[In this excerpt from her study of Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Schaub discusses Montesquieu's concept of despotism, comparing it to the political philosophy of Tocqueville, Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke. Schaub links Montesquieu's own philosophy to his positive view of pleasure and sexuality, embodied in the Persian Letters in his treatment of the women of the seraglio.]

Because the Persian Letters is concerned with the articulation of despotic government (and the interrelationship between domestic, religious, and political despotism) more than with its positive alternative, moderate government, it might be described as having a largely “negative” character.¹ However, it is not negative in the sense of being a separate and merely preliminary undertaking; rather the Persian Letters is like the film negative from which Montesquieu's masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, was developed. Indeed, the concept of despotism might be said to hold together Montesquieu's entire corpus. The Persian Letters, while treating despotism comprehensively, takes up in particular the question of Christian monarchy's relation to despotism and Montesquieu's doubts of the stability or sufficiency of the monarchical principle. The Considerations on the Romans then traces the relation of ancient republicanism and despotism. Like monarchies, republics too (especially those which attain political greatness) are subject to collapse into despotisms. Moreover, the moral greatness of ancient republics bears a certain resemblance to despotism proper, such that we may speak of a despotism of virtue. Accordingly, the movement in The Spirit of the Laws is from these three traditional regimes toward a new regime, one devoted explicitly to liberty. In other words, Montesquieu explores the possibility of a regime with a greater resistance to the gravitational pull of despotism. (Tocqueville, in his elaboration and correction of Montesquieu, will look more closely at the dark side of this regime and discover that there is a despotism of liberty as well—what Tocqueville calls “democratic despotism.”)

The concept of despotism is central to Montesquieu's political project. Moreover, by means of it, one can locate his achievement vis-à-vis both ancient and modern thinkers. Despite its familiarity to us today, Montesquieu's usage of the term despotism was unique and constituted a significant departure from both ancient and early modern usage. Unlike the ancients, whose search for the best regime was guided by a view of man's natural end; and equally unlike those moderns, namely Hobbes and Locke, whose elaboration of a universally valid public law was guided by a view of man's natural beginnings, Montesquieu takes as his starting point the most prevalent political situation: despotic government. He begins in medias res, amidst human history and human convention. Perhaps no other thinker has so documented the ways in which individuals are unfree: under the power of climate and geography, of passion and prejudice, of custom and law. Montesquieu's sociological inquiry, however, is not undertaken with a view to establishing determinism. Rather, he seeks room for maneuver within the conditions of life; he seeks to increase the potential for politics. In the Pensées, Montesquieu offers this startling summation of the difference between despotic and nondespotic government: “For me, good laws are like great nets in which fish are caught but believe themselves free, and bad laws are like nets in which the fish are so constrained that they sense immediately they have been caught” (no. 1798). For Montesquieu, liberty is in a very real sense a state of mind, an opinion of one's security—an opinion fostered by mild laws and unobtrusive institutions. More than any other thinker, Montesquieu is guided by a negative standard. Liberty itself is understood not as the opposite of despotism (that is, as the absence of constraint), but rather as a relaxation of it. The constraints of liberty should be invisible.

Like Machiavelli, Montesquieu could claim to take men as they are. Montesquieu, however, does not reach Machiavellian conclusions; he is in fact a most determined opponent of Machiavellian policies and practices. It is Montesquieu who more than any other thinker is responsible for the onus that now attaches to despotism. Although despot and despotic were part of the political lexicon of the Greeks, their meaning was not always pejorative. Despotēs was the Greek term for master and despotic rule proper was that exercised by a master over his slaves. To the extent that slavery was regarded by the Greeks as just, despotic rule had its legitimate sphere in the household. It was only when a ruler sought to treat free men as slaves that despot became a term of abuse. Aristotle, for instance, in his categorization of regimes, refers to all three corrupt regimes as despotic.² In general, however, the ancients spoke much more frequently of tyranny than of despotism. One of the great achievements of classical political science was its analysis not simply of the tyrannical regime, but of the tyrannical soul. Although the ancient authors gave memorable accounts of the methods of tyranny, those accounts were in some sense ancillary to the more fundamental inquiry into the motivations to tyranny. Through such works as Plato's Republic and Xenophon's Hiero, we come to understand in just what way “tyranny is a danger coeval with political life.”³

Given the power of ancient analysis of tyranny, perhaps it is not surprising that, of all the Greek words for political things, tyrant and its cognates were the only ones to be adopted into Latin. For the duration of Latin's sway, despot—that other Greek term of political corruption—languished. It was known of course to those who read Aristotle in the Greek; in Latin and Latin-influenced vernaculars, however, despot was translated into other terms: dominus, seigneur, or master.⁴

After this long neglect, it was Thomas Hobbes who reintroduced the original Aristotelian terminology into political discourse.⁵ His intentions in writing of “dominion paternal and despotical” were, however, very un-Aristotelian. Just as Machiavelli had dissolved the Aristotelian distinction between kingship and tyranny, Hobbes, as the foremost apologist of absolute sovereignty, redefined despotic, attempting to relieve it of any negative connotations. Hobbes's restoration of the term despotic was thus accomplished on the ground of a significant moral abdication. According to Hobbes, despotical dominion is founded on the consent of those vanquished by force; and for Hobbes, that extracted consent does not differ from the consent of those who agree together to submit to a sovereign. Both types of consent are prompted by fear—whether it be fear of a conqueror or fear of one another. Hobbes concludes that “the rights and consequences of … despotical dominion, are the very same with those of a sovereign by institution; and for the same reasons.”⁶

Montesquieu was unwilling to follow the Hobbesian progression from the primacy of individual natural right to the doctrine of absolute sovereignty. He expressed his disagreement with the Hobbesian argument throughout his career, from his earliest to his latest writings. Of course, John Locke also departed from Hobbes; but his departures—despite their tremendous practical significance—could be described as on the order of refinements, qualifications, and corrections. For Locke, individuals do not cede to the civil sovereign the full natural power that each person in the state of nature possesses to be his own judge and executioner. Natural right is inalienable. In Locke's view, individuals cannot be said to transfer their natural power to the sovereign; rather, in moving out of the state of nature they create a new kind of power: political power. On the basis of the distinction between natural and political power—the one unlimited, the other limited and divided into executive and legislative—Locke establishes more stringent standards for legitimacy. Unlike Hobbes, he denies the legitimacy of governments founded on conquest and usurpation and, accordingly, allows people recourse to a collective right of revolution against despotic or tyrannical authority. (It is true that Hobbes permits the man on the way to the gallows, whether justly condemned or not, to try to make off or otherwise resist. This may be an exercise of an inalienable right to self-defense, but as to its efficacy, we must judge it “too little, too late.”) As a theorist of limited government, Locke took the first steps to make despotic once again a term of opprobrium.

