The Theory of a Man:

Montesquieu’s Greatness and Our Greatness

Cody Valdes
Professor Vickie Sullivan
PS 148: Political Thought of Montesquieu
Tufts University
December 17, 2012
Revised Fall 2015
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When we fearlessly fight for what we believe in and remain hopelessly optimistic about life, love, and the
future, we create an authentic connection with all in our path. Most importantly with ourself.
- Restoration Hardware Home Catalogue, Fall 2012

What is Noble?
- Nietzsche

Montesquieu, the gentle philosopher from Bordeaux, spiritually conquered the world. His effects

took time because his design was to inspire rather than impose, but his conquest is all around us. It

therefore behooves us as people, not only as scholars, to understand what his vision sought and what it

sacrificed.

In his vision for society, did Montesquieu permit greatness? Did he care that people would be

able to do great things? Or did he sacrifice the pursuit of greatness in order to gain some other ends? Two

forms of greatness had animated individuals and groups before him. The first was external greatness, or

the grandeur of a person’s and nation's conquests, monuments, and legacy. In Montesquieu's time,

Alexander remained the unsurpassed symbol of this greatness and the foremost received example of what

an ambitious individual could achieve. The second was inward greatness, or the completeness and solidity

of one’s virtue. There had been two kinds of virtue and two institutions for nurturing them: political

virtue, or love of the homeland, the object of Rousseau’s exhortations and ancient republicanism; and

moral virtue, or the purity of one’s soul in light of the Scripture, the goal of the Church. In Montesquieu’s

time, Jesus remained the Christian world’s symbol of perfect moral virtue. Political virtue was a less

relevant experience and ideal for subjects of the French monarchy and I leave it aside for this paper. For

this reason, his greater project was correcting the Church and its imposing pursuit of inward greatness.1

Both forms of greatness produced mighty and venerable ends, but both were pursued at great costs.

Montesquieu excluded the pursuits of external and inward greatness from his vision. External

greatness violates the political liberty, or security, of citizens, which is an inviolable good for

Montesquieu. In The Spirit of the Laws, he staunchly affirms political liberty against the rampages of

1
These categories were never exclusive. The French nobility of the sword upheld a complex set of warrior virtues that united all.
The Vatican, in the time of Pope Julius II (1503-13) – Il Papa Terribile – pursued external greatness without compunction. The
fact that violent nobles also sought moral virtue is exactly why we must ask whether the pacification of the world diminished our
inward greatness.
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glory-seeking noblemen, unchecked magistrates, and princes. Inward greatness, on the other hand, is a

tremendous and worthy thing, but its organized and zealous pursuit tends to oppress the philosophical

liberty, or free will, of the individual. In both The Spirit of the Laws and The Persian Letters,

Montesquieu affirms our philosophical liberty against the oppression of the Church, Eastern seraglios,

ancient republics, and other despotic institutions that exist to forcefully sow virtue in the individual. It is a

human flaw, he recognized, to institutionalize what should not and cannot be institutionalized.

Montesquieu did not organize his attack on these two forms of greatness as I present them, but

this is how his legacy must be understood. We enjoy political liberty because we reject Alexander’s

external greatness, and we have our philosophical liberty because we reject the organized pursuit of Jesus’

inward greatness. In realizing his vision, we have made sacrifices. Montesquieu had the courage to

meditate on his sacrifices and the uncertainty of his gains. His endorsement of the liberties, the general

spirit of equality, commerce, and their effects on human happiness and grandeur, was equivocal. I address

his fears in Part I, for they are our realities.

From this I draw my second, perhaps provocative insight: Montesquieu's exclusion of these two

forms of greatness must be understood as his act of succession after Alexander and Jesus. Although he

rejected the two forms of greatness they represented, Montesquieu saw himself as their successor, not

their destroyer. Each founded an epoch in human history. There are breaks between the founders, but

there are strong continuities too, and a combination of breaks and continuities is the essence of

succession. This is a new perspective on his sense of purpose as a legislator and founder that I present in

Part II.

The importance of my representation of Montesquieu is twofold. First, violence and spiritual

oppression were the brick and mortar of the two great pursuits he was swinging his hammer at. But they

often built great things. Acknowledging their greatness forces us to reflect on what we have abandoned.

He gives us a new definition of greatness to soothe our losses, but should it satisfy us? Second,

Montesquieu rejected the conquests of Alexander and Jesus. But in The Spirit of the Laws, the liberty-

crushing princes are not associated specifically with Alexander, nor the soul-crushing stewards of

Christianity with Jesus. The lingering and inexplicable favor with which Montesquieu treats Alexander,
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and the conspicuous absence of Jesus in his vivid attacks on the Church, is explainable by the fact that he

saw himself standing alone with them on hallowed ground.2 I am thus not the only one calling

Montesquieu the next in line after Jesus and Alexander: Montesquieu assumed that illustrious lineage

himself. By the end of this paper, Montesquieu will appear more similar to Christ than a superficial

impression of his works would give, and far more than his attested legacy as one of the Enlightenment's

leading thinkers suggests.

A consistent theme of this paper is that Montesquieu's spiritual conquest is increasingly complete.

We see Montesquieu's impact at all places and times. "The influence of [Montesquieu's] great work is

difficult to overstate, especially with respect to the American Founding," writes Robert Bartlett (“On the

Politics of Faith and Reason,” 13-14). In a panegyric, the Irish philosopher and statesman Edmund Burke

described him as “a man, like the universal patriarch in Milton” who “had drawn up before him in his

prophetic vision the whole series of the generations which were to issue from his loins” (Appeal From the

New to the Old Whigs, end; in Pangle, The Theological Basis of Liberal Modernity, 128). The American

clergyman and orator Frederick Huntington spoke in 1852: "Montesquieu's maxim, that the certain effect

of enlarging intercourse is to consolidate Peace, gains illustration every hour... By travelling up and down

the earth, on errands of barter and mercy, we may shake the smell of blood out of our garments, and even

purge from our Saxon name the original odor that taints it, - Seax, a sword" (“Christ the Pacificator,” 92).

