Montesquieu's Interpreters: A Polemical Essay

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Montesquieu's Interpreters: A Polemical Essay MARK HULL1UNG The Need for a Critique of Montesquieu's Interpreters Anyone who writes an interpretive book on Montesquieu prem­ ised on the assumption that the secondary literature may well be more an obstacle than an aid in the search for truth is under an obli­ gation to explain where and why he believes so many able scholars have gone wrong.1 My purpose in the present essay is to honor my duty to the secondary literature by taking it to task. The literature on Montesquieu is possibly the least satisfactory body of interpretive works dealing with a major political thinker. Taken in the large, the mass of books, essays, and articles written on Montesquieu is so wanting that even at this late date his powerful claim to membership in the ranks of the greatest political theorists remains inadequately acknowledged. When scholars call out the honor roll of the foremost political minds, Plato to Marx, the name Montesquieu either is omitted or is included as an act of magnanim­ ity. Truth be told, the Montesquieu of the secondary literature, even when sympathetically portrayed, is more fitting company for, say, Harrington, an influential second-rater, than for the likes of Rous­ seau or Hegel, thinkers who are their own history by virtue of their preeminent intellectual accomplishments. And if Montesquieu's in­ tellectual stature has been so seriously misjudged, we should not be 327 328 / HULLIUNG surprised to find that his ideological convictions have also been mis­ understood, his intentions misread, and his thought obscured by a secondary literature, passed from generation to generation, which contains as many layers of cumulative error as of cumulative knowl­ edge. Neither an exhaustive book-by-book critique of the secondary lit­ erature nor a bibliographical essay will be attempted here, but rather a paper organized around various "fallacies" of Montesquieu inter­ pretation. My objectives are to designate categories of fallacies, to demonstrate that these fallacies are in fact fallacies, to cite represent­ ative examples from the secondary literature, and finally to suggest reasons, whenever possible, why interpreters have missed the mark in the past and may continue to do so in the future. Montesquieu's Interpreters: Sins of Commission and Omission Aristocratic Liberal or Feudal Reactionary? Was Montesquieu an "aris­ tocratic liberal" or was he a "feudal reactionary" ? Much ink has been spilled over this question—enough to testify that the majority of Montesquieu's interpreters believe the essence of his ideological com­ mitments, his parti pris, is surely contained in one or another of these alternatives. J. J. Chevallier has written a very succinct, Elie Carcas­ sonne a very comprehensive, account of Montesquieu the "aristo­ cratic liberal"—the sworn enemy of royal absolutism, the dedicated friend of constitutional monarchy, the godfather of all persons of lib­ eral persuasion.2 On the other hand, Albert Mathiez, Louis Althus­ ser, Franz Neumann, and Franklin Ford may be numbered among those convinced that Montesquieu was a "feudal reactionary" whose thrusts at despotic monarchy were taken with an aristocratic saber in hand: unmasked, Montesquieu stands exposed as the defender of privilege, inequality, and class oppression; for the heart and soul of his constitutionalism—so they argue—is an apology for the feudal society of which he was a beneficiary.3 It seems safe to say that the proponents of the "feudal reactionary" thesis have gained the upper hand. Theirs has been the pleasure of playing the game of ideological "unmasking," a process in which they can by turns be righteously indignant (for example, Mathiez) or urbanely forgiving (for example, Ford) in the face of Montesquieu's supposedly regressive opinions. Theirs also has been the enviable lot of taking credit for tying the history of ideas to social history, thereby Montesquieu's Interpreters I 329 saving us from an "idealist" interpretation of Montesquieu wherein ideas originally intended as rationalizations of a set of "material" con­ ditions are later divorced from—and elevated ethereally above— those circumstances. Subjected to critical scrutiny, Montesquieu is merely a large-minded theorist of narrow-minded interests, no mat­ ter how much cosmetic surgery his scholarly defenders, the propo­ nents of the "aristocratic liberal" thesis, perform on his...

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