Montesquieu's Philosophy of History

Author(s): David Carrithers

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1986), pp. 61-80
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY

BY DAVID CARRITHERS*

I. "I believe this is the historical Age and this the historical Nation,"'
asserted no less a luminary than David Hume, and as Cassirer, Becker,
Beck, Gay, and others have shown, eighteenth-century intellectuals had
a much greater interest in history than men of the next century would
acknowledge.2 Certainly a period that produced important historical
works by Montesquieu, Voltaire, Gibbon, Hume, Robertson, Herder,
Condorcet, and others cannot properly be accused of lacking an interest
in history, and more specifically in the "philosophy of history," a phrase
that entered the Western lexicon as the title to a brief work by Voltaire.3
It was assumed by some historians in the eighteenth century that history
should be written en philosophe, that is, that it should transcend the genre
of meaningless chronicle of miscellaneous facts and should serve both a
didactic purpose in affirming the superiority of the present age and an
explanatory purpose in seeking out the causes underlying important his-
torical happenings. It was deemed critically important to explain rather
than just to describe events, and it was therefore assumed that the writing
of history required a philosophical bent of mind. "If philosophers are
not always historians," Gibbon observed, "it were at least to be wished
that all historians were philosophers."4 "History must be written by
philosophers,"Voltaire observed, "whateverour pedants say."5For Hume
history and philosophy were inseparable, since both were needed to dis-
cover and then test those uniform principles of human nature that so
haunted the eighteenth-century mind.6
Voltaire epitomized the quest for causes transcending mere chronicle

*I would like to thank Lester Crocker and Aram Vartanian for helpful discussions
concerning the general problem of Enlightenment historiography.
1 Letters of David Hume, ed. J. Y. T. Greig, (2 vols.; Oxford, 1932), II, 230 quoted

by Ernest Campbell Mossner, "An Apology for David Hume, Historian," PMLA, 56
(1941), 660.
2 Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophyof the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz Koelln and James

Pettegrove (Princeton, 1951), 197; Carl Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-
CenturyPhilosophers(New Haven, 1932), 92-93; Lewis White Beck (ed.), Immanuel Kant
on History (Indianapolis, 1963), p. xii; Peter Gay, The Enlightenment:An Interpretation.
Vol. II, The Science of Freedom (London, 1973), 369.
3 Frank E. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, 1965), 92.
4
Edward Gibbon, An Essay on the Study of Literature. Written originally in the
French (London, 1764), 107.
5
Correspondancelitt6raire, III, 20 quoted by Becker, op. cit., 91.
6 See "History and Philosophy in Hume's Thought," in Norton and Popkin (eds.),

David Hume: Philosophical Historian (Indianapolis, 1965), xxxii-1.

61

Copyright 1986 by JOURNALOF THE HISTORYOF IDEAS, INC.

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62 DAVID CARRITHERS

in a chapter of his Philosophy of History entitled "Questions upon the

Conquest of the Romans, and Their Decline." Without presuming to
provide definitive answers, Voltaire probed such questions as why it took
the Romans four and a half centuries to conquer twenty-five leagues and
why it took them seven hundred years to gain an empire as large as
Alexander had conquered in seven or eight years.7Only such an analytical
approach could render the study of one age instructive to another. The
trick was to ignore meaningless facts that revealed little about larger
trends or patterns. Fenelon could only pity fact-mongers who had no
principle of order other than chronology and who were so blinded by
facts that they failed to see "changes in the nation as a whole."8 To
consider history merely as facts, observed Condillac, is "a vain and puerile
curiosity."9Not that facts could be ignored. It was rather a question of
finding precisely those facts that illuminate a whole pattern of events.
Edward Gibbon observed that it takes "a genius" such as Montesquieu,
whose Roman history Gibbon greatly admired, to search out, "amidst
the vast chaos of events wherein they are jumbled," just those facts which
do actually hold explanatory keys.?1However difficult the task, it was
deemed critically important, and great strides were made in rendering
history less opaque to human reason.
Philosophical historians of the eighteenth century took up the fun-
damental riddle of history, namely, the extent to which the record of the
past is a mere crazy-quilt composed of chance accidents rather than a
symmetrical pattern woven of ordered threads traceable to discernible
causes. Hume, for example, confronted this issue in his essay "Of the
Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences." "Nothing requires greater
nicety, in our enquiries concerning human affairs," he wrote, "than to
distinguish exactly what is owing to chance, and what proceeds from
causes." "What depends upon a few persons," he continued, "is, in a
great measure, to be ascribed to chance, or secret and unknown causes.
What arises from a great number (of persons), may often be accounted
for by determinate and known causes."1 Hence, Hume contended, both
revolutionary change and foreign policy will likely involve significant
elements of chance since the pivotal decisions are likely to be made by
only one person, or at best a few. When men act in unison, however,
motivated by "general passions and interests" shared by the multitude,

7 Essai sur les moeurs et

l'esprit des nations, ed. Rene Pomeau, (2 vols.; Paris, 1963),
I, 183-184. (Originally a separate publication, Voltaire's La Philosophiede l'histoire later
became the introductory segment of his Essai sur les moeurs.)
8 Oeuvres, (1848-51), VI, 639, 640 quoted by Becker, op. cit., 91.
9 Oeuvres
completes (Paris, 1803), XXIX, 8, quoted by R. N. Stromberg, "History in
the Eighteenth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas, 12 (1951), 298-99.
10 Gibbon,
op. cit., 100.
" Essays Moral, Political, and Literary, ed. T. H. Green and T. H. Grose, (2 vols.;
London, 1912), 1, 174-75.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 63