Montesquieu's differences with Hobbes are more thoroughgoing than Locke's. Montesquieu rejects both elements of the Hobbesian paradox: the absolute liberty of the individual in the state of nature and the absolute power of the sovereign in the state of civil society. He rejects as well the mediating term between the extremity of liberty and the extremity of power: namely, the social contract. Whereas Locke sought to avoid the despotic Hobbesian outcome while retaining in large measure the Hobbesian account of man's origins, Montesquieu was duly impressed by their inseparability. He accepted the Hobbesian linkage of fear and absolutism. He did not, however, regard fear as the originating passion of all government. For Montesquieu, fear is the spring of one particular form of government: despotism. In effect, Montesquieu turns Hobbes's terminological innovation back upon him. Hobbes had retrieved the adjective despotic, thinking to render it value-neutral; but Montesquieu appropriated it, and by capitalizing on its transformation into the noun despotism, forged a powerful weapon against absolute monarchy.

Montesquieu was the first political philosopher to embrace the neology despotism and to make it central to his thought.⁷ Although the Church had been employing the ism suffix for some time, producing such words as paganism, exorcism, Thomism, and atheism, and although both humanism and Machiavellism existed, there had not as yet been an -ism designating a system of government.⁸Despotism was the first. The study of political science today is largely a study of -isms; in the midst of our current welter of -isms, it is worth remembering and reflecting upon the beginnings of this branch of nomenclature in the thought of Montesquieu.

We might wonder, for instance, at the significance of the shift from tyranny to despotism. Why does Montesquieu need a new word? What makes tyranny no longer serviceable? The ancient critique of tyranny was connected to a particular understanding of the human soul according to which the naturally superior element of mind ought to govern spiritedness and desire. The tyrant possesses a soul gone awry, a soul lacking the proper articulation of its elements. His tyranny is but the simulacrum of his disordered soul. Tyranny is then a phenomenon traceable to the individual; it is the structure of the tyrant's soul writ large. Despotism, by contrast, is understood by Montesquieu as systemic or institutional. The despot himself is not the culprit. To put it in terms we are all too familiar with: he is a product of the system. Montesquieu's protagonist Usbek is just such a reluctant despot, a despot not by his own desire or design. Usbek is presented to us as an enlightened and virtuous man whom we nevertheless see authorizing and perpetrating horrible cruelties. We may say that Montesquieu's use of the term despotism in preference to tyranny acknowledges the ideologization of politics; in other words, Montesquieu finds the source of the political problem not in rulers, but in ruling doctrines. His critique of despotism is able to encompass the doctrines of both Christian divine right and Hobbesian natural right—no small feat, given the virulent anticlericalism and thinly disguised atheism of Hobbes. But Montesquieu saw that the Hobbesian system shares something fundamental with Christian dogma: the principle of fear. In the Christian dispensation, the fear of God is the beginning of all wisdom; in the Hobbesian dispensation, the fear of death is the beginning of all wisdom. Montesquieu implies that for people who have rejected the religious justification of rule, Hobbes's views are a likely and dangerous replacement.⁹ (Rousseau, by the way, in his Social Contract, showed his understanding of Montesquieu's critique by classing Hobbes among the “Christian authors.”¹⁰)

For Montesquieu, the alternative to despotism is not a different -ism; it is moderate government, of which there are many varieties in accordance with the many varieties of the human spirit. Montesquieu, the most nondoctrinaire of thinkers, would not have welcomed our proliferation of -isms. Despotism was his only -ism, the one that should have discredited all others.

Through his concept of despotism, Montesquieu pursues his quarrel with both the ancient and the modern view of rule. The ancients, and Aristotle in particular according to Montesquieu, made the mistake of distinguishing among regimes on the basis of what Montesquieu calls “accidental things, like the virtues or the vices of the prince” (XI.9). The ancients believed, if not in the possibility, then at least in the theoretical desirability of rule by one preeminently virtuous man: Aristotle's pambasileus, or king over-all. However, the practical import of Aristotle's ideal king was a lesson in moderation, not absolutism. For Aristotle, the politically-available approximation of the all-king's complete virtue was to be found in the mixed regime, wherein democrats and oligarchs moderate their respective claims to possess the whole of virtue. By combining the partial virtue of these two groups, the mixed regime achieves the best available approximation to the rule of the best man. As so often in ancient thought, contemplation of the best prepares the way for compromise with the existing.

Machiavelli's revolution, by exploding the distinction between kingship and tyranny, did away with the Aristotelian standard, and thereby eroded the “ideal” support for political moderation. Modern thought, from the realism of Machiavelli on, has believed itself more efficacious. Indicative of this, one speaks, quite spontaneously, of the modern political “project” and of the various rehabilitations it has undergone (in a certain sense, modern men all may be said to live, like the residents of Cabrini Green, “in the projects”). Paradoxically perhaps, the utopian impulse has been given much more scope in modern times than in antiquity.

Although Montesquieu agrees with Machiavelli in rejecting Aristotle's manner of thinking, he is concerned about the disappearance of moderation and its replacement by a philosophic incitement to extremism. In a passage deleted from the final proofs of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu blamed “the delirium of Machiavelli” for having “given to Princes, in order to maintain their grandeur, principles which are necessary only under despotic government, and which are unuseful, dangerous, and even impracticable under monarchy.” He concludes that Machiavelli, despite “his great spirit,” has “not understood well the nature and the distinctions” of regimes.¹¹ Montesquieu does not endorse the immoderation of the Machiavellian prince; nor does he endorse either the Hobbesian sovereign or the Lockean executive, both of which are formalized, legalized, constitutionalized versions of Machiavelli's prince.¹² The routinization of the Machiavellian prince undertaken by Hobbes and Locke is regarded by Montesquieu as an insufficient response to the danger of Machiavellian immoderation. Institutionalization is not a cure.

Montesquieu's own response is to seek a recovery of moderation and prudence, albeit on modern grounds, which is to say, not on the grounds of classical virtue but on the grounds of security and liberty for the individual. This moderation undoubtedly gives Montesquieu's political science something of the aspect of Aristotle's. It possesses an equivalent breadth and flexibility. However, we ought not to forget that whereas Aristotle's moderation is supported from above, by a conception of human virtue, Montesquieu's moderation is supported from below, by a conception of elemental human needs and passions.

CONTRA HOBBES

Having seen something of the unique form and content of the Persian Letters—its unusual epistolary style and untraditional notion of despotism—we can begin to explore the particular understanding of the passions that accounts for that uniqueness.

