Baron De Montesquieu Research Articles

Separation of Powers in Baron de Montesquieu: Philosophical Appraisal

In a democratic system, citizens of a given country vote to elect their representatives who will form a government. Fair and equal treatment is required to be provided for every citizen by the government such as fundamental rights, popular and free participation in governance and so on. However it is quite unfortunate that men, once vested with power, abuses it there by causing despair among citizens, just as it is being portrayed in most African countries. Therefore it is necessary that power becomes a check to power. Having seen the need for such check and balances in power, Baron De Montesquieu in his treatise ‘Spirit of Laws’ espoused the separation of powers among the three arms of government in a democratic setting to avoid the abuse of powers.

Comparative Study of the Customary Institutional Structure of Ngata Toro, Central Sulawesi, and Montesquieu’s Legal Doctrine

The Republic of Indonesia was established on a unified territory of kingdoms and the original laws bounding them. Article 18B paragraph (2) of the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia became the constitutional basis for formulating Law Number 6 of 2014 concerning Villages, accommodating both Customary Villages and Villages. At the local level, the ratification of the Decree of the Sigi Regent Number 189-324 of 2018 was a form of recognition and respect by the state for the existence of indigenous people living in Ngata Toro, Sigi region. As a customary village, Ngata Toro has a unique institutional structure based on local ancestral law. This study aims to explain the institutions in Ngata Toro’s Customary Law compared to the infamous view of the Trias Politica by Baron de Montesquieu. A socio-legal method was employed by focusing on the study of legal anthropology to compare the institutional structure and functions of Ngata Toro to Monstesquieu’s doctrine. The results unveiled that institutions within Ngata Toro resembled Montesquieu’s view regarding the separation of powers. Those institutions were Topantale (the legislative), Topo Baha (the executive), and Topo Tangara (the judges/judiciary), whose jurisdiction covered the entire territory of the Ngata Toro customary land.

The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow ed. by Julia Herzberg, Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle

Reviewed by: The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow ed. by Julia Herzberg, Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle Matthew P. Romaniello Herzberg, Julia; Renner, Andreas and Schierle, Ingrid (eds). The Russian Cold: Histories of Ice, Frost, and Snow. The Environment in History: International Perspectives, 22. Berghahn Books, New York and Oxford, 2021. vii + 261 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Notes. Bibliographies. Index. $145.00; £107.00. Julia Herzberg continues to make important interventions in the field by focusing on the history of the environment and its influence over Russian and Soviet history. This new volume, edited alongside Andreas Renner and Ingrid Schierle, follows an earlier volume by Herzberg, Christian Kehrt and Franziska Torma — Ice and Snow in the Cold War: Histories of Extreme Climatic Environments (New York and Oxford, 2018). The two volumes significantly overlap in their focus on the twentieth century, though the earlier encompassed a broader geography while the current volume centres on the Soviet Union in eight of its eleven chapters. The Russian Cold also contains three chapters that look back into the pre-revolutionary era — two by Herzberg on the eighteenth century and one on views of Siberia in the late imperial press by Nataliia Rodigina. The earlier chapters are an important addition here, as the themes raised demonstrate that scientific and popular conceptions of the influence of the cold have a long history, of which the Soviet iterations reflected historical developments rather than modern innovations. [End Page 568] What remains as impressive here as in the first volume is the variety of disciplinary approaches offered by the contributors. The ‘cold’ in this volume becomes an unstable category of analysis. The history of science is the focus of the first section, followed by a cultural approach including two chapters focused on Soviet cinema by Oksana Bulgakowa and Roman Mauer, and then chapters focused on the impact of climate on the Second World War (Aleksandr Kuzminykh), tourism (Aleksei Popov) and masculinity and sports (Alexander Ananyev). At times the cold is a subject of climatological inquiry, the object of exploration (Erki Tammiksaar and Denis J. B. Shaw), a visual marker in the chapters on the press and film, a sensory experience, or a location for activity. The volume offers no single concept of coldness, which may open the field to further inquiries rather than resolving the topic for future researchers. The first section offers several perspectives on the politicization of science both in the tsarist and Soviet eras. Herzberg considers the Academy of Sciences’ response to the ongoing critique of Enlightened-thinkers such Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, who relied on Russia as his example of the danger of a cold climate. Experiments launched in St Petersburg and across Siberia attempted to gather data to respond to this assertion. In the Soviet era, its scientists attempt to prove imperial Russia’s breakthrough in discovering Antarctica and promoting their own Marxist-inspired analysis of geography to explain the unique features of the Subarctic to reject the popularity of landscape science offered by Western geographers. The next section focuses on representations of the cold across media and offers fresh insights into this fundamentally important symbol of Russia. Rodigina’s insightful chapter on the thick journals’ reliance on Siberia’s cold as a mechanism to create a sense of national pride over its unique geography connects to the earlier chapter on the history of science. The cold climate, for these authors, was not so much an experience than a valuable symbol for inculcating nationalism, or as Rodigina insightfully captures from these journals, a ‘poetics of a godforsaken place’ (p. 126), turning a source of criticism to one of national strength. Mauer’s chapter on cinema moves these images onto the screen, arguing that Soviet films promoted a vision of masculinity that required its subjects to demonstrate their ability to overcome ‘the national trauma of powerlessness’ through their ‘liberation from cold Siberia’ (p. 170). The final section shifts to presenting the cold climate as an opportunity, either for tourism or sport, or as an obstacle, as in the Second World War. What holds this section together is an understanding of the physical experience of cold, as it...