Of course, much of what Montesquieu envisioned was already happening around him. "And happily," he

wrote, "men are in a situation such that, though their passions inspire them the thought of being wicked,

they nevertheless have an interest in not being so" (Laws, 21.20, 389-90). My meaning is that we are so

thoroughly Montesquieu, and he is so thoroughly us, that he both prophesized and begat our world. Like

the expansion of the cosmos after the Big Bang, which shares this remarkable feature, I find that

Montesquieu's effect is accelerating as we move away from the moment of our spiritual founding.

A consistent position of this paper is that Montesquieu upholds the political and philosophical

liberty of people as his highest ends, with England as the closest, albeit imperfect, model. The laws of

2
Montesquieu was consciously using a fiction of Alexander. He admits as much when he cites his own fictitious treatment of
Alexander in order to refute the fictitious scholarship of Abbé Dubos (30.24, 662).
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liberty are "the best laws" that are like "pure air" for "those who have lived in swampy countries" (19.2,

308-309). In this respect, Montesquieu is not a total cultural relativist but a universalist with cultural tact,

revealing himself in memorably strident moments. In a single line he dismisses the manners and mores of

most of the world: "The customs of a slave people are a part of their servitude; those of a free people are a

part of their liberty" (19.27, 325). He is not a total cultural relativist, even though he is a student of the

world's political systems; even though he equivocates on attempts to improve other societies by force and

laws (19.14, 315), which he calls a tyranny of opinion (19.3, 309); even though he prefers moderate over

perfect legislation and disdains “universal solutions to political problems" (Radasanu, “Montesquieu on

Moderation,” 287-88); even though he instructs lawgivers to legislate in contemplation of local passions,

manners, and climates (14.1, 231); and even though he cautions that the pure air of liberty would shock

the lungs of those above-mentioned slaves. He inspired agents, not acolytes, but he commanded them to

treat the two liberties as non-negotiable.3

Lastly, one could think that Montesquieu objectively upheld whatever accorded with human

nature – "Nature repairs everything" (29.6, 311) – but this assumes too much earnestness on his part.

Human nature is his hammer, not his subject, doing for him what the Garden of Eden did for the gospel.

Part I: The Destruction and its Sacrifice

Before Montesquieu, external and inward greatness were the foremost aims of human

civilizations, the strongest movers of the human spirit, and, if I dare use the term, naturalized parts of the

human condition. They often substituted for the meaning of life. But Montesquieu changed that, and in

doing so he made great sacrifices.

Just as Adam Smith made grave and neglected reservations about capitalism, Montesquieu feared

the consequences of the diminishment of honor in a liberal, democratic, and commercial society. He

3
Krause objects to my position: "Montesquieu denies that nature determines human ends directly, and that it can be a definitive
guide for politics. It is true that he opposes despotism, like slavery, on the grounds that they are bad for 'human nature.' To the
extent that human nature has a role in political standards, however, it is one that is mediated by the 'spirit' of the laws of particular
societies, by the climate and conditions of a country, by the customs, manners, and religion of the inhabitants, and by their
political histories. Montesquieu does not fully exclude nature from political standards, but neither does he believe that absolute,
universal standards of political right are given to human beings fully formed by nature, or that such standards can be taken
directly from an analysis of human nature" (1999, 483). But Krause overstates her argument and occludes the line that separates
his comparative politics, which is empirical and ingenious because it accounts for local factors, and his underlying normative
view, which is that all governments, like human bodies, must have the same backbone to protect both liberties, because these
liberties alone allow the different peoples of the world to express their cultural uniqueness.
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understood this as inevitable in democracy: "As no citizen would depend on another citizen, each would

make more of his liberty than of the glory of a few citizens, or of a single one" (19.27, 328). But as

Tocqueville later wrote, repeating themes that Montesquieu raises in Book 20, the feudal honor we no

longer embrace made way for grand, and at times violent, acts of brilliance. It brought glory to the nation

and led the nobility to their virtue:

In certain cases, feudal honor... imperiously command men to overcome themselves, it

ordered the forgetting of oneself. It made neither humanity nor mildness a law; but it
vaunted generosity; it prized liberality more than beneficence... Cupidity appalled it less
than avarice; violence often agreed with it, whereas guile and treason always appeared
despicable to it. These bizarre notions did not arise only from the caprice of those who
had conceived them. A class that has come to put itself at the head of all the others, and
that makes constant efforts to maintain itself in this superior rank, must particularly honor
the virtues that have greatness and lustre and that can be readily combined with pride and
love of power. It is not afraid to disturb the natural order of conscience so as to place
those virtues before all others. One even conceives that it willingly elevates certain
audacious and brilliant vices above peaceful and modest virtues. (Democracy in America,
II.3.18, 590-91)

By placing themselves in a position to destroy, the nobility had occasion to be magnanimous and

courageous. By wrapping their identity in honor, they were pushed to develop extraordinary virtues

(Krause, Liberalism with Honor, 64). Alexander earned his timeless glory, in Montesquieu's eyes,

because he carried out his violence with magnanimity, grace, and courage (10.14, 148-50). The Viscount

of Orte likewise showed "great and generous courage" by refusing a vile and unworthy king’s abominable

orders (4.2, 33). As Sharon Krause evocatively writes: "What Orte did was 'fine' (belle) in the sense of

being beautiful or admirable... [Honor] is wonderful to see, like a beautiful painting, because it reminds us

that there is more to being human that getting by" (“The Politics of Distinction and Disobedience,” 477).

