Montesquieu Publishes De l'esprit des lois
The Spirit of the Laws was published anonymously in Geneva in 1748 and went through twenty-two editions in two years. Montesquieu had worked on it for around twenty years, and its method is what made it new. Earlier political writing derived the right constitution from nature, scripture or reason; this treats laws as things produced by circumstances — climate, soil, size, religion, commerce, the character of the people — and asks what suits what. Its typology divides governments into republics animated by virtue, monarchies by honour, and despotisms by fear, and its warning is that each is destroyed when its animating principle decays. Book XI describes the English constitution as a distribution of legislative, executive and judicial power among distinct bodies that check one another, so that power arrests power. That description was already inaccurate about the England of 1748, where ministers sat in parliament and the Lords were the supreme court, and it became the most influential passage in the history of constitutional design. The Americans cite him more often than any other author in the ratification debates, and the separation he described is built into their document. He also devoted books to commerce, to the corruption of the Roman republic, and to slavery, which he attacked in a chapter of savage irony that some readers took at face value. The Sorbonne and the church condemned it, and it went on the Index in 1751. Catherine the Great said she had used it to draft her legislative instructions. He put the criticism of his own method into the book. A law that suits one people may ruin another, he wrote, and the largest error a legislator can make is to import institutions from somewhere they worked without asking why they worked there.
- Year: 1748 CE
- Category: Intellectual
