SOURCE: Shklar, Judith. “The Spirit of the Laws: necessity and freedom.” In Montesquieu, pp. 93-110. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.

[In this excerpt from her study of Montesquieu's works, Shklar begins by examining the development of Montesquieu's theory of culture, or the cumulative reasons that different regions and peoples adopt different systems of government; she also critiques his theory, suggesting that he overemphasized psychology. Shklar also discusses the importance of commerce to Montesquieu's notions of government and the function of laws.]

The second part of The Spirit of the Laws deals with the ways in which the physical environment and the acquired culture of a people shape its actual and potential laws. This is the realm of necessity, of climates that dominate our physical and emotional development, and of compulsive habits and beliefs that are passed down from one generation to the next. Geography, history, and economic resources exert inexorable pressures on every society, and the nature of things so constituted determines the degree of freedom and wealth a people may enjoy. According to Montesquieu a combination of ‘physical and moral causes’ will, in time, give a people a distinct character or ‘spirit’, which both limits and structures its political possibilities. While these forces would seem to leave no scope for deliberate political action, Montesquieu did not see them as shackles. The material world was for him first and foremost an object of scientific understanding. To know physical nature is to be able to control it intelligently or at least to resign oneself to it consciously, not as a victim but as an agent. For the climate and the collective psychology one can trace from its effects are not a new sort of fate, any more than the laws of gravitation. The rational lawmaker must begin by understanding the conditions legislation confronts. They set his agenda and he must adjust to them, but he can also overcome and counteract the given world. A scientific jurisprudence must know even more: it must understand the character of the lawmakers, as Montesquieu had already shown.

While the object of Montesquieu's science was clearly to illuminate and encourage the practical understanding that he called political moderation or rationality, his model of science seemed to leave no room for such choices of conduct. His theory of climate appeared to make human volition illusory. It was a very ‘hard’ determinism which made it seem easy to grasp social patterns and to diagnose their malfunctions, but not to change them. Societies were natural, predictable wholes, created by automatic human responses to climate and topography. How could one interfere with their set course, or alter them by design? That the climate, heat and cold, north and south, had a profound effect upon health and wealth was, of course, not a new idea. Among modern political theorists, Bodin had already claimed that the climate had a significant impact upon society, but he was still enmeshed in astrological speculations. Much of the serious travel literature discussed the subject soberly, and an official survey of France made for the heir to the throne in 1697 had also dwelt on the effect of local climates upon the people. Montesquieu was interested above all in medical literature on the climate. He particularly admired Hippocrates's writings, which, at the very beginnings of medical thinking, had paid much attention to the effects of the air on human illnesses (Spicilège, II.1322). The most advanced physicians of Montesquieu's time shared this clinical approach, especially in describing the likely causes and course of epidemics. Both French and English medical authorities believed that substances in the air mixed with human ‘animal fluids’ caused and spread disease. Montesquieu himself had remarked that stagnant pools of water could produce disease-bearing vapours, and in time alter the character of a neighbourhood (Réflexions sur les Habitants de Rome, [Œuvres complètes; hereafter referred to as O.C.,] I.910-12). among his contemporaries, writers on aesthetics discussed the effect of climate on our sensibility and on the variety and changes in artistic taste. And, not insignificantly, sceptical philosophers used the climate and the different mentalities it created to cast doubt upon the certainty of their own and everyone else's opinions, knowledge, and judgement. Only Hume thought that climate had nothing to do with shaping national character.