A nobleman’s honor was contrived and violent, but it inspired a certain greatness of soul and action that

can only be summoned in the severest duress, in seizing control over peoples' lives and then gracefully

checking one's wrath, and by letting the adoration of the masses and the envy of the highest castes be the

auditors of one's exceptionalism. The violent rites of honor-bound princes permitted a spectacular display

of the warrior's potency over his bounty and himself. For this reason, Montesquieu seems to cherish the

warlike mentality of France's "great nobility," who "have necessarily contributed to the greatness of the

kingdom" (20.22, 351). In Book 19, Montesquieu describes the general spirit of a great nation where

courage, generosity, and "a certain point of honor" are the virtues that complete the gentle and playful joie
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de vivre of the people (19.5, 310). But the code of conduct that occasioned Orte’s beautiful virtue is

deliberately excluded from his liberal vision. If liberal democracy leaves no group of distinguished men in

a position to destroy, and honor loses its grip over the minds of the exalted, will the people ever again be

graced by these glorious and rare displays of virtue?

Perhaps Montesquieu hoped they would. Perhaps he envisioned an “ennobled liberalism” that

combined the glory and grandeur of Alexander’s world with the security of England’s (Radasanu, 285).

Krause argues both that he desired an ennobled liberalism and considered it necessary: “Instead of

suppressing particular passions for the sake of the common good, Montesquieu’s concept of honor makes

use of them for the sake of individual liberty” (“The Politics,” 489). Her argument rests on a more urgent

concern: that the guarantor of individual liberties, the balance of powers, could be threatened by the loss

of honor. Montesquieu uncovered the antidote to despotism in complex political systems. But, as Krause

notes, only spirited individuals enliven and preserve the integrity of these systems:

The formal limits specified by our Constitution are only 'parchment barriers' without the
springs of individual agency that set them in motion: American liberties need spirited
guardians. The spirited defence of liberty once was explained not merely as a matter of
self-interest, but also as a point of honor, as when the first Americans pledged to defend
their independence with 'our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.' We rarely speak
of honor today. It is a word that lost currency soon after the first Americans declared their
independence. (“The Politics,” 470)

And yet, as Krause readily concedes, the spirit of liberty is inhospitable to noble honor: “The greater

mobility of an open society undermines the shared identities that support honor, and produces greater

variability in codes of honor” (“The Politics,” 490).

Did Montesquieu fear that when honor vacated the peoples’ souls and commerce became their

animating concern, when their minds discovered selfish and small distractions, the guardians of the

system would become impotent? Did he fear that they would be incapable of perceiving threats to the

very constitution that permits them to strive after petty things or, even if they could, that their souls would

be too small to rise in its defense? America's Founding Fathers apparently expected to meet this problem

with a part of the human spirit that no longer prevails in American life. Tocqueville feared this liberal

impotence and, as a student of Montesquieu, tried to reconcile the radically different spirits of honor and

liberty. Krause writes:

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To support individual liberty against the twin dangers of majority tyranny and ‘mild’
despotism, Tocqueville seeks to inspire in the democratic character qualities associated
with aristocratic mores and tied to old-regime honor. Courage, pride, high and principled
ambition, the desires for distinction and self-respect, the sense of duty to oneself, and the
love of liberty as an end in itself all prove to be crucial supports for democratic freedom.
(Liberalism with Honor, 67)

Krause insists that Montesquieu envisioned an ennobled liberalism like Tocqueville. But her work turns

to a normative plea of her own – a worthy one, no doubt – at the expense of her fidelity to Montesquieu,

who did not share her hope. In Book 5, he denies the compatibility of honor and robust democracy: "All

these prerogatives [of honor] will be particular to the nobility and will not transfer to the people, unless

one wants to run counter to the principle of the government, unless one wants to diminish the force of the

nobility and the force of the people" (5.9, 55). And as Andrea Radasanu persuasively writes:

Montesquieu’s political philosophy does not bear out these hopes... Montesquieu
concedes that politics aimed at liberty and security comes at the significant cost of
greatness, beauty and capacious souls. He is aware that his modern political principles
threaten to dwarf man’s aspirations and great ambitions... Great and powerful passions
that fuel profound sentiments and convictions are inimical to the gentle mores necessary
for security and liberty. (“Montesquieu,” 306-307)

Montesquieu was fully aware of the unique glory of the nobility of the sword, honor's capacity to inspire

people to spectacular external and inward exertion, and its incompatibility with systems of human liberty.

He deliberately sacrificed the beautiful warrior virtues to introduce gentleness and moderation into our

world.

But how did he respond to the fears expressed by Tocqueville, Krause, and the Founding Fathers?

Montesquieu did not imperil liberty by excluding honor. Their fears were founded on a false premise.

Montesquieu foresaw the great strength of a spirited liberal people:

This nation would love its liberty prodigiously because this liberty would be true; and it
could happen that, in order to defend that liberty, the nation might sacrifice its goods, its
ease, and its interests, and might burden itself with harsher imposts than even the most
absolute prince would dare make his subjects bear. (19.27, 327)

History has confirmed Montesquieu's prognosis: England marshaled itself solidly and courageously

against Napoleon, Nazi Germany, and the USSR. It seems that a vigorous spring has sufficed to replace

honor and allowed the liberal nation to do a great thing.4

4
In the unconscionably bloody tumult of World War I, Great Britain actually began to look on death in battle as an honor,
suggesting that the concept still had great emotional significance. The nation’s casualty list became known as the Roll of Honour.
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Montesquieu’s second major fear concerned the effects of commerce, the great pacifier of

humankind. He feared that the commercial people would become spiritually enslaved by their material

ambitions, actuated by small desires and ephemeral pleasures without noble motivations or ends (19.27,

333). Roger Boesche notes: "Montesquieu frankly regarded commerce as a petty undertaking, not worthy

of a great people" (‘Fearing Monarchs and Merchants,” 755). Taking stock of their lives, the laborers

would be unfulfilled, pursuing trifles without knowledge of what a full life once entailed. This lack of

fulfillment, amplified by the restless ambition that precludes Stoic tranquility, would render them

unhappy. The liberal commercial people, "sovereignly jealous" of one another’s wealth and moved by too

much petty ambition, "would find more distress in the prosperity of others than enjoyment in its own"

