In book III chapter 4 of the Social Contract, Rousseau takes up the political principle established by Montesquieu in the Spirit of the Laws by correlating the form of a polity’s government to the extent of its territory: it is impossible, in his view, to answer once and for all the question of the best regime, without considering the suitability of regime types for particular situations. Yet democracy could still have a crucial advantage in Rousseau’s system: this kind of government confers most power to the people. A republican state seems to call for a democratic regime. This is why Rousseau’s response may come as a surprise: far from being the best form of government, democracy is the worst – or at least it is not suitable for a people of men, not gods. This essay reassesses Rousseau’s case against democracy. Why does Rousseau declare that democracy causes, so to speak, “a government without government,” and threatens popular sovereignty itself? This paradoxical claim needs to be explained.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is often considered one of the founding works of political liberalism. Yet more recently, a series of interpreters have thrown doubt on this dominant reading. In order to revisit and assess this debate, this contribution delineates Montesquieu’s definition of political liberty as distinct from so-called “philosophical” liberty. It considers his “solution” to the threat despotism poses to all forms of government, namely, the distribution of state powers and the division of social forces, while evaluating the status of the “English model.” Finally, it probes the original distinction between political and civil liberty, while showing that Montesquieu’s political theory cannot be integrated into the tradition of republicanism conceived as a theory of participatory self-rule. In The Spirit of the Laws, the understanding of liberty fits neither a standard liberal view nor a civic republican one; it includes elements that reach beyond both, such as a political culture grounded on honor as much as on the love of liberty.

“This book is not precisely in anyone's camp.” Should we take at face value this statement at the end of the introduction to volume one of Democracy in America? Or should we see it, more subtly, as an echo of the quotation from Ovid with which Montesquieu prefaced The Spirit of the Laws: prolem sine matre creatum, a work created without a mother? For Tocqueville, as for Montesquieu, the point is by no means to forgo the inspiration of past sources but rather to announce a new method – the “new political science for a world altogether new,” which he evokes in keeping with the science of society for which The Spirit of the Laws laid the groundwork. From the first volume of Democracy in America – weaving together geographical causes, laws, and customs – to The Ancien Regime and the Revolution, which redeploys the method of Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Tocqueville pursues Montesquieu's project: to determine the causes of institutions (laws, customs) and assess their effects in a comparative light, to theorize the adaptation of legislation to the “genius” of the people it is meant to govern, and to explain the deep causes of radical historical breaks, without denying any leeway to the human will.

Nevertheless, it is not sufficient to quote Tocqueville's famous phrase about his three “fetish authors”: Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Pascal. Beyond the parallels, we need to revisit an affinity that his contemporaries recognized but that has since been lost from view. Like the American Framers such as Madison and Hamilton, Tocqueville knew his debt to the “rarest political writer” of all time. In his eyes, however, Montesquieu was never a politician and would doubtless not have known how to be one. It is therefore necessary to separate theory and practice. As a political theorist, Tocqueville drew on analyses of England as a free, trade-oriented nation, and he suggested that the French should study the “American model,” to see liberty “as if in a mirror” and judge how free were their own institutions. As a politician, Tocqueville gradually distanced himself from the author of The Spirit of the Laws.