Montesquieu was clearly drawn to the materialists among the medical writers. He certainly shared their model of scientific knowledge: if you cannot measure it, it does not exist. Heat expands and cold contracts the fibres of the body, he thought. The speed with which the blood reaches the heart and the amount of juice extracted from food all depend upon the texture of the fibres, and these physiological processes have an immediate effect upon our character. They account for the languor of southerners and the energy of northerners. The effect of extreme cold on a sheep's tongue that he had observed under a microscope convinced him that freezing reduced sensation. From this he inferred that one must indeed flail Muscovites to make them respond at all. Southerners feel too much, in contrast, and have excessively lively imaginations. He also at once drew lessons for lawgivers from these observations. Southerners need good laws to control the effects of the climate more than do northerners (Spirit, XIV.3-5). Although political action is not powerless against these apparently overwhelming physical forces, it was nevertheless one of Montesquieu's purposes to demonstrate the narrow reach of legislation. The English, for example, commit suicide not out of despair like Roxane, nor like the Romans to make a public statement, but out of recurrent depressions brought on solely by the climate. The climate here functions as an extenuating circumstance because it is a compelling necessity that accounts for what we cannot help doing. The only appropriate public response to something so exigent is forbearance and tolerance. This is the liberal face of relativism and determinism. Its more awkward aspect is that it justifies irresponsibility and inaction. Relativism has its uses against the culture-blind efforts of political and religious bigots and missionaries, but it serves the defenders of despotic government and cruelty just as well. Liberty, Montesquieu assumed, is not the fruit of all climates, just as fresh air is disagreeable for people used to swamps. Freedom is intolerable for those not accustomed to it (XIX.2). In China, where law, religion, manners, and morals are all tied into a single system of civility, it is impossible to introduce Christianity or to alter the prevailing order. Why should missionaries meddle so vainly in the lives of the Chinese (XIX.16-19)? Did not Montezuma know better than the Spaniards what religion was best for Mexico (XXIV.24-5)? In Europe Catholicism is suited to the south, but Protestantism is natural in the north, where the spirit of liberty cannot abide a monarchical church (XXIV.5). If relativism can do much for religious tolerance, it can, however, also condone despotism. And indeed Montesquieu did not doubt that China was a despotic state and that most of Asia was compelled by physical causes to remain utterly unfree (VII.21; XVII.6). It is as if a double empire dominated the entire continent. Nature and government combined seem to rule Asia with inordinate rigour. Chinese despotism, which responds effectively to a very hostile natural environment, cannot even be called irrational.

The tensions inherent in Montesquieu's theory of climate become particularly acute in his chapters on slavery (XV-XVII). He had no doubt that slavery was absolutely evil. It degrades the slave and demoralizes the master. Without freedom the slave can never act out of motives of virtue, while unlimited power makes his owner ‘fierce, hasty, severe, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel’ (XV.1). Slavery can have no place in any moderate government, since there cannot be such a degree of inequality in a republic or such human debasement in a monarchy. It is also against the law of nations, for prisoners of war may be disarmed and then detained only as long as the emergency lasts. No right to sell oneself can be imputed to anyone, since it is impossible to put a price on a life. Certainly religion cannot claim a right to enslave people in order to hasten their conversion, as those ‘superbly Christian’ Spaniards did in America. In spite of Aristotle, moreover, there are no natural slaves. Slavery makes men dull, not the other way around. Montesquieu's deepest scorn and blackest humour, however, were reserved for racist defences of slavery. It was his hope, though he was not certain, that no climate was so hot that free men could not somehow be induced to work, thus making slavery unnecessary everywhere, which was only half a qualification. There was also the assumption that, since no one is free in despotic states, slavery might be less intolerable there. Finally, having so unconditionally denounced it, Montesquieu went on to discuss all the ways in which slave systems had in fact been run more or less effectively and safely. To explain is not, of course, to excuse, but if we must make allowances for suicide in England, why not slavery in Asia, since the hot climate impels peoples' fibres and tempers so uncontrollably? The question seems especially obvious when we consider Montesquieu's explanation of ‘domestic slavery’, or polygamy that amounts to enslaving women and shutting them up in seraglios (XVI.1-10). Girls mature early in hot countries and marry before they have any common sense and so are easily dominated by their older spouses. As they age quickly and learn nothing, they are readily replaced. In the north women marry later when they already know how to look after themselves. Moreover, men drink too much in the north while women remain sober, which gives them a hold over their sodden mates. It would be absurd even to think of putting them in a harem. But as a response to the climate and as part of a generally despotic society, ‘domestic slavery’ corresponds to the nature of things. Montesquieu did not say that polygamy was an admirable institution. It does nothing for morality and encourages homosexuality, but it is a necessary part of a given order and not something northerners should meddle with. In its place polygamy is just as appropriate as monogamy is in its locality. It is not entirely surprising that his clerical critics accused him of defending polygamy and of treating morality like an anatomist. His reply that he was only describing, not judging, was disingenuous and evasive.