as in the evolutionary shaping of domestic policy, it is less likely that

chance will be the sole arbiter of change and more likely that the actions
taken will be traceable to discernible causes.12
Hume did not, in this discussion, address the question of whether
discernible causes, once they appear on the horizon, produce a pre-
determined chain of consequences. Other philosophical historians of the
day, however, did raise this ultimate question. Voltaire, for example,
sometimes wrote as if history were driven by necessary currents deriving
from general causes. What are commonly considered "strokesof fortune,"
he wrote in his Essai sur les moeurs, are "nothing else, after all, than the
necessary connection of all the events in the universe."13
And elsewhere in the same work he asserted that "in the multitude
of revolutions that we have seen from one end of the universe to another,
there appears a fatalistic connection of causes which lead men on as the
winds drive the waves and the sand."14These pregnant intimations of
determinism as an interpretation of history, however, are mere philo-
sophical debris lying on the surface of Voltaire's narrative. He by no
means connects these statements to the train of events he is describing.
In practice, Voltaire stressed the role of unpredictablehuman actions
in shaping history. In fact, he often considered chance events to have
had the most momentous consequences, even going so far as to suggest
that the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) resulted from the Duchess of Marl-
borough's spilling a glass of water on Mrs. Masham in the company of
the Queen, which caused both her disgrace and the Whigs' fall from
power, whereupon the Tories sued for peace with France.15What better
exemplification of Collingwood's lament, amidst his discussion of En-
lightenment historiography, concerning "a bankruptcy of historical
method which in despair of genuine explanation acquiesces in the most
trivial causes for the vastest effects"?16 Voltaire was too enamored of the
"great man" approach to history to place much emphasis, in practice,
on the influence of deep-seated causes predeterminingoutcomes decades,
or even centuries, in advance. Consider, for example, his analysis of the
Glorious Revolution: "Fortune had apparently very little share in any
part of this revolution, from the beginning to the end. The characters of

12Ibid., 175-76. Hume returned to the theme of causation versus accident in the
opening chapter of his History of England, wherein he compared the "convulsions of a
civilized state" which he deemed "instructive" to the "sudden, violent, and unprepared
revolutions" characterizing barbarians which he characterized as "guided by caprice."
The History of England (1778) (6 vols.; Indianapolis, 1983), I, 3.
13Essai sur les moeurs, ed. Pomeau, I, 187.
14
Ibid., I, 794. My attention was drawn to these two passages by the discussion of
Voltaire in J. B. Black, The Art of History. A Study of Four Great Historians of the
Eighteenth Century (London, 1926), 40.
15
Black, op. cit., 40-41.
16
R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford, 1967), 80-81.

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64 DAVID CARRITHERS

William and James did everything."17As J. H. Brumfitt aptly remarked,

"When he finds a hero to admire, he tends to attribute everything to his
actions."'8 Certainly this could be demonstrated at length were one to
analyze Voltaire's approach to Charles XII of Sweden, Peter the Great
of Russia, and Louis XIV of France.
The problem of the relative weight of accident compared to prede-
termined necessity in the shaping of history did not escape Gibbon, who
concluded in his Essai sur l'etude de la litterature (1761) that one errs
in attributing too much either to "the wanton caprices of chance" or to
"system, regularity and connection," as if "mankind in general are as
systematical in practice as in speculation" and as if one could legitimately
"discover art in our passions, policy in our foibles, dissimulation in our
caprices."19Having absorbed the methodology of Montesquieu's Roman
history and his Esprit des lois, Gibbon concluded that what is required
to avoid attributing too much either to "caprice" or to "connection" is
the "study of general and determinate causes" as epitomized by Mon-
tesquieu's approach.20And such stress on general causes capable of acting
"without the concurrence of particular causes, and sometimes directly
against them"21introduced an element of determinism into Gibbon's
philosophy of history. In his chapter "General Observations on the Fall
of the Roman Empire in the West," for example, he advanced a deter-
minist interpretation of the decline of Rome obviously influenced by
Montesquieu's own interpretation of that same course of events. "The
decline of Rome," Gibbon wrote, "was the natural and inevitable effect
of immoderate greatness." Once Rome had achieved greatness, it was
inevitable that "the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own
weight." What is remarkable, according to Gibbon, is not that Rome
declined but that "it had subsisted so long."22
Whatever the obvious importance of Hume, Voltaire, and Gibbon as
philosophical historians concerned, among other things, with distinguish-
ing "caprice" from "connection," none of them equalled Montesquieu
in the depth of his exploration of the role of determinist currents in
shaping history. In fact Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1857-1918),
the so-called "father" of Russian Marxism, in his lengthy essay, "The
Role of the Individual in History" (1898), argued that Montesquieu
believed that the flow of history, far from being subject to the unpre-
dictable wills and whims of individuals, has a logic of its own. Montes-

17
Voltaire, Siecle de Louis XIV, in Oeuvres(Paris, 1878), IV, 303.
18
J. H. Brumfitt (ed.), Voltaire, The Age of Louis XIV and Other Selected Writings
(New York, 1963), xxv.
19 Gibbon, op. cit, 111.
20
Ibid., 112-13.
21
Ibid., 113.
22
Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. An Abridgement by
D. M. Low (New York, 1960), 524-25.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 65

quieu recognized, in Plekhanov's words, that while "the personal qualities

of leading people determine the individual features of historical events,"
and while "the accidental element... always plays some role in the causes
of these events," the "trend" of these events "is determined in the last
analysis by so-called general causes."23Like Vico and Herder, Montes-
quieu stood head and shoulders above the historians of his times, Plek-
hanov asserted,because he avoided the superficialapproach that "reduced
everything to the conscious activities of individuals."24Instead he saw
that history is subject to underlying general causes that shape the direction
in which societies move. In reaching this judgment, Plekhanov no doubt
had partly in mind the stress placed by Montesquieu in the Esprit des
lois on the formative role of climate, religion, laws, maxims of government,
precedents, morals, and customs on the development of human societies.
He was also aware, however, of the stress on determinism in Montes-
quieu's Considerationssur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur decadence (1734). In that work, for example, Montesquieu had
written:
It is not chancethat rules the world. Ask the Romans,who had a continuous
sequenceof successeswhen they were guidedby a certainplan, and an unin-
terruptedsequenceof reverseswhen they followedanother.There are general
causes,moral and physical,which act in every monarchy,elevatingit, main-
taining it, or hurlingit to the ground.All accidentsare controlledby these
causes.And if the chanceof one battle--that is, a particularcause-has brought
a state to ruin, some generalcause made it necessaryfor that state to perish
from a single battle. In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular
accidents.25

Other texts in the same Roman history minimize the impact of in-
dividuals qua individuals on Roman history. In the very first chapter of
that work, for example, Montesquieu introduced a kind of institutional
determinism. "At the birth of societies," he wrote, "the leaders of re-
publics create the institutions; thereafter it is the institutions that form
the leaders of republics."26
Such a contention substantially reduces the significance of the per-

23
Georgy V. Plekhanov, "The Role of the Individual in History" (1898), in Fun-
damental Problems of Marxism, ed. James S. Allen (New York, 1969), 172. As Allen
indicates, Plekhanov's essay first appeared under the pseudonym A. Kirsanov in Nauch-
noye Obozrenie(Scientific Review), 184.
24
Ibid., 154.
25
Considerationson the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline,
trans. with notes and introduction by David Lowenthal (Ithaca, 1968), 169. All quotations
from this work utilize Lowenthal's translation.
26
Ibid., 25. One might argue that the initial creation of institutions by individuals
maximizes the role of persons and is hardly determinist. The impact of those institutions
once formed, however, on numerous individuals will be a long-term influence of much
greater magnitude than the brief influence of those who fashion the institutions.

