Foreword

Summary

A massive and shocking silence punctuates Spirit of the Laws: nowhere in the entire work is John Locke explicitly or even tacitly mentioned. This is singularly unaccountable for three reasons. First, we know from Montesquieu's Pensées and correspondence that he was well aware of Locke's work. Second, Locke's explicitly political work treats of the very constitution (albeit differently) that constitutes the model for Montesquieu's analysis. Third, Montesquieu both explicitly and tacitly discusses the work of Locke's predecessor, Thomas Hobbes. Although we must be wary of attempting to “explain” an absence, we must minimally conclude that the silence on Locke is deliberate.Reflecting on that pregnant silence opens the door to fulsome interpretation of Montesquieu. It is a strong hint that the criticism of Hobbes resulted not from deliberate misdirection but, instead, from considered analysis. When we are forced to take the criticism of Hobbes seriously, we are minimally invited to entertain the notion that Montesquieu regarded Locke as having added nothing substantive to Hobbes's argument. Such an argument would go a long way toward surfacing Montesquieu's argument about the natural foundations of moral principles as a serious argument. When we add to this argument Montesquieu's rejection of any notion of “innate ideas,” we stand on strong ground for advancing the claim that Montesquieu's relation to “metaphysics” differed radically from that of Hobbes (and we may say Locke as well).Montesquieu's anti-utopianism (discussed in Chapter 7) is founded not upon a rejection of metaphysics but instead upon a sealing off of metaphysics from the fundamental unseriousness of politics. Montesquieu, that is, takes the Crito joke to heart (as discussed in Chapter 2), while nevertheless making a brief for founding legislation that if unsusceptible to wisdom nevertheless stands less orthogonally to wisdom.Because the development of this argument stands in such strong contrast to most commentary on the work of Montesquieu, the approach in this commentary is to stand as near as psychologically possible to the moment of first reception of the work in order to respond to it independent of succeeding developments in political philosophy. The temptation to read Montesquieu as a forerunner—which has characterized commentary from the nineteenth century onward—leads ineluctably to the tendency to read him as a nascent or even primitive version of theories subsequently developed.