonymous Troglodyte and consider how to harness the human impulse for distinction for good while bridling its potential for evil.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Céline Spector for teaching me to see past the surface of The Spirit of the Laws; to Matthew Landauer for introducing me to John Adams; to Constantine Vassiliou, Richard Samuelson, and Hugo Toudic for their advice on drafts; to Emily-Weston Kannon for editorial assistance; and to Paul Cheney and Pierre Manent for their encouragement.
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