The Judgmental Gaze of European Women

Abstract

B Y NOW, ALMOST EVERY AUTHOR in the canon of Western political thought has been redescribed, revised, and sometimes reviled from the point of view of contemporary feminist concerns. Exceptionally, little attention has been paid to Montesquieu in this regard, despite the fact that he is the sole modern author to have explicitly linked both gender relations and modes of sensuality to political theory.' Montesquieu identified a typology of political relationships between men and women and additionally invoked modes of heterosexual and homosexual conduct in a debate over the constitutional form appropriate to the European nation-state. In effect, this was a debate over the respective merits of republican and monarchical forms of rule. The kinds of gender relations and types of sexuality condoned or sustained by each form of government (as well as those encouraged under despotic rule) were to decide the issue of the best form of government as well as the issue of the political genealogy of that idea called Europe. In contemplating these linked themes, I also claim we can see how the recognitions they entail suggest the self-transformative properties of a certain kind of political theory. By way of working out the implications of a communications ethic, Montesquieu's apparently naturalistic sociology of regimes transforms itself into an idealist social theory. At the end of the day, Montesquieu tells something like the following story. Communication between men and women, or more generally, between differently constituted or related beings, is a subversive process that brings both sides to new forms of self-recognition. In a mood of approval of such processes, regimes could be then judged by the extent to which they accorded