Ep. 239: Montesquieu Invents Political Science (Part Two)

0:00 Mark: I feel like we should talk more about republics and what is specific to those. We had said earlier that the emotive force behind a monarchy is honor.

0:11 Seth: Right?

0:11 Mark: That's what keeps the noble class that needs to be there to balance against the monarch in line, keeps them striving such that their self interest is the same as the self interest of the state. So for republics, that's supposed to be virtue, though. Want to say more about what that means?

0:29 Wes: Book three, chapters two and three here. I mean, I think he thinks that if you're making your own laws, if the people are entrusted to make the laws, then a certain amount of virtue is required within a society.

0:43 Mark: So virtue is defined specifically as love of country. That is the virtue in question. It in fact amounts to self abnegation. What I distinguish by the name of virtue in a republic is the love of one's country, that is the love of equality. Anyway, it's toward the end of the preface. Honor is to be found in a republic, though its spring be political virtue. And political virtue is found in monarchical government, though it is actuated by honor.

1:05 Dylan: This section, he has a lot of sort of historical stuff to his illustration about Cromwell, right.

1:11 Mark: About when it fails. Like that's what really is the stinger here is what do you mean by virtue? What does that mean? Well, we can see where it fails if everybody in electing the representatives treats the treasury like their private piggy bank, right? We're just going to take all the treasury and divide it up amongst us. Like that is one of the kind of things which is very much like Burke, you know, in other words, the tyranny of the poor majority against those poor rich people that they're going to have all their property confiscated and that's going to undermine everything.

1:40 Seth: I think we're talking about the same thing. He's talking about part one, chapter three, on the Principles of Democracy. What he says here is there need not be much integrity for a monarchical or despotic government to maintain or sustain itself. The force of the laws in the one and the prince's ever raised arm in the other can rule or contain the whole. But in the popular state there must be an additional spring which is virtue. What he means here is that the ones who execute the law must also feel themselves to be constrained by it or subject to it as well.

That is what virtue means in a democracy. The prince or the despot can mete out justice and institute laws for others without feeling constrained by them themselves. But in democracy, you must have the sense that those who are elected. By the way, he makes a point of talking about how, you know, in a representative democracy, the people must elect the judges as well as the magistrates and so forth, but they must feel that they are subject to the law as well. And that's what virtue is in a democracy. It's the sense that the law is above all of the individuals and that all people feel themselves subject to the law.

2:51 Mark: Yep, Socrates in the Crito.

2:54 Seth: And when that breaks down, when the laws are not executed properly, or when they're executed inconsistently, or when some people feel themselves to be above the law, then the democracy is corrupted and that's the end of it.

3:07 Mark: Yeah. On page 22, he's talking about Cromwell's failed attempt to establish democracy, that the government is constantly changing as factions gain prominence, that everybody is subsumed by avarice. One was free under the laws, one wants to be free against them. Each citizen is like a slave who has escaped from his master's house.

3:27 Seth: Yeah, he has a nice phrase right there at the end of the page. The political men of Greece who lived under popular government recognized no other force to sustain it than virtue. Those of today speak to us only of manufacturing, commerce, finance, wealth, and even luxury. What? Capitalism corrupts democracy? Pshaw. Please.

3:50 Mark: Well, Stanford pointed out, I guess it's book eight or something that we didn't read, but I remember listening to it in the audio version about him warning against extreme inequality as well. He warns against extreme inequality and against extreme equality, that equality before the law. Yes, we're all citizens, but if you insist, like, everybody must have the same amount of stuff, that kind of equality, that's too far for him. That's what I was just describing. It's like the recently freed slave who's running rampant and doesn't know what to do with himself, according to Montesquieu's weird picture of what that would be like.

4:26 Dylan: Should we move on to aristocracy?

4:28 Seth: Sure.

4:29 Dylan: I guess it's important that book three is. He's summarizing the principles of these three governments, the motive, spirit of them, and then the rest of the reading involves sort of details, particularly regarding republics and how they're constituted, the details of their laws. So at this point, we're not even talking about really what the laws are. We're talking about what the principles of those are.

4:50 Wes: So this is the second form of republic, the aristocracy.

