Variations on Tyranny. From Pascal to Montesquieu

While the title of Montesquieu’s greatest oeuvre, "The Spirit of the Laws," identifies the subject of the work, it nevertheless remains obscure. Many presume to know what law is. The title, however, will prompt most readers to ask: What is the spirit of the laws? Insofar as the title implies the existence of a relation between spirit and law, it also implies that knowledge of what both spirit and law are is a necessary precursor to understanding it. Montesquieu’s choice of title, then, should lead any reader who ponders it to raise three philosophic questions: What is law? What is spirit? And, what is their relation? The reader sensitive to the distinction in which philosophy is said to originate – that between nature and law – sees the question of nature lurking in the others. That nature is a foremost concern of the work is hinted at by Montesquieu’s use of the word and its derivatives in the book and chapter headings. Thus, to the three questions above is added a fourth: What is nature? This paper is an attempt to sketch Montesquieu’s answers to these four questions as he presents them in both the preface and the first book of "The Spirit of the Laws."

2018

This lecture was given at St. John's College in Annapolis, MD on June 13, 2018. Abstract: Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws is famous for its celebration of the separation of powers in the English Constitution and its promotion of commerce as the means of softening mores and rendering sectarian conflict unattractive and untenable. However, behind these institutional solutions lies a radical spiritual project: recover barbarian mores for a Christian world, translate them into a commercial and philosophic age, and redefine the meaning of barbarism itself. This project has many challenges: the Germanic barbarians, for Montesquieu, are the model of judicial probity and toleration of different beliefs, but they have no serious beliefs of their own; as pastoral peoples they are the model of how one can take one's property and one's security with oneself wherever one goes, but they have no real property; and they have a reputation for violence and brutality, not the gentleness and moderation Montesquieu favors. Yet the barbarian has a moral freedom that can be, and was adapted to liberal modernity, where we speak of freedom of speech, of religion, and of the press. This lecture treats Montesquieu's transformation of the barbarian understanding of property into modern privacy of conscience, and the corresponding redefinition of barbarism from what is unlearned and uncivilized to what assaults life and liberty in the name of controlling belief and opinion.

A consideration of Montesquieu's mode of writing applied to Book I of "The Spirit of Laws"

This draft defends the claim that, contrary to the primary critiques of the Western philosophical tradition provided by Nietzsche and Heidegger, the most significant aspects of postmodernity are best understood from the unchallenged acceptance of Montesquieu's profoundly influential teaching in The Spirit of the Laws.

Estudios de filosofia, 2025

Abstract: Pascal’s work is punctuated by a paradox. On the one hand, only a handful of the texts that constitute it are explicitly political; on the other hand, it is haunted by a constant political concern. To resolve this paradox, the paper shows that Pascal incites us to rethink the very definition of politics. Emerging on the basis of a double human nature marked by the Fall, violence is an ontological problem that arises from the need to preserve an infinite object for human love. For this reason, its solution lies in affective self-regulation, which makes politics an exclusively behavioralist field that cannot be a part of the intimacy of individuals who belong to another order. Thus, Pascalian politics does no more than serve the same gesture of the divine creation of the human being that keeps him alive to praise God. Pascalian politics is, then, an indirect way of realizing God’s will: its différance. Keywords: Behaviour, Force, Grace, Justice, Order, Pascal

Lumen, 2019

Political Theory

This essay draws attention to the importance of Montesquieu's earliest and unpublished writings on liberty for our understanding of the famous eleventh book of the Spirit of the Laws. Montesquieu's investigation of the nature and preconditions of liberty, the author argues, was much more polemical than it is usually assumed. As an analysis of his notebooks shows, Montesquieu set out to wrest control over the concept of liberty from the republican admirers of classical antiquity, a faction that he believed to be dangerously populist and revolutionary. In order to do so, Montesquieu came up with a redefinition of the concept of liberty that allowed him to argue that monarchical subjects could be just as free as republican citizens. This conclusion has important implications not just for our understanding of Montesquieu's writings but also and more broadly for our understanding of the intellectual history of liberalism.

This draft provides a synopsis of some of the more interesting insights provided by Thomas Pagle in his two book-length commentaries on Montesquie's Spirit of the Laws .

2023

INTRODUCTION This essay deals with the thought of three great European classics: Machiavelli and Montesquieu for political philosophy and Grotius for international law. The part devoted to the former is considerably more extensive. Therein I aim to clarify three key issues of political praxis. According to Machiavelli, this is the most difficult and risky human activity: because of both the intellectual foresight to establish an adequate plan for the conquest and maintenance of power and the valour and bravery required to achieve it. The term that unites the two skills is virtù, which, as is well-known, in ancient Italian retained the sense of the Roman "virtus", more suited to military valour than moral virtues. Each of the key themes hinges on a correlation: 1. between political virtue and fortune or chance; 2. between such a virtue and the virtues and vices of the Ancient and Christian tradition, i.e., between good and evil; 3. between the citizens' desire for freedom and the existential energy of their republic. The third correlation is also a fundamental theme of Montesquieu's "De l'esprit des lois", whose antithetical definitions of the principle and essence of despotism and democracy are masterfully argued. Now, by argumentative method and literary style, they are quite different if not opposite: the more obscure and contradictory the former’s statements sometimes are, the clearer and more consistent those of the latter appear; the more ambiguous and figurative the former’s style, the clearer and more consistent that the latter’s ones. Nevertheless, Machiavelli's dense and blazing statements on the cruelty of tyrants or the valour of republican militias are well suited to Montesquieu's rigorous logical categories on similar themes. Again, while those characteristics, peculiar to "The Prince" in particular, have led some scholars to polarised and partial interpretations, the essay aims, instead, at an exegesis that gives a reasonable explanation of certain antithetical statements. In a small but fundamental chapter of the "Esprit", Montesquieu addresses the brutal warlike characteristics of despotism. Well, the issue has a certain complementarity with the concepts of just and unjust war according to Grotius' "De iure belli ac pacis"; Grotius’ theory is developed in the last part of the essay. A much shorter version was restricted to the theme of despotism, whose topics are subdivided according to the order of the concepts and not of the authors, so that, at times, quotations from the three authors are intertwined. There is only the English version designed for the Ukrainian universities: "Violence & Fear, Essence & Principle of Despotism", whose paper is reproduced in this same section.