Classic liberalism begins from an insight into man's asocial concern for self-preservation in the face of other men's animosity and nature's stinginess. Hobbes places more stress on the former, Locke on the latter. But whether it is the fear of violent death, or the problem of scarcity that is primary, Hobbes and Locke are alike in presenting a fundamentally optimistic rendering of the human situation. For despite the fact that “nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one another,”¹³ the art and artifice of man can supply the defect. Man can bring together, or convene, what nature fails to; convention can remedy the inconvenience of nature. According to the guns and butter diagnosis, the human problem is soluble. The Leviathan neutralizes strife among men; and once the world has been made safe for the industrious, the bare endowment of nature can be rendered productive.

For Hobbes, the movement from the state of nature to the state of civil society depends on the ascendancy of man's most powerful (and most rational) passion—the fear of violent death, which inclines men toward peace—over the welter of desires and appetites which leads to vain contentiousness. Natural law is derivative from passion, but not from all passion indiscriminately. In keeping with his conviction of man's solitary life in the state of nature, Hobbes does not accord any socializing significance to sexual passion. Even the existence of the family does not really mitigate the essential character of the state of nature. According to Hobbes, “For the savage people in many places of America, except the government of small families, the concord whereof dependeth on natural lust, have no government at all; and live at this day in that brutish manner, as I said before.”¹⁴

Montesquieu is generally reticent about the state of nature; however, in the opening book of The Spirit of the Laws, he does take one chapter to consider the human constitution “before the establishment of societies.” Montesquieu there criticizes Hobbes by name:¹⁵

Hobbes asks, “If men are not naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?” But one feels that what can happen to men only after the establishment of societies, which induced them to find motives for attacking others and for defending themselves, is attributed to them before that establishment.

(I.2)

In propounding his new conception of natural law, Hobbes mistakes nurture for nature. Just as primitive man, concerned with self-preservation, would be incapable, according to Montesquieu, of speculative ideas (like the idea of a creator), so too “the idea of empire and domination” would be beyond him. By discounting first the traditional Christian natural law teaching and, in the next breath, the Hobbesian teaching, Montesquieu indicates that Hobbes shares with his Aristotelian and Christian opponents a certain overestimation of human capacities.¹⁶ Contrary to the assertion of Hobbes, prepolitical men are not bellicose and prideful: they are weak and fearful and timid. “Everything makes them tremble, everything makes them flee.” Peace is indeed the first law of nature, but not in the Hobbesian sense of a dictate of reason. Rather, peace is the immediate consequence of subrational sentiment; peace is not a desideratum, something that must be sought and followed, but simply a fact of the solitary, uncivilized life.

According to Montesquieu, however, the pattern of mutual flight is temporary. Men have other, potentially more unifying, inclinations. Hunger inspires men to seek nourishment. Although Montesquieu does not say so, obedience to this second natural law may, in an incidental way, bring men into contact with one another. It is possible to imagine this contact as peaceful, even cooperative. Montesquieu does say that men's very timidity conduces in the end to acquaintance. Although fear initially keeps men separated, the perception of reciprocal fear is an assurance of safety and encourages approach. Montesquieu's third natural law concerns sociability directly. Montesquieu discerns a force in our nature that considerably mitigates the radical isolation and individualism of the state of nature. Like other species, human beings feel the pull of animal attraction; they take pleasure in others of their kind and are especially charmed by those of the opposite sex: “The natural entreaty [prière naturelle] they always make to one another would be a third law” (I.2). In other words, the prayers of natural man are directed not to God but to natural woman. In addition to fellow feeling and sexual passion, Montesquieu describes the emergence of a fourth natural law: the desire to live in society—a desire motivated by the specifically human bond of acquired knowledge.

According to the Thomistic understanding, the natural law prescribing man's duties draws upon three natural inclinations: self-preservation, sociality, and knowledge. Hobbes dispenses with the latter two, restricting natural law to a deduction from the right of self-preservation. Montesquieu, it seems, preserves all three, albeit in drastically altered form. His mention of natural incentives to association should not be taken as a pious harking back to an earlier tradition of natural sociability. According to Montesquieu, our sociability is in large part animal—gregarious and carnal—not political, as the ancients would have it. And while Montesquieu's laconic presentation leaves it unclear just what he means by knowledge serving as a “new motive for uniting,” it is clear from his earlier remarks that the knowledge of God—the keystone of Thomistic natural law—is not meant. Montesquieu folds knowledge into a discussion of sociality; he does not consider it as an inclination to transcendence.

Although sexual and social alliances take shape naturally, those very alliances serve to divide as well as unite men. Men join themselves not to some universal society, but to societies—particular and plural. As soon as men are allied in this way to others, “they lose their feeling of weakness; the equality that was among them ceases, and the state of war begins” (I.3)—war between nations and between individuals within nations. Thereafter, “these two sorts of states of war bring about the establishment of laws among men.” In Hobbes, the movement is from individual, anarchic natural right to universal natural law; in Montesquieu it is from universal natural law to the multiple forms of positive right: the right of nations, political right, and civil right. These contain, so to speak, the disciplines of war, the rules of men's engagement with one another. On Montesquieu's explanation, the state of war is the product of society, not the condition of nature; it is born of developed inequalities, rather than original equality. Thus, it seems that Montesquieu's correction of radical individualism, which had looked so favorable to the social virtues, may chasten our expectations of community as much as embolden them. Man's bodily desires and intellectual capacities drive him into human connectedness, but it may well be that those very desires and capacities are incapable of fulfillment within or any easy reconciliation with a social, political, or familial order. Montesquieu suggests the ambiguous character of an instinctual sociability rooted in drives and desires rather than reasoned consent. Human sexuality and human knowledge (libido and libido sciendi) are soon transformed into the desire for distinction and domination—amour-propre to use the familiar language of Rousseau. (Indeed, Rousseau's debt to Montesquieu for the outline of his conjectural account of humanity's prehistory, the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality among Men, should be obvious.)

