The Culture of Old Regime Europe387parliament, and one of the founders of modern univer-
sity training in law, published four volumes of the ex-
tremely influential Commentaries on the Laws of England
(1765–69). He cautiously concluded: “The liberty of the
press is indeed essential to the nature of a free state, but
this consists in laying no previous restraints upon publi-
cation, not in the freedom from censure for criminal
matter when published.”
As with the parallel battle against religious intoler-
ance, not everyone agreed with the attack upon censor-
ship. Conservatives rallied to the defense of the
government, just as they stood by the church. Samuel
Johnson, a journalist and lexicographer, is a good exam-
ple. Johnson was a deeply conservative man who de-
spised writers such as Voltaire and Rousseau and
thought it a splendid idea that writers of their sort
should be sent to penal colonies. And he stoutly de-
fended censorship: “No member of society has a right
to teach any doctrine contrary to what society holds to
be true.”
As the Enlightenment progressed, political writers
became bolder in their criticism. The opposition of
Louis XV, the French courts, and the Catholic Church
did not stop the publication of the Encyclopédie.Its essay
on “Government” shows how radical the criticism had
become. It stated that society exists under a civil consti-
tution that invests rulers with their power, but those
rulers are “bound therein by the laws of nature and by
the law of reason.” Nature and reason both dictated
that the “purpose in any form of government [is] the
welfare” of civil society. Thus, the bold argument con-
tinued, society should expect “to abrogate laws that are
flaws in a state” and even to revoke “the allegiance and
the jurisdiction in which they are born,” by changing
the government.
Such ideas were not new to the Enlightenment.
The English political theorist John Locke had made
eloquent statements of them in the late seventeenth
century, especially in his Second Treatise on Civil Government
(1690).
Voltaire returned to France from his exile in En-
gland (1726–29) filled with similar willingness to write
of his opposition to absolutism. His Philosophical Letters
(1734) praised the English for their form of government
and suggested it as a model for the rest of Europe. “The
English nation,” he wrote, “is the only one of earth that
has successfully regulated the power of its kings by re-
sisting them; and which, after repeated efforts, has es-
tablished that beneficial government under which the
Prince... is restrained from doing ill.”
Baron Montesquieu, however, produced the most
widely studied political analysis of the era (see docu-
ment 20.4). His Spirit of the Lawsstands as the founding
work of modern comparative government. Mon-
tesquieu adopted the ancient political observation—
used by both Aristotle and Cicero—that three basic
forms of government exist: a republic, in which the
people or their representatives govern; a mixed monar-
chy, in which a king reigns with constitutional limitsDOCUMENT 20.4
Montesquieu: Law, Liberty,
and Government
The Spirit of the Laws
Law in general is human reason inasmuch as it
governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the politi-
cal and civil laws of each nation ought to be only
the particular cases in which human reason is
applied....
There are three species of government: repub-
lican, monarchical, and despotic.... A republican
government is that in which the body, or only a
part of the people, is possessed of the supreme
power; monarchy, that in which a single person
governs by fixed and established laws; a despotic
government, that in which a single person directs
everything by his own will and caprice....
There is no word that admits of more various
significations, and has made more varied impres-
sions on the human mind, than that of Liberty....
Political liberty does not consist in an unlimited
freedom.... Liberty is a right of doing whatever
the laws permit....
It is necessary from the very nature of things
that power should be a check to power. A govern-
ment may be so constituted, as no man shall be
compelled to do things which the law does not
oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things
which the law permits....
In every government there are three sorts of
power: the legislative, the executive in respect to
things dependent on the law of nations; and the
executive in regard to matters that depend on the
civil law.... When the legislative and executive
powers are united in the same person, or in the
same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.
Montesquieu, Baron de. The Spirit of the Laws,trans. Thomas
Nugent. Cincinnati: Clarke, 1873.