O rządach prawa w dawnej Polsce

The Polish Republic of Nobles was characterized by the fact that the activities of public authorities were based on statute law. This is a feature that distinguishes this country from the vast majority of European states in the early modern period where the principle of the sovereign power of the absolute monarch was dominant. In Poland, the highest authority in the state was the Sejm, in which the monarch was only one of the three estates in the Sejm, along with the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies. The General Sejm was formed in the second half of the 15 th century, expanding its powers over the next two centuries. At the beginning of the 16 th century, the view of the sovereignty of law in the state prevailed among the nobility, to which the monarch himself was also subordinated, according to the principle that in Polonia lex est rex . It can therefore be concluded that in Poland as early as in the 16 th century there was a practical division of powers according to the principle that two centuries later would be formulated by Baron de Montesquieu, and which would underlie the constitutional systems of the bourgeois state. The second half of the 18 th century brought a further change. It was during this period that the subordination of all activities of the state to the applicable law became even more clear. At that time, an essentially hierarchical structure of executive authorities was established with the king, the Guardians of the Law (Pol. Straż Praw ) acting as the government, government commissions constituting central departmental institutions, and commissions of order, which were responsible for the performance of local government. All these collegiate bodies were established by legislation with appropriate Sejm constitutions. Their activity and structure were thus clearly defined by the provisions of law. They could function only within the framework of Sejm statutes and on the basis thereof. In most European countries, it was only the postulates of political liberalism in the 19 th century that brought the possibility of extending legislative control over the government in the form of constitutional and parliamentary responsibility of ministers. In Poland, however, this principle was introduced by the Constitution of 3 May 1791.

Debating ethical nominalism in Early Enlightenment thought on China

AbstractThis article discusses debates about the normative implications of nominalism by considering significant Enlightenment assessments of China’s society and politics. Enlightenment universalism has been criticized as an insufficient bulwark against nominalist tendencies towards cultural or subjective relativism, and (in its Anglo‐French formulations) as responsible for the ills of modernity which need to be overcome by a ‘spiritual turn’ in Critical Realism. Yet in response to the nominalist aspects of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (1588‐1679), the early Enlightenment thinkers Pierre Bayle (1647‐1706), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646‐1716), and the Baron de Montesquieu (1689‐1755) countered the nominalist denial of the reality of universal concepts while conceding the validity of multiple cultural perspectives on the social and political world. Each thinker attempted to reconcile certain universal ethical standards with the fact of cultural and epistemic diversity as demonstrated by China, with differing levels of success. Indeed, their considerations on Hobbesian nominalism and views on China are tied to conceptions of the social as a sphere in many ways independent of the political order—a general development in western social and political theory in the late seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Thus, the links between their responses to ethical nominalism and conceptions of the Chinese social and political order shed crucial light on debates internal to Enlightenment thought relative to non‐European cultures, and in turn on the development of classical social theory. Furthermore, their anti‐nominalist universalist theories which nevertheless accounted for particular and often incommensurable cultural frameworks can be seen as early modern precursors to ongoing efforts to navigate between extreme versions of universalism and relativism, and as constituting ‘philosophical under‐labour’ for contemporary social theory.

Arsehole aristocracy (or: Montesquieu on honour, revisited)

The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great deeds. Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy.