Montesquieu's theory of climate was morally completely out of keeping with the entire burden of The Persian Letters and the universalism implicit in the political judgements, such as those on slavery, throughout the Spirit of the Laws. What makes his social comparisons at all possible is that at the very least ‘they’ (women, blacks, eunuchs, foreigners) feel exactly what ‘we’ do. That is why we should think of mankind as consisting of sentient rather than rational beings. The question ‘how can one be a Persian?’ is either an offensive parochialism that is an insult to the unity of humanity, or a sceptical solipsism that precludes any mutual identification. Montesquieu did not think that we were doomed to be like that, but because he assumed that the climate determines the way we feel, it follows that we are separated by it just at the level where we are supposed to be most alike. Do the Russians really suffer less because of their ice-thickened fibres and are they not to be pitied, because they are different? The doctrine is also politically confused. If climate, the demands of survival, and ages of habit, manners, and belief have conditioned the Chinese people and their rulers to a highly industrious and regimented life, the state cannot be called despotic and the rule of fear. Since the citizens know that this is how they must live and appear not only to accept it rationally but to like it as well, then it is not a regime based on fear in the way conquerors and arbitrary tyrants are feared. For fear like pain is a universal physiological, not a cultural reaction. If the Chinese live in fear and are ruled by it, then their regime is not the rule- and custom-bound state that Montesquieu ascribed to them when he discussed their climate and its effects. Finally, the theory is hard to defend. Why are cold Russia and Sweden not free? That the Russian nobility might become restless and the Swedish kings were a temporary aberration were the best answers Montesquieu could invent (XVIII.3). All islands are free, we are told (XVIII.5). That does not fit Japan, as he was forced to admit. The physiology of social development had all the attractions of a hard science for Montesquieu, but it was morally inconsistent, politically incoherent, and factually false.

In spite of the manifest difficulties that it presented, Montesquieu never abandoned the theory of climates, but he subordinated it to a far more flexible theory of culture. We are not, after all, the supine victims of temperature. ‘Mankind is influenced by various causes: by the climate, by religion, by the laws, by the maxims of government, by precedents, morals, and customs; whence is formed a general spirit of nations’ (XIX.4). All but the first of these are what Montesquieu would have called ‘moral causes’. A society is now a ‘union of spirits’ and each one has a character of its own which it has slowly acquired through the ages. Each century, in fact, has a spirit of its own. In the Gothic years a spirit of independence and disorder prevailed. Under Charlemagne a monkish spirit reigned. Then came the spirit of chivalry, which was succeeded by the spirit of conquest as soon as regular armies were organized. Now it was the spirit of commerce that predominated in the civilized world (Pensées, 810). Thanks to the discovery of the compass and all that followed, ‘Europe has arrived at so high a degree of power that nothing in history can be compared with it’ (XXI.21). These are wholly political definitions of the collective spirit of Europe at least. Indeed in his own age, Montesquieu thought that the spirit of a people was directed by the court and the capital from which they were ruled. ‘It is Paris that makes the French. Without it some of the provinces would be more German than Germany.’ The modern world is a culture in which politics, not the climate, matters most (Pensées, 1581, 1584). In England, the model of a modern state, conduct is shaped indirectly by the laws. In ancient Rome, by contrast, mores ruled, and laws were enacted only when the force of mores had failed (XIX.23, 27). That does not imply progress. For laws are adapted to regulate only the actions of a citizen, mores those of a man in his inner being, while manners only teach external behaviour (XIX.16). Nevertheless, in The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu recognized a steady development of the spirit of peoples which was far less pessimistic than the essentially cyclical view of history that had informed his history of the Romans. Mankind has moved from the most primitive stage of being herdsmen, to settled agriculture, to the discovery of metal, and to the use of money. The last is a decisive moral moment. Craft replaces violence, and injustice becomes common. It is, moreover, not only practised, but understood as wrongdoing, so that one can speak of an ethical awakening. Only the prehistory of society is a matter of purely economic growth. Moral causes have their origin with civil law and government. They are a mixed blessing, but this is nevertheless the beginning of civilization, of wealth, and of the possibility of rational law. For it is also the first imposition of intelligence over nature (XVIII.8-17).

