Montesquieu’s
Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws. By Thomas L. Pangle.
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973)*
Reviewed
by W. B. Allen
Professor Pangle’s work
reclaims Montesquieu as a critical theorist to be considered in any attempt to
understand the American regime and the principles of modern liberalism. Among
Americans, only Alexander Hamilton pointed toward the necessity of considering
Montesquieu’s practical proposals in theoretical terms. Hamilton justly accuses
his adversaries of having grasped the “observations” from one part of Montesquieu’s
work without adverting to his “sentiments” in another part. Professor Pangle enables
us to accept that challenge in a manner that has not been equaled since
Hamilton first formulated it.
According to Pangle,
Montesquieu—“of the handful of thinkers” at the origins of liberalism—“emerges
as the most helpful and relevant for us.” Following his precursors, he
subjected their principles to a “new analysis.” A return to Montesquieu,
therefore, should rekindle fundamental consideration of our regime: “What we
require and what we do not meet with in contemporary attempts to defend the
liberal, open society is a sympathetic inquiry that goes to the roots, that
does not take this society’s existence or its desirability for granted. . .”
(p. 2). What is proposed is at once a greater understanding of Montesquieu and
ourselves. That such understanding is needed now, especially, results from “the
modern crisis of reason itself.” Liberal intellectuals are no longer capable of
responding to the “dissatisfied,” the “critics,” since they no longer possess “faith
in the validity of evaluative reason.” The challenge of left liberalism has
disclosed a defect of right liberalism. This work seeks to supply the defect.
Because of the importance of
the work, it is necessary to regard it from its most important aspect. Perhaps
the most important part is footnote fifteen of chapter three, where Professor
Pangle states his case for reading Montesquieu’s attack on Hobbes as feigned.
It is through that consideration that the defect of right liberalism emerges
plainly. The chapter in which the note occurs is a consideration of “human
nature and natural law,” and it is essential to the interpretation of the work
as a whole.
Provisionally it must be
said that, although it is abundantly clear that sufficient political inducement
to dissociate oneself from Hobbes existed, nowhere is there drawn a principle
which depicts the purpose of a feigned rejection. Equally, therefore, the reader
cannot discern whether the praises and attacks on Plato, Aristotle, and
Machiavelli are to be taken literally or as feigned. If taken literally, there
arises the difficulty that the literal understanding of the latter, in fact,
agrees significantly with literal understanding of the attack on Hobbes.
Insofar as such agreement exists, the question arises whether all that agrees
with what is feigned is equally feigned or not to be taken literally? If one
answers yes, one must either deny, most significantly, that the laws of Plato
were in fact held by Montesquieu to be the best laws or maintain that
Montesquieu’s understanding of those laws is in agreement with—not “his
understanding of” but what are in fact—Hobbesian laws. The feigned attack is
said to cover Montesquieu’s acceptance of Hobbesian principles, and to know of
what the acceptance consists we must perforce return to Hobbes. Indeed, fullest
acceptance of Pangle’s thesis means, as well, full acceptance of David
Lowenthal’s thesis that Montesquieu, in singling out the Republic as the
ultimate manifestation of political virtue, recommends it only with respect to
its practical considerations and omits altogether its highest formulations.
Those formulations are the problematic status of the philosopher-king and the
community of wives and children, which respectively consider the role of
philosophy or wisdom and the role of eros in politics.
What Pangle demonstrates is
twofold: first, the Hobbesian view of nature is more conducive to modem
political philosophy than Spinoza’s; and, secondly, that Montesquieu, rather
than rejecting Hobbes, incorporates the Hobbesian view into a Spinozistic view
of the material world, thus effecting a synthesis. If this be the case—and the
argument is persuasive—Montesquieu’s theory, too, rests on the “crypto-teleology”
implicit in the attempt to construct a pre-political—nay, apolitical—human
existence which nonetheless leads inexorably to civil society. But, the
critical factor is that, such a theory must yield positive law (civil society).