Introduction: Performances of Sovereignty in African Dictator-Fiction

Introduction:Performances of Sovereignty in African Dictator-Fiction Charlotte Baker Correction: On page x: A citation was added: (Armillas-Tiseyra, "Dictates of Authority," 5-6) On Page xiii: The filing date for Magalí's dissertation should be 2012, not 2014. The online version of this article has been updated. This special issue focuses on the relationship between literature and sovereignty and, more specifically, on the ways in which writers of African literature since independence have responded to the performance of authoritarian state power in Africa.1 In postcolonial Africa, sovereignty is more than simply an expression of supreme power or authority. It is to have the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die or, as Cameroonian theorist Achille Mbembe puts it, "to exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deployment and manifestation of power" ("Necropolitics" 1). The very legitimacy and efficacy of sovereignty in the postcolony relies on repeated performances of violence. Contributors to the special issue examine the role of writers of fiction in revealing and questioning this legitimizing violence, the ways in which sovereignty is expressed in African literature and how such expressions of sovereignty can be read. Analysis of the ways in which states deploy spectacle has led many contributors to this special issue to Mbembe and his insights into the performance of power in the postcolony. His ground-breaking work De la postcolonie was published in French in 2000 and appeared in English as On the Postcolony just one year later. On the Postcolony extends Mbembe's earlier discussion of his notion of the "banality of power" in contemporary Africa, concentrating on the aesthetics of postcolonial regimes, their style of government, and attempts to represent themselves. The postcolony, for Mbembe, "identifies specifically a given historical trajectory—that of societies recently emerging from the experience of colonisation and the violence which the colonial relationship involves" (102). Focusing on political rule in the postcolony, he continues: The postcolony is characterised by a distinctive style of political improvisation, by a tendency to excess and lack of proportion, as well as by [the] distinctive ways identities are multiplied, transformed, and put into circulation. But the postcolony is also made up of a series of corporate institutions and a political machinery that, once in place, constitute a distinctive regime of violence. (102–03) [End Page vii] Above all, Mbembe highlights the inadequacy of the legal model of sovereignty to account for the functioning of the African state. Etymologically, the term "sovereignty" comes from two French words: "souvrain" and "souveraineté." The former means a leader with supreme powers and authority, while the latter alludes to the territory over which a leader has such powers. The complex issue of sovereignty has been debated in the writings of political and jurisprudential theorists including St. Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Baron de Montesquieu, John Rawls, and Jürgen Habermas. As Christopher Morris comments: The modern notion of sovereignty developed slowly with the interest shown in Roman law in the twelfth century and with the discovery of Aristotle's works in the thirteenth. By the time Bodin formulated it, most of the elements needed for its emergence were to be found in Western Europe, or at least France. (173) Morris continues: "Sovereignty is the highest, final, and supreme political and legal authority and power within the territorially defined domain of a system of direct rule" (178). Thus, sovereignty is understood as the supreme power of a governing body to administer itself without any outside interference. In this view, those who incarnate this supreme power of the state are vested with the ability to make laws and enforce them with cohesive force. This perspective on sovereignty warrants that the individual is obliged to take part in state affairs even when they are contrary to his own views and vision. The sovereignty of the state is above individual will or consideration and any individual or group attempting to undermine the sovereignty of the state could be accused of treason. Mbembe points to the inadequacy of the legal model of sovereignty for the African postcolony, remarking that: As in the colonial regimes, in African regimes...

Protean boundaries: Montesquieu's Europe and the Mediterranean world

The Lettres persanes, the Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains and the Esprit des lois contain few direct references to the Mediterranean. Moreover, all of them imply a strictly physical and geographical notion of the region, while the cultural significance seems to be ignored. And yet the idea of a great sea that might influence customs, religions, traditions and laws, uniting or dividing the people on its shores, actually underlies many of the pages written by the Baron de Montesquieu. The purpose of this article is to reconstruct the notion of the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in his writings by relating it to his views on Europe. The main argument is that Montesquieu construed the Mediterranean as a geographical, historical and ideological barrier, which he used to portray the image of a modern, commercial and liberal Europe.