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66 DAVID CARRITHERS

sonality and character of whatever individual or individuals happen to

wield power. Montesquieu was clearly suggesting that political figures
do not shape their environment so much as they are shaped by it.
Montesquieu also believed the distribution of land in Rome exercised
a determinist grip on her historical development. Critical to early Roman
success had been a roughly equal division of land. Such a division,
Montesquieu observed, produced not only a well-regulated society but a
vigorous army, since everyone had an equal and substantial interest in
defending the country. Hence a much higher proportion of the male
population could be incorporated into the army. At a later time, when
land division was no longer roughly equal, a wealthy class arose with
artificial needs for luxuries. Corruption and cowardice then made their
appearance, and patriotism as well as military valor swiftly declined.27
Similarly important to understanding Montesquieu's conception of
the deterministic currents that swirled Rome first toward grandeur and
then toward decline were his conclusions on the effect of the size of
Rome on her historical rise and fall. Here Montesquieu evidenced an
interest in a form of political sociology stressing volume of territory that
is still a subject of serious academic interest.28Montesquieu believed that
the volume of territory inevitably affects the psychology of those who
reside in a country,29which in turn affects the form of government
appropriate for a given territorial expanse. Reading into Roman history
a kind of territorial determinism, he argued that the principle of gov-
ernment, republican virtue, that originally made Rome great could only
be properly sustained while the republic was small. Once Rome expanded
beyond the confines of the Italian peninsula, the psychology of her citizens
and soldiers was completely transformedso that allegiance to the republic
was replaced by allegiance to one general or another. This necessarily
prepared Rome for the civil wars that were to plague her in the late
republican period. Republican Rome declined because territorial expan-
sion created a political mentality that made the rise of types like Pompey
and Caesar inevitable.30Montesquieu was convinced in fact that if there
had been no Caesar and no Pompey, other generals would have acted
out the same parts along the same general lines. The details constituting
the accidental components of history would have been different, but the
"general causes" producing the "main trend" of Roman history would
have been unchanged, and the end to which Roman events were moving
would have been the same:
27
Ibid., 39-41.
28
See, for example, Robert A. Dahl and Edward R. Tufte, Size and Democracy
(Stanford, 1973).
29
This point was fully developed in chapters 16-20 of Book VIII of the Esprit des
lois.
30
Considerations,40-41; 92-93; 101-02.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 67

If Caesar and Pompey had thought like Cato, others would have thought like
Caesar and Pompey; and the republic, destined to perish, would have been
dragged to the precipice by another hand.31
Given the general causes operative in Roman history, the demise of
republicanism was for Montesquieu a predetermined necessity. "Since
the republic had necessarily to perish, it was only a question of how, and
by whom, it was to be overthrown."32 Once the patriotic spirit of alle-
giance to the commonweal had been dissipated, it could not be recaptured.
Political division became inevitable: "The distracted city no longer formed
a complete whole."33
Montesquieu's stress on general causes as the dominant mode of
historical explanation does not mean that he completely ignored the role
of chance in Roman history. He was fully aware of the unpredictable,
accidental factors that influenced the careers of such men as Marius,
Sulla, Pompey, and Caesar, whose destiny it was to carry out the designs
of Roman historical development. In a text reminding us of Pascal's
assertion that the shape of Cleopatra's nose altered the course of history,
Montesquieu asserted that Caesar's falling in love with Cleopatra caused
him to undertake no less than four wars. Such chance occurrences,
however, Montesquieu considered twisted threads on the general skein
of Roman history. The main lines of Roman historical development were
impervious to change by mere accidents. Components of human unpre-
dictability influenced the tempo of Roman history and the shape of its
secondary features, but they did not alter its necessary direction.
II. Given Montesquieu's obvious profundity in the area of philo-
sophical history, surprisingly little attention has been bestowed on his
minor historical writings. Two particular treatises stand out as likely
candidates for analysis if our understanding of his historical thought is
to be enlarged. These are De la politique (1725) and Reflexions sur le
caractere de quelques princes et sur quelques evenements de leur vie (1731-
33). Neither of these works was explicitly intended as a discourse on
historical causation per se, but both of them nonetheless included im-
portant philosophical statements about the nature of historical change.
Both deserve analysis if one seeks to discover whether the roots of Mon-
tesquieu's determinism in his history of Rome are discernible earlier and
whether he applied this determinist theory to other historical settings
besides Rome.
De la politique deserves substantially more attention than it has re-
ceived. There has been no extended analysis of its contents, and as yet
there is no English translation. Originally, it was composed as the con-
cluding chapters of the Traite des devoirs (1725), a work revealing Mon-
31
Ibid., 108.
32
Ibid., 102.
33
Ibid., 93.