(19.27, 328). An excessive fervor for equality and liberty would create a serious and dour people whose

aversion to anything aristocratic in nature would render them insensible to life’s vivacious

pleasures. They would withdraw from society, timid and unhappy. For this reason, Book 19 contains his

finest moment as a cultural legislator, but also his largest retreat from the tenor of his universalism and his

admiration of liberal England, when on behalf of the French he writes: "May we be left as we are. Our

discretions joined to our harmlessness make unsuitable such laws as would curb our sociable humor"

(19.6, 311).5

I wish to compare my peers in America today with the salon of Montesquieu's eighteenth century

France: their conversation was governed by contrived courtly performances, but they appear to have been

giddy in their hearts and prone to making mischief, flirting, and finding pleasure in breaking false rules

wherever they could. The emotional reservation of young people today, on the other hand – in the most

liberal and supposedly self-assertive era of human history – is firmly rooted in youth's characters. The

restrictions on action seem to have increased and bold demeanors are stymied by the cold and

reprimanding eye of political correctness. Montesquieu foresaw our misfortune, and there is a vigorous

debate over whether he thought we could avoid it. Radasanu writes:

Even Thomas Pangle, who does not concur with [Michael] Mosher and Krause that

5
Radasanu writes: "This does not imply that France would not benefit from constitutional separation of powers. It only implies
that whatever changes need to be made in France ought not to include a moralistic assessment of its so-called vices. Perhaps that
is why Solon makes a cameo appearance in Book XIX, to remind the reader that a legislator ought to give a people the best laws
it can bear" (289).
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Montesquieu wanted only moderate reforms of traditional monarchy, argues that he

hoped for a regime that respected commercial interests but was nobler and more pleasant
than England. According to this interpretation, Montesquieu hoped that it was possible to
combine the diversity, liveliness, grandeur and enjoyment of monarchy with the security
and liberty of the new and improved science of politics. Pangle argues that this desire is
the result of a delusion or misunderstanding. Does not Montesquieu’s political
programme, aimed at making life secure, ‘eventually threaten to create a way of life no
longer lovely or enjoyable enough to be seen as worth securing?’ (306; quoting Pangle,
Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism, 303-304)

By challenging Montesquieu so strongly, Pangle was sounding the tocsin a little too dourly himself. But

without a playful companion to enliven their liberty, as the French added joie de vivre to their

monarchical honor, a liberal and commercial people can lose their capacity for enjoying life. It may seem

illogical that we should be unhappy in a world of expanding possibilities. But have our cubicles made us

happier? Have young elites rediscovered themselves on the conveyor belt to Wall Street? Montesquieu is

not here, but modern writers like David Brooks have asked these questions, and it appears that we are at

least as unhappy and unfulfilled as humans ever were.

I have so far focused on the costs of transitioning from the nobleman’s world of external

greatness to a gentler world of political liberty and commerce. Montesquieu also made a meditated

sacrifice of inward greatness by affirming philosophical liberty against the despotism of its organized

pursuit. One could immediately object: by returning us to our nature, did Montesquieu not make our

virtue complete? But as Tocqueville noted, many of the greatest virtues require “the forgetting of

oneself;" they require deliberate action and compelling guidance from a group. One could also object,

now invoking Montesquieu, that pursuing virtue under constraints renders virtue hollow, so he really

sacrificed nothing by attacking the imposing Church. This is a true maxim. Montesquieu pushed for a day

when "to the very great benefit of politics, the concern for religion in general and Christianity in

particular would fall into desuetude, the lives of citizens being taken up with other, more mundane, and

strictly speaking more natural concerns" (Bartlett, 16-17).

But while atheists like Pierre Bayle envisioned an irreligious society in which individuals

maintained their inward greatness, Montesquieu did not. What he feared was the correction we would

make as we asserted our freedom from the Church, for just as political liberty is confused with total

freedom and criminal abandon, we would confuse philosophical liberty with a total rejection of soul-craft
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in general, the absence of which produces nothing valuable in a person. He anticipated our world

again. This is why he appears to praise religion, even the "merits of the Lacedaemonian religion," in

Books 14-16 (Bartlett, 15). He forcefully derogates the religious expiation of crimes as a pernicious

obstacle to moral virtue. He writes of the Hindus in an unveiled reference to Catholicism: “What does it

matter if one lives virtuously, or not? One will have oneself thrown into the Ganges” (24.14, 469). A

further demerit of Christian virtue was that it treated moral virtue as a means to an end in the afterlife, a

concern that of course presupposed but nevertheless trumped the desire to live as a good human in this

life. But Montesquieu believed in the remarkable capacity of religious practice to mine the soul for

inward greatness: “Religion, even a false one, is the best warrant men can have for the integrity of men”

(24.8, 465). He notes that, “The laws of perfection, drawn from religion, have for their object the

goodness of the man who observes them” (26.9, 502). And yet, he tells us that pursuit of “perfection does

not concern men,” and in Book 24 he demotes religious laws to precepts, leaving only the zealous few

“who love perfection” to seek their inward greatness obscurely (24.7, 464). Montesquieu was ultimately a

legislator who cared for “the moral goodness of men in general, more than that of individuals” (26.9,

502). To protect our philosophical liberty, Montesquieu made a meditated sacrifice of inward greatness,

not by proscribing it, but by allowing it to disappear with organized religion. His vision reflected the

urgent fact that the public good could not bear the yoke of religious intolerance and spiritual oppression

any longer. He determined that the pursuit of inward greatness would no longer be a social

undertaking. The great sacrifice Montesquieu was prepared to make is seen in his praise of the Stoic

religion: “It exaggerated only those things in which there is greatness: scorn for pleasures and pains. It

alone knew how to make citizens; it alone made great men; it alone made great emperors” (24.10, 466).