Otherwise, granting acceptance of the general laws of modern science, man finds
himself able to speak, politically, only of his present regime and its past. He
will derive “normative rules” from tradition rather than abstract principles,
precisely because he has tossed aside the option of consulting nature
understood in terms of a final cause. Either, that is, Montesquieu follows
Hobbes or he must abandon political philosophy.
This,
then, is the defect of right liberalism. It is the notion that man’s selfish desires
could furnish the complete basis for his attachment to a regime and obviate the
necessity for reasoned reflection on the nature of that regime. Hence, once
natural rights were discovered and a regime established there remained only the
flurry of interested activity to keep it in motion. Pangle argues that
Montesquieu was the first who, while portraying the charms of such a vision,
introduced another principle—history—as the basis of attachment to such a
state. His principles were, in essence, still Hobbesian, based on natural
rights; the history was only incidental. Agreeing, Madison, in Federalist
#49, recognized that this regime would require a certain opinion to sustain it,
which opinion ought be fortified by examples not merely numerous but ancient.
But Montesquieu’s philosophical successors could not or would not follow his
cautious admonition that history could be used not to legitimate but only to
sanctify political arrangements. History, for Montesquieu, was a tool for legislators
or statesmen; its use was to be guided by rules of prudence. He envisioned,
therefore, that natural right was incapable of perpetuating political institutions—and
hence was not decisively human—though it could alone provide the effective
basis for such institutions.
The
turn to history as not only sanctifying but legitimating was in fact a
rejection of the natural right tradition. What Pangle demonstrates is that the
historicist abandonment of natural right is also the rejection of faith in
evaluative reason. Hence, the crisis of modernity is seen as the imprudent
rejection of the fundamental principle of modernity without a concomitant
detachment from the aspirations of modern liberalism. This crisis is most
vividly symbolized politically in the challenge of the Marxist historical
vision, and academically in the importance of existentialism.
To
know whether Montesquieu chooses either alternative presented to him, one must
read carefully The Spirit of the Laws. And, if one does so, one may
consider three questions raised by Pangle’s chapter three.
Rousseau
shows that Montesquieu’s peaceful state of nature serves no essential purpose.
But, Montesquieu takes pains to elaborate it, although he hedges the
elaboration with conditional statements as to the existence of “such a state.”
Nonetheless, he describes the necessary characteristics of a conceivable
pre-political human existence, and it is decidedly peaceful. He accounts for
the end of the peace and pre-political life by referring to the specific reliance
of “first society” on “understanding” and the necessary limits of this
understanding. Because each or any people suffers a peculiar ignorance, these
first societies are in reality states of war. But the very ignorance which
governs them is also the condition of civil peace. The next subject should be
the “normative rules” deducible from such a Hobbesian understanding, but
Montesquieu turns, instead, “to a classification and examination” of the
various forms of government. The first question, then, is whether Montesquieu,
in constructing such a murky transition, does not suggest a fundamental error
in the establishment of governments—or, the making them necessary—an error
implicit in Montesquieu’s appreciation of “the various regimes ... devoted to
various ways of life, each implicitly (raising) a claim on behalf of its way of
life.”
The second question is
whether, “in the key political respect,” Montesquieu adopts the Hobbesian
position that there is “no natural right or law of the human passions in general.”
What magnifies this question is the further question of a key passion, politically
speaking. Montesquieu appreciated the central role of eros in Plato’s Republic,
but, differing from Plato, does not see it as ultimately obstructive. He avows,
in his Pensées, that he considers The Republic every bit as
realizable as the Spartan republic. This is more obliquely maintained in The
Spirit of the Laws, and, suggesting that the early discussion of passion is
incomplete, the central book of The Spirit of the Laws considers the
central subject of The Republic.
The third question is
whether “the best justification” of the principles in Book I is “the
persuasiveness of the political teaching” based on a Hobbesian view of nature.