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68 DAVID CARRITHERS

tesquieu's deep concern, midway through the 1720s, with natural law
theory stressing absolutes of justice to which positive laws should con-
form. Unfortunately, the full text of this Trait6des devoirs is no longer
extant. It was part of the group of manuscripts sent to England in 1818
by Joseph-Cyrille de Montesquieu to his cousin Charles-Louis de Mon-
tesquieu, and an autograph note of Prosper de Montesquieu preserved
at Bordeaux indicates it was sent back to France with certain other works
in 1828 after Charles-Louis's death.34At that point, or sometime there-
after, it disappeared. Therefore, our knowledge of its contents derives
exclusively from a compte rendu analytique published in the Bibliotheque
franfaise and from fragments preserved in the Pensees. Montesquieu
discussed in his Traite des devoirs three sorts of duties: duties to God,
duties to oneself, and duties to one's fellow man. He concluded that the
duties associated with our ontological condition have a higher priority
than those duties associated with being a citizen of this or that country.
Hence we should put our obligations to mankind ahead of more parochial
attachments.35
Not surprisingly, what is now known as De la politique bears a close
thematic relation to the earlier portions of the Traitedes devoirsof which
it was once the concluding part. Whereas the first twelve chapters of
that work dealt with justice abstractly and philosophically, Montesquieu
turned in the two concluding chapters to the concrete world of historical
experience. His express purpose was not the presentation of any particular
philosophy of history. Unlike his later work on Rome, De la politique
presented no unifying statements suggesting that historical accidents are
controlled by general causes. Rather, he merely flirted briefly with a
determinist orientation in analyzing events in seventeenth-century Eng-
land and early eighteenth-century France, while stressing the influence
of unpredictable human behavior in other historical settings.
De la politique was cast essentially as an anti-Machiavellian tract.
Montesquieu's purpose was to register a plea for simple, straightforward,
honest statecraft that does not violate fundamental principles of justice.
His disenchantment with politics considered as political cunning and
duplicity was then at its height,36and De la politique attacks what he
perceived as widespread and immoral Machiavellianism in statecraft and
international diplomacy. Rather than attacking the prevalent doctrine of
raison d' etat on abstract moral grounds, however, which he concluded

34 Oeuvres
completes de Montesquieu,publiees sous la direction de M. Andre Masson,
(3 vols.; Paris, 1950-1955), III, 1575-6.
35
Ibid., III, 159-60.
36 Robert
Shackleton, "Montesquieu and Machiavelli: A Reappraisal," Comparative
Literature Studies, 1 (1964), 5.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 69

would "convince everyone but influence no one,"37he chose to focus

upon the real, empirical world of recorded human history in order to
demonstrate the futility of self-serving, immoral statecraft.
Montesquieu suggests two different reasons for this futility, and the
contrasting orientation of these explanations suggests an unmistakable
tension, at this stage in his historical thought, between two contrasting
historical explanations:
Most effectscome aboutfromsuch unusualcircumstancesor dependon causes
so imperceptibleand remotethat they defy prediction(112).

The mention of "unusual circumstances" clearly refers to the unpre-

dictable world of accident and caprice. Such unpredictable occurrences
make history a jumble of accident piled on accident. Stress on "imper-
ceptible and remote" causes, on the other hand, bespeaks a view of history
stressing necessity rather than chance.
Not surprisingly, the most determinist, and hence the most sensa-
tional, passages of De la politique are the best known, They are in fact
almost the only ones that are ever quoted by secondary commentators.
The most frequently cited passage presents, with a notably determinist
twist, one of Montesquieu's early formulations of the doctrine of the
esprit general:
In all societies,whichare reallygroupingsof minds,a commoncharactertakes
shape.This collectivesoul takeson a mannerof thinkingwhichis the effect of
a chain of infinitecausesthat multiplyand combinefrom centuryto century.
Oncethe tone is set and has permeatedthe society,it alonegovernsand all that
sovereigns,magistrates,and peoplesare able to do or plan, whetherthey seem
to go againstthis tone or follow it, is alwaysin relationto it; and it dominates
until the societyis totally destroyed(114).

Major political events, Montesquieu here suggests, however they may

appear to the merely casual observer, are the necessary result of the
influence of a complex chain of causes resulting in what he will later
label a society's espritgeneral. And lest his argument remain an abstrac-
tion, he introduced two historical examples in De la politique to prove
his point: England in the period of civil war in the seventeenth century
and France during the regency of Louis XV in the early eighteenth
century.
Far from being a chance event uninfluenced by the dominant tone,
or "general spirit," of the times in England, the anti-monarchical op-
position to Charles I in mid-seventeenth-centuryEngland was well nigh
inevitable once Henry VIII had freed England from the papal yoke.

37 De la
politique, in Oeuvrescompletes de Montesquieu, texte presente et annote par
Roger Caillois (2 vols.; Paris, 1949-1951), I, 112. All further page references to De la
politique will be cited in parentheses within the text.

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70 DAVID CARRITHERS

"Literally everyone," Montesquieu wrote, "thought he had increased his

power by becoming head of his own church as well as dispenser of the
spoils of the old. But not so." Freeing England from the theological
domination of Rome gave rise to an uncontrollable spirit of liberty that
soon degeneratedinto fanaticism and frenzy. The consequence for Charles
I, roughly a century later, was that his power was fated to be radically
curtailed however he might have acted: "If this King hadn't offended
his subjects in one way, he would have offended them in another. It was
fated in the order of things that he would be in the wrong" (112-113;
115). "The tone was such under Charles I that, however he acted, his
power was sure to be diminished. Prudence was of no value amidst such
fanaticism and universal frenzy" (115). No absolute English monarch
would have fared any better since it was not Charles's actions but rather
the underlying disposition of general causes that rendered his position
untenable. A trace of the old attitude of respect for royalty remained in
the reigns of Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth, Montesquieu contended, but
by the seventeenth century it had been completely eroded. Hence the
troubles Charles I (executed in 1649) faced in the English Civil War were
a foregone conclusion.
Montesquieu also demonstrated the determinist grip a dominant
"tone" can exert by referring to France in the period of the regency of
Louis XV. In spite of the extraordinarynature of the events that occurred
in that period, the general "tone" was such, Montesquieu contended,
that even had those in power been entirely different, and even had entirely
different policies been adopted, the general course of events would have
been unaffected:
The dispositionof the people,the circumstancessurroundingthe government,
the generalsituationof the country,the interestsof differentgroupswere such
that the end resultwould have been the same regardlessof the causesat work
or the rulerin power(114).