4:54 Mark: I did find it really strange. So originally in chapter two, he was talking about republican government can take the form of a democracy. People as a body have the sovereign power, or it can take the shape of aristocracy. So power is in the hands of part of the people. In that context, aristocracy is kind of in the middle. Like if we're going to give the three types, and most of this book divides it into republic versus a monarchy versus a despotic government. So aristocracy is none of those.

5:26 Wes: I mean, I took aristocracy and democracy to be two types of republic. Republic. And I thought he explicitly said that, but maybe I've just read that into it.

5:38 Seth: That's correct.

5:39 Dylan: What Mark just quoted said that.

5:41 Mark: Right. But it's weird that here in chapter four of part one, he's introducing aristocracy as the second type and talking about the monarch in this context as if he's talking about a monarchical aristocracy, like they have in France.

5:56 Dylan: And at the bottom of page 21, he says, I have said that the nature of republican government is that the people as a body or certain families have the sovereign power. The nature of monarchical government is that the prince has the sovereign power, but that he exercises it according to established laws. And the nature of despotic government is that one alone governs according to his wills and caprices. So aristocracy is a form of republican government.

6:20 Wes: Some instead of all. Or. But yeah, it is confusing because he is talking about the monarch here.

6:26 Mark: So what is the principle of aristocracy then, as opposed to monarchy? Monarchy is honor.

6:30 Dylan: Moderation is the principle or the soul of aristocracy. Okay, moderation, that's founded on virtue.

6:37 Mark: Gotcha.

6:38 Wes: Which.

6:38 Mark: That seems like the democracy that seems like that would be the key as well. Right. For at least one of the ways that the general populace in a democracy can be moderate is to not think that they're more competent than they are.

6:50 Wes: The aristocrats make laws that keep the general public in line. But then what is going to keep them in line? And that the idea is, yeah, some sort of moderation, which I'm not sure I completely understand what that means. He will talk about greater and lesser virtues of moderation and where the greater is total equality and the lesser is equality of nobles. So it seems to have to do with some idea of equality.

7:17 Mark: Right. It says that the aristocracy has to repress itself. This is still page 24. It can do that either by a Great virtue that makes the nobles in some way equal to their people, which may form a great republic, or by a lesser virtue, a certain moderation that renders the nobles at least equal amongst themselves, which brings about their preservation. Therefore, moderation is the soul of these governments, because if they pursue the other way, it's not an aristocracy anymore.

7:41 Dylan: It's not clear if he thinks that it has less robustness and maybe that's the wrong way to think about it. I mean, I keep wanting to talk about the way in which he constructs laws as being oriented towards having the laws and the constitution be robust. But a big chunk of that robustness comes from the activity of the people themselves. So if people are the spirit of the people. Right. So if they're not paying attention to the laws, then it's not going to work.

8:11 Wes: What Stanford has to say about moderation, just to clarify it a little bit, is just that it involves the aristocracy restraining themselves from oppressing the people or from trying to have too much power either over each other, nobles over each other or over the people. And so you have laws that limit what they can do. So for instance, how much they can tax or, or that other stuff. So the moderation comes in as sort of laws that are basically focused on self restraint, on limiting the powers that the aristocrats have.

8:43 Mark: So throughout this, is it true the only examples he has of republics really to reflect on is reading about ancient Greece?

8:50 Seth: Well, that's all he says in the sections we've read. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia thing in his biography, he traveled quite a bit in contemporary Europe, but he doesn't mention any of those places other than England,

9:03 Mark: which is a constitutional monarchy.

9:05 Wes: Yeah, so there's a lot of democratic stuff going on there.

9:08 Mark: I mean, I think he's setting up these types, but maybe it's a continuum. Even though England is a constitutional monarchy, it seems like it has all the elements in place. You know, when we finally look at this book 20, where he's kind of describing first Britain more, and then America as the colonies under Britain and praising them, and I was unclear whether that section was sort of laying out an ideal or whether he was just like, okay, well this is kind of what it's like there. Kind of like Tocqueville is doing, but not necessarily commenting whether this is the best possible setup or not. It doesn't seem like uniformly positive.

