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14 results

  • 8 - Internationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Empires

  • Edited by Keegan Francis Callanan, Middlebury College, Vermont, Sharon Ruth Krause, Brown University, Rhode Island
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Montesquieu
    Published online:
    23 February 2023
    Print publication:
    02 March 2023, pp 130-146

  • Summary

    In Chapter 8, the volume turns to the international dimensions of Montesquieu’s ethical and political thought. We can identify Montesquieu with the cosmopolitan and internationalist vision of the Enlightenment, anchored in the ideal of a common, rational outlook. Yet he understood that this aspiration came with coercion and cost. Universal rationality pushed against the expectation that each people and regime was rooted in particular mores, manners, and dispositions. The costs of cosmopolitan detachment are stamped on the figures of Usbek and Roxanne in Persian Letters, and they are evident in his praise of six “good enough” empires in The Spirit of the Laws. Despite a deserved reputation as a critic of colonialism, Montesquieu’s work also suggests justifications for empire on grounds of survival and sustenance, international security, human rights, the spread of science and enlightenment, and finally, doux commerce, whose global ambitions Montesquieu discerned but never with the naïve, coercionless expectations some readers erroneously drew from his work.

  • 5 - Montesquieu on Empire and Enlightenment

  • Edited by Sankar Muthu, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    Empire and Modern Political Thought
    Published online:
    05 October 2012
    Print publication:
    17 September 2012, pp 112-154

  • Summary

    This chapter discusses whether empire for Montesquieu was potentially a way of containing the particularities of human life and giving expression to its normative unity. Montesquieu's epistolary novel Persian Letters already exhibits the territorial logic of despotic empire made explicit in the Laws. Montesquieu never excludes any region of the world from despotism. Asia's geography is more favorable to despotic rule. The continent possesses larger and wider plains unbroken by mountains or broad rivers. Anti-imperial sentiments are a feature of all of Montesquieu's writings. Persian Letters summarizes the indictment. In the guise of a fantasy about Descartes in Mexico, Montesquieu gives the reader a picture of a European spiritual civil war between faith and enlightenment. For Montesquieu, women are the natural agents of change. For Montesquieu, Gelon, the king of ancient Syracuse, made "the finest peace treaty mentioned in history".

  • Political Theory in Albania: An Exercise in Democratic Culture

  • Nancy Hirschmann, Julie Mostov, Michael Mosher
  • Journal:
    PS: Political Science & Politics / Volume 28 / Issue 1 / March 1995
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    02 September 2013, pp. 146-149
    Print publication:
    March 1995
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  • The Particulars of a Universal Politics: Hegel's Adaptation of Montesquieu's Typology

  • Michael A. Mosher
  • Journal:
    American Political Science Review / Volume 78 / Issue 1 / March 1984
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    01 August 2014, pp. 179-188
    Print publication:
    March 1984

  • This article explores both the influence that Montesquieu's typology of regimes exerted on Hegel's thought and Hegel's ultimate rejection of Montesquieu's monarchical order, especially its cult of honor, as a plausible candidate for containing and expressing the citizen's “claims for private judgment, private willing, and private caprice.” Can Hegel provide a substitute model of a polity, neither republican nor despotic, which corrects the particularism of Montesquieu's monarchical society? Marx did not think so. His criticism of Hegel exactly parallels Hegel's criticism of Montesquieu. Hegel's dilemma may be expressed in more contemporary terms as the difficulty in reconciling the goals of “neutrality” and “communicative competence.” The latter reflects the concerns of Montesquieu's moral geography, whereas the former reflects the rather different preoccupations of the social contract tradition.