At Law & Liberty, Adam M. Carrington (Ashland University): Revisiting The Spirit of the Laws. From the introduction:
Scholarly interest in Montesquieu, the eighteenth-century French political thinker, has blossomed over the last 20 years. In addition to further analyzing his longstanding link to the American Founders, scholars have looked to him for thoughts on international relations, despotism, and the relationship between culture and law.
In line with that renewed interest, Anthem Press has recently released a new translation and commentary on Montesquieu’s magnum opus, The Spirit of the Laws, from William B. Allen. Allen, who served under the Reagan and Bush administrations and has published extensively on the American founding, certainly did not need to publish this translation and commentary out of any professional need. Instead, his work exudes not just intellectual curiosity but also personal love for the subject.
This volume also has a long backstory. In his preface to The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu writes, “I request a consideration which I fear some may not accord me: that is, not to judge by a moment’s reading a work of twenty years.” William B. Allen has been working on this translation for more than fifty.
I cannot do justice to Allen’s effort. He engages the immense complexity of The Spirit of the Laws with a range and depth worthy of his subject. He speaks of and with Montesquieu as an old friend with whom he has conversed warmly and beneficially for much of his life.
To understand Allen’s distinct contribution to the study of Montesquieu, we must touch on other views of the work to which he responds. For some interpreters, Montesquieu’s “spirit” consists of something akin to the zeitgeist. The laws have an underlying sentiment that the lawmaker must perceive, react to, and to some limited extent, guide. Moreover, The Spirit of the Laws lacks any real foundation in nature. Instead, Montesquieu acts as a kind of sociologist, dispassionately observing the infinite variety among peoples, their societies, and their political orders as part of pinpointing the spirit of each. His answers to political problems consist largely of a moderation built around economic commerce that seeks peace at the cost of the noble, comfort instead of virtue. His system of separation of powers, too, partakes in this lowering of the political by seeking to limit governmental power to thwart despotism. These answers, moreover, remain subject to the deterministic limitations of climate and terrain that constrain human possibility and thus, ultimately, human political achievement.
Allen’s extended commentary challenges these and similar interpretations. His Montesquieu looks more like Aristotle than he does a modern sociologist. At the same time, Allen’s Montesquieu does not merely reprint Ancient thoughts. Instead, Allen writes, “Montesquieu labored to integrate what was thought prior to modernity with what surfaced in modern theorizing.” This Montesquieu has one foot in the classical world and another in the early modern, seeking to place them in helpful conversation in pursuit of a politics superior to either.
And here is the book description from Amazon:
The Spirit of the Laws not only systematizes the foundational ideas of “separation of powers” and “balances and checks,” it provides the decisive response to the question of whether power in the nation-state can be limited in the aftermath of the Westphalian settlement of 1648. It describes a civilizational change through which power becomes domesticated, with built-in resistance to attempts to absolutize (or make total) political power. As such, it is the Bible of modern politics, now made more accessible to English readers than it ever has been.
Posted at 6:02 AM