‘Mankind by its industry and the influence of good laws have rendered the earth more proper for its abode’ (XVIII.7). The very notion of need has been transformed. From being the static measure of what is required to keep us alive, it has become a flexible notion that corresponds to the wants that wealth inspires and our imagination projects and urges us to satisfy. Bare needs can never be eliminated, hence the lasting importance of agriculture; however, the pain of biting necessity that prevailed in our impoverished and mindless past is gone. In an unpublished essay Montesquieu had as usual engaged in some physiological speculations to explain the ascent of intellectual man. The fewer our experiences, the thicker the fibres and the grosser and fewer our ideas. The soul scarcely moves within primitive man. It is with the accumulation of ideas as it is with the accumulation of capital: thanks to the labour of the senses it multiplies. Wealth and inherited learning, physically and socially transmitted, create a national spirit that once had its roots in the climate, but is no longer in its thrall. Europe is the end product of ages of learning and is increasingly governed by intelligence and driven by the quest for wealth and knowledge.

To what extent did Montesquieu rely on the ancient analogy between the human body and the body politic? Was the spirit of a people somehow like that of an individual? It is unlikely that he would resort to such a prescientific and traditional notion. If anything is the ‘soul’ of a state, it is its principle, as equality, for example, was the ‘soul of democracy’, but that was only a turn of phrase, not a sustained analogy. What he would have liked to do, but found impossible, was somehow to show how the structure and motions of the individual's ‘machine’, as he liked to call it, explained the development of that ‘unity of spirits’ which defines a society. Society is a system of norms which are related to each other and can be understood historically and as functioning to maintain the social whole. What active part does the spirit of individual people, who make up this whole, play in this construct? Montesquieu found it easy to account for its general constitutive elements, but he found no clue to the mystery of how exactly individuals learn the rules, or how the variety of individual personalities is aggregated to form a homogeneous collective spirit. The last question troubled him deeply and to no avail.

In his last essay, On Taste, written for the Encyclopédie, he spoke of the soul as having two kinds of passions, those that are inherent in its being and those that it acquires through the body as our ‘vital spirits’ carry physical sensations to it. Among the former, curiosity, the desire for knowledge, comes first, because the soul's inherent passions are those of any thinking being. The sentiments that come to it from the body are added to and modified by what is already there, so creating a ‘natural’ whole. There are also ‘acquired’ sentiments, which come to us from the society in which we live. Spirit (esprit) in an individual is to have the right sort of organs required for any skill, what is called talent, taste, intelligence, or the capacity to perform the tasks societies set. It is a socially acquired, adaptive characteristic. Not the soul, but the spirit of an individual is relative to society. It is the learned ability to satisfy its demands, but how social signals travel up through the fibres is completely obscure. Montesquieu seems to have been aware of his difficulties, for the mechanics of learning preoccupied him a good deal while he was working on the book. We have some notes he composed under the heading ‘Causes that May Affect Men's Minds and Characters’ that show him grappling with the problem. It was at best a set of jottings revealing a perplexed mind. As usual the physical causes that affect individual personalities were described in great detail and very mechanically as messages sent by juices from and to the soul. ‘In our body the soul is like a spider in its web. It cannot move without shaking one of the threads which are extended at a distance, and similarly, none of these threads can be stirred without moving the spider.’ As all of us have different fibres and different sensations impinging upon us there is an enormous difference between the bodies and characters of individuals. The moral causes, or education, which shape us also differ, and Montesquieu was very brief and vague about them. He could not finish that part of the essay, or even organize his notes on moral causality. The general idea was that the education each one of us receives is the totality of our social experiences. Among these some are shared by members of the same social group, but this cannot alter the uniqueness of the individual. What Montesquieu called the spirit of a people on this account can only be the sum of common experiences. These yield more or less accurate statistical regularities of conduct among otherwise diverse individuals. The spirit of a people is thus unlike either the soul or the spirit of an individual because it is not an active but a reactive social force. The fact that experiences are shared by members of a culture explains their similarities less than their differences from other peoples. It is in no sense like the spider that is our personal soul. Montesquieu simply did not have a coherent theory of psychological development or of education to explain how the enormous differences between individual members of a society could be compatible with the notion of a discernible, single, politically meaningful, collective spirit.

