Abstract
Auguste Comte, Émile Durkheim, Raymond Aron and Louis Althusser, among others, all claimed Montesquieu to be the first to discover the social.2 Such a claim, despite or because of the diversity of the claimants, is entirely conventional, at least among French authors. By revisiting this convention, I am defending the claim—although I admit to more than one discovery. Moreover, these authors all claim that social analysis arose in opposition to the formerly dominant political (and implicitly, metaphysical) schemas. But this latter claim begs a number of questions, and it is in the response to these questions that my analysis seeks to cut its own path. How is the separation of the social from the political made possible? What is this ‘social’ that by being separated appears for the first time? What kind of ‘object’ is it? What does its emergence mean for the comprehension of—and by implication, action on—collective life? And what are the implications of this separation as it rebounds onto the political? To highlight my difference from the more common responses, I want to begin with a brief examination of Émile Durkheim’s writings on Montesquieu. I choose Durkheim’s writings because they are far more extensive than those of Comte, more emphatic than those of Aron, and in crucial respects similar to those of Althusser.3 Besides, Durkheim is a perennial favourite in classical sociology courses.
When I recollect what the President Montesquieu has written, I am at a loss to tell why I should treat of human affairs …’
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Notes
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (London: Transaction Books [1767] 1980), p. 65.
Auguste Comte, Physique sociale. Cours de philosophie positive: Leçons 46 à 60 (Paris: Hermann, 1975 [1842]), 85;
Émile Durkheim, Montesquieu and Rousseau: Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1960);
Louis Althusser, Montesquieu, la politique et l’histoire (Paris: PUF, 1959)
[Reprinted in English in Politics and History: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel, Marx (London: NLB, 1972)]; Raymond Aron, Les étapes de la pensée sociologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1967). [Main Currents in Sociological Thought, trans. Richard Howard and Helen Weaver (New York: Basic Books, 1965)].
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893) trans. George Simpson (New York: The Free Press, 1964).
Another example: L. Thomas, Pangle, Montesquicu’s Philosophy of Liberalism: A Commentary on The Spirit of the Laws (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1973), pp. 44–5.
Admittedly, physiocracy was concerned more with what would become the science of economics. See Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, The Origins of Physiocracy: Economic Revolutions and Social Order in Eighteenth Century France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976);
and Ronald L. Meek, The Economics of Physiocracy: Essays and Translations (Fairfield, NJ: Harvard University Press, 1993), among other works.
Though the central concern of the idéologues was with moral phenomena, which they equated with the socio-political order, their method led them to treat ideas as facts, whose operations could then be studied empirically. See Georges Gusdorf, La conscience révolutionnaire: Les idéologues (Paris: Payot, 1978);
Laurent Clauzade, L’Idéologie ou la révolution de l’analyse (Paris: Gallimard, 1998); and Robert Wokler, ‘Ideology and the Origins of Social Science’.
Note that reason is not deemed immanent to the nature of the world, let alone to man’s nature. Montesquieu does not hold to what Leo Strauss would call ‘modern natural law’, a point also made with considerable brio by Jean Goldzink, La solitude de Montesquieu: Le chef-d’oeuvre introuvable du libéralisme (Paris: Fayard, 2011).
De l’Esprit des lois was first published outside France to avoid censorship; it would still be condemned and a copy burned on the steps of the Sorbonne. Subsequent editions would include concessions on minor points; but no concessions could be made regarding the larger hierarchical order, and the place of God in it. See Jonathan Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man, 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 824–39.
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988 [1777]), p. 22.
The claim is made by Patrick Riley, The General Will Before Rousseau (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1986);
and Paul-Laurent Assoun, ‘Les sources philosophiques du concept de loi dans l’Esprit des lois: Montesquieu et le malbranchisme’, in Analyses& réflexions sur Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois: la nature et la loi, ed. Joël Askénazi et al. (Paris: Ellipses, 1987). Thomas Pangle argues that, by claiming the generality of the law, Montesquieu is indicating that his ideas refer to the classical rather than a Christian realm of ideas (Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism, p. 24). It is typical of Straussians to miss the references to more recent authors. Whether Malebranche believed that God violated general laws to produce ‘miracles’ is a rather vexed question. Clearly Malebranche held that general laws are on occasion violated, but such violations cannot be contrary to God’s nature. As such, Malebranche suggests that miracles may be general laws of a higher nature, surpassing all human understanding.
See David Scott, On Malebranche (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), pp. 13–4.
The conception of representation presented here is not unlike that described by Louis Marin, Portrait of the King (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988 [1981]), pp. 1–15. The paradigmatic case of this conception is the host that represents the body of Christ in the Catholic mass.
It should be clear that we do not follow Jonathan Israel’s suggestion that, even if Montesquieu is tied to the ‘moderate Enlightenment’, his philosophical roots lie in Spinoza, Bayle and Boulainvilliers . To situate Montesquieu in relation to hierarchical modes of thinking is to remove him from all forms of philosophical monism. Enlightenment Contested (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 268–83.
The ultimate reference in my rather polemical construction of a republican epistemology is, once again, ‘modern natural law’ or ‘natural jurisprudence’, with its claim that the juridical order (and, by implication, the moral and political order) is to be understood as constituted on the basis of human powers alone (whether rooted in human nature, human sociability, passions, interests, conscience or reason). For classical accounts of modern natural law, see Otto Friedrich von Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society 1500–1800, 2 vols., trans. E. Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1934 [1913]);
and Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1950).
For a more contemporary reading of modern natural law, I recommend the writings of Knud Haakonssen, notably, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy: From Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
As Neil G. Robertson points out, unlike the state of nature in Rousseau, Montesquieu’s state of nature is not self-sufficient, and does not therefore require a catastrophe to initiate the transition to social existence. ‘Rousseau, Montesquieu and the Origins of Inequality’, Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities, 12 (2008), http://www2.swgc.mun.ca/animus/Articles/Volume%2012/Robertsonl2. pdf.
Brian C. J. Singer, ‘Intellectuals and Democracy: The Three Figures of Knowledge and Power’, CTHEORY, http://www.ctheory.net/default.asp, Article: A147 (12 January 2004).
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Singer, B.C.J. (2013). The Question Concerning Laws. In: Montesquieu and the Discovery of the Social. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027702_1
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