The Great Books Project Great Books
Spirit of the Laws
Twenty years of work by a French magistrate going blind, and the book that handed the American founders the separation of powers.
What It Is
A comparative study of law and government, published anonymously in Geneva in 1748. Montesquieu was a Bordeaux judge with vineyards, a title, and an appetite for travel. He spent nearly two years in England, came home, and spent the better part of two decades turning what he had seen and read into a system. His sight was failing by the end and he was dictating.
It runs to thirty-one books and is organised like a filing cabinet. Rome, Persia, China, England, the Germanic tribes; climate, commerce, religion, marriage, taxes, criminal procedure, the wearing of trousers. Chapters can be a single paragraph. The argument advances by accumulation rather than by proof, which is either the book's method or its vice, depending on the day you read it.
Rome put it on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1751. Europe read it anyway.
Why It Matters
Two ideas here reshaped the modern state. The first is that laws are not commands issued from nowhere. They grow out of a country's climate, religion, commerce, history and habits, and a law that suits one people will wreck another. Take that seriously and you have the founding intuition of sociology; Durkheim said as much.
The second is the separation of powers. Montesquieu looked at the English constitution, partly misread it, and produced from the misreading a doctrine: liberty survives only where the power to make law, to enforce it, and to judge under it sit in different hands. Madison called him the oracle who is always consulted. The three branches of the American constitution and the French Declaration of 1789 both run back through this book.
He is also the author of the most devastating page written against slavery in the eighteenth century, and the method he chose to do it with is worth the price of the book on its own. It takes four minutes to read and it does more damage than a treatise.
Before You Read
Long, and long in an unusual way. Individually the sentences are short and clear; there are simply hundreds of pages of them. Twenty hours or so, spread over weeks.
Books 1 to 13 carry the spine of the argument, including the chapters on political liberty that everyone comes for. After that, be selective without guilt. Books 28, 30 and 31, on the origins of French feudal law, are a specialist's inquiry inside a general reader's book, and almost nobody reads them straight through.
Treat it as a commonplace book rather than a treatise. He did.
Which Translation to Read
- Cohler, Miller and Stone (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, 1989) — recommended. The first complete scholarly English translation since 1750, and the one to read and cite. It keeps Montesquieu's short, dry, unnerving sentences short, dry and unnerving, where earlier English versions puffed them up. The cost: the literalism can turn wooden, and the notes are thinner than a book with this many hidden references deserves. View on Amazon →
- Thomas Nugent (1750; reprinted for centuries, including in the Great Books of the Western World). This is the version the American founders actually held in their hands, which is a real reason to want it. The cost: Nugent pads. He expands where Montesquieu is terse and treats accuracy as a secondary concern. Read it as a historical document, not as Montesquieu.
- David Carrithers (University of California Press, 1977). A compendium of the Nugent text with a strong scholarly introduction, and a sane way to meet the book if the full thirty-one books defeat you. The cost: abridged, and built on the old translation.
Take Cohler to read Montesquieu. Take Nugent to read what Jefferson read. Take Carrithers if you want the argument without the archive.
Getting the Most From This Book
Read the Cambridge introduction first. It is contextual rather than a walkthrough, and you will need the orientation.
Keep a pencil. This is a book you mine. The pleasure is in the sudden observations that fall out of the catalogue: on why commerce softens manners, on why a republic needs virtue and a monarchy does not, on what luxury does to a state.
The commonest mistake is to read the famous chapter on the English constitution, nod, and consider the job done. That chapter is six pages of a seven-hundred-page book, and it is not even the most interesting thing in it.
He is not a systematic thinker pretending to be a magpie. He is a magpie who found a system, and the mess is part of the evidence.
Some links on this page are affiliate links. Purchases made through them help support the Great Books Project at no additional cost to you.