Whereas Hobbes sees men, or would like to see men, moving from vanity to fear, Montesquieu describes the reverse movement, from fear to vanity. For both thinkers, these primary passions have great political significance; they are in fact correlated to specific regimes. The public life of a democratic or aristocratic citizenry elevates considerations of honor and reputation over mere life. Thus, according to Hobbes, republics are like hothouses for the noxious growth of vainglory. In monarchies, on the other hand, salutary fear retains its prominence, both for the sovereign, aware of his solitary position, and for his subjects. By Hobbes's account, monarchy preserves the sense of exposedness necessary to real security.¹⁷

The correlations set forth in Montesquieu's politics of passion are more complex, for Montesquieu divides rule by one into two distinct forms of government: monarchy and despotism. According to Montesquieu, fear is the principle, the psychic animus, of despotism. “As the principle of despotic government is fear, its end is tranquillity; but this is not a peace, it is the silence of the towns that the enemy is ready to occupy” (V.14). Montesquieu is not impressed by the supposed political beneficence of fear. Montesquieu prefers a regime with spirit. For him, a monarch governs by fundamental laws rather than by his will alone, which is to say that monarchy depends on the existence of intermediate powers (as for instance, the nobility, the clergy, and municipalities), with prerogatives and rights of their own. Honor, or “the prejudice of each person and each condition” (III.6), is the soul of monarchy. Montesquieu admits that “philosophically speaking,” monarchic honor is “false” (III.7)—a delusive refinement upon self-preference. As such, honor is susceptible of various incarnations and, as we shall see later, Montesquieu speaks more favorably of some national codes of honor than others (preferring, for instance, the French to the Spanish, and it seems the English to the French). But in general, Montesquieu speaks well of the political effects of the striving for rank and preferment in monarchies:

You could say that it is like the system of the universe, where there is a force constantly repelling all bodies from the center and a force of gravitation attracting them to it. Honor makes all the parts of the body politic move; its very action binds them, and each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests.

(III.7)

These thoughts on the differing passional springs of despotism and monarchy, which appear in The Spirit of the Laws with Montesquieu's characteristic compression and economy of thought, receive their preliminary, and in many respects, fuller and more profound elaboration in the Persian Letters. Just as the harem sequence of letters is an investigation and tragic dramatization of what it means for fear to be the predominant passion of life, so the French letters, or more accurately, that subset of letters that treat of social life, provide an analysis of honor, the predominant passion of monarchical subjects. This understanding of Montesquieu's intention would, I believe, account for the odd double character, both satiric and appreciative, of the observations made about French social life. On the one hand, Montesquieu does not spare the French. Honor is shown to be a fundamentally artificial or theatrical passion. Moreover, when kept from its proper political exercise, honor is susceptible of degeneration into the most anserous forms of personal vanity. On the other hand, through its role in producing civility, politeness, and taste, honor is instrumental in creating and protecting a preserve of personal freedom (what Montesquieu calls the “liberty of the subject”). At its best, honor can work to secure political freedom also (“the liberty of the constitution”)—though it must be said that the fate of the parlements, which Montesquieu discusses in two very importantly placed letters (#92 and #140), does not augur well for the political efficacy of honor in absolutist France.

SONS AND LOVERS

Unlike The Spirit of the Laws, the Persian Letters contains no direct mention of Hobbes. Nonetheless, there are two places in which state-of-nature theorizing is touched upon (#94 and #11-14). Analysis of these letters (and those immediately adjacent to them) reveals Montesquieu's complicated take on the question of human sociability, and offers, as well, a good portal to the work as a whole.

In #94, prior to criticizing the prevailing realpolitik conception of public or international law, Usbek mocks inquiries into society's beginnings:

I have never heard a discussion of public law which was not preceded by a careful inquiry into the origin of societies. This appears absurd to me. If men did not form into society, if they avoided and fled from one another, then it would be necessary to find the reason why they kept apart. But they are all born linked to one another. The son comes into the world beside his father and stays there: here is society and the cause of society.

The differences between this passage and that of The Spirit of the Laws (I.2) are instructive. Usbek asserts the naturalness of patrilineal society. When speaking in his own name, Montesquieu made no such statement. He offered, in very brief compass and preliminary to his investigation of positive law, an anticontractualist account of the evolution or derivation of society. Society was shown to be natural in the sense of being the outcome of certain natural mechanisms and impulses, prime among them the operation of sexual passion. Montesquieu said nothing, however, as to the form of these early associations: fleeting or permanent, monogamous or polygamous, patriarchal, matriarchal, or fatherless (i.e., mother alone with children).

Usbek's version of the familial origin of society does echo a passage from Montesquieu's Pensées (no. 615).¹⁸ There, after savaging Spinoza, Montesquieu launches into Hobbes, a philosopher “much less outré and, as a result, much more dangerous” than Spinoza:

Hobbes says that, natural right being only the liberty that we have of doing whatever conduces to our conservation, the natural state of man is a war of all against all. But, beyond the fact that it is false that defense must entail the necessity of attack, it is not necessary to suppose men, as he does, fallen from heaven or sprung fully armed from the earth, almost like the soldiers of Cadmus, for the sake of destroying one another: this is not the state of men.

The first and only would fear no one. This man alone, who would come upon a woman alone also, would not make war on her. All the others would be born into a family, and soon into a society. There is no war here; to the contrary, love, education, respect, recognition: each breathes peace.

Montesquieu's account, although reminiscent of Usbek's, begins from the conjugal rather than the paternal relation; he stresses mutuality rather than obedience. Moreover, in the remainder of the passage, Montesquieu grants Hobbes's starting point, but argues that Hobbes's reasoning from that premise is incorrect:

It is not even true that two men fallen from the clouds into a wilderness, would seek, out of fear, to attack and subjugate one another. A hundred circumstances, joined to the particular nature of each man, would enable them to act otherwise. The air, the gesture, the bearing, the particular manner of thinking would make for some differences. First, fear would lead them, not to attack, but to flee. The marks of mutual fear would soon lead them to approach. The boredom of being alone and the pleasure that every animal feels at the approach of another animal of the same species would lead them to unite, and the more they were miserable, the more they would be determined toward it. Up to this point one sees no aversion. It would be with them as with other animals, who make war on those of their species only in particular cases, although they are found everywhere in the forests, almost like Hobbes' men. The first sentiments would be for the true needs that one would have, and not for the commodities of domination. It is only when Society is formed, that individuals—in abundance and peace, having at every instant occasion of sensing the superiority of their spirit or their talents—seek to turn to their favor the principal advantages of this society. Hobbes wants to cause to be done among men what lions themselves do not do. It is only by the establishment of societies that they abuse one another and become the most powerful; before that, they are all equal.

(no. 615)

This portion of the refutation of Hobbes was, as Montesquieu indicates in a margin note, “placed in large part in The Spirit of the Laws” (I.2, discussed above). The more harmonious, monogamous account of the first man and woman was dropped.