9:45 Seth: Nothing that we read suggests that there's the best possible. I don't think.

9:51 Wes: Should we get monarchy real quick? Yeah, we mentioned that the principle was honor, but we didn't say exactly what that meant.

9:58 Mark: It's a very Adam Smithian, even though this is before Adam Smith way of putting it, that. Do you have that quote about the

10:05 Wes: self interest aligning with ambitious is pernicious in a republic. It has good effects in monarchy. It gives life to that government. And it has this advantage that it is not dangerous because it can constantly be repressed. And then you could say that it is like the system of the universe where there is a force constantly repelling all bodies from the center and a force of gravitation attracting them to it. Honor makes all the parts of the body politic move. Its very action binds them. And each person works for the common good, believing he works for his individual interests. People are seeking status basically within the society. And the overall effect is a good one. It's an invisible hand sort of effect.

10:49 Dylan: I was going to quibble with the invisible hand part because I think this is the kind of thing that he means by spirit. He uses this kind of language both in the part that you quoted where he's using this sort of mechanic language. A force constantly repelling all bodies from the center and a force of gravitation attracting them too. He has, in chapter five, made fun of courtiers and a kind of corruption and depravity that are part of monarchical governments or can be. And in fact, you know, the way he describes it to me made me think of sort of like every movie you've seen of costume drama from the 1700s portraying the court and the way in which they interact with one another.

But then he says that I hasten and lengthen my steps so that none will believe that I satirized monarchical government. No, if one spring is missing, monarchy has another. That is, if virtue is missing, monarchy has another honor. That is the prejudice of each person and each condition takes the place of the political virtue which I've spoken of, and represents it everywhere. So I wanted to draw attention to what spirit means here. It's a spring. So the spirit that moves monarchical government is honor. It's the spring for monarchical government.

Maybe it's the same kind of thing that Adam Smith meant by invisible hand. I suppose it is that it's an intrinsic motion that's characteristic of that kind of process and structure in society.

12:21 Wes: People are seeking their own self interest. Structure is created out of it. And the analogy is the cosmos, right? They're gravitationally pulled towards whatever they think is going to win them status. But instead of just obtaining that, they do a little dance that creates the whole structure. And that's the effect that you get. And the contrast, right, is between love of say one's country, the political virtue that's required for a democracy, and in this case just love of one's own status and self interest. So it makes monarchy seem like a much better form of government. It doesn't require virtue, it just requires people to follow their self interest. We ought to distinguish honor from self interest, Right? With honor we're talking about Thomas, not simply Eros, not simply seeking one's own desire. So it's a very different sort of seeking.

13:13 Dylan: It harnesses ambition.

13:14 Wes: Yeah.

13:15 Seth: The motive force that he describes when I was reading it reminded me more of Eros. Thinking back to the kind of Greek mythology of like, okay, you have earth and sky and then there's Eros, which is the motive force that drives them to interact. And so when he was talking about democracy and the structure of democracy and then virtue as being something that the motive force or honor or what have you in a monarchy, there has to be something to impel you to act like what is it that actually moves the society forward? What is it that drives it forward to achieve?

Yes, the goal ultimately is security and stability. He does talk about our ultimate aims are, at least in the non despotic states, are for stability and security. But what urges people to actually do anything at all? And he's trying to identify some kind of motive force, but he doesn't believe that there's a fixed and eternal and absolute human nature, that the way human beings function inside these societies is dictated by starting with the climate and the culture and the mores and so forth, the land and the facadeen, all that stuff which dictates the political structure, which in turn dictates the motivations of the people and what drives them to move forward.

Oh my God. I think he's saying that we're socially conditioned. Did we accidentally, by going back to a classic text, return to this theme of socially determined?

14:47 Mark: Well, that was made very explicit in that selection that we read came from this Foundations of Modern Social Theory course for Yale, Iván Szelényi. That was kind of his big thing that he and Rousseau. So I was very much looking for his analog in this text to Rousseau's General will have a very anti individualist take that this whole idea that the state is the unity of our individual strengths. And so that's what the corruption in democracy is like. We're now pulling in different directions. We're not unifying that strength anymore. We're not creating a state that that's the French counter to Hobbes and Locke, you know, British individualism.