This is an extraordinary thesis. Even a different array of causal forces,

Montesquieu suggested, would not have altered the existing pattern of
things, since the dominant tone had such a determinist grip on the way
events unfolded. Unlike the English, who were constantly challenging
authority, the French were at that time politically obedient. This dom-
inant spirit of obedience reduced, Montesquieu believed, the importance
of what particular causes were operating or who held the reins of power.
In fact, Montesquieu was moved to announce amidst his discussion of
the Regency: "The prudence of man actually amounts to practically
nothing. In most situations, deliberation does no good because, except
where major disadvantages are quite obvious, all the courses of action
one might adopt are equally good" (114). This or that action by a
particular leader might have added this or that minor twist to develop-

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 71

ments, but no particular actions of leaders could have substantially af-

fected the outcome, which was predetermined by France's historically
established dominant tone.
To arrive at a proper understanding of the overall philosophy of
history expressed in De la politique, the determinist passages already
referred to must be considered along with contrasting passages that at-
tribute the primary role of shaping history to the chance actions of
individuals. A substantial number of little noticed passages within De la
politique maintain that the record of history is a complex and unpre-
dictable web of chance occurrences uninfluenced by overriding general
causes. At one point, in fact, Montesquieu contends that, far from being
deterministicallycontrolled by causes antecedent to the event in question,
history is as riddled with accidental influences and occurrences as is an
individual human life. When we turn to history, he writes, "we discover
momentous, unforeseen events everywhere we look," momentous events
that literally transformthe contours of history and are clearly the product
of unpredictable accident rather than some inexorable cunning of his-
tory (112).
In terms of sheer volume of texts, Montesquieu actually spends sub-
stantially more time in De la politique demonstrating the thesis of his-
torical accident than arguing on behalf of historical determinism. His
first example, chronologically speaking, of the role of chance in history
was the reign of Heraclius, Byzantine emperor from 610 to 641. Heraclius
was clever but not sufficiently so to foresee what his fate would be as a
result of a great and unpredictable historical accident. He believed the
Avars and the Persian Sassanid dynasty posed the most substantial threat
to his rule, and he therefore devoted himself to making peace with the
Avars and subduing the Persians. Unbeknownst to him, however, a great,
unanticipated intrusion of human will into history was brewing in Mecca,
where in 613 the prophet Mohammed began preaching. Heraclius, Mon-
tesquieu commented, had probably not even heard of the town of Mecca;
and yet the great historical accident of the birth of Mohammed-an
accident from the vantage point of Montesquieu, if not from the viewpoint
of the Islamic faithful-was soon to devastate his empire (113). No one-
least of all Heraclius-foresaw the rapid expansion of Islam. It was one
of these "unusual circumstances"that statesmen, no matter how cunning,
cannot foresee and hence cannot forestall or overcome.
A second example Montesquieu employed to demonstrate the role of
accident in shaping history was the career of Louis XI of France (1461-
83). The great accident of Louis XI's reign was his failure to gain the
Burgundian succession after Charles the Bold, his intransigent vassal,
was killed in 1476. Montesquieu depicted this as "a totally irreparable
blunder" (114). What he no doubt referred to is that Louis could have
negotiated a marriage alliance between his son, the future Charles VIII,
and Charles the Bold's sole heir, Mary of Burgundy. This would have

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72 DAVID CARRITHERS

brought the Netherlands, a Burgundianpossession, within the boundaries

of France. Instead, Louis chose to attack Burgundy to gain Artois,
Franche-Comte, Picardy, and Boulogne by force. This drove Mary into
the arms of the future Habsburg Emperor, Maximilian I, grandfather of
Charles V, thereby setting up the epic Habsburg-Bourbon rivalry. One
of the great rivalries of modem politics is portrayed, then, not as im-
planted in necessary patterns linked to general causes but rather as the
unpredictable result of the actions of a less than perfect ruler.
Montesquieu also alluded briefly in De la politique to Philip II of
Spain (1556-1598), successor to Charles V as Holy Roman Emperor.
Philip II lost the Netherlands, Montesquieu contended, not because of
causal factors making Dutch independence inevitable, but rather "on
account of mistakes more moderate men would not have made" (114).
Montesquieu's treatment of Gustavus Adolfus, King of Sweden from
1611 until his death in Germany in 1632, is similarly voluntarist. There
was nothing predetermined, Montesquieu observed, about either Gus-
tavus's decision to intervene in the Thirty Years War or his striking
success. In fact, Montesquieu contended, Gustavus "had nothing in his
favor except his courage," and no one at the time thought his influence
would be very great. And yet, "the whole face of Europe was transformed"
by his active support of the Protestant cause (113).
Clearly, close attention to all of De la politique reveals a Montesquieu
who was just as fascinated by the capricious nature of history as by the
contrasting idea of causal currents advancing events toward predeter-
mined ends. Had he been a fully committed determinist, he would have
consistently argued that Machiavellian duplicity and cunning are always
ineffective because dominant tones and general causes render the acci-
dental acts of key historical actors of minimal influence. He was not
prepared, however, to advance this as a general, all-encompassing thesis
valid in all historical contexts.
III. Like De la politique, Montesquieu's Reflexions sur le caractere
de quelques princes et sur quelques evenements de leur vie (1731-33)
deserves fuller examination than it has received. There is at present no
English translation, and most students of Montesquieu pay the work little
heed. As was the case with De la politique, the Reflexions was not
explicitly intended as a philosophical statement concerning history. Since
the work consists of sketches of the lives of various influential princes,
however, Montesquieu cannot help but make importantjudgments about
the relation of these individuals to the flow of history around them.
Hence a philosophical viewpoint about history emerges. The Reflexions
were originally conceived as part of a larger, uncompleted work to be
called Le Prince, or Les Princes. A fragment of this larger work preserved
in the Pensees reveals that the overall emphasis of the work was to have
been, as in the case of De la politique, the need for morality in politics,
particularly on the part of rulers. "A private individual who fears the

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 73

laws that threaten him," Montesquieu wrote in this fragment, "can be,
without morals and even in spite of himself, a good citizen; but a prince
without morals is always a monster." 38
Using a comparative method and discussing two rulers at a time,
after the model of Plutarch, Montesquieu discussed the careers of Charles
XII of Sweden (1682-1718), Charles, Duke of Burgundy (1433-1477),
Tiberius (42 B.C.-A.D. 37), Louis XI of France (1423-1483), Philip II
of Spain (1527-1598), Pope Paul III (1468-1549), Pope Sixtus V (1521-
1590), the Duke of Mayenne (1554-1611), Cromwell (1599-1658), Henry
III of France (1551-1589), and Charles I of England (1600-1649). In
contrast to his treatise on Roman history composed during the same time
period, Montesquieu by no means adopted a determinist stance in this
work. In fact one finds an important shift away from determinism in the
analysis of Charles I as compared to the earlier De la politique (1725).
Whereas Montesquieu had earlier stressed the historical forces arrayed
against Charles, he now stressed Charles's own actions as the main source
of the problems he faced. Admittedly, Montesquieu began his re-analysis
of Charles I with a text that sounds distinctly determinist:
There are certaincircumstancesin which men of the least ability can govern
successfully;thereare otherswherethe greatestgeniusesare shaken:sometimes
the art of ruling is the easiestart in the world, and sometimesit is the most
difficult.39