In judging Usbek's pronouncements, and particularly those on the family, we must not lose sight of Usbek's domestic situation. Montesquieu admonishes the reader against such forgetfulness by juxtaposing to these two letters on public law (#94-95) a letter detailing the method by which a harem, including Usbek's own, is formed (#96). The first eunuch writes Usbek boasting of his procurement of a new wife—part of a shipment of women just arrived from Visapour, a once-independent kingdom conquered in 1686 by the Grand Mogol Aureng Zeb. Although this wife was bought for Usbek's brother, a provincial governor, the first eunuch promises to do as well by Usbek. After Usbek has just stated in the previous letter that “[c]onquest in itself does not establish right” and moreover, “if the people are destroyed or dispersed, it is the monument of a tyranny,” we learn that Usbek acquires his wives via conquest and the international slave trade. In his ridicule of state-of-nature reasoning in #94, Usbek spoke of sons being born near to their fathers; however, he was silent as to how men secure women to bear them sons. The sequel (#96) reveals his own and his brother's method: rape or, in its institutional form, domestic slavery. The context shows this to be one of the most elemental and pervasive violations of both natural law (the law of “natural entreaty” between the sexes) and public law (the principles of just war).

Interestingly, the letter on the other flank of #94 is written by Usbek to a different brother, a monk at the Casbin monastery. Other than these two letters (#93 and #96) surrounding Usbek's declaration of father/son solidarity as the definition and cause of society, the novel contains no other mention of Usbek's male relatives. Letter #93 describes the anchorites, both Moslem and Christian, who hid themselves in the desert to pray: “Ten entire years sometimes passed without their seeing a single man.” So apparently there have been men—indeed, men honored above others—who avoided and fled human contact. They were not entirely alone however: “day and night they lived with demons and were ceaselessly tormented by malignant spirits who sought them out in bed and at table; no asylum from them was possible.” As Usbek wryly observes, “If all this is true, venerable santon, it must be admitted that no one ever lived in worse company.” Eremitism just lands you in bed with a host of incubi and succubi. Despite his fulsome praise of his brother (“I humble and prostrate myself before you, holy santon”), Usbek manages to convey his criticism of monasticism. For instance, he presents the conclusions of “sensible Christians,” who look on the lives of the saints as allegories about the ineradicability of the passions. “In vain do we seek tranquillity in the desert.” Moreover, it turns out that, even in the desert, the early hermits did not live completely alone with their visions and phantoms. Usbek says “they took refuge by the thousands in the fearful Theban deserts and had for chiefs Paul, Anthony, and Pachomius.” In other words, these hermits formed themselves into communities. Even those who regarded the passions as evil could not suppress the urge for a common life. Pachomius, the last named, organized a cenobitic community (the very word “cenobitic” means common life, from the Greek koinos-bios) and wrote a very influential monastic rule. Monasticism represents a profound recasting of the desire to live in society.

Usbek's confidence in an unproblematic natural sociality based on the patriarchal family, as expressed in #94, is qualified by Montesquieu through the information about Usbek's brothers in the neighboring letters. Usbek's brothers, one a monk, one a despot, present the extremes of enforced sexual abstinence (the denial of the natural law of entreaty) and forceful sexual indulgence (the violation of the same law). The social life of one is founded on celibacy, that of the other on rape. We might conclude that these social orders not begun by proper sexual coupling have some connection to the theory of society expressed by Usbek. With his inattention to the role of women as partners and mothers, Usbek made society a matter of intergenerational male bonding. The monastery and the harem are embodiments of that neglect.

Usbek's scorn for speculative reconstructions of man's original condition also manifests itself in his history of the Troglodytes (#11-14). In place of “subtle philosophizing,” Usbek prefers to present this “morsel of history,” the first installment of which (#11) reads like a parody of the Hobbesian state of nature. Although they were the descendants of ancient cave dwellers who “more resembled beasts than men,” the Troglodytes themselves, Usbek says, “were not that deformed; they were not shaggy like bears, nor did they hiss, and they had two eyes. However, they were so wretched and ferocious that there was no principle of equity or justice among them.” Usbek's history of this Arabian tribe is a fable-like demonstration that men constituted along Hobbesian lines could not construct the great Leviathan, but could only destroy themselves. The Troglodytes are ungovernable. In a reversal of the Hobbesian progression, the Troglodytes move from kingship to anarchy—not just ordinary anarchy, but contractually based asocial anarchy. After murdering a succession of their rulers, from a foreign king to freely elected magistrates, the Troglodytes agree among themselves to obey no one; each will attend to his own interests, without consulting the interests of others. The Troglodytes consent not to associate, but to dissociate.

The self-destructive results of this radical individualism are spelled out in a series of vignettes. The denial of mutual dependence leads quickly to famine, as the Troglodytes are unable to survive agricultural failure or to operate, or better, co-operate, a market. The insecurity of all holdings, whether women or land, unleashes a destructive cycle of desire, usurpation, and revenge. Production of any kind is impossible. All those Troglodytes who lack humanité eventually perish—“victims of their own injustice,” Usbek concludes.

As the sequel (#12-14) reveals, only two men remained. These two “singular” men possessed of humanity, justice, and virtue are linked to one another by the pity they feel at the surrounding desolation. Pity is “the motive of a new union.” In #12, Usbek outlines the idyllic life that flows from this alternative germ of society: loving marriages, the education of the young in virtue (an education based on the negative example of the lost Troglodytes), the advent of natural religion among them, and the practice of communism (shared meals and commingled flocks). In #13, Usbek presents a new sampling of anecdotes, parallel to those of #11, illustrative of the unfailing thoughtfulness of the Troglodytes toward others, from family members to the gods, extending even to criminals and strangers.

Despite an impression of pastoral insipidity, there are a number of interesting features in Usbek's description. We note the singularity of the new nation's beginnings—a fact that suggests that the history of the Troglodytes is not paradigmatic. It is not, for instance, intended as a demonstration of man's natural goodness in the state of nature. While the virtue of the founders may have been exceptional and unexpected, the virtue of their offspring is not; it is laboriously instilled. Usbek indicates that the image of the first Troglodytes' misery is kept constantly before them. Although Usbek does not spell out the principles of this education, we may see that it depends on the evocation of a sympathy grounded in superiority. By keeping uppermost in their minds a comparison to other men favorable to themselves, the Troglodytes are kept both self-contented and tender toward others. Envy and other hostile passions have slim purchase upon hearts given up to the action of pity. However, despite its adept tutoring of sentiment, this education is not always successful; there are, for instance, thieves among the Troglodytes (although to judge by one of the anecdotes, no recourse in law is taken against them). There are other hints that self-interest is not completely subsumed into the common interest. Thinking of themselves as one family, the Troglodytes kept their flocks “almost” always commingled and “ordinarily” spared themselves the trouble of separating them.