Enlightenment Universalism? Bayle and Montesquieu on China

This article addresses questions concerning Enlightenment universalism and cultural diversity by focusing on the views of China held by Pierre Bayle and the Baron de Montesquieu. In contrast to the characterizations of Enlightenment thought as insufficiently attentive to cultural diversity and as providing pretexts for imposing European values on non-European cultures, recent scholarship has sought to uncouple Enlightenment thought from imperialism and colonialism. An examination of the perspectives, positive and negative, of Bayle and Montesquieu on China suggests that Enlightenment thinkers attempted to reconcile ethical universalism and cultural diversity, but also shows the limitations of such attempts. Thus, while dismissals of Enlightenment thought as universalistic and even imperialistic fail to consider Bayle’s and Montesquieu’s subtle engagements with Chinese culture, their accounts of China arguably fall short of being robust cross-cultural or anti-colonial perspectives.

The Lesotho Constitution and Doctrine of Separation of Powers: Reflections on the Judicial Attitude

Abstract Since the popularization of the doctrine of separation of powers in the 18th century by Baron De Montesquieu, emerging democratic nations have continued to strive towards evolving patterns of governance that suit their internal needs with regards to the political, social and cultural peculiarities of each nation. Lesotho is no exception to this evolutionary trend, as the country transitions from a traditional monarchical to parliamentary system of government, founded on popular democracy. The 1993 Constitution of Lesotho embodies provisions that ensure the distribution of governmental powers among the three arms of government, but with due reverence to the monarch whose powers cut across each branch of government. The judiciary plays a very important role in preserving the tenets of the constitution. The courts in Lesotho have been very assertive, sometimes excessively so, by intruding into the functions of the other arms of government. This paper captures the true importance of the doctrine of separation of powers, examines the Lesotho constitutional arrangement in preserving this doctrine and calls for caution on the part of the courts as guardians of the constitutional order.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu ed. by David Carrithers

la passionnante histoire du pantalon jusque dans les pays anglo-saxons d’où proviennent des forces et des influences non-négligeables. Notons, entre autres, celles de l’Américaine Amelia Bloomer qui a donné son nom à un modèle de pantalon , ou des groupes religieux ou hygiénistes qui luttent contre l’emprise “satanique ” (117) de la mode, car “the laws of Health come from God, the laws of Fashion from Paris” (110). Tout en révélant aux lecteurs l’étonnante histoire d’un vêtement aujourd’hui si ordinaire, Bard les emporte dans une prodigieuse exp édition dans le temps et l’espace, où les plus curieux découvriront de nouvelles pistes à explorer. Auburn University (AL) Samia I. Spencer CARRITHERS, DAVID, ed. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-2701-2. Pp. 584. $325. This sizeable volume consists of twenty-eight articles on Montesquieu published in scholarly journals mainly during the second half of the twentieth century . The first section addresses Montesquieu’s major works, Les lettres persanes, Grandeur et décadence des Romains, and L’esprit des lois. The different types of government , namely, republic, monarchy, and despotism, follow. Finally, topics related to England, notably the separation of powers, and then Religion, Commerce and Economics, and Philosophy of History complete the volume. The editor, David Carrithers, a Montesquieu specialist, opens the volume with a detailed introduction. Here he summarizes Montesquieu’s major works and interprets them. He frequently cites the articles contained in the volume to substantiate his claims. In discussing the various topics, he notes how recent scholarship has developed or deviated from previously held ideas. For example, Lowenthal and Keohane show that Montesquieu held high regard for a republic, whereas traditional scholarship considers monarchy as his preferred form of government . Carrithers also notes the value that Montesquieu placed on commerce, considering it an economic necessity in contrast to the agricultural state favored by other philosophes. Finally, he cites the reasons why Montesquieu’s works remain popular today, noting their timeless quality. Whereas Voltaire and others responded to events of their day, Montesquieu sought for the causes underlying laws and governments. This, added to his deep reflective spirit, ensures his permanence. Many articles address the story of the Troglodytes from The Persian Letters. Ranum states that Montesquieu’s life-long aim was to understand this parable and the reasons for the changes in states. Crisafulli sees the parable as a refutation of Hobbes, and an affirmation of Shaftesbury, since Montesquieu sees virtue as resulting essentially from moral-social instincts. In the section “Republics,” Keohane calls attention to the sequel, contained in an informal document entitled “Pensées.” Here Montesquieu enlarges his former concept to admit the possibility of a virtuous nation under wise political authority, at the same time enjoying commerce and the arts. Other authors note the effect of Montesquieu’s philosophy of history. Chinard sees it as fundamentally pessimistic, derived from a determinist perspective. This, he believes, occasioned the cool reception of L’esprit des lois from fellow philosophes, who professed the notion of perfectibility. While admitting a determinist current in Montesquieu, possibly due to his scientific 570 FRENCH REVIEW 85.3 training, Carrithers notes additional points. Charles XII of Sweden and Cromwell in England show that great people can change events and redirect the course of history. The accidents of history may produce surprising results. History is also at the root of Montesquieu’s religious beliefs, according to Oake. Montesquieu admired the civic religion of the early Romans, and he saw religion as a social activity with utilitarian dimensions. Thus, Schaub maintains, Montesquieu favored toleration. However, state tolerance of all religions was less problematic than mutual tolerance by different religions. According to Grimsley, Montesquieu believed that reason could justify the toleration of any socially useful religion, although he also accepted non-rational arguments. Above all, people must avoid gross superstition and fanaticism. All the articles in the volume are written in English, although some may use quotations in French. They are reproduced as they originally appeared in the journals . Thus one sees a variety of printing styles and notes. An impressive, cumulative bibliography is...