Since sloughing off the Church, we have entered a drawn-out cultural moment in which

individuals assert their spiritual sovereignty against any and all communal impositions. Each of us, as

Montesquieu predicted, is "led by his own enlightenment or his fantasies" (19.27, 330). As David Brooks

writes today: “At some point over the past generation, people around the world entered what you might

call the age of possibility. They became intolerant of any arrangement that might close off their personal

options,” such as the familial duty to care for one’s elders (“The Age of Possibility”). Our generation is
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free to constrain ourselves by entering whatever spiritual order we want, and we frequently chose none. If

we must give an intelligent reason, we invoke Montesquieu’s rational maxim that a virtue that is

mandatory is no virtue at all. But the heavy feeling of obligatory service, at the behest of a republican

government or our Sunday minister, is what we really reject like a leper. In Book 26, Montesquieu even

presupposes a common civil understanding of marriage that we are tearing down today, reimagining

relationships in a thousand different ways.6 And when we constrain ourselves, supplicating before the

wisdom of a group, we commonly chose a regrettable subject matter. The proof of this will be preserved

for our descendants’ eyes in the profitable formula of our popular magazine covers, which, after

correcting the abuses of our correction, they will find useful for documenting the crude spiritual

impoverishment of our age.

David Hume, an irreligious man, considered the philosophical pursuit of wisdom a sufficient and

ample companion for nurturing a complete soul and living the good life: “But as much as the wildest

savage is inferior to the polished citizen, who, under the protection of the laws, enjoys every convenience

which industry has invented; so much is this citizen himself inferior to the man of virtue, and the true

philosopher, who governs his appetites, subdues his passions, and has learned, from reason, to set a just

value on every pursuit and enjoyment” (Essays, “The Stoic,” 148). Montesquieu feared a society of

polished citizens who chase after trinkets and gems, for there is this difference between philosophy and

religion: the true philosopher is rare, but in a religious world, many are the devout who take succor in the

repetitious wisdom of their spiritual founder. Montesquieu feared for the secular masses, the distracted

many, “the mistaken mortals,” in Hume’s words, “who blindly seek for the true path of life, and pursue

riches, nobility, honour, or power, for genuine felicity” (151).

But as a result of Montesquieu's conquest, the average youth today is uncomfortable speaking

about her 'soul' or living in contemplation of her virtue. The vocabulary is no longer there. Aristotle’s

great moral repertoire, or the elements of character personified and immortalized in pagan gods and

mythology, has no parallel in our world. Without the vocabulary of moral virtue that religions provide,

6
Are we losing the spirit of the original loving bond that led humankind towards marriage, or are we adapting to our new
realities, as he would hope – such as, intolerably long life expectancies? See Sonja Lyubomirsky, “New Love: A Short Shelf
Life.”
 Valdes 12

our secular generation can hardly label the virtues when it sees them, let alone think about them, search

for them, or exemplify them. We stumble on them fortuitously by disposition more often than we struggle

to achieve them. We summon their limp and untried forms as propriety or success seems to demand:

discipline for the sport seasons, intellectual rigor and honesty for the classroom, transparency for the

angry customer, gentleness and familial love for birthdays – but the heart's content remains unchanged.

Why have our philosophers and the Western literary canon always looked back to the Greeks?

Why is it that “things were done in those governments that we no longer see and that astonish our small

souls” (4.4, 35)? Living through every passion, fear, and conundrum that the human condition is capable

of enduring, they developed a collective discourse about virtue that engaged the cosmopolitan Corinthian

sailor equally with the simple Spartan farmer and resounded like a symphony over Hellas. In the austere

schools of war, conversation, and life they discovered the means to live and die well. This matured and

solid wisdom raised children into worthy adults. We are searching for our modern symphony. Our era’s

project will be reviving group sovereignty over the young man and woman whom have been abandoned

to the imperceptible spiritual quick sands of 'post-modern' thought: cynical intellectual impotence, ironic

timidity, malaise, and intellectual indolence. Montesquieu anticipates that parents will once again steward

their children’s souls, as they did in the Greek and Roman worlds (26.14, 507) – but just as our

grandparents sloughed off the church, our parents sloughed off our grandparents, and our generation is

even more slippery. We pinch no penny that could equip our children to do great things, but they deserve

more: we must equip them to become great people.

Thus, before this journey among the sacrifices of Montesquieu’s philosophy of greatness

depresses us, we should know that our consolation is substantial. We have the liberty to correct the abuses

of Montesquieu’s and our correction whenever we want. If we think deeply on what matters, if we read

prodigiously like our founder, and if we act in contemplation of our own unique needs, we might discover

“enlightened fantasies” that are worthy of a great people. In respect for the horrors Montesquieu

originally excluded, we should only be mindful to not zealously institutionalize our efforts.

Part II: The Succession of Founders

This work has prepared us for the climactic phase of Montesquieu’s philosophy of greatness, as
 Valdes 13

we may now examine his pedigree. For his sacrifice of the two kinds of greatness they represented,

Montesquieu was the successor of Alexander and Jesus. By building on their methods, he walked further

than both. Because of his sacrifices, we live under Montesquieu's conquest differently than the Illyrians

under Alexander or Europeans under the Church.

Alexander's world made conquests vigorously, established epochs by force, and crafted citizens’

souls with zeal. Alexander founded a new epoch through physical violence and hard power. His conquest

affirmed the worthiness of the sword and nearly deified a man. In his world, a republic did a fine thing by

sculpting boys into warriors, even though it stole children from their mothers and suppressed maternal

love under the love of the nation.