Knowledge of the gods is a late development among the Troglodytes—the ratification of their happiness rather than its source. However, once introduced to fear of the gods, the Troglodytes believe in “[the gods'] inevitable anger toward those who do not fear them,” regardless of the fact that their own virtuous forebears did not fear and the earth nonetheless “seemed to fructify of itself” for them. When the subject is first mentioned, religion is credited with softening Troglodyte mores, left rude by nature. Yet, in the immediately succeeding description of their religious celebrations, which seem largely to be occasions for the chaperoned courtship of the young people, Usbek says that “it was in these assemblies that naive Nature spoke.” In the same letter (#13), after recounting their daily invocation of “the grandeur of the gods, their unfailing aid to men who implored it,” Usbek sums up their happy existence by saying that “Nature supplied their desires as well as their needs.” This repeated alternation of gods and nature, or more accurately this substitution of natural explanation for divine, suggests Usbek's (and/or Montesquieu's) correction of the Troglodyte self-understanding.¹⁹

The halcyon days do not last. The Troglodytes are the envy of neighboring peoples who, moreover, regard them as easy prey because of their generosity and innocence. Despite their conciliatory diplomacy, war is forced upon them. They fight successfully in self-defense, not least because “a new ardor took hold of their heart.” This new ardor finds its inspiration beyond the common cause; each Troglodyte, we learn, has particular reasons for fighting and, before too long, particular deaths to avenge.

The final letter of the series (#14) has them choosing a king. The Troglodytes felt it was appropriate to abandon their leaderless state since “the People were growing greater every day.” However, it is questionable whether size is a sufficient explanation for the turn to monarchy. Earlier it had been said that numbers had no effect on the bond of union; “virtue, far from dispersing in the crowd, was instead strengthened by a very great number of examples” (#12). Perhaps the people are now swelling not so much in number as in reputation and ambition. The man whom they select to be the new king, the most just among them, laments their choice. He claims the Troglodytes have indeed tired of their virtue and that under a prince they will indulge in ambition, wealth, and pleasures.

Usbek does not explicitly link the Troglodytes' experience of war and their desire for a king. In fact, by concluding one letter with the Troglodyte victory and reserving their election of a king to the next, he seems to sever any connection. But as always in the Persian Letters, we must be attentive to juxtapositions sharpened by suppressed transitions. We might speculate that war has eroded the pity that served to unite the Troglodytes. While the image of the ancient, wicked Troglodytes cemented their virtue, an encounter with the real thing—men whose injustice astonishes them—undermines their virtue. In vowing to treat their enemies as wild beasts, the Troglodytes reveal themselves to have lost their sense of common humanity. Universal pity is no match against the martial spirit and, particularly, the desire for revenge. By heightening the prospect of individual suffering and individual glory, war also threatens to introduce inequality among the Troglodytes. It is not that the Troglodytes become selfish, say, by refusing to hazard their lives for others; quite the reverse, they sacrifice themselves readily, but for private reasons. Once the distinction between private causes and the common cause makes itself felt, it can act as a wedge further forcing them apart.

Along with a connection between foreign war and monarchy, Usbek's account suggests (albeit equivocally) some relation between monotheism and monarchy. The Troglodyte chosen to be the first king swears by God and indicates his belief in an afterlife. His monotheism seems to be exceptional; the speech of the Troglodyte ambassadors on the eve of the war indicates that, at that time, the Troglodytes were still polytheists. The king is exceptional also in his justice, and in his reluctance to see monarchy instituted. His decidedly antimonarchic speech, reproving the Troglodytes for their wish to adopt “a yoke other than that of virtue,” would seem to debunk the notion that there is any natural connection between belief in one God and rule by one on earth. Interestingly, this first monotheist among the Troglodytes is the first to admit that virtue is difficult. The education of the Troglodytes was initially described as instilling the feeling that “virtue is not something which ought to cost us; and it is not necessary to regard it as a painful exercise” (#12). The lesson of the first monotheist, who “inveighs in a stern voice,” is just the reverse. The first monotheist may be averse to the establishment of kingship, but in a deeper sense, the details of the Troglodyte history show a connection between monotheism and monarchy; the advent of both divine and human law is symptomatic of decline from the easy virtue of old. Monotheism and monarchy are distinct responses to the problem of virtue that the popular will insists on amalgamating.

Although the history of the Troglodytes is presented by Usbek in illustration of his view that “men were born to be virtuous,” the history's final installment introduces the thought that virtue can be effectually dispensed with under monarchy. Betraying some bitterness, the new king acknowledges that political institutions allow for a relaxation of the moral demands on men: “You know that, so long as you avoid falling into great crimes, you will not need virtue.” Usbek concludes his history of the Troglodytes with the king's lamentation for virtue; and by doing so, Usbek implies that he bemoans this political/moral divide as much as the king does.

However, it is by no means certain that Montesquieu sheds a tear with them. Commentators have tended to take Usbek as a mouthpiece for Montesquieu,²⁰ particularly when it comes to the serialized letters, of which the Troglodyte set is the first.²¹ Some attention to the dramatic setting would reveal more interesting possibilities. Usbek writes his history of the Troglodytes in response to a query from Mirza, a Persian associate who has renounced orthodox religious belief, but who finds his own reason insufficient and therefore seeks instruction from Usbek. To judge by Mirza's letter, Usbek had apparently been the central figure of a sort of Persian salon or academy (Mirza remembers him as “the soul of our Society”). In order to decide the question now before the group—whether it is virtue or sensual pleasure that makes for happiness—Mirza asks Usbek to explain his oft-expressed view that virtue is integral to existence. The caption of Mirza's letter reads “Mirza to his friend Usbek, at Erzeron.”²² Usbek's reply is captioned simply “Usbek to Mirza, at Ispahan.” In Usbek's first letters to both Rustan and Nessir (#1, 6, 8), the designation “his friend” was used. Its absence here suggests some disproportion in the relationship. Although Usbek professes himself flattered by Mirza's friendship and good opinion, he does not say that the feeling is reciprocated. Indeed, he refers to his response not as an act of friendship but as a performance that has been prescribed. (Mirza's name means “son of a prince”—an etymology not unknown to Montesquieu, one imagines.)

The setting for the Troglodyte letters seems almost Socratic: a man whose reputation for wisdom makes him a sought after and occasionally (as in the Republic) a prevailed-upon interlocutor. Taken together, the intellectual difference between Mirza and Usbek, the compulsory character of the discourse, and Usbek's choice of myth over argument raise the possibility that the story of the Troglodytes is intended by Usbek as an exoteric teaching. In other words, there may be some ironic distance between Usbek's full views and those he expresses here. Pauline Kra has shown the extent to which the Troglodyte letters might be read as a naturalized account of biblical history.²³ Such an account would be suitable for a man like Mirza who has expressed religious doubts, but who clearly remains pious with respect to country and family, a patriot and a patriarch. There is no letter in reply from Mirza; whether that is indicative of Mirza's complete satisfaction would be difficult to say.