Professor Pangle leads the reader to the question by presenting, without
mentioning it, the fundamental principle descriptive of the relationship all
beings have to the laws of nature: obedience. This principle, as Montesquieu
develops it, represents the effect of “general laws” on beings. It is possible
to conform to natural law only through obedience to that law. But, where
obedience requires the use of error-prone reason, the law of nature will be
inadequately obeyed. Thus, it can be said “that it is a necessary part of human
nature to be capable of acting contrary to nature.” But, it must be questioned
whether this view is Hobbesian. The question is the more urgent to the extent
that deliberation is the formulation of successive appetites and its end,
will, but the last appetite. The alternative is that Montesquieu’s argument is
more radical; that is, the reason man possesses would discomfit him for a
natural (primitive) existence but provides no end (telos). Could it be a fundamental
error that brings man into civil society (and there traps those who can reason
well), and, in fact, makes civil society necessary? This is the suggestion
contained in Pangle’s statement that “the emergence of society must be
explained in terms of unnecessary and unforeseeable accidents.” Is that not
precisely a mistake?
On the answers to these
three questions Pangle’s analysis of the Hobbesianism of Montesquieu depends.
On the distinction between the principles of Montesquieu and Hobbes the fate of
modern liberalism depends. The conclusion seems fair in the light of what is
considered the defect of right liberalism and the understanding that Hobbes is
its founder. Hobbes teaches, in this view, that all social and political
obligations are derived from and in the service of the individual rights of men.
Montesquieu found this view an inadequate basis of civil peace. In either
amending or transcending it, he laid the foundations of modern liberalism—at
least as expressed in the founding of the United States. But modern liberalism
is in crisis because it has lost sight of its foundations. The return to
Montesquieu is an attempt to deal with the crisis by reconsidering the charm,
the dignity of the original vision (that emancipation from intolerance,
religious and racial, imparted by easy commerce in goods and beliefs). Such
are the questions Pangle finds it possible to raise after consulting Montesquieu.
A return to fundamentals makes it possible to provide that kind of defense
liberal democracy requires, if it is to resist successfully the impulse to abandon
all rule as merely arbitrary and hence illegitimate. And, as Montesquieu
maintains, the impulse to abandon all rule is at once the impulse to establish
tyrannical rule.
Though Pangle succeeds in
providing this insight into the modern crisis, he does leave the suggestion
that what is new in Montesquieu’s “new analysis of the principles of modernity”
is only a. sensitivity to the requirements of public opinion coupled with a sensitivity
to the demands of different circumstances, rather than a genuine understanding
of any defect of right liberalism. Montesquieu amends Hobbes, makes him more
gentle, less “sauvage.” Yet, such a reading leaves it unclear how deep the
defect goes. That Montesquieu should have been concerned with the necessity of
enshrouding modern regimes in a faith that more lay at their foundations than
was really there suggests a radical understanding of the defect. Surely, one
inescapable conclusion that emerges from the central books of The Spirit of
the Laws is the idea that the entire globe will not necessarily support
right politics. Hence, the history of progress to be written by modern natural
philosophy is a history that may be confined to select regions. The world need
not be made safe for democracy, since nature has made many parts of it unsafe
for any moderate government. Montesquieu raises, in the context of modern
science, the possibility that it may justifiably be the eternal human prospect
that men should be divided into high cultures and barbarian cultures. On this
basis, the city and man can remain the themes of political philosophy without
requiring political philosophy to reconcile itself to the fundamental
inadequacy of the human. It is to the practical accomplishment of this
objective that his history of the republic is directed. It is a history of
right politics—not the history of man on earth—that is intended to serve as
the principle of right for the citizens of the modern regime. Montesquieu, one
might say, sought, to ensure the possibility of universal politics, but only
for particular regimes. Such reflections would lead to consideration of the
sense in which Montesquieu was more radical than his predecessors. What is at
stake is man’s capacity to discern and choose legitimate politics and the
necessity of rejecting tyranny as an error. That is a theoretical goal, and we
wish to know the nature of that political prudence which might ensure it.
Harvey Mudd
College