That there's this French methodological collectivism that emphasizes, as you're saying, the social programming that goes into mores. So seeing us as atoms in this political science thing, that is part and parcel of the critique of individualism, at least according to this Szelényi.

15:48 Dylan: I just want to quote something at the end of Monarchy where he's talking about how honor guides. And he points out that speaking philosophically, it is true that the honor that guides all the parts of the state is a false honor, but this false honor is as useful to the public as the true one would be to individuals who could have it. And is it not impressive that one can embody oblige men to do all the difficult actions and which require force with no reward other than the renown of these actions?

16:18 Wes: That's actually a very cool observation. Yeah, just give out trophies. That's all you need to run a society. Medals and posts.

16:28 Mark: I keep thinking, Seth, what you were saying about Eros, that right there in his description at the beginning of the fundamental drives, this timidity is part of that, is he even mentions the sexual desire in that context. Right. The third natural law is natural entreaty, pleasure at each other's presence.

16:46 Dylan: The fourth one is sex.

16:49 Wes: Yeah. And then there's desire to live in a society. So I think like, if we want to make connections to other readings, we're not just talking about Eros, but we're talking about Thomas, which corresponds to Hegelian mutual recognition and self consciousness. So the idea of a desire for status, you have to be able to have the desire to be seen in certain ways by other people, to be recognized by them. For Plato, that's. Although arguably you could say Eros goes into all three parts of the soul, right into the. Not just into the explicitly erotic, but into the thematic and even into the rational part, because they all have to be motivated.

And for Freud, that's true. Everything is made of the clay of libido that includes. Includes the ego and the superego, which I take as being corresponding to the reason and the thumotic part. But on the other hand, one might also want to argue that these are really very fundamental distinctions. So that we might want to say that it's actually very different to follow one's own desire and to follow what one sees as honorable, which in a way is very connected to the desire of the other. Thinking back on our Lacan episode, so I think I see these as very fundamentally different motivations.

17:59 Mark: By saying that the fourth natural law is this desire to live in society that we've then taken eros and said, well, in a democracy, right, what virtue was is love of country. And so love of country really is an elaboration of this desire to be in society. So I don't know what the true honor, I don't know what that means. If he thinks all these things in these awards, the trophies that they give out in monarchy are all a false honor. So it seems like the true honor would have to be something like what virtue was, right?

18:34 Wes: I think of it almost in terms of Orwell's distinction, right, between patriotism and nationalism. Because in your identification with the state, you can either want power, you can just want power for power's sake, or you can want to preserve a way of life, let's say, and to see it prosper and to see it furthered. So I have certain ideals, the whole thumotic part of the soul, it's any sort of ambition. So it could be any sort of ideal and it could be self serving or it could be something higher.

19:06 Mark: That might be too individualistic a way of putting it for Montesquieu. Book one, chapter three, he's asking, do you put the strength of the whole society in one hand or many? The individual strengths cannot be united unless all wills are united. The union of these wills is what we call the civil state. So there's something in what he sees as the teleology, right? The natural goodness that comes out of our desire to be in a state together, of unifying our will. So that honorable will would not be wanting status. I guess it would be closer if you have to choose among those two things, of wanting, wanting a certain way of life. But it seems more like wanting the status of the group, if that's what he's saying. Civic virtue is loving your country. In other words, identifying with it, wanting it to be strong and stable.

19:57 Wes: Yeah. So wanting its well being versus wanting its superiority, that's Orwell's distinction between patriotism and nationalism. Do you want to be dominant, more powerful, better than some other, or do you just want to preserve this higher good that you're a part of? And again, it's an ideal, right?

20:18 Mark: So the latter is true honor and the former is false honor.

20:22 Wes: This is complete speculation on my part, Right? So, yeah.

20:25 Dylan: So despotic governments suck.

20:28 Wes: They are the worst. Honor is not the principle of despotic states. All right? At least we got that right.

