Montesquieu, Rousseau, and the Foundations of Constitutional Government

Abstract

In an effort to shed light on recent doubts about the future of liberal democracy, this dissertation compares the political thought of Montesquieu and Rousseau – two eighteenth-century philosophers who, beginning from strikingly similar premises, diverged radically in their prescriptions. Whereas Montesquieu sought to rationalize political life by nudging religion to the periphery of public consciousness, by attenuating patriotism, and by shifting legislative and judicial power to educated professionals, Rousseau sought to shore up religion’s popular influence, to instigate revivals of patriotism, and to defend popular self-government. I first take up their views of “the state of nature.” My account differs from those of the previous interpreters who have read the state of nature as a hypothetical construct, but it differs also from those of the previous interpreters who have read the state of nature as historical, inasmuch as I show that neither Montesquieu nor Rousseau made implausible assumptions about the naturalness of asociality or peacefulness. Next, I focus on the issue popular enlightenment. Whereas commentators have tended to cast Montesquieu simply as a proponent of the pacifying effects of enlightenment and Rousseau as a critic of its morally corrupting effects, I argue that they were both primarily interested in the relation between the dwindling of religious faith and the maintenance of the psychological qualities that underlie resistance to foreign and domestic threats to liberty. I then turn to the question of cosmopolitanism, suggesting that Montesquieu embraced it not because of any extreme idealism but because of his horror at the repressiveness and belligerence of actual patriotic republics. Likewise, I maintain that Rousseau’s embrace of patriotic “intoxication” was not a product of any romanticism; instead, it was a product of his thoroughly rationalistic inquiry into the phenomena of law and government. Finally, I argue that the divergence between them on the question of popular self-government followed from their divergent understandings of freedom. This divergence cannot be reduced either to “negative liberty” versus “positive liberty” or to “liberty as non-interference” versus “liberty as non-domination,” two paradigms that have long dominated Anglo-American political theorists’ thinking about freedom.