Montesquieu often confused statistical regularity with causality, which is not uncommon. In his book on the Romans he had treated their military spirit as a ‘general’ long-range, deep conditioning cause of their political development. In The Spirit of the Laws that idea was retained, but the new emphasis on the physiological sources of the spirit of the people made it a less plausible explanation. In fact the purpose of the idea of the spirit of a people had altered. It was no longer meant only to explain social rules, but to set out the practical limits of legislation. The spirit is seen less as contributing directly to the creation of laws than as indicating their probable effectiveness. A government that violates popular attitudes will destroy itself, as Charles I of England was undone because he could do nothing that did not offend the spirit of the people (O.C. III.545-6). The cleverest Machiavellian schemers among politicians are in fact helpless against the primordial force of the popular spirit. This ethos is not what intelligence is to a person, but is an expression of old habits and responses which legislation should not ignore. It is like a natural fact, which an intelligent legislator must understand fully. If anything plays the part of human reason in society in Montesquieu's political sociology, it is law itself. ‘Law in general is human reason, to the extent that it rules all the peoples of the earth; and the political and civil laws of every nation should be nothing but particular cases to which this human reason is applied’ (I.3). Moreover, in all but the most primitive societies, the laws made by those who govern determine the spirit of a people more decisively than anything else. That is why Montesquieu protested to his clerical critics that his book demonstrated the perpetual victory of moral causes over physical ones, and congratulated David Hume for having said so too.

The triumph of law over all other determinants of human conduct also permitted Montesquieu to demonstrate that political and personal morality were quite distinct. Modern regimes especially do not have to impose moral rules upon their citizens, or limit their freedom in these matters, because political stability does not depend on it. English society proved to him that bad men make excellent modern citizens, which is a powerful liberal as well as an anticlerical argument. English laws do not educate men for a life of virtue, but prepare them for liberty and political ambition, which animate their admirable regime, and which require very little in the way of domestic discipline (XIX.26). Since they are free to say whatever they wish unless the law explicitly forbids it, and as it does not matter in a free country whether people reason well, so long as they assert themselves, every passion is on public display. This, as well as a multiplicity of religious sects, is entirely functional and so is the constant and open conflict of interests. Only wealth and political merit impress these people, and if they are not happy it is only partly due to the climate. Their uncouth manners and generally bad social character do not make for felicity, only for free institutions. The rules of law and party strife have politically educated a people to be self-assertive, commercial, free, and in a crisis, patriotic. Law is quite adequate to guide them, nothing educationally more intense is required.

Montesquieu thought that separating law and morality was generally a sound policy everywhere, not just in modern England. In China, for example, the distance between social custom and our idea of morality is just as wide. The Chinese have to be so thrifty that they become terrible cheats to survive. The Spaniards are devout, haughty, despise work, and live in proud poverty as a result. A wise legislator would know how to stimulate their vanity to better ends. All of which proves that not all moral vices are political ones, and that not all political vices are immoral (XIX.9-11). For the stability of regimes it matters only that the spirit of the people and the principles of government do not clash (V.1; XIX.5). Thus in England political interests give way to commercial ones as a matter of national policy, because wealth is generally preferred to military glory. The English, in fact, really know how to appreciate religion, commerce, and liberty. They care nothing for the first, are only interested in the second, and would sacrifice everything for the last (XX.7). In a modern state commerce and political self-interest are the principles that sustain a regime, not classical virtue or Christian morality. Because law does not touch the inner life of people, it can secure a sphere of freedom for individuals in a way custom does not (XIX.14-16). Laws may have regrettable moral limitations, since by looking to the public good they may have to offend personal values, as laws of inheritance sometimes must (XVII.1). That is unfortunate, and it again suggests that only necessary laws should ever be established at all. For free men, however, it is an advantage to be ruled only by law, for only overt actions come under its control. Not that Montesquieu expected rational or free order to emerge in all modern societies or to see perfection anywhere. ‘An excess of reason is not always desirable. … Mankind generally accommodates itself better to mediums than to extremes’ (XI.6).