Even if we determine that Usbek has not deliberately sophisticated his speech, Montesquieu has surely done it for him. Among the second race of Troglodytes, the conflict between the pleasant and the good seemed to be obviated, for a time at least. However, we have already noted some of the complexities and difficulties of the Troglodyte history. Whether Usbek is aware of them is unclear, but Usbek's creator could not be ignorant of them.

This preliminary exposition of Usbek's views on the relation of the passions and virtue is subject to both an internal commentary—that buried in the details of the history—and, more significantly, an external commentary—that provided by the surrounding letters. Usbek's concern for virtue and its imperiled state had already been made very evident, both in the letter to the chief black eunuch charging him with the wives' virtue (#2) and in the letter to Rustan detailing Usbek's uncompromising devotion to virtue while in the service of the shah (#8). Usbek's gloom at the Troglodytes' eventual desire to become like all the nations, with a king over them, would seem to be justified by his experience as a courtier; Usbek's “grand design”—daring to be virtuous even at court—earned him ministerial enmity without securing princely favor. The sincere voice of virtue disconcerted both idol and idolaters. Whereas the first letter to Rustan (#1) had blazoned Usbek's voyage as a quest for wisdom (sagesse), this second letter to his friend (#8) lays bare “the true motive” of his travels: under threat by the flatterers whom he had exposed, Usbek flees Persia out of care for his life. It is sagacious self-preservation that determines his self-exile, rather than desire to be a sage. Usbek admits that he feigned an interest in science in order to facilitate his escape. Confronted with the feebleness of moral virtue, but unwilling to make any accommodation to the ways of the world, Usbek took refuge in intellectual virtue. He claims, however, that what began as protective coloration became intrinsic.

As the letters proceed, we will be able to judge the extent to which Usbek's enlightenment is genuine and the extent to which it remains a blind, a place from which he views the world, but in which he lies concealed, undisclosed to himself as well as others. While his dedication to the life of inquiry is yet unproved, we know from letter #8 that Usbek's turn to inquiry is the result of the incompatibility he experienced between his intransigent virtue and Persian rule.

Although Usbek seems so pessimistic about virtue's chances, Montesquieu has him sketching the outlines of a virtuous monarchy in an unpublished continuation of the Troglodyte chronicle.²⁴ In this sequel, the Troglodytes are once again in the midst of a societal debate. Within a generation of their decision to establish monarchy, they are considering the idea of establishing commerce and the arts. Both king and people believe they can meet the threat to virtue posed by this further sophistication of their way of life. According to the people's spokesman, the Troglodytes' immunity to the blandishments of wealth and luxury will depend on the king's example. The king, in turn, hinges his virtue on the incorruptibility of the people. Thus, the hope for a virtuous monarchy rests on the reciprocal virtue of king and people. It seems a very delicate foundation, inasmuch as a misstep by either side would initiate a downward spiral. In place of the countervailing influences and powers that maintain equilibrium in a Montesquieu-styled monarchy, the Troglodyte version prescribes mutual dependence and mutual exhortation.

Given what we have seen of Usbek's longing for virtue, as well as his belief that virtue's natural locus is in the family, we might expect Usbek's homelife to be a showcase for his views, with his domestic arrangements on the Troglodyte model: “They loved their wives, and were beloved by them. Their entire attention was directed toward educating their children to virtue” (#12). However, instead of tender and virtuous natural relations, we encounter the institution of the harem, wherein we see immediately and most starkly the results of an attempt to realize virtue in the face of nature's opposition. Six of the novel's first nine letters, prior to the Troglodyte series, deal with the harem. By presenting the different perspectives of the parties involved, Montesquieu creates a three-dimensional view of the harem: Usbek writes to the chief eunuch (#2) and to a friend (#5) about his wives; three of the wives write to Usbek (#3, 4, 7); and the chief eunuch writes to a fellow eunuch who has accompanied Usbek on his travels (#9). Moreover, the letter that follows the Troglodyte series is also from the chief eunuch to one of his subordinates (#15). Of the 161 letters constituting the novel, there are only four that do not involve either of the two main characters, Usbek and Rica, as author or recipient. All are written by eunuchs to other eunuchs.²⁵ Two of these unusual letters—elaborating the plight of men separated from nature and from themselves—appear here, as the frame for the Troglodyte episode. Usbek has sacrificed these men on the altar of virtue. In the harem, moral virtue has been reduced to a species of physical (and specifically “gendered”) virtue: namely, female virtue understood as sexual modesty, either virginity or fidelity. Claustration and castration are the sex-specific means of securing that virtue. Set within the context of the surrounding letters, the Troglodyte utopia begins to appear as the Potemkin village for Usbek's dystopia.

Before beginning the real tour, behind the walls of the seraglio, let us return for a moment to Hobbes. He too conducted a critique of virtue, directing himself against the male virtue of courage or the manly disposition of one's body with respect to death. By contrast, Montesquieu's critique of virtue focuses on female rather than male virtue, continence—or the disposition of the body with respect to pleasure—rather than courage. For Montesquieu, the passion for life is positive and linked to sexuality, rather than negative and linked to the fear of death. Montesquieu turns individuals away from such life-denying ethics as ancient manliness and Christian martyrdom, but not, like Hobbes, by directly advocating cowardice. An at least residual admiration for human high-heartedness may be quite indispensable to political life.

Notes

1. For instance, Pangle, “Montesquieu,” 344, hazards this description: “The work may be tentatively characterized as presenting the negative or ground-clearing portion of Montesquieu's philosophy: his critique, in a spirit informed by Bayle, Locke, and Spinoza, of the reigning traditions of Judaeo-Christian religion and Aristotelian natural right.” I believe Montesquieu's critique is more far-reaching than Pangle allows, extending even to his protomodern forebears. I hope to establish the distinctiveness of Montesquieu's contribution within the tradition of political thought, to show him as something more than the Continental Locke. Montesquieu is too often regarded as a derivative part of hyphenated modernity, an addition to that amalgam of Machiavelli-Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau.

2. Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1279a17-21. Further, at 1279b15-17, Aristotle defines tyranny as the “monarchic rule of a despot over the political association” (also 1295a17); at 1292a15-25, he describes democracies that become despotic and analogous to tyranny; at 1306b1-6, he speaks of oligarchies being overthrown when they become too despotic. (I have made slight emendations in this and subsequent passages from the Lord translation.)

3. Leo Strauss, On Tyranny (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963), 21.

4. For a fascinating philological tour, see R. Koebner, “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 275-302; also Melvin Richter, “Despotism,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas 2 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973): 1-18; and Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (Jan.-March 1963): 133-42.

