Montesquieu And The Philosophy Of Natural Law

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality.

In what constitutes the only English-language collection of essays ever dedicated to the analysis of Montesquieu's contributions to political science, the contributors review some of the most vexing controversies that have arisen in the interpretation of Montesquieu's thought. By paying careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical contexts of Montesquieu's ideas, the contributors provide fresh readings of The Spirit of Laws, clarify the goals and ambitions of its author, and point out the pertinence of his thinking to the problems of our world today.

This first comprehensive commentary on The Spirit of the Laws uncovers and explicates the plan of Montesquieu's famous but baffling treatise. Pangle brings to light Montesquieu's rethinking of the philosophical groundwork of liberalism, showing how The Spirit of the Laws enlarges and enriches the liberal conception of natural right by means of a new appeal to History as the source of basic norms.

This impressive volume is the first attempt to look at the intertwined histories of natural law and the laws of nature in early modern Europe. These notions became central to jurisprudence and natural philosophy in the seventeenth century; the debates that informed developments in those fields drew heavily on theology and moral philosophy, and vice versa. Historians of science, law, philosophy, and theology from Europe and North America here come together to address these central themes and to consider the question; was the emergence of natural law both in European jurisprudence and natural philosophy merely a coincidence, or did these disciplinary traditions develop within a common conceptual matrix, in which theological, philosophical, and political arguments converged to make the analogy between legal and natural orders compelling. This book will stimulate new debate in the areas of intellectual history and the history of philosophy, as well as the natural and human sciences in general.

The essays in this volume--written by academic lawyers as well as legal and moral philosophers--address some of the most intriguing questions raised by natural law theory and its implications for law, morality, and public policy. Some of the essays explore the implications that natural law theory has for jurisprudence, asking what natural law suggests about the use of legal devices such as constitutions and precedents. Other essays examine the connections between natural law and natural rights.

Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket.

As the world reels from crisis to crisis, the most serious one seems to draw the least attention. And that is the crisis of the Western mind. The seeds of radical subjectivism sown at the time of a previous such crisis, chronicled in Paul Hazard’s Crisis of the European Mind, have now borne fruit, fruit of such stupendous magnitude that they threaten to drag us down into the depths of cultural despair. In The Rise and Fall of Natural Law, this descent into the maelstrom was chronicled from its origin to its inevitable conclusion – at least, in the world of intellect. Culture lags intellect, but it is never insulated from it. Ideas do have consequences. The intellectual counterpart to our cultural crisis already played itself out 200 years ago. The crisis of the European mind, by which intellectual culture shifted from Revelation to Reason, found its fitting conclusion in the work of the ultimate solipsist, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte’s focus on enthusiastic conviction and the primacy of the subjective makes him the prophet of the modern world. Indeed, his orientation has now triumphed for all to see. His story, and the stories of those leading up to him – the leading characters in “the Rise and Fall of Natural Law” – are crucial to understanding the genesis of the modern world. But that is not the end of the story, for history goes on. That spot, precisely where the first half of Stahl’s history of legal philosophy leaves off, is where the second half picks up. The Recovery of Historical Law narrates the attempts to overcome this radical subjectivism and establish a functioning social order in which the ideal matches up with the real, the theory is in harmony with the practice. After discussing the work of Locke, Montesquieu, Constant, and the Doctrinaires, all of whom functioned fully within the framework of autonomous natural law while attempting to mitigate it, Stahl reveals the hero of the story: Friedrich Schelling. It was Schelling who initiated the gargantuan task of reorienting philosophy away from subjectivism and back toward objective reality. Stahl characterizes this as a “Samsonesque act” whereby Schelling “lifted the temple of the previous philosophy off of its pillars and buried the whole army of enemies, himself included, under its ruins.” For one thing, this explains the cover illustration, “Samson Destroying the Philistine Temple.” For another, it intimates how Schelling, like Moses, stood at the entry to the Promised Land without entering in. Schelling’s philosophy is an exercise in pantheism, an orientation from which he struggled to free himself later in life. And in fact, Hegel, his great fellow laborer in so-called “speculative philosophy,” took that pantheism and turned it into a mighty system in its own right. A rabbit trail that carried many into another dead end, one with which we wrestle today: “conscious” or “woke” big government. But that is not the end of the story. Schelling’s first fruits were recovered by the Historical School of Jurisprudence, led by Friedrich Carl von Savigny. Here the work of Counter-Revolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre and Edmund Burke was carried forward to bear fruit for jurisprudence. And this is the foundation for Stahl’s own system, as contained in Volume II: The Doctrine of Law and State on the Basis of the Christian World-View. It is on this basis that the laborious task to reconstruct Western civilization can begin. And not a moment too soon.