Popular culture sets boundaries which governments overstep at their peril. If one fully understands the spirit of a people one is likely to pursue moderate rather than reckless policies. Planned change can, after all, cause a lot of suffering (XXIX.18). One needs only to recall the changes introduced by the Emperor Constantine. Even reform can be very arbitrary. Montesquieu thought that many policies that affected the manners and customs of a people were harsh and frequently self-defeating. He did not think of social change as the work of popular pressure or protest, but as innovations undertaken by governments. Law is an agent of change expressing the preferences and aims of lawmakers. In the infancy of societies they make the institutions, and even if in time rulers are made by institutions, they always have the opportunity for legislation, especially in modern Europe. There is, however, always a tension between the lawgivers and those for whom they legislate. ‘Laws are established, manners are inspired’ (XIX.12). A wise legislation can alter the latter and even deep-seated customs, but it is not easy and is rarely wise. It is therefore the first task of intelligent, or what he called moderate, government to take culture into account.

Political culture is a notion that serves policy makers well even if its scientific standing is poor. Montesquieu used it as a counsel of caution, though he mentioned several examples of deliberate legislation that had proved to be beneficial and enduring (XXVIII.29, 45). He assumed throughout that there was a huge gulf between the group that rules and the spirit of the people. His advice was directed entirely at those who more or less consciously order the latter. That puts his theory of political culture into some disarray. For in effect it places the rulers outside the orbit of the spirit of the people. The mentality of the rulers, the principle of any government, is no part of that spirit, apparently. Indeed it is the task of intelligent legislation to see to it that these two normative orders never come into conflict.

By making his theory ultimately too uniform and too dependent on physiology, he had left himself no way of accounting for cultural variety within a society. There is a general spirit, but rulers and lawgivers inexplicably stand outside and above it. So, of course, do reason and science. And if these are ever to guide legislation, then law too will in some way rise above the culture it must manipulate. There is much hope in this apparent confusion. There is also, of course, the reality that in a monarchy the distance between the ruler and the people is enormous.

Of all the fields of legislative activity open to a modern state none seemed to Montesquieu more important than commercial activity. The wealth of nations, he knew, depends on agriculture, manufacturing, and trade. Natural resources are important, but law, especially the laws of inheritance and land ownership, have always had a far deeper impact upon the prosperity of a people (XVIII.1-8). Now commerce must also be regulated, or rather merchants must be constrained to act so as to advance it (XX.12). Generally the flow of goods between nations should be unimpaired, with tariffs to be imposed only in extreme cases. Nowhere did Montesquieu reveal himself more clearly as a citizen of Bordeaux than in his appreciation of commerce. No landed aristocrat ever sang its praises more enthusiastically. Commerce might stunt the highest Platonic virtues, but that was a small price to pay since it had cured Europe of its worst social vices, barbarity and Machiavellism (XX. 1-2). Not only was Montesquieu free of aristocratic disdain for commerce, he also rejected Christian objections to the pursuit of gain and Aristotelian strictures upon usury. Commerce is the object of free states, while conquest is the aim of despotic ones and, as he knew, of all continental monarchies as well. The cost of wars of expansion is there for all to see in impoverished, oppressive Spain and devastated Spanish America. This is the anti-England, the political pole opposed to a free, commercial society. Commerce means peace among nations. It is the best policy imaginable.

The political benefits of commerce pale before its moral ones. It has not only encouraged peace, but also reduced prejudice, refined manners, and promoted justice. After centuries of barbarism, commerce has brought prosperity, probity, and learning to Europe. Much of the credit for making all this possible should go to the Jews, who alone had kept the spirit of commerce alive for bleak centuries (XXI.19-20). Tolerance in general is a good bargain; the exiled Huguenots have brought prosperity to Protestant countries much to France's loss. Far from being corrupting, commerce even encourages such public virtues as ‘frugality, economy, moderation, labour, prudence, tranquillity, order, and rule’ (V.6). These are qualities that democratic republics need especially, but any society can use them. If commerce has any defect it is in the realm of manners. People in Holland, for instance, would never do anything for you except for money. Politeness does not flourish among traders. There are of course moral limits to commercial greed. Interest should not be extortionate, and it is wrong of Europeans to trade junk to Africans in return for their precious metals (XXI.2).

