How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.

If there is one thing that in our time everyone knows concerning Niccolò Machiavelli, it is that he favoured the establishment of a citizen militia. Aristotle had made the case for a citizen army in his Politics. In his De militia, Leonardo Bruni had advocated the establishment of an order of civic knights composed of the leading citizens of Florence (although not, as some suppose, a civic militia, including a large body of infantry, of the sort that had existed in the thirteenth century). Machiavelli followed these predecessors. So at least we are told by luminaries such as Hans Baron, Cecil H. Clough, J. G. A. Pocock—who made ‘arms-bearing citizenship’ the mainstay of his argument concerning the so-called civic humanist tradition—and Quentin Skinner in The Foundations of Modern Political Thought; and on their authority, this claim has been bandied about ever since.

However, as I have noted in passing more than once, the claim does not survive close scrutiny. Machiavelli agreed with Aristotle and Bruni that mercenary soldiers are unreliable. He firmly favoured reliance on ‘populations armed’ (‘populationi armate’), but nowhere in any of his correspondence or works did he ever insist that those armed be drawn from the citizenry or that they be made citizens.

In Florence, when he was secretary of the Second Chancery, Machiavelli championed the institution of a popular militia, as is well known. He proposed and succeeded in securing the passage of what came to be known as the ordinanza. He personally oversaw the militia's establishment. He hired a mercenary captain to see to its training, he selected the officers, he managed this little conscript army throughout its existence, and he was justly proud when his ordinanza secured the surrender of Pisa and brought that city back into the Florentine territorial state.

Moreover, nine years after the Medici had been restored to power and his militia been partially disbanded, reconfigured, and reconstituted by the city's new masters, Machiavelli published his dialogue The Art of War, where he had his chief interlocutor, a distinguished mercenary captain named Fabrizio Colonna, defend the ordinanza and lay out his understanding of the manner in which a popular militia along such lines should be organized, trained, and deployed in battle. It would be fair to say that arming the population was for Machiavelli a persistent or even a central concern.

In April 1787 James Madison composed for his own use a memorandum entitled “Vices of the Political System of the United States.” He did so in preparation for a convention, slated to meet within a few weeks in Philadelphia, which had been called – in part at his urging – for the purpose of proposing amendments to the instrument linking the various American states.

It is much easier to start a war than to end one. The former, a single, willful party can ordinarily accomplish with ease; to achieve the latter, it usually takes two. Often, it takes more parties than that. Such was the experience of those who found themselves engaged in what is conventionally called the Archidamian War – the first stage in what Thucydides termed “the great war” that took place “between the Athenians and the Peloponnesians” (Thuc. 1.1).

The Archidamian War began in the spring of 431 B.C. It ended, if that is the proper word, ten years thereafter in the spring of 421 B.C., when ambassadors from Athens and Sparta met to swear an oath on behalf of their rival cities that for fifty years they would honor the terms of what came to be called the Peace of Nicias (5.17-20). The fact that the Athenians and the Spartans set a term to the agreement, that they regarded it as a long-term truce and never even imagined that it would be a lasting peace, should occasion on our part a brief digression. Peace making in antiquity was not the pious process that it pretends to be today.

With regard to war and peace, the ancient Greeks entertained few of the illusions that govern twenty-first–century rhetoric and shape policy making as well.

Preface

On Good Friday in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada, Thomas Hobbes was born the younger son of an ill-educated, exceedingly bibulous, and imprudently pugnacious curate then living in the village of Westport just outside the town of Malmesbury in the county of Wiltshire. From the obscurity to which his paternity would otherwise have condemned him, he was rescued by a childless and prosperous paternal uncle, who sent him to grammar school in Westport to study Greek and Latin and thence on to the University of Oxford. Later he was promoted to prominence by the noble Cavendish family, which hired the young scholar as a tutor in the summer of 1608, kept him on as a gentleman servitor after his charge came of age, and introduced him to many of England's leading lights. As Hobbes demonstrated when he translated Thucydides in his prime and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey in extreme old age, few Englishmen were as thoroughly steeped in the classics. More to the point, few had a better opportunity to drink in the new principles first broached in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, and few were as eager to do so.

When, as a young scholar, Hobbes abandoned Oxford's Magdalen Hall for Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, he left the world of the old learning for that of the new, and in the process he exchanged a contemplative posture for one of engagement in the affairs of the time.