Jesus rejected that part of Alexander's method that destroys political liberty, moderation, and

natural love. He built on Alexander by conquering spiritually through the soft power of ideas. “The

character of truth is in its triumph over hearts and spirits and not... when you want to make it accepted by

punishment,” his actions said with Montesquieu (25.13, 491). The character of Jesus’ gospel was gentle,

and for what it lost without the sword, it gained by emphatically deifying a man. But like the republics of

Alexander’s world, the implementation of his spiritual conquest affirmed zealotry, despotism, intolerance,

and extremity. Montesquieu had to avoid these consequences.

Montesquieu built on Jesus by capturing the gospel’s meek virtues in his political project,

allowing Christian intolerance and expiable crimes to disappear while affirming its gentleness and love in

the worldly laws of men. In doing so, he re-made Christianity (24.1, 459; Sullivan, Lecture, November

28). But he preached moderation moderately so that the stewards of his thought would follow his example

where Jesus’ failed to. And yet, his genius could not have been too subtle. What distinguishes

Montesquieu from other tranquil vineyard farmers of Bordeaux, who surely spread a spiritual gentleness

in their humble lives, was the immoderation of his purpose and his extraordinary capacity to realize it.

Like Jesus, he conquered men spiritually. Unlike Jesus, he deified the outlines of a system, not a man. His

effect was the deepest and the most effortless because, like Jesus, his followers became his vectors, but

unlike Christianity, he also offered their souls the liberty they yearned for.

The progression of the founders’ methods is thus: hard power to soft power, or sword to ideas;
 Valdes 14

violence to love; zealotry to subtlety; and deification of man to deification of a system.

Succeeding Alexander

By rejecting Alexander's greatness, Montesquieu did not destroy the concept of greatness. Nor

did he moderate our will to do great things. His first act of succession after Alexander was to redefine

greatness. The human species was so flexible, in Montesquieu's eyes, that he could approach it in its

sleep, pluck the vision of Alexander from its dreams, and put a great nonviolent merchant in his place. A

generation would wake up that only recognized the greatness of the replacement. Be ambitious,

Montesquieu instructed us, but abide by the "restrictions and limitations that humanity and a good police

can require" (20.15, 347). He rendered the species gentle by confining individual ambitions to a new

raised box. Was it a smaller box? Maybe, but Montesquieu would not admit it. Far from stunting our

minds and our spirits, he simply wanted to habituate our imaginations to an idea of greatness that entailed

no bloodshed. As Vickie Sullivan observes today: “True greatness is no longer conquering huge swaths of

the globe with the sword and placing cities under your rule” (Lecture, November 14). Alexander's

supposed grandeur no longer stuns and awes our imaginations like it did for Cicero, Napoleon, and other

men of ambition in Montesquieu's time.

Tocqueville made his eternal contribution by documenting the first people to totally embrace this

redefined greatness. As Krause writes, he observed that: “Commercial and industrial enterprises could not

thrive without ‘audacious enterprise’ and ‘commercial boldness.’... Thus Americans ‘look with favor on,

and honor, audacity in the matter of industry,’ viewing the love of wealth as a ‘noble and estimable

ambition’” (Liberalism with Honor, 72; quoting La démocratie en Amérique, II.3.8). Commercial and

industrial ambition became a matter of “American honor.”

Montesquieu made great efforts to exalt commercial greatness. After quoting Cicero to the effect

that the great nations of the world should not engage in commerce, lest they have "a head full of both

great projects and small ones," he claims, to the probable astonishment of his world: "Yet the greatest

enterprises are also undertaken in those states which subsist by economic commerce, and they show a

daring not to be found in monarchies" (20.4, 340). In the same book, the only people who are said to be

able to "do great things" are the poor people of a commercial society (20.3, 339). The meteoric rise of a
 Valdes 15

hard-working Horatio Alger, in other words, would replace Alexander, Alcibiades, and Achilles as the

foremost example of what an ambitious post-Enlightenment prince could achieve.

By redefining greatness, Montesquieu also made it more complex. The spirit of honor was

disassembled and commercialized for the people; likewise, the infinite division of modern society into

subcultures and niche interests gives us a thousand different worlds and a thousand new arenas in which

to become great – every genre of music, every genre of cooking, every industry, sport, and concern has its

thought-leaders and excellent performers. The promise and the paradox of putting our greatness in a

commercial box is that the box nourishes diversity, but perhaps dilutes its significance. This is no longer a

barren and deathly sandbox where two combatants enter and one survives, where only a primal and base

glory that produces nothing looms. We seek greatness in a raised garden box that is fertile. But it is

unmanicured and overflowing with many little shrubs that, by self-decree, arrogate their right to suck the

soil's nutriment with the blossoms and towering trees. Unlike war, commerce makes greatness accessible

to more phenotypes than the physically endowed warrior. But if the juxtaposed epigrams suggest

anything, it is that today's commercial man often seeks a deformed grandeur in frivolous work, confusing

what once served great noblemen as mere hobbies and diversions for the serious pursuits of grownups.

Understandably, there was a protracted struggle to squeeze mankind into this box. Abraham

Lincoln brilliantly picked up Montesquieu’s fight in his 1838 Lyceum address, where he remarked of the

founding congress:

This field of glory is harvested, and the crop is already appropriated. But new reapers will
arise, and they, too, will seek a field. It is to deny, what the history of the world tells us is
true, to suppose that men of ambition and talents will not continue to spring up amongst
us. And, when they do, they will as naturally seek the gratification of their ruling passion,
as others have so done before them. The question then, is, can that gratification be found
in supporting and maintaining an edifice that has been erected by others? Most certainly it
cannot. Many great and good men sufficiently qualified for any task they should
undertake, may ever be found, whose ambition would inspire to nothing beyond a seat in
Congress, a gubernatorial or a presidential chair; but such belong not to the family of the
lion, or the tribe of the eagle. What! Think you these places would satisfy an Alexander, a
Caesar, or a Napoleon? – Never! Towering genius disdains a beaten path. It seeks regions
hitherto unexplored. – It sees no distinction in adding story to story, upon the monuments
of fame, erected to the memory of others. It denies that it is glory enough to serve under
any chief. It scorns to tread in the footsteps of any predecessor, however illustrious. It
thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of
emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen. Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some
man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its
utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us? And when such a one does, it will
require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and
 Valdes 16

generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs. (“The Perpetuation of Our