Separation of Powers Under the American Legal System and Islamic Law

Separation of Powers is well-established principle in all modern-democratic legal systems. In the abstract, this principle is a constitutional principle in which every state is eager to draw its features in its own constitution. The Separation of Powers is a term that invented by the French political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu after being first introduced by the ancient Greeks and developed by the Roman Empire. The principle is a mere attempt to a draft a model of governance that reinforces the democratic aspects in the state by dividing the state into three branches “executive, legislature, and judiciary”. The principle is to arm each branch with some tools whereby each branch can check the powers of the other and guarantee that no branch will intervene in the functions of the other. In this paper, I will expound briefly the borders of this principle in both the American Legal System and Islamic Law, in an attempt to shed light over the emergence of this principle and the mechanism that shapes its working field in the two systems.

Character, civil society and prospects for democracy

In this article a framework is developed for comparing a number of present‐day societies in terms of their ability to produce social order and moral character. America is compared with Europe, and then, in less detail, to Latin America and the Islamic world. Reference is also made to Alain Touraine's What is democracy? to show a present‐day French perspective on democracy. The place of the middle class in America and in Europe in providing compromise solutions for their societies is noted, together with the possible relationship between social and political democracy, and how they may converge and diverge. Cultural elements involved in the production of social order are taken into account. Reference is made to the different checks and balances in different societies between the central and local government and local communities, as well as between elites and the masses. This reflects the cultural factors as well as the degree of bureaucratisation of these societies. Finally, there is a summary of various principles of honour governing differing structures of political power derived from the Baron de Montesquieu's The spirit of the laws.

