The disposition of things

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I am very grateful for the generous assistance of Professor Catherine Larrere and Dr Lisa Hill. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Cohler, Miller and Stone (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989); all quotations are from this edition. "On Politics," in Oeuvres Complets, vol. 1 (Paris: Pleiade NRF, 1949), 112, cited in A. O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests. Political Arguments for Capitalism before its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), 76. Hirschman (Ibid., 70) has discussed this aspect of Montesquieu's thought. For a discussion see Jean Claude Perrot, "Le main invisible et le droit cache," in Une Histoire Intellectuelle de l'Economie Politique, ed. J. C. Perrot (Paris: Editions d l'LHESS, 1992), 333-53. For the idea that the invisible hand of Adam Smith is a version of this idea see "The Hidden Theology of Adam Smith," European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 8(1) (Spring 2001): 1-29. See e.g. Michel de Montaigne, Essais, Bk III, chapter 1, "De l'utile et de l'honnête;" Pierre Nicole, Essais de Morale (1671), esp. "De la grandeur," "De la charité et de l'amour-propre," translated in Henry C. Clark, ed., Commerce, Culture and Liberty, Readings on Capitalism before Adam Smith (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2003). Two recent studies of French accounts of spontaneous order before Montesquieu are: Christian Lazzeri, "Peut-on composer les intérêts?," in Politiques de l'intérêt, ed. Christian Lazzeri and Dominique Reynié (Besançon: Annales Universitaires de Franche Comté, 1998); Céline Spector, "Cupidité ou charité ? L'ordre sans vertu, des Moralistes du Grand Siècle à L'Esprit des lois de Montesquieu," no. 43 (2003). Stephen Toulmin calls a polity regulated according to mechanical principles and laws and functioning in clockwork harmony a "Cosmopolis" and alleges that its employment in various forms as a regulative idea in political theorizing is the "hidden agenda" of modernity. He locates the intellectual foundations of Cosmopoly in the mechanistic science of Descartes and Galileo. If this is correct, then Montesquieu played a crucial role, through his influence on the founding fathers of modern constitutionalism, in embedding the concept of Cosmopoly in modern political thought. See S. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. EL, I, VII, 27. EL, I, I, 4. Ibid. "[T]hough the intelligent world also has laws that are invariable by their nature, unlike the physical world it does not follow its laws consistently. The reason is that particular intelligent beings are limited by their nature and are consequently subject to error. Furthermore it is in their nature to act by themselves." I should point out that this interpretation of the reason Montesquieu chose England as his model would be seen as aprioristic and tendentious by, for example, Cohler: "That government then, is not the solution to the political problem but is an example of a modern government whose responses to its circumstances and possibilities can teach much about those same circumstances and possibilities." Cohler, Montesquieu's Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism (University of Kansas Press, 1988), 7. V 14, 63. Ibid. It is no coincidence that such theorists, especially in the German tradition, are more interested in the Aristotelian than Ciceronian sources of modern views. The latter, which actually played a more significant role in constitutional theory, at least in what Pocock calls Atlantic republicanism, place more emphasis on the connection between the form of the constitution and political liberty than its role in enhancing public reason. In fact, the liberal appropriation of Roman classical tradition which starts with the Federalists misreading of Montesquieu probably explains why public reason becomes extra political in the American context, as Toqueville was the first to notice. John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government, VI, 123, in Political Writings, ed. David Wootton (London: Penguin, 1993). EL, X, VI, 166. Aristotle, The Politics, Bk III. Ibid. His Majesty's Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Both Houses of Parliament. Quoted in C. Weston, English Constitutional History and the House of Lords (NY, 1965), 25. Both quotations from Pocock's "Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century," in Politics Language and Time (London: Methuen, 1972). EL, X, VI, 166. EL, X, VI, 157. Ibid. As Skinner points out, Locke is distinctive in not justifying his political theory by reference to the Ancient Constitution. An historian or political theorist who took Plamenatz's advice to read the text "over and over" as the basis for her methodology would completely miss this aspect of Locke's thought. EL, II, VI, 156. EL, I, III, 22. T. Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1974). As Althusser points out, the anachronism of this type of analysis consists in projecting the interests of the industrial bourgeoisie in justifying modern representative democracy onto a purported eighteenth century counterpart, whose conception of its political role was anchored in its mediaeval, feudal inheritance. The term is Hulliung's, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976). Hulliung regards this as the standard interpretation of Montesquieu. Richter discusses Fenelon in The Political Theory of Montesquieu (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 36-46. Althusser, Politics and History. Montesquieu, Rousseau, Hegel and Marx (London: NLB, 1972), 93. As Althusser says, Montesquieu "merely wanted to re-establish a threatened nobility in its outdated rights" (106). For Althusser, any liberalizing result was inadvertent. The extent of Montesquieu's own anachronism is that he did not see that the threat to the nobility was not from the king, but from the emerging industrial bourgeoisie who adopted his constitutional theory as their charter. Althusser, a structuralist Marxist, refers in his interpretation of the balance of powers doctrine to "the meaning of this division and its ulterior motives" which are reactionary: the restoration of feudal prerogatives. As Althusser points out, Montesquieu locates the origin of the English Constitution in the Mediaeval (feudal) political organization of land tenure originating in the "woods and forests of Germany." Althusser, Politics and History, 92. R. Forster, "The Noble Wine Producers of the Bordelais in the Eighteenth Century," Economic History Review 2nd Series, XIV (August 1961). Quoted by Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, 16. Montesquieu's capacity for irony is also invoked by liberal interpreters embarrassed by his apparent conservatism and Classical republicanism. See Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism, 3. R. Aron, Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1 (Penguin,), 62. For an account see the chapters 1 and 2 of Barrington Moore, Moral Aspects of Economic Growth (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,). I. Berlin, Against the Current (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). Hamilton and Jay, The Federalist IX, The Federalist Papers, Madison, Hamilton and Jay, ed. I. Kramnick (Penguin, 1987). For a recent discussion of the influence of Montesquieu on the Founding Fathers of the American Constitution see chapter 7of Cohler, Montesquieu's Comparative Politics and the Spirit of American Constitutionalism. See also The Federalist Papers, editors introduction pp 47, 48.l Note, too, that Blackstone's reliance on Montesquieu was once described as a plagiarism "which would be nauseating if it were not so comic," quoted by Richter at p 3 of his The Political Theory of Montesquieu. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPhilip Gerrans Department of Philosophy, Adelaide University, Adelaide 5005, South Australia. Email: [email protected] Department of Philosophy, Adelaide University, Adelaide 5005, South Australia. Email: [email protected]

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