This statement clearly stresses the importance of the underlying allure,

or disposition of things, and thinking back to De la politique, one would
expect Montesquieu once again to treat Charles I as a victim of irreversible
historical tides. Instead, however, Montesquieu takes a different tack
altogether, placing the blame for Charles's disastrous failures squarely
on his own shoulders. He says absolutely nothing about a dominant
antimonarchical tone stemming from Henry VIII's break with Rome,
which so increased the general desire for liberty that any absolute mon-
arch would have been doomed to failure. Instead he focuses on Charles's
imperfections.
He admits that Charles I's personal life was impeccable. But Charles,
he now asserts, had an absolutely unparalleled incapacity for govern-
ing (526). Comparing him to Henry III of France, who faced unavoidable
civil wars beyond his control, he remarks: "Charles brought about civil
war in England: He could be said to have forced the English to dispute
his every prerogative,"so much so, in fact, that had Civil War not broken
out, he would have been overthrown by Parliament in the same sort of

38 Pensees 634 (524), in Oeuvrescompletes (Pleiade), I, 1154.

39 Reflexionssur le caractere de quelquesprinces et sur quelques evenements de leur
vie (1731-33), in Oeuvrescompletes (Pleiade), I, 526. All further page references to the
Reflexions will be cited in parentheses within the text.

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74 DAVID CARRITHERS

"bloodless" revolution England experienced in 1688 (527). The signifi-

cance of this shift in emphasis from the determinism of De la politique
to the voluntarism of the Reflexions should not be underestimated.
Clearly, the determinist leanings evident in De la politique did not develop
into a doctrinaire position. Montesquieu backed away from inflexible
determinism in the Reflexions even with regard to that very monarch
who had earlier been his chief example of the role of determinism in
history. Charles I, Montesquieu now contended, was himself responsible
for the animosity he faced. He was weak, superstitious, biased, alterna-
tively too bold and too timid, and much more concerned with pleasing
his courtesans than his subjects. The result was that his subjects' initial
hatred turned soon to scorn (526). Charles's personal defects, then, rather
than the general antimonarchical tone discussed in De la politique, are
the reason for the fate he met at the hands of the Puritans.
In treating the career of Cromwell, Montesquieu similarly eschewed
determinism and enunciated a "great man" theory of history. Cromwell
becomes the prototype of the gifted individual molding history of his
own design, the great man overcoming all obstacles by means of extraor-
dinary genius. Montesquieu stresses Cromwell's personal abilities by fa-
vorably comparing him to the Duke of Mayenne of France, who faced
similar circumstances but bungled his way into misfortune. The French
Duke, after assassinating Henry III, put the old Cardinal Bourbon on
the throne in order to return the crown to Catholic hands. This im-
provident act worsened rather than alleviated the spirit of faction in
France (525). Cromwell, on the other hand, by wisely attacking the very
institution of monarchy, destroyed the spirit of faction while also pro-
viding his party with a sufficiently extreme goal to unify them and give
them reason for existing (525).
So impressed was Montesquieu with Cromwell as a person that he
believed a comparison to none other than Caesar was justified:

Althoughit would be difficultto find two men more differentthan Cromwell

and Caesar,it cannotbe said that the Englishmanwas inferiorin geniusto the
Roman(525).

Most great men, Montesquieu observed, pursue their goal by means of

a single course of action. Cromwell, however, advanced on a multitude
of paths simultaneously. Furthermore, his designs were so complex as
to be inscrutable to others (525). "He went from one contradiction to
another;but he always went forward, like those pilots whom almost every
wind blows to port" (525). Furthermore, Cromwell was completely in
control. "He ruled the English as if he alone were possessed of a soul.
He had no confidant; all were his dupes, and his plans were so successful
that even his accomplices were afraid of him" (525). Considering Mon-
tesquieu's clear denunciation in Book III, chapter 3 of the Esprit des lois

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 75

of the brief English experiment in republicanism in the mid-seventeenth

century,4 his appreciation of Cromwell's abilities in the Reflexions is
surprising indeed. However much the English Civil War horrified him,
he could not help but recognize Cromwell's extraordinary feats, partic-
ularly compared to the far less successful Duke of Mayenne. And this
translates into a "great man" theory of history rather than a determinist
theory stressing vast, impersonal forces.
Further evidence that Montesquieu's Reflexions by no means broad-
ened the determinist reading of history evident in selected portions of De
la politique can be gathered from his additional treatment of Louis XI
and Philip II in this later work. Louis XI's failings, Montesquieu again
assures us, were personal, not predetermined.We now learn that he failed
in part because of his treachery. Instead of trying to govern men, he
meant only to deceive them. Furthermore, unlike the Roman Emperor
Tiberius, to whom Montesquieu now compares him, he did not know
how to rein in his vices when deceit would prove destructive and did not
know how to appear virtuous when such a reputation would be advan-
tageous. And finally, Louis, while shrewd, nonetheless lacked depth (520).
Montesquieu's account of Philip II in the Reflexions is fully consistent
with what he had written in De la politique. He stresses his personal
flaws rather than deterministic currents of history precluding success.
Philip's chief failing, Montesquieu now contends, was his inflexibility.
Particular circumstances that might and should have colored his thinking
were never allowed to do so. The result was that he was never able to
follow a moderate course. He mistakenly approached distinctly different
events with the same mind set, and he never knew how to do precisely
what was required in a particular situation. He had only the appearance
of political astuteness and actually was "incapable of judging things
correctly." In addition, he did not act systematically in pursuit of his
goals. "He engaged in many great enterprises,"Montesquieu wrote, "but
he never knew how to arrange things so that he would succeed" (521).
His decision to attack simultaneously France, England and the Low
Countries completely ignored the true extent of his power. His plan to
import the Inquisition into the Netherlands and to establish the Spanish
government there shows that "he neither understood the nature of the
Flemish people, nor of free nations, nor even of men in general" (522).
Furthermore,his ill-begotten intervention in the civil wars of France only
consumed his resources in vain.
In Montesquieu's Reflexions only one brief passage in a discussion
of Charles XII of Sweden even hints at a deterministphilosophy of history.
Charles XII's colorful and daring career proved a popular subject for
eighteenth-century writers-Voltaire's Histoire du Charles XII (1731) is

40He accused Cromwell and others of excessive ambition and insufficient virtue,
which made factional strife inevitable.