Culture as Theater / Culture as Belief

Culture as Theater / Culture as Belief Vincent P. Pecora Once upon a time—and a very good time it was—some of us in the business of literary and cultural criticism found an extraordinary kinship with some folks in the business of cultural anthropology. And the result was nothing less than paradigm making, at least for those on the literary side of the conversation. Somewhere between the publication of Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures in 1973 and Stephen Greenblatt’s “Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion” in 1981 arose the idea that “culture”—or, more precisely and carefully now, a culture, as the plural in Geertz’s title famously signaled— could be seen as a (more or less) organically knit structure of symbols (Geertz) or representations (Greenblatt) that a given, more or less geographically circumscribed group of people produced for the purpose of understanding but also reinforcing its collective existence.1 None of this came out of the blue. Baron de Montesquieu, James Macpherson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, J. H. von Herder, Edmund Burke, and G.W. F. Hegel had all, in their individual ways, contributed to the idea that a culture (or a civilization) possesses some degree of organic unity, out of which emerge its laws, civil institutions, folklore, customs, literature, language, myths, traditions, statecraft, political order, and sense of belonging, even its divinely ordained and essential Geist. Hegel went perhaps further than anyone, describing a “Spirit of a People” that thus constitutes “One Individuality which, presented in its essence as God, is honored and enjoyed in Religion; which is exhibited as an object of sensuous contemplation in Art; and is apprehended as an intellectual conception, in Philosophy.”2 Early eighteenth-century figures like Jean-François Lafitau had already begun to catalog the customs of “savage Americans” in a more dispassionate and accepting way, implying (albeit hesitantly) that they too possessed a civilization.3 But the nineteenth and twentieth centuries saw the rise of a more deliberate and systematic attempt to circumscribe specifically “primitive,” and supposedly simpler, culture (rather than that of modern peoples or nations) along such lines, especially following the evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin. E. B. Tylor elaborated primitive culture as modern [End Page 505] civilization’s evolutionary source, vestiges of which could still be found in the myths, philosophy, religions, languages, arts, and customs of modern nations; Bronislaw Malinowski demonstrated how in the course of systematic fieldwork an outsider could apparently learn how to participate subjectively in a foreign culture even as he or she objectively observed it, could acquire “the feeling” for native manners, and could begin to feel “in touch with the natives” even as he or she scientifically described them; and a large number of later ethnographers, from Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict to Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, had given the idea of culture a sort of hands-on palpability—a physically detailed and differentiated yet still conceptually unified presence—that increasingly allowed readers to distinguish the Nuer, say, from the Samoans, and each in turn from the French or Americans, while gradually coming to see all such groupings as belonging to some idealized, and finally United-Nations-authorized, “family of man.”4 Drawing on the work of Evans-Pritchard and others on questions of kinship, Claude Lévi-Strauss provided a notoriously unanchored mathematical/linguistic groundwork that defined the rules of marriage between different subgroups within a larger collective: “Kinship phenomena are of the same type as linguistic phenomena,” he declared.5 This analogy allowed both the social and cultural to derive from structures of mind and language (not so unlike those posited by the philosophicallinguistic nativism developed only a few years later by Noam Chomsky), and produced a method that Lévi-Strauss, endorsing Paul Ricoeur’s criticism of his work, acknowledged as “Kantism without a transcendental subject.”6 The lines of thought developed by such figures, and by so many others, are nevertheless quite diverse and produce a range of important debates depending on the degree of one’s functionalism, one’s commitment to “evolutionism” or “diffusionism,” one’s acceptance of the notion of a “primitive mentality” or of Lévi-Strauss’s...

How trade affects international interactions

A viable peace is one that comes about naturally and persists without the need for outside intervention. At least since Baron de Montesquieu's statement that "peace is the natural effect of trade. Two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent: for if one has the interest in buying, the other has the interest in selling and thus their union is founded on the mutual necessities" (1748) a number of economists and political scientists maintained that trade among nations leads to peace. That logic is as follows: If a target country that is the recipient of conflict retaliates by cutting its trade ties with the conflict instigator, then a portion of the costs of conflict born by the instigator results from its lost gains from trade. Conflict is more costly the higher these gains from trade losses. This article summarizes some of the empirical work testing this proposition.

David Ramsay and Louisiana: Time and Space in the Adolescent Rhetoric of America1

Young men have strong passions.... They look at the good side rather than the bad, not having yet witnessed many instances of wickedness. They trust others readily, because they have not often been cheated. They are sanguine; nature warms their blood though with excess of wine. --Aristotle, The Rhetoric Writing in the New England Journal in 1889, Robert Morss Lovett (2002) asserted, If we ask what the purchase [of Louisiana] meant to Jefferson's fellow-citizens and contemporaries, we have to answer, Very little. They had come into possession of a territory extending from the Mississippi to the Mexican border and the Rocky Mountains, but yet they comprehended but vaguely their new acquisition. (282) While this may have been true of many Americans, it was certainly not the case with Dr. David Ramsay, the celebrated physician, historian, and South Carolina politician. In fact, on May 12, 1804, Ramsay delivered a stirring speech at St. Michael's Church in Charleston, entitled An Oration on the Cession of to the United States. [2] The speech offered an occasion not only to commemorate the anniversary of the fall of Charleston to the British on May 12, 1780, but also to celebrate the first anniversary of the acquisition of the Territory by the United States. [3] France's sale of Louisiana, concluded on April 30, 1803, amounting to about 828,000 square miles, almost doubled the size of the United States with the stroke of a quill. Ramsay was nothing if not enthusiastic in his endorsement of the deal. Louisiana is ours! he exclaimed. It was nothing less than a heaven sent boon, which, if properly improved, would make the United States as great and happy a nation on which the sun has ever shone (par. 3). The enthusiasm of Ramsay and others over the Purchase stands in marked contrast to ongoing doubts, prevalent in the early federal period, regarding the geographical extent of the Republic. As Sanford Levinson (2002) puts it, Size matters, especially given certain basic conflicts inherent in American political thought of the (p. 109). The conflict was over the possibility of republican government in a geographically large country. The conventional wisdom of European politics, grounded in the writings of Baron de Montesquieu, was that the size of America was a tremendous liability (Onuf, 2000, p. 17). At the time of ratification of the constitution, James Madison was obliged to engage the huge size of the country a formidable obstacle to ratification. Madison addressed the problem in Federalist 14, arguing, among other things, that traditional negative views of large republics were overblown with imaginary difficulties, that in the past, great distances had not hindered the successful functioning of the 13 states, that the United States compared favorably with several large European countries, and that some problems presently connected with the size of the country could be deferred to the future. Curiously, Federalist 14 ends with a very emotional plea, uncharacteristic of Madison, to Americans to embrace the novelty of large republic. By 1804, Americans like Ramsay were enthusiastically endorsing a land acquisition that doubled the dimensions that had so troubled Madison. The sharp contrast between Ramsay's exalting over the Purchase and Madison's emotional plea regarding even the possibility of a large republic indicates a marked change in public discourse that happened over a short period of time. The rhetoric of founding was transformed into a rhetoric of growth and development. A close reading of Ramsay's speech helps illuminate how this shift came about. For Madison, space was a problem. There was too much of it, or so it was commonly believed, to establish a viable republic. In a notable exercise of American pragmatic ingenuity, Ramsay recasts the issue by turning space into a solution. …

