Summary: The Spirit of Laws (page 6)

The history of Rome supports Montesquieu's view that laws must adapt to the principles of government. Rome adjusted the severity of its punishments depending on whether it was a monarchy or a republic. In its early days, it was marked by extreme harshness, with death sentences imposed on pamphleteers and poets.

In general, Montesquieu relies heavily on the Romans. Roman history is frequently invoked to support his arguments: I find myself strong in my maxims when I have the Romans on my side ¹.

Torture is suited to despotism, which is governed by fear. Montesquieu refuses to justify it, however, even within his pragmatic approach of identifying which laws function best in each regime: I hear the voice of nature crying out against me ².

Two eminently despotic judicial principles are the law of retaliation and the punishment of fathers for the crimes of their children.

Book VIII

Here Montesquieu examines how each of these regimes collapses.

It is the corruption of the principles underpinning these three types of government that leads to their downfall.

A democracy becomes fragile when the spirit of equality is lost—but also when the spirit of equality is taken to extremes, and everyone seeks to be equal to those whom they have chosen to govern them ³.

Citizens can no longer tolerate entrusting their power to representatives and insist on doing everything themselves. Respect for elected representatives and for the authority of elders disappears.

Freedom gives way to lawlessness. The situation soon becomes unbearable, and people, desperate to restore order, hand power to a despot.

The spirit of equality is as remote from the spirit of extreme equality as heaven is from earth.

Aristocracy becomes corrupted when the nobles no longer observe the laws—at which point there is despotism, with several despots at once.

Too much security can also corrupt a government:

A republic must fear something. The fear of the Persians maintains the laws among the Greeks. A singular thing! The more secure these states are, the more, like waters that are too still, they are subject to corruption ⁴.

A monarchy is corrupted when the monarch seeks to rule alone and suppresses the intermediate bodies; or when honour is put in contradiction with honours, and one can be covered in both disgrace and dignities at the same time ⁵.

Despotism, by contrast, is in a state of perpetual decay, as it is corrupt by nature.

This underlines the importance of a government's principle: when it becomes corrupted, even the best laws turn bad.

The size of a territory also determines the appropriate form of government. Only a republic can survive in a small city; a despot or a king would be overthrown. A monarchical state must be of moderate size, whereas despotisms extend over vast and unwieldy territories.

Enlarging or shrinking a country's territory may therefore bring about a change in its political system.

Book IX

To ensure their security, republics form federations. Despotic states, by contrast, practise a scorched earth policy, devastating their borderlands to prevent foreign armies from advancing. Monarchies build fortresses.

If republics and monarchies wage war, despotisms launch invasions.

Book XI

What is political liberty? Not the ability to do whatever one wills, but the ability to do what one ought to will—and not to be compelled to do what one ought not to will ⁶.

Alternatively, liberty is the right to do whatever the laws permit ⁷.

It is in this book that Montesquieu develops his famous theory of the separation of powers.

The same person or institution must not hold all three types of power within a state: legislative, executive, and judicial. Otherwise, freedom would cease to exist.

A sense of security is also a necessary condition for liberty: Political liberty in a citizen is that peace of mind which arises from the opinion each has of his own security [so that] one citizen cannot fear another citizen ⁸.

There must therefore be a separation of powers—a principle Montesquieu sets out in one of the most celebrated passages of The Spirit of Laws:

When in the same person the legislating power is united with the executing power, there is no liberty; because it is to be feared that the same monarch or the same senate will make tyrannical laws in order to execute them tyrannically. [...]

Everything would be lost if the same man, or the same body—whether princes, nobles, or people—were to exercise these three powers: that of making laws, that of executing public resolutions, and that of judging crimes or disputes between individuals ⁹.

This is a fundamental law of government, whose aim is political liberty.

For Montesquieu, England is the country that comes closest to this ideal.

¹ VI, chap.15
² VI, chap.17
³ VIII, chap.2
⁴ VIII, chap.5
⁵ VIII, chap.7
⁶ XI, chap.3
⁷ ibid.
⁸ XI, chap.6
⁹ ibid.