Montesquieu's Educated Citizen: Commerce, Honor and Virtue in Moderate Government

• In Event: Reading Montesquieu

Abstract

Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws established itself as the authoritative text on politics throughout the second half of the eighteenth century. His famous tripartite classification of republics, monarchies, and despotic governments provided contemporary statesmen and political philosophers with a rubric for evaluating regimes and exercising political judgment. This paper examines an underexplored facet of Montesquieu’s political education, which concerns his preoccupation with the sentiments of the citizen, the statesman, and the philosopher. I argue that alongside Montesquieu’s innovative framework for evaluating regimes, he aims to impart a spirit among contemporary and future readers, equipping them to identify from within their nations the existing institutions that enliven the just sentiments, with a view towards approximating virtue in an increasingly inward-looking commercial world. I present Montesquieu as one of the first modern political thinkers who is attuned to liberalism’s capacity for moral interrogation and self-correction. His writings constantly remind us that with every generation which saw itself standing at the precipice of moral degeneration, their nations’ existing institutions continued to provide poles of meaning that enable moral action in the face of injustice.

Author

• Constantine Vassiliou, University of Colorado, Colorado Springs