Political Institutions”)

Not every man of lofty genius and grand ambition will make his imprint gently, such as by writing a

book. Lincoln was rallying his world to defend the integrity of the laws against such men; he was rallying

to confine their libertine and destructive ambitions to the commercial box. Montesquieu has not fully

moderated our species’ capacity to destroy. The proof of this is that we still endure five rapacious Trumps

for every gentle Buffet. But this shrinking of the will to earn glory continues to gain, rather than lose,

momentum, for we are sprinting with Montesquieu's torch now even though the last man was pacified

long ago. Human history can be nothing if not a steady abolishment of petty labors and a retreat into the

life of the mind, for a sentient species that has secured its needs must tend to its agonizing cries for

meaning; it thus migrates into the meditations of the liberal arts. But once there, one begins to despise

competition and competitiveness; one begins to loathe ego and disdain exceptionalism; and finally, one

must despise that one despises. One violently suffocates the primal sobriety in the breast that manifests

excellence through the backbreak of new works - in commerce or war. But before I push this digression

too far, let us rest assured: since Lincoln’s time, we have softened our great men so that we do not suffer

under Alexander or Usbek. In this way, we are gentle and we are great. Montesquieu’s act of succession

after Alexander was thus to redefine external greatness.

Succeeding Jesus

Montesquieu built upon Jesus in two ways. His first act was replacing God in the hearts of men

with the principle of liberty and the liberal constitution. Lincoln again was Montesquieu’s mouthpiece

when he sermonized to this effect at Lyceum:

Let every man remember that to violate the law, is to trample on the blood of his father,
and to tear the character of his own, and his children's liberty. Let reverence for the laws,
be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap--let it
be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in Primers, spelling
books, and in Almanacs;--let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative
halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the
political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the
grave and the gay, of all sexes and tongues, and colors and conditions, sacrifice
unceasingly upon its altars. (Emphasis in original)

But let us place these two men in context: Montesquieu existed to inspire a person like Lincoln to define

the terms of America’s new civic religion, or Mandela to affirm the humanity of South Africans, or Aung
 Valdes 17

San Suu Kyi to fight for the liberties of the Burmese. He did not attempt to describe the content of civic

religions for these more precise and engaged legislators that followed in his spirit. He only wanted to

deify that which affirmed political and philosophical liberty for them. He thus preserved Jesus’ message

of gentleness and love in his civic religion. And while Jesus gave particulars, Montesquieu, bearing

witness to the disastrous effects this had on the Christian world, did not want his vision corrupted because

it was too punctiliously followed. He thus gave general maxims.

But what? Even Lincoln is struggling to expunge illiberal inquisitions from the body of the nation

born in liberty's image? The difficulty of establishing these maxims in the human consciousness was

monumental. Montesquieu's religion needed a potent idea. Moderate precepts are flaccid compared to the

stories that immortalized the dreadful dictates of God. Stories of poor people, who through sweat and hard

work become average, are less prehensile, and the masterpieces of legislation are more difficult to

comprehend, than the glorious conquests of kings. Despotism has the advantage, notes Montesquieu, of

grabbing people by their passions (5.14, 63). He did not forget this. To conquer the despotic world,

Montesquieu borrowed from the despotic world: he summoned a powerful fiction of human nature.7

The premise of Montesquieu’s liberal vision is the premise of Christianity. Montesquieu tells us a

story that follows the arc of mankind’s fall from grace, ending with the prodigious arrival of its redeemer.

In his story, man begins in nature where he is peaceful (1.2, 6). Perfect Adam and Eve are in the Garden

of Eden. Through intercourse with women, society is formed, where man forgets himself and descends

into a wicked state of war (1.3, 7). Eve bites the apple, committing Original Sin on behalf of mankind.

When all is lost, a wise legislator leads them back to their nature (Preface, xliv-v). Jesus arrives and

preaches the Gospel to mankind. A prophet like this is rare; eighteen centuries might separate one from

another.

We are now ready to return to Montesquieu's definition of political liberty, the thing that most

animated his vision. For Montesquieu, "It is true that in democracies the people seem to do what they

7
Pangle studied, among many things, whether Montesquieu believed that the laws of human nature included a reverence for a
creator. I want to clarify that I am looking at an entirely different question. I am seeing the parallels between Montesquieu and
Jesus’ use of an a priori concept of a pre-social man. To me, this is the other, more provocative “theological basis” of
Montesquieu’s liberalism.
 Valdes 18

want, but political liberty in no way consists in doing what one wants... liberty can only consist in having

the power to do what one should want to do, and in no way being constrained to do what one should not

want to do" (11.3, 155). But who judges what man should want to do? The clause, "the power to do what

one should want to do," is the veil that cloaks Montesquieu's entire normative position, or his answer to

the question: What is a legitimate ambition?

Using human nature, Montesquieu draws a line somewhere in the sand, beyond which

he fundamentally dismisses other visions of human flourishing. The art of deciphering Montesquieu is

seeing where he draws the line: “it is a very delicate thing to see clearly the point at which the laws of

nature cease and where the civil laws begin,” he writes (26.14, 506) - for through his authorship of the

Laws he appoints himself the legislator, genius, and judge of the universal good. He determined that

neither Alexander's nor Christianity's pursuits should be considered with food, security, and love as the

natural needs of a person. They were false meanings of life.