20:35 Dylan: And also moderate government can, as much as it wants without peril, relax its springs. It maintains itself by its laws and even by its force. But when a despotic government, the prince ceases for a moment to raise his arm, when he cannot instantly destroy those in the highest places, all is lost. For when the spring of the government, which is fear, no longer exists, the people no longer have a protector. So again he keeps using this mechanical language regarding how the spirit of the these laws work. And in this case that the presence of resilience that the moderate government can tolerate a fair bit of stuff because its structure will keep it going. But the structure of a despotic government is only as strong as its constant maintenance by the despot.

21:26 Mark: Well, I like that he can retain some Hobbes here, because even though he disagreed with Hobbes state of nature. It's not really that people are so aggressive in the state of nature, but they're all afraid in the state of nature. They're weak and afraid. So they're basically afraid, even if it's not in fact nasty, brutish. In short, everybody's afraid of it being so. And so it's still better for them if they more fear each other and fear life without a government, you know. So it's not just fear of the sovereign. Yes, fear of the sovereign keeps them in line, but it's more fear of not having a protector, of not having a sovereign.

In that quote you gave, it was weird that being a protector went at the end of that, because it was the beginning of it was the will of the sovereign has to be absolute and immediate. So in other words, the sovereign has to be able to kill you or anyone else on a whim instantly. And as soon as like the mechanisms by which that would occur break down, then according to him, the citizens will no longer feel that they have a protector. So it's sort of like, you know, whatever the government can do for you, it can do to you. That's something we use to scare people about despots.

But it goes the other way that if it can't do something to me, then it can't do it for me either. It can't smite the people who are going to hurt me. If it can't hurt me, it can't protect me either.

22:41 Dylan: So it's a strongman hypothesis, right? Why do people like strongmen is because they feel that they're protected by them, even though they may turn on him.

22:49 Wes: But he does seem to be saying in this section that it's all about fear. Fear must beat down everyone's courage. And extinguish even the slightest feeling of ambition. What's really interesting is in the other forms of government, right, the principles are at work in the psyches of everyone here. It is also the case, right, because fear is what. But fear is a very passive thing. It's not the engine of anything like virtue or honor and the other systems, and everything just comes from the despot. Anything that's an active principle comes from one place.

23:20 Dylan: Virtue is not necessary and honor will be dangerous.

23:24 Mark: I'm just trying to make a connection. So later, when he's talking about separation of powers, he's saying that if powers aren't separated, then it's bad because the sovereign could come in.

23:34 Seth: Right.

23:34 Mark: Even if there's a constitution or whatever, if it's the same power that is making the law, that set up the constitution and that has the power to change the constitution, that has the power to enforce the constitution, that has the power to apply it in individual circumstances, there's just too much room for abuse in there. And so that's bad. But is it destabilizing because it causes fear? Right, because we were saying that for a despot, fear is good, you have to have the fear.

24:01 Wes: Let's come back and say what's bad about despotism? Yeah. Why isn't it just its own? Okay. You know, yeah, it functions on fear, but isn't that workable? That seems to be kind of the part of what you're asking. Mark.

24:14 Mark: One of the things he points out that whereas in a monarchy, we were talking about how honor is controlling the nobles, but it also, he says, controls the monarch, which is, I'm a little less clear about, but like, there are objective standards out there that would make the monarch not want to contravene and not merely the fear that the nobles have enough power that they could take him down. But the despot doesn't have any kind of motivation like that. Maybe religion. He says religion could keep a despot under control. But in terms of terms of the monarch's fear of the nobles, like the despot doesn't have that. So the despot, then will. Has no compunction to be a good ruler at all.

24:54 Dylan: The reason despotism sucks is because everybody under a despot is subjugated. They're not flourishing well.

25:02 Wes: There's no liberty, there's no actual security. You don't know when you're going to be punished or when you're not. You're subject to whim. Like, he makes a big deal about the fact that there's not even a lawfulness to the despot. It's just a function of the despot's whim.

25:15 Dylan: Your characteristic of liberty is something like. Of who you are as a human being, Right? So he says. No tempering, modification, accommodation, terms, alternatives, negotiations, remonstrances. Nothing as good or better can be proposed. Man is a creature that obeys, a creature that wants.

25:32 Wes: That's a great line.

