Abstract
This work is based on an apparent paradox: it claims that Montesquieu discovers the ‘social’ without using the term, or any cognate terms like the ‘social bond’. And, in a sense, he could not: for the term supposes (a) that relations between humans can be separated from all other types of relations; and (b) that relations between humans are sufficiently similar as to be described by the same adjective. If I have described the ‘spirit of the laws’ as a substitute term for the social, the former does not separate out these relations, but ties them to both the sub- and supra-human worlds. Moreover, he does not begin with the claim that all such relations are, or should be, similar because based on imperatives common to the human(/social) condition; he begins in difference, these relations being different, not least because situated in different political regimes. The different political regimes are, to be sure, comparable, but not because constructed from the same (social) substance. What makes them comparable is that they are constructed from differential relations between the same two political terms, positive law and power. Now, the analysis does not remain within these terms; whether turned to the general laws beneath the positive laws, or to the institution of historical dynamics, the analysis moves beyond the terms of a strictly political perspective. Nonetheless, at this point, the social either begins in or ends with the political and its vertical relations. One cannot yet speak of the social as indicating a set of relatively autonomous horizontal relations.
Notes
This is why a famous writer has made virtue the fundamental principle of Republics […] But for want of the necessary distinctions, that great thinker was often inexact, and sometimes obscure, and did not see that, the sovereign authority, being everywhere the same, the same principle should be found in every well-constituted State, in a greater or lesser degree, it is true, according to the form of the government.1
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References
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. and intro. G. D. H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent and E. P. Dutton, 1973), pp. 217–18.
For this reason his portrait of republican virtue was much admired by some of the more radical French revolutionaries, including Marat, Saint-Just and Barrère—though Montesquieu would have been appalled at the way they used his ideas. Roger Barny, ‘Montesquieu Patriote?’, Dix-huitième siècle, revue annuelle publiée par la société française d’étude du 18éme siècle (Paris: PUF, 1988), pp. 83–95.
The idea of self-rule, that one is simultaneously ruler and ruled (if only indirectly through representation) is a modern idea. See the first chapter of Bernard Manin, The Principles of Representative Government (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).
Hannah Arendt has pointed out that the opposite of political virtue is not vice, but hypocrisy (virtue’s false appearance and vice’s disguise). By the same token, virtue that does not show itself remains private, and thus apolitical, even anti-political. On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), pp. 91–101.
Ibid., P. 30. See also, Saint-Amand, The Laws of Hostility, pp. 23–6; and Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph, 20th Anniversary Edition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 10; Paul A. Rahe, ‘Forms of Government: Structure, Principle, Object, and Aim’, Montesquieu’s Science of Politics, p. 78. One must remember that Adam Smith wrote after Montesquieu, though both had read Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees.
For a discussion of the ‘French moralists’, see Chapter 3 of Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, trans. Sheila Gogol (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1995);
Jean Starobinski, ‘Sur la flatterie’, in Le remède dans le mal: Critique et légitimation de l’artifice à l’âge des Lumières (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), pp. 61–90;
Nannerl O. Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), Chapter 10.
Thus, in contrast to Montesquieu’s claim that the nobles limit the monarch’s will, the Abbé Bossuet claims that it is their love for the monarch, whom they see as a living saint, which humbles the nobles, and limits their personal ambitions. See Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), pp. 121–2.
Emma Rothschild makes much of the fact that Adam Smith uses the term ‘invisible hand’ only three times in his entire oeuvre—though once in each of the two works mentioned here. Nonetheless, the term handily condenses his claim that there are providential mechanisms that, unseen, regulate human affairs. Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2002), pp. 116ff.
Georg Simmel calls sociability the ‘autonomous form, or play-form, of sociation’. ’It is freed from all ties with contents. It exists for its own sake and for the sake of the fascination which, in its own liberation from these ties, it diffuses.’ The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. Kurt H. Wolff (New York: The Free Press, 1950), p. 43.
Norbert Elias, The Court Society, and the two volumes of The Civilizing Process, The History of Manners (New York: Pantheon, 1978) and Power and Civility (New York: Pantheon, 1982). There are many works that have extended such analysis.
See, for example, Robert Muchembled, L’Invention de l’homme moderne: Culture et sensibilités en France du XVe au XVIIIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1988).
And notably Madame de Pompadour, who was despised because of her links to finance, and her plebeian background. John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2006), pp. 27–33; Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Louis le Bien-Aimé and the Rhetoric of the Royal Body,’
Mona Ozouf, Les Mots des femmes: Essai sur la singularité française, 2nd ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), pp. 329–39. The most famous figure to denounce the ‘rule of women’ was, of course Rousseau.
Joan Landes provides ample examples in Chapter 3 of Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1988). Ironically, Montesquieu provided ammunition for the misogyny of the revolutionaries, when arguing that, in republics, a woman’s place was in the home.
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© 2013 Brian C.J. Singer
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Singer, B.C.J. (2013). The Spirit of the Three Regimes: Social Bonds. In: Montesquieu and the Discovery of the Social. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027702_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137027702_3
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