5. Koebner, 288.

6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 154.

7. According to Koebner, 300, “For despotisme no earlier evidence has been traced than the jesting side-remark of an antiquarian, who in 1698 wrote of ‘le despotisme que la grammairiens ont exercé sur les poésies d'Homère.”’ I don't know whether Montesquieu knew of this first usage, but he does include a letter (#36) that mocks a disputation concerning Homer (a part of the “Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns”), and that contains as well a swipe at scholastic Latin.

8. Koebner, 300-301, gives a brief history of the -ism suffix (yet another Greek contribution that Latin purists had long resisted).

9. In the Spicilège, Montesquieu notes that in certain cases the religious authorities have been the purveyors of Hobbes: “It is the abbé Dubois [cardinal and prime minister to the regent] who has corrupted the duc d'Orléans and has had him read Hobbes and other authors of that kind” (2:1350).

10. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, ed. Roger D. Masters, trans. Judith R. Masters (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978), 127.

11. Dossier de L'Esprit des lois, 2:996.

12. See Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York: Free Press, 1989) for an account of the philosophic effort to harness the force unleashed by Machiavelli. Mansfield's short chapter on Montesquieu is, I believe, one of the finest things written on him.

13. Hobbes, 100.

14. Ibid., 101.

15. This is one of two published references to Hobbes. The other, from his Défense de L'Esprit des lois, is even more negative, perhaps exaggeratedly so—Montesquieu speaks of the “terrible system” of Hobbes. Among the Pensées, there are three more references: nos. 601, 615, 1142. There is also a letter of 8 October 1750 to Monseigneur de Fitz-James where, in defending himself against the charge of irreligion, Montesquieu boasts that “Everyone in England acknowledges that no one better combatted Hobbes, and Spinoza also, than I. In Germany it is admitted that I have better crushed Bayle, in two chapters, than M. Basnage and other theologians have done in books expressly made for that purpose.”

16. Pensées, no. 1142, points up Hobbes's anthropocentrism: “Hobbes said that curiosity is peculiar to man; in this he deceives himself: each animal having it according to the extent of his understanding.”

17. Leo Strauss, The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis, trans. Elsa M. Sinclair (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952), 110-12.

18. This passage was excluded from Montesquieu's Traité des Devoirs (1725) and placed in the Pensées instead. The Traité des Devoirs is now lost; all that remains is an abstract of it and those excisions placed in the Pensées, some of which eventually made their way into The Spirit of the Laws.

19. Just as Usbek downplays the special providence of the gods, so he downplays heavenly wrath in explaining the demise of the wicked Troglodytes. The plague that finally wiped them out was a recurrence of a disease that had been successfully treated the first time around by a foreign doctor who refuses to return because he wasn't paid for his services. Were he to intervene again, the doctor says he would be opposing the just anger of the gods. Usbek, however, says the Troglodytes were victims of their own injustice. Man has arts with which to counter the violence of nature, but their practice requires certain moral precepts, including the observance of contracts. Had remuneration been forthcoming, the doctor would not have regarded a new epidemic as a judgment of the gods; after all, disease is the condition from which he derives his livelihood.

20. Lack of attention to the conversational context, as well as a simple equation of Usbek with Montesquieu, mars the work of Allessandro S. Crisafulli, “Montesquieu's Story of the Troglodytes: Its Background, Meaning, and Significance,” PMLA 43 (June 1943): 372-92. Crisafulli was the first to read the story of the wicked Troglodytes as a rebuttal of Hobbes. The bulk of his essay, however, is concerned with the good Troglodytes, whom he takes as evidence of Montesquieu's primitivism. Crisafulli aligns Montesquieu with thinkers like Shaftesbury. He does not consider whether the fable may not raise objections against both sides of the contemporary debate.

21. Most notable of the others are the long series on population #112-22, and Rica's library tour #133-37; there are also other shorter series #89-90, #94-95, #99-100, #102-4. This density of explicitly connected letters is characteristic of the book's second half, a circumstance that has led some commentators (mistakenly I believe) to view the movement of the book as an ascent or progression from the simple to the complex, from the more frivolous to the more weighty. See for instance, Barrière, Un grand provincial, 242-44; and Kra, “The Invisible Chain,” 11, 13, 40.

22. These captions are not salutations. As the preface makes clear, Montesquieu, in his role as translator, has stripped the letters of such trivialities; rather, these are “editor”-supplied headings. As such, they provide clues to the sometimes shifting character of the relationship between correspondents. For instance, in the first three letters to Rustan (#1,8,19) the caption is “Usbek to his friend Rustan,” while the final letter (#91) is simply “Usbek to Rustan.” The change is indicative of Usbek's emotional isolation from others, as the harem situation comes to dominate his thoughts.

23. Pauline Kra, “Religion in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes,” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century 72 (1970): 40-55.

24. Most available editions append the various unpublished letters and fragments, including the Troglodyte finale. See Pléiade, “Dossier des Lettres persanes,” 1:383-4, no. 120.

25. See chap. 5, pp. 78-79, for discussion of this subset.

Works Cited

Aristotle. The Politics. Translated by Carnes Lord. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Barrière, Pierre. Un grand provincial: Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu. Bordeaux: Delmas, 1946.

Crisafulli, Allessandro S. “Montesquieu's Story of the Troglodytes: Its Background, Meaning, and Significance.” PMLA 43 (June 1943): 372-92.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Edited by Michael Oakeshott. New York: Macmillan, 1962.

Koebner, R. “Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 14 (1951): 275-302.

Kra, Pauline. “The Invisible Chain of the Lettres persanes.” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century 23 (1963): 3-55.

———. “Religion in Montesquieu's Lettres persanes.” Studies on Voltaire and the 18th Century 72 (1970): 11-224.

Mansfield, Harvey C., Jr. Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power. New York: Free Press, 1989.

Montesquieu. The Persian Letters. Translated by George R. Healy. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, Library of Liberal Arts, 1964.

———. Persian Letters. Translated by C. J. Betts. NY: Penguin, 1973.

———. Oeuvres complètes. 2 vols. Édition établie et annotée par Roger Caillois. Paris: Gallimard, “Bibliothèque de la Pléiade,” 1949-51.

Pangle, Thomas L. “Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat.” The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Edited by David Miller, 344-47. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

Richter, Melvin. “Despotism.” In Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. 2. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973.

Rousseay, Jean-Jacques. On the Social Contract. Edited by Roger D. Masters, translated by Judith R. Masters. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978.

Strauss, Leo.

———. On Tyranny. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963.

———. The Political Philosophy of Hobbes: Its Basis and Its Genesis. Translated by Elsa M. Sinclair. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1952.