25:34 Dylan: Yes, it is. He can no more express his fears about a future event than he can blame his lack of success on the caprice of fortune.

25:42 Seth: There.

25:42 Dylan: Men's portion, like beasts, is instinct, obedience and chastisement. It is useless to counter with natural feelings. Respect for a father, tenderness for one's children and women, laws of honor, or the state of one's health. One has received the order and that is enough.

25:59 Wes: And then he disses Persia.

26:01 Mark: We're talking about a strongman. A strongman is reassuring. It doesn't necessarily rule through fear, even though. Because you feel like the strongman is on your side, even if the strongman can, on a whim, destroy someone. And maybe that even thrills you as the strongman subject, like, look at what that strongman can do, because you just don't think it'll happen to you until it does.

26:20 Wes: Yeah. It's the difference, I think, between authoritarianism and totalitarianism. What I thought about here, reading this was actually Orwell's 1984, as I've already mentioned, because this is total. This is the extreme version. It's not just about an authoritarian government in which there may be certain residues of aristocracy or democracy or whatever. This seems to be the ideal limit kind of thing. So, for instance, is everyone under a Stalin? Let's say that's probably an example of more of a totalitarian government.

26:53 Seth: Probably, yeah.

26:55 Wes: I'm thinking of a difference between a Third Reich where Hitler can do anything on a whim. But there's a lot of people, barring the war, who aren't necessarily scared that they're going to be targeted. You know who's going to be targeted and who isn't. With Stalin's terror, there's an indiscriminateness to it that it doesn't matter if you're a member of the party or not. There's no real protection. You're constantly afraid, even if you're very close to him. In fact, you should be more afraid, obviously, if you're very close to him. When I think despotic, I'm thinking totalitarian.

27:26 Mark: From his description, Stalin did not appoint a grand Vizier to take over his duties. Right. He says the thing that's gonna buy this sort of natural physics type law is somebody that has no checks on him. His appetites are gonna grow. He's certainly not gonna want to put any effort into ruling the state. So he's gonna appoint a vizier to take power, to actually do the work, so he can just fulfill his pleasures constantly. Which does not describe Stalin.

27:54 Seth: Yeah. I think his concept of despot, it's not the same as totalitarian dictator, dictator and despot. He doesn't have a concept of a dictator in the modern sense. I don't think, comparatively, we did not

28:06 Mark: have the technologies of oppression back then to enable that to be effective.

28:10 Wes: Yeah, there's a continuum and there's a lot of nuances to what distinguishes a dictator and a despot. And all these other. These are very general categories in the

28:20 Dylan: last chapter of this section. Or as Mark pointed out, they're sort of aphorisms, because some of them are like six lines where chapter 11 is called Reflections on this. Such are the principles of the three governments. This does not mean that in a certain republic one is virtuous, but that one ought to be. Nor does this prove that in a certain monarchy there is honor, or that in a particular despotic state there is fear, but that unless it is there, the government is imperfect.

28:51 Wes: Yeah. So he's telling us that these are the ideal limits that I'm describing in reality, that things might be mixtures. They might not approach it perfectly.

28:59 Mark: Should we look briefly, before we get out of here, at the latter portions of the reading?

29:04 Wes: Yeah, we'll go Back to book 11. We did most of the stuff on Liberty, chapter six. He's going to get into the Constitution of England. And. And so book 11, chapter six, I think, is the place to.

29:19 Dylan: And there it's like one of the longer chapters. And he is just sort of talking about these different powers. I mean, he starts off, there are three sorts of powers. Legislative power, executive power, and executive power over the things depending on the rights of nations, and executive power over the things depending on civil rights, which is

29:37 Wes: the judiciary, I think. And he's going to talk a lot about judges, which includes juries. So a lot of it will sound like, okay, what he's talking about here is he'll be talking about judges, when he means juries.

29:49 Mark: Just a lot of familiar stuff here. This is kind of the game of going through something like this or like Locke or like Tocqueville or the Federalist Papers, and just seeing, oh, there's Some things we recognize people should have a jury of their peers. The executive shouldn't get to make laws, but should get to veto them.