At no time did John Milton allow the thinking of Niccolò Machiavelli to shape in any fundamental way the manner in which he wrote about, defended, and surreptitiously tried to guide the nascent English republic in strictly political affairs. To be sure, in 1651–1652, when he worked his way through the Discourses on Livy, he at first found attractive the fierce populism of the Florentine, and in his Commonplace Book he pointed with approbation to the crucial chapter in which Machiavelli distinguishes his republicanism from that of the ancients by attacking Livy, “all the other historians,” and “all the writers” of earlier times for their presumption that moral and political virtue are difficult but nonetheless possible to attain and that more is, therefore, to be expected from the educated and accomplished few than from the vulgar crowd. But Milton soon changed his mind – and, even at this time, he was inclined to shy away from the Florentine's contention that republics devoted to imperial expansion are far more likely to be viable than those satisfied with what they already have. Moreover, at no time did he embrace the fundamental premise on which the Florentine grounded this rejection of the classical republican principle of differential moral and political rationality. Nowhere did he echo the dictum that a legislator must presuppose that “all men are wicked and that they will make use of the malignity of their spirit whenever they are free and have occasion to do so.”

On 20 April 1653, when Oliver Cromwell ousted the Rump and then intervened to shut down the Council of State as well, Marchamont Nedham's old patron John Bradshaw administered to the Commonwealth's Lord General a verbal slap in the face. “Sir,” he said, “we have heard what you did in the House in the morning, and before many hours all England will hear it: but, Sir, you are mistaken to think that the parliament is dissolved; for no power under heaven can dissolve them but themselves; therefore take you notice of that.” Similar sentiments were expressed by Sir Arthur Haselrig and Thomas Scot.

Bradshaw, Haselrig, and Scot were not the first to breathe defiance. Nor would they be the last. Parliament had entered the Civil War intent on preserving its prerogatives from encroachment by the king. It was inconceivable that any substantial number of those who so prided themselves on being its members would acquiesce in its dissolution at the hands of one of their own servants. Henry Marten spoke for the great majority of his colleagues when, in an open letter to Cromwell that he prudently refrained from dispatching to the printer, he accused the Lord General of having accomplished that fateful morning “the same thing which the last King and his Father did so long designe.” Such was the considered opinion of those preeminent among his colleagues.

Thomas Hobbes could not have escaped a connection with Sir Francis Bacon had he wanted to. As we have already seen, he was implicated from the moment he arrived at Hardwick Hall. The presentation copy of the ten “Essayes” deliberately composed on the Baconian model, which young Sir William Cavendish gave to his father, is a fair copy in the handwriting of his tutor, and Hobbes in all likelihood supervised his pupil's composition of A Discourse against Flatterie and its publication as well.

We do not know when the Malmesbury philosopher first met Sir Francis Bacon, but the account books of the first earl of Devonshire show Hobbes visiting the Lord Chancellor on his employer's behalf in May 1619 and again in May 1620, and it is most unlikely that this was the first time their paths had crossed. Indeed, it is perfectly possible that their first encounter took place more than a decade before. We know, moreover, that Bacon corrected the Italian translation of his essays before the final version of the London edition was published in 1618, and it is reasonable to suppose that Hobbes, who had in the interim become Sir William's secretary, played a considerable role in the management of this project and even in the work of translation.

We do not know when Thomas Hobbes first read De rerum natura. For understandable reasons, the authorities who designed the curricula for England's grammar schools and for the University of Oxford chose not to include on either syllabus a poem quite rightly regarded as a fount of atheism, and in his various autobiographical works, Hobbes is silent on the subject. In consequence, Lucretius is rarely mentioned in the secondary literature on Hobbes's political thought – although there is evidence that his influence on the Malmesbury philosopher was considerable. He was, after all, one of the handful of authors whom Hobbes himself actually deigned to mention. Moreover, the English philosopher's physics, as he readily acknowledged, owed a great deal to the Epicurean account espoused by the Roman poet, and the charge that he was an Epicurean was frequently leveled against Hobbes by contemporary critics. By the eighteenth century, one could, in fact, speak of “an epicurean or a Hobbist” as if there was no difference, and no less an authority than David Hume did so.

It is tolerably likely that Hobbes read De rerum natura on the sly during his years at Magdalen Hall. He arrived at Oxford in the wake of an Aristotelian revival, and in his day the university statutes not only specified that students study with extreme care the works of Aristotle dealing with physics, metaphysics, psychology, rhetoric, morals, and politics.