Trade, Peace and Democracy: An Analysis of Dyadic Dispute

At least since 1750 when Baron de Montesquieu declared peace is the natural effect of trade, a number of economists and political scientists espoused the notion that trade among nations leads to peace. Employing resources wisely to produce one commodity rather than employing them inefficiently to produce another is the foundation for comparative advantage. Specialization based on comparative advantage leads to gains from trade. If political conflict leads to a diminution of trade, then at least a portion of the costs of conflict can be measured by a nation's lost gains from trade. The greater two nations' gain from trade the more costly is bilateral (dyadic) conflict. This notion forms the basis of Baron de Montesquieu's assertion regarding dyadic dispute. This paper develops an analytical framework showing that higher gains from trade between two trading partners (dyads) lowers the level of conflict between them. It describes data necessary to test this hypothesis, and it outlines current developments and extensions taking place in the resulting trade-conflict literature. Crosssectional evidence using various data on political interactions confirms that trading nations cooperate more and fight less. A doubling of trade leads to a 20% diminution of belligerence. This result is robust under various specifications, and it is upheld when adjusting for causality using cross-section and time-series techniques. Further, the impact of trade is strengthened when bilateral import demand elasticities are incorporated to better measure gains from trade. Because democratic dyads trade more than non-democratic dyads, democracies cooperate with each other relatively more, thereby explaining the democratic peace that democracies rarely fight each other. The paper then goes on to examine further extensions of the trade-conflict model regarding specific commodity trade, foreign direct investment, tariffs, foreign aid, country contiguity, and multilateral interactions.

Madison and the French Enlightenment: The Authority of Public Opinion

N 1791-1792 James Madison published at least nineteen unsigned articles in Philip Freneau's National Gazette, a Philadelphia newspaper that he and Thomas Jefferson had recently helped to establish in the nation's temporary capital city. The objective of the paper to circulate republican ideas on the issues of the day and to counteract the effects of the systematically pro-administration newspaper, the Gazette of the United States. One of Madison's Party Press Essays, of Governments, addresses the issue of how to categorize the different forms of government and explicitly criticizes the regime typology invented by Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu.1 After bestowing circumscribed praise on Montesquieu's contributions to the science of politics, Madison swiftly turned his pen against the regime classification the French philosopher set forth in the Spirit of the Laws. Despite the glimpse of truth Montesquieu experienced, he was in politics not a Newton or a Locke, who established immortal systems in matter and in mind. Moreover, Madison asserted, the accuracy of Montesquieu's treatment of governmental types can never be defended against the criticisms which it has encountered.2 Montesquieu's influence on Madison and the American founders, particularly evident in the theory of separation of powers that informs the United States Constitution, is well noted by scholars.3 Madison's cri-

Montesquieu and China

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (born January 18, 1689; died February 10, 1755) was an outstanding thinker of the French Enlightenment in the first half of the eighteenth century, a sociologist and philosopher that laid the foundation for the theory of the bourgeois state and of the science of law. He was, with Voltaire and Rousseau, an intellectual pioneer of the French bourgeois revolution. This glorious name, Montesquieu, has to the ears of our people of China both a familiar ring and a sense of intimacy.