By swaying his followers with a concept that is necessarily fictional, for better or worse,

Montesquieu resembled most prophets and founders of religions. For example, he resembled Lao Tzu,

who spoke of the Tao or the Way of nature to which the sage must guide the people. Just like various

despotisms had "some sacred book that acts as a rule, like the Koran for the Arabs, the books of Zoroaster

for the Persians, the Veda for the Indians, the classics for the Chinese" (12.29, 211), Montesquieu's liberal

society would receive its precepts from the Laws. Drawing on an image of human nature that purports to

exist beyond his prejudices, his readers would treat his word as inspired from a divine source: "Make it so

that one is instructed though I do not teach," he calls to the Muses, "and that, when I announce useful

things, one believes that I knew nothing and that you told me everything" (20, 337). In this way,

Montesquieu is Jesus.

Scholars mistake Montesquieu for a man without a project, or a total cultural relativist, because

his dominant tone was: so long as their laws respect my conception of human nature, let the people

legislate as they like and must (26.14, 509). In the spirit of empowering the people, Montesquieu sketched

the backbone, but not the sinews, of his descendants’ systems. But remarkably for a political scientist who

used the empirical method over decades of exhaustive research, he pushed his liberal agenda boldly with
 Valdes 19

an a priori assertion.8 So while Pangle calls him a "prophet of the religion of reason" because he gave

open-ended precepts, he was Jesus because he barbed his hook with a fictitious idea that made his

argument unanswerable and more prehensile (Theological Basis of Liberalism, 128). Through it, his

vision became "an exhortation to behold a new and better Jerusalem, built by human hands and fit for

human habitation here and now" (Bartlett, 24). Bartlett speculates with me:

One cannot help but wonder whether Montesquieu adopted the idea of a state of nature as
a fiction useful for his purposes. At all events, what appears to be the theoretical
foundation of Montesquieu's political prescriptions is in fact deduced from those
prescriptions: The politics justifies the theory, not the other way around. (Ibid)

But Montesquieu not only disapproves of a priori thinking, he considers it one of the highest

dangers in society. Speaking of corporal punishment, a matter he took seriously, he mocks and dismisses

accusations of magic and heresy: “On how many prodigious things did this crime [of destroying God’s

miracles with black magic] not depend?" (12.5, 192). By now, the question to ask Montesquieu is clear:

On what prodigious basis did you acquire your knowledge of human nature? The hard truth we are left to

struggle with is that our spiritual founder is fundamentally a hypocrite. He uses the same unanswerable

tool, an a priori construct, and dips his arrow into the same goblet of venom, the despotic passions, as

magicians, heretics, and Jesus.

The implications of this critique for our society are what we make them. We live under a system

whose foundation is partially fictitious; at its founding, it seized a higher platform that it deserved. By

cloaking his project in the same plot as the dogmatic and dangerous systems of thought he was rejecting,

Montesquieu betrayed his principles. He treads a fine line where his means could totally violate his ends.

But this was also his power. It equipped his fine discernment of the good with a spiritual weapon sharper

than any Alexander ever carried into battle. Should he be forgiven?9

8
David Hume, whose empiricism alerted the world to the impossibility of discovering useful knowledge through a priori
reasoning, published his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739-40 and his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in multiple
editions from 1748-77; because the former was so poorly received, I do not know if Montesquieu ever read Hume before
publishing the Laws in 1748. Hume would approve of Montesquieu’s empirical approach to his comparative politics, but not of
his a priori vision of human nature that became the cornerstone of his liberal vision.
9
It is in line with modern demands for transparency and perfection in our public leaders – however contrary to Montesquieu's
views on perfection – for me to suggest so. Brooks would rush to Montesquieu's defense. He writes of Steven Spielberg’s epic
portrait of Lincoln: “The movie portrays the nobility of politics in exactly the right way. It shows that you can do more good in
politics than in any other sphere. You can end slavery, open opportunity and fight poverty. But you can achieve these things only
if you are willing to stain your own character in order to serve others — if you are willing to bamboozle, trim, compromise and
be slippery and hypocritical. The challenge of politics lies precisely in the marriage of high vision and low cunning. Spielberg’s
‘Lincoln’ gets this point. The hero has a high moral vision, but he also has the courage to take morally hazardous action in order
 Valdes 20

Conclusion

When we see how Montesquieu understood his role as the successor of Alexander and Jesus, and

the epoch-rendering contribution he was about to make to mankind's consciousness, we see more clearly

what he sought from their worlds and what he sacrificed to found ours. By building on their methods and

reimagining their conquests, he realized a new era of human flourishing. He excluded our pursuit of

Alexander's external greatness and sacrificed our pursuit of inward greatness in order to secure our

political and philosophical liberty. He left it to us to correct the consequences.

As a founder, his conquest is peculiar. Humankind cannot rely on geniuses because they are

exceptional by definition. Its governments cannot anticipate magnanimous, wise, and gentle leaders.

Therefore, he circumscribed individual greatness and anticipated a future of human inadequacy, deifying

an impersonal system in which there would be no expectation of a benevolent dictator or a timely Solon

or Lycurgus. But if Hegel is right, if the liberal democratic system will endure, and if Montesquieu was

not speaking the whole truth when he said that humans could not create something that lasts indefinitely,

Montesquieu's conquest could be the last great thing any human being will do.

Radasanu writes of The Spirit of the Laws: "Montesquieu gives the reader access in speech to the

most ambitious governments with the most exalted goals known to us through history. Perhaps he hopes

that some readers will follow him in thinking through the range of human possibilities as they have

manifested themselves historically, even while denying that the actualization of these possibilities through

action is warranted or justified" (307). Montesquieu was doing more than giving us a history lesson: he

was reveling in the false greatness of the Ancient empires, Alexander, and the Church, so that he could

redefine our idea of greatness and leave us to reverberate the significance of his.

to make that vision a reality. To lead his country through a war, to finagle his ideas through Congress, Lincoln feels compelled to
ignore court decisions, dole out patronage, play legalistic games, deceive his supporters and accept the fact that every time he
addresses one problem he ends up creating others down the road. Politics is noble because it involves personal compromise for
the public good” (“Why We Love Politics”).
 Valdes 21

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