Montesquieu

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, published in 1748, established itself as the authority on politics and law on both sides of the Atlantic and would remain so throughout the eighteenth century. His famous tripartite classification of republics, monarchies, and despotic governments provided contemporary statesmen and political philosophers with a rubric for evaluating regimes and exercising political judgment. This chapter examines an underexplored facet of Montesquieu’s political education, which concerns the emotional health of the citizen, statesman, and philosopher. I argue that alongside his innovative framework for evaluating regimes, Montesquieu aims to impart a spirit among contemporary and future readers, enabling them to identify from within their nations the existing institutions that enliven the just sentiments and enable virtue in the modern commercial world. A growing number of scholars, anxious over how our techno-mediated liberal world is hollowing out the public sphere for the sake of commercial gain, either flirt with or flat out embrace illiberal, postliberal, or post-secular responses to our most pressing civic challenges. This chapter shows how Montesquieu’s instantiation of liberalism’s capacity for moral interrogation and self-correction offers a useful conceptual framework for developing prescriptions for our political problems that lie within the boundaries of liberal modernity.