Since stability and the dispersion of power are politically so important, governments should regulate who may and who may not take part in commerce. In a monarchy the nobility should not engage in commerce and neither should the king, because they would use their power to create monopolies and this would disturb the balance of power as well as discouraging commoners from entering the field (XX.19-22). In aristocratic republics the rulers should also stay out of trade, because it would create too much inequality and destroy their moderation (V.8). Despotisms are too insecure for commerce. The best commercial regime would appear to be some sort of democracy. That commerce and freedom go together seemed obvious to him. That does not mean that the government should remain inactive. Montesquieu believed that it has a responsibility for preventing extreme poverty. More specifically, the proper supply of money is extremely important in stimulating economic growth. The disasters of the Spanish inflation are to be avoided at all costs. The optimal situation is one in which the value and quantity of money are in exact equilibrium with the value and quantity of commodities. Each one represents the other exactly in that case, and money can perform flawlessly its function as a medium of exchange. This is what governments ought to aim for. Prices would be stable and the confidence of buyers, sellers, debtors, and creditors in the currency and in the economy as a whole would be perfect. Investment and consumer spending would both be high (XXI.21-3, XXII.3-10). In monarchies, luxury trades, profitable in the short run, are best, because they require moderate banking services. For in a monarchy bankers are a danger, since they can dominate the royal finances and thus the prince (XX.10). Republics can engage in large, long-term enterprises more readily, since banks do not pose any threat to them. The rate of interest is determined at any moment by the demand for money, and governments should only act to prevent excesses. In general the need for liquidity should be allowed to determine interest rates. Finally, there should be no public debt, and if it cannot be avoided it should be funded. Like almost all of Montesquieu's advice, this was meant to prevent governments from altering the economy and social power in any particular direction.

Economic policy is very much a matter of modern knowledge. Even the Romans knew and cared nothing about commerce. It is the moment where social science and political authority seem to meet. That was surely one of its attractions for Montesquieu. For The Spirit of the Laws is a hymn to knowledge. The sciences we need are those that help us plan our environment, because it is easier to alter it than to control our desires directly. Our passions are fixed, but not the ways in which we may satisfy them. The science of legislation can, at least in principle, attempt to structure the rules in ways that would make us less miserable and oppressed than we usually are. All law manifests a purposeful will, that is its spirit. It is not just a reaction to circumstances beyond human control. To know what its aims can and must be under various regimes, at different times, and under different historical and physical conditions is to know enough to prevent political disintegration and despotism. Even in the unlettered past laws were not fantasies or accidents, but the necessary expressions of the political will to survive under varying constraints.

Montesquieu had said at the outset of The Spirit of the Laws that law must be looked at as ‘relative’ to heat and cold, to the quality and extent of the terrain, to the way subsistence is gained, to religion, to the degree of liberty the constitution can bear, and to the number, inclinations, wealth, customs, and manners of the people. The laws are related to each other, to their origins, to the aims of the legislators, and to the matters that they address. And they must be studied in all these aspects. This was what he meant to do, and this is what he achieved. Europe on this showing was capable of freedom and prosperity, but there were no assurances that it would fulfil its possibilities. Montesquieu certainly believed in the healing powers of knowledge. That is why in spite of his caution and apprehensions he was the most perfect representative of the hopes of the Enlightenment. He was utterly convinced of the moral and political dignity of scientific knowledge and of its power to improve our lives. He had begun his great book with the declaration that he would be the happiest of men ‘if he could cure mankind of its prejudices’. By prejudices, he had explained, he did not mean what makes people ignorant of some matters, but ‘what makes them ignorant of themselves’. He did not find a cure, but he certainly did identify the chief political diseases that make us incapable of judging and acting in our own interests. The scientific study of political mistakes was, moreover, far from futile, because it came to provide an enduring intellectual basis for constitutional government and personal freedom.

Abbreviations

O.C. stands for Œuvres complètes de Montesquieu, edited by André Masson (Paris, Les Editions Nagel, 1950-5).

References to The Persian Letters are to the individual letters and are given in lower-case Roman numerals.

Romans refers to Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence, in O.C., vol. I. All references to it are to page numbers.

Spirit refers to L'Esprit des lois, in O.C., vol. I. References are to books, given in upper-case Roman numerals, followed by chapters in Arabic numbers.

Pensées are numbered as they appear in O.C., vol. II.