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76 DAVID CARRITHERS

the preeminent example-and readers of the Esprit des lois will recall
that Montesquieu later included a chapter on Charles XII in Book X of
that work. Seeds of the later treatment of Charles XII are clearly present
in the Reflexions. In both instances Montesquieu made statements that
seem at first to evoke the earlier determinism of portions of De la politique
but prove instead to be implanted within general arguments moving in
a decidedly voluntarist direction contending that Charles XII was himself
the architect of the misfortunes that befell him.
In the Reflexions Montesquieu compared Charles XII to Charles,
Duke of Burgundy, and remarked of them both:

These princesare also similarin that they continuallyrebelledagainst their

destiny(519).

Certainly the idea of rebelling against one's destiny seems to suggest

irreversibletides of history that can only be ineffectually opposed. If one
is fated to be doled out a given historical result, resistance to the dictates
of history would seem to be futile. Close analysis of Montesquieu's text,
however, reveals that this was not actually his meaning. He actually stops
short of depicting an historically determined fate that made Charles a
prisoner of forces beyond his control. Precisely as Voltaire had done,
Montesquieu stressed defects of Charles's character, above all, as the
reason for his misguided decision to wage the disastrous battle of Pultova.
Charles had the unfortunate habit of seeking new enemies even as he
suffered new losses and of attacking after a defeat just as if he had been
victorious (519). Hence he decided to march east towards Moscow after
waging a long and difficult campaign in Poland. The result, following a
disastrous winter so cold that birds fell out of the sky, was that Charles
faced Peter's 80,000 troops at Pultova with a pitiful 22,000 men and only
four artillery guns.41It is surely in this context that Montesquieu re-
marked:
In mostcases,whena monarchis killedon the battlefieldit is a resultof chance;
but the militaryconductof CharlesXII... madesuch a deathinevitable(519).

Clearly what Montesquieu was arguing is that death became a necessity

for Charles XII-Persian Letter 127 reveals he was fully aware Charles
died not at Pultova but in battle in Norway in 1718-because he insisted
on engineering military campaigns which other generals would have
eschewed as foolhardy. Charles's eventual death, then, was "a necessity"
only because of his consistent tendency to deny rational odds of survival.
It is safe to conclude, then, that Montesquieu's treatment of Charles
XII in the Reflexions of 1731-33 does not present much grist for a
determinist mill. The emphasis is on Charles's own actions and on his

41 David
Ogg, Europe in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1962), 437-40.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 77

inadequacies as a general. Charles's wrongheaded decisions were no more

determined by the underlying allure, or structure, of things than Louis
XI's or Phillip II's equally disastrous policy choices had been. In contrast
to the way Montesquieu had portrayed Charles I of England in De la
politique, Charles XII of Sweden was by no means fated to fail. In the
final analysis the Swedish monarch was the architect of his own demise.
IV. What, then, can we conclude concerning Montesquieu's philos-
ophy of history based on the works we have considered? Certainly it is
safe to say that, as of 1725, when he composed De la politique, he had
not yet chosen between accident and necessity as the primary force of
history. He was willing to consider both possibilities as having some
validity depending on the particular historical setting. Furthermore, by
1731-1733, when he composed the Reflexions sur le caracterede quelques
princes, his emphasis had shifted from the determinism of portions of De
la politique to the unpredictable actions of political leaders. Prior, then,
to the Considerationssur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de
leur d6cadence (1734), Montesquieu had not emerged as anything resem-
bling a dogmatic determinist. He had toyed with determinism but had
certainly not discovered a systeme to be articulated over and against all
other theories of historical interpretation.
How, then, do we account for the distinctively determinist orientation
of Montesquieu's philosophical sketch of Roman history? Perhaps the
most plausible explanation is that, however much chance occurrences
and circumstances seem to predominate in some periods of history, there
does seem to have been an overridinglogical sequence to Roman historical
development. If one were ever tempted towards a determinist reading of
history, Rome would be the example triggeringthat response. And Roman
history, furthermore, was sufficiently distant in time from the eighteenth
century to enable Montesquieu to discern a logical development in events
that certainly would have escaped such a perception among those living
through them or commenting on them in close proximity.
Certainly Montesquieu's Roman history cannot be characterized as
embodying an actual transformation in his historical thought. Rather,
Roman materials simply brought to the fore determinist sentiments trace-
able to De la politique. The Roman history does present, however, his
most doctrinaire stance on determinism as a mode of historical expla-
nation. Not only Rome, he writes, but "every monarchy" was subject to
general causes controlling even what seem to be accidents. Merely sug-
gesting such a broad applicability of the determinist formula, however,
is very different from demonstrating it. Had he tried to do so, he would
likely have had a difficult time, since the historical writings we have
examined reveal a Montesquieu who very strongly believed that the course
of European history up to his day had been very substantially affected
by the unpredictable decisions, actions, and blunders of those European
rulers who had quite literally made the history of their day.

