318 Ch. 9 • Enlightened Thought And The Republic Of Lettersdrawn from a more inexhaustible source, the vanity of his subjects. He has
undertaken and carried on great wars, without any other supplies than
those derived from the sale of titles of honors.” But beneath the satire of
the Persian Letters, Montesquieu was arguing the point that nature reveals
a universal standard of justice that applies for all people in all places at all
times, in Islamic Persia as in Christian France.
Montesquieu’s ideas reflected the increased contact between Europeans
and much of the rest of the world. Merchants, soldiers, missionaries, and
colonists had followed the first European explorers to, among other places,
the Americas and Asia. Published accounts of travel stirred the imagina
tion of upper-class Europeans who were interested in societies and cul
tures that lay on the fringes of or beyond their continent. America and
China, in particular, fascinated Europeans who had read about them. Yet
in Persian Letters, Montesquieu manifested doubts about the quest for
colonies: “empires were like the branches of a tree that sapped all the
strength from the trunk.” He also offered the first critical examination of
the institution of slavery by a philosophe. He rejected slavery as an exten
sion of despotism, concluding that “slavery is against natural law, by which
all men are born free and independent” because “the liberty of each citizen
is part of public liberty.” Thus slavery compromised “the general good of
men [and] that of particular societies.”
The Spirit of Laws (1748) inaugurated the high Enlightenment. Mon
tesquieu applied the principles of observation, experimentation, and analy
sis, which lie at the heart of scientific inquiry, to the social and political
foundations of states. He described the relationship between climate, reli
gion, and tradition, and the historical evolution of a nation’s political life.
Laws, he argued, are subject to critical inquiry and historical study
because they develop over time. Historians, freeing themselves from the
influence of the Church, could now study “general causes, whether moral
or physical.”
The British political system fascinated Montesquieu, who spent two
years in England. He was impressed by the historical role of Parliament, a
representative body unlike French parlements (law courts), despite the
similarity of their names. The English Parliament seemed an “intermediate
power” that had during the English Civil War prevented Britain from
becoming either a monarchical despotism or a republic, which Mon
tesquieu identified with chaos. His point was that each political system
and legal tradition evolved differently. He feared that the French monar
chy was showing signs of becoming despotic because it lacked the separa
tion of powers found in England. Only constitutionalism could combine
the guarantees for order (offered by monarchy) with those of freedom.
Montesquieu believed that noble rights and municipal privileges, which
had been eroded by royal absolutism in France, could stave off monarchi
cal despotism. Montesquieu held that the sovereignty of the king came not
from God, but from the people.