Montesquieu

Abstract

The first readers of Montesquieu (b. 1689–d. 1755) confronted the breadth of writings that extended into every domain, seeking to offer a global vision of human activities by means of the notion of relationship (rapport) that outright rejects any artificial segmentation of the real. It is multiple as well in its form, insofar as it adopts, while renewing them radically, the paths of fiction, treatises, and essays. But his thought has often been teleologically reduced to The Spirit of Law (L’Esprit des lois, 1748) alone, to which all the rest of his work was supposed to be leading. To be sure, it is a culminating work; but with the discovery of a mass of uncompleted or confidential manuscripts it has become impossible to limit ourselves to his published works: if we are to understand its design and implications in depth, to see even its meaning (for Montesquieu’s thought, synthetic and rich in allusions, is concentrated, even elliptical), it is better to contextualize it and show its evolution. The edition of the texts (and of course their translations as well) here assumes particular importance, for it is not merely a function of philology, but also of interpretation, and it grounds the hermeneutic, which has developed historically in several directions. The first critiques bore on the supposed disorder of The Spirit of Law. This still sometimes underlying notion has become marginal, especially after the renewal of research around 1960. On the other hand the reproach of not choosing between fact (particular) and right (universal), what is and what ought to be, or rather describing without taking sides and underrating the question of value, assumes major importance; to it correspond the political question and that of justice, to which must be added two little-understood aspects of his philosophical activity: the domain of history, and that opened by the Persian Letters. A section on Montesquieu in Context also allows us to put Montesquieu’s originality into relief by indicating the philosophical currents in which he can be situated, more precisely in a section on Montesquieu and the Foundations of Modern Thought; and the Posterity section looks at the echo and influence of his work, more especially in the United States, which merits its own section. As a complement, we have thus also adopted an analytical presentation of the different means that allow us to approach his work: simple tools, edited collections, monographs that are rarely aligned along a single axis or theme of his thought, so pregnant is this totalizing vision in which “everything is closely connected.” By way of complement, bibliographies, biographies, and research resources, indispensable tools, are also presented. The author would like to thank Philip Stewart for translating this article from French into English.