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78 DAVID CARRITHERS

It is also true that the search for monistic explanations, which became
something of an obsession in the nineteenth century, was not part of
Montesquieu's outlook. He would almost certainly have allowed his broad
statement concerning "every monarchy" to be tempered by the facts. He
clearly never aimed for the sort of rigid, dogmatic systematization that
a nineteenth-century intellectual might have demanded of himself. He
did not set out to be a philosopher of history in the modern manner of
a Marx, a Spengler, or a Toynbee. "Philosopher of history" is a phrase
he would not have accepted. He was rather a student of history who
sometimes made philosophical statements about the content of history.
Therefore one does not encounter a finished systeme in his works. He
did not attempt to impose a dogmatic inflexible system on all of recorded
history.
Furthermore,even Montesquieu's determinist pronouncementsdo not
always preclude a realm of influence for accidents. He never denied that
those events that triggered this or that necessary sequence of events did
not have points of origin that were accidental rather than predetermined.
There was no hint, for example, in his analysis in De la politique of the
historical causation of Charles I's problems, that Henry VIII's break
with Rome was itself a predetermined event. Another monarch, we are
left to assume, might have followed a different course. Nor did Montes-
quieu contend that a given determinist flow of history, when and where
it existed, could never be altered. What he maintained instead is that
changes in that dominant, historically-conditioned tone will not be pre-
dicted or seen ahead of time. Such changes, he asserted, will "depend
either on causes so remote that they seem no more capable of influencing
the course of events than many others, or on a minor effect hidden by
a great cause which produces other great, readily apparent effects, while
holding in store the minor effect until it erupts, sometimes three centuries
later."42And what makes a hidden cause suddenly or finally erupt may
itself be accidental. Hence the role of the unpredictable cannot be dis-
missed even within the context of some of Montesquieu's determinist
thinking. We must be wary, therefore, of one-sided readings of Montes-
quieu's philosophy of history.
Surely the overall historical philosophy of Montesquieu's Roman
history was determinist. Focusing exclusively on that work, however,
cannot help but lead to a distortion of the true complexity of his historical
thought. A foray into his less studied historical writings demonstrates
that he possessed a rich awareness of the many twists and turns events
can take depending on the decisions made by influential historical actors.
At the same time, however, Montesquieu's appreciation of the underlying
general causes at work in Roman history enabled him to look, in that
setting, beyond the surface disturbances Braudel calls "l'histoire evene-
42 De la politique, in Oeuvrescompletes (Pleiade), I, 115.

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 MONTESQUIEU'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY 79

mentielle" to the realm of structural history which focuses on the un-

derlying constellation of forces influencing a given historical development.
Hence Montesquieu was clearly an important contributor to the move-
ment attempting to make history something more than "an undecipher-
able hieroglyphic."43He sensed the need to move beyond the level of
mere chronicle to ask not just what happened but why. Only when this
question was asked could historical studies come of age.
To see rhyme and reason within a given series of events, however,
was not equivalent to perceiving transcendent meaning in history. Mon-
tesquieu could discover that a certain series of historical happenings were
set in motion by general causes without jumping to the conclusion that
the overall pattern of events served some teleological goal or end. He
discerned no "plan" in history akin to Kant's contention in his Idea for
a UniversalHistoryfrom a CosmopolitanPoint of View (1784) that Na-
ture's historical intention for man was "the development of all the ca-
pacities which can be achieved by mankind" and the attainment of "a
perfectly just civic constitution."44 Montesquieu neither retained Bos-
suet's teleological stress on Divine providence nor envisioned, as did
many among his intellectual contemporaries, its replacement by a teleo-
logical stress on incessant progress based on scientific advance. He was
part of that movement striving to "free history from the domination of
final causes and lead it back to the real empirical causes."45In spite of
his substantial interest in natural science, he did not join the ranks of
those prophesying infinite progress as nature was subjected more and
more to man's control. He would have considered the progressivist vision
of a Turgot or a Condorcet in his own century, or of a Saint Simon or
a Comte in the next, a subjective, unwarranted gloss. Far from being a
believer in infinite progress, Montesquieu was, as Gilbert Chinard dem-
onstrated, a "historical pessimist," whether spinning out the circularity
of moral progress in the Troglodyte cycle in the Lettres persanes, or
dwelling on the contemporary decline of Spain, Italy, and Poland in the
same work, or delineating the historical inevitability of Rome's decline,
or predicting the eventual demise, even of England, toward the end of
his famous Book XI, chapter 6 of the Esprit des lois, setting out the main
components of English liberty.46Insofar as he was willing to indulge in
sweeping speculation, Montesquieu believed not in endless upward ad-
vance but in the likelihood of birth, rise, and decline as epitomized by
the example of Rome. And this means he was closer in spirit to F6nelon,

43 Black, op. cit., 87. Black contends that for Hume, captivated "by the belief that

human nature was uniformly the same at all times and places," history remained very
much "an undecipherable hieroglyphic."
44 Beck (ed.), op. cit., 16.
45Cassirer, op. cit., 220.
46 Gilbert Chinard,
"Montesquieu's Historical Pessimism," in Studies in the History
of Culture (Menasha, Wisconsin, 1942), 161-72.

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80 DAVID CARRITHERS

Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Raynal, Grimm, Dubos, and Vico than

to the French prophets of progress.47
What is important about Montesquieu's contribution to historiog-
raphy is that he understood better than most of his contemporaries that
history is not just a record of man's impress on events. If great men
sometimes shape history, it is also true that sometimes the cumulative
weight of past events coalesces into a general cause inclining a given
society in one direction rather than another so that the role of particular
individuals is reduced to a near nullity. As Gibbon, too, was aware,
Montesquieu perceived that these general causes sometimes overpower
secondary causes and predispose events toward one historical outcome
rather than another. As Raymond Aron aptly observed, Montesquieu
was trying to replace "incoherent diversity" in the social universe with
"a conceptual order," having concluded that "beyond the chaos of ac-
cidents, there are underlying causes which account for the apparent
absurdity of things."48 Hence Montesquieu can be interpreted as the
Kepler, or Newton of the social world. If nature had been shown to be
subject to rationalistic explication, so too might the world of man be
made to give up its secrets to a suitably perspicacious philosophe.49For
Montesquieu to have advanced historical studies by means of this keen
insight must certainly be judged a substantial achievement.

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga.

47 HenryVyverberg, Historical Pessimism in the French Enlightenment (Cambridge,

1958), 139-69; 198-200.
48
Raymond Aron, Main Currentsin Sociological Thought,Vol. I, Montesquieu,Comte,
Marx, Tocqueville,and the Sociologists and the Revolution of 1848 (Garden City, New
York, 1968), 14.
49 For further elaboration of this theme see David Carrithers(ed.), The Spirit of Laws

by Montesquieu.A Compendiumof the First English Edition ... (Berkeley, 1977), 18-23.

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