30:06 Dylan: You know that Madison and Hamilton and Jay and all those other guys, their copies of this book, this chapter was like underlined all over the place. Then they said like, oh, insert this into Article 7.

30:21 Wes: It makes you think, though more carefully about some of the reasoning behind this. For instance, so why is it the case that you can't have the legislature also be a judge and jury? Part of that is the fact that when you're judging someone for a crime, you're judging a particular individual. I think in our Constitution there's something against a bill of attainder. Right. So you can't just say, I'm making a law that says John Doe is guilty of such and such and must to go to jail for 10 years. You can't make laws that are essentially judgments against someone because it opens up a completely arbitrary abuse of power. So it can never be the case that the legislature, just because you have a majority of people who want to do it, can convict someone and imprison someone. There's exceptions, of course, for impeachment.

31:09 Dylan: But another example is that on page 162, if the executive power does not have the right to check the enterprises of the legislative body, the latter will be despotic, for it will wipe out all the other powers. So in his account, you could have a despotic democracy run by the legislative body. And the reason why you have the power of the veto on the executive branch is to check the legislative branch so it doesn't become despotic.

31:38 Mark: And you even need balance within the legislative branch, that you should have the lower house and the higher house representing the rich, because the rich are the minority and you don't want that particular minority's rights to be violated because otherwise

31:52 Wes: they have no reason to cooperate.

31:53 Mark: Right? Right. You know, given how much similarity there is to what we have ended up with, it's really glaring when there's something that diverges. He has a lot of discussion in a democracy, what are the citizens competent to do that he doesn't like a pure democracy because realistically, the citizenry cannot make foreign policy decisions. They don't understand how things actually work. But he does think that unproblematically people are wise enough to choose wise legislators. Right. At least if they're not corrupt. If they're corrupt, maybe you just try to get your cousin in because your cousin is going to give you a kickback.

But if you're not corrupt, then you just are looking like, you know, who is obviously qualified to do this, who's been in the military. He gives some different criterion of things you might think would make someone a good legislator. But you should definitely not vote for someone because they promise to do a particular thing. So the entire way that we vote now is like based on your platform. Here's what I'm going to try to get past. He does not think that we should do that. 159. The great vice in most ancient republics was that the people had the right to make resolutions for action.

Resolutions which required some execution, which altogether exceeds the people's capacity.

33:07 Wes: That's like a referendum, though.

33:08 Dylan: Yeah, he objects to referendums.

33:10 Wes: Yeah.

33:12 Dylan: So he'd be really pissed off about California.

33:15 Wes: Yeah, but it's different for a politician to run on some general platform. It's not like, you know, by voting for Bernie Sanders, for instance, that we're automatically voting in universal healthcare. We know that might not happen or could end up being a compromise or so I think that difference is. Still. I'm not sure how Montesquieu would feel about that, but.

33:33 Mark: Well, the same page. Here's another quote. Nor should the representative body be chosen in order to make some resolution for action, a thing it would not do well. But in order to make laws or in order to see if those they have made have been well executed, they these are things it can do very well and that it only can do very well. Maybe I'm misunderstanding that. What I thought that was saying is that you shouldn't vote for someone merely because you're choosing them to take some particular action.

33:59 Wes: He does say that, you know, one knows the needs of one's own town better than those of other towns. So you should have the legislative body drawn from the body of the nation at large so that they can. Each principal town can have a representative. So it seems like he's aware that these representatives are going to represent the interests of their particular constituencies.

34:20 Mark: But the people in those constituencies should just vote for that person based on, hey, I see that you're wise and you live here and understand our deeds. Please represent me. I'm too foolish to do anything but merely acknowledge your wisdom.

34:34 Wes: But they're not allowed to say we need farm subsidies or whatever.

34:39 Mark: I don't know. It seems like this is a long enough book. I'm sure he addresses this somewhere. Nobility should be hereditary to induce them to preserve its prerogatives, which are always endangered in a free state. I think at this point he's really talking again about the English model.

34:56 Dylan: What's the English constitution?

34:58 Wes: Right.

34:58 Dylan: This is that section.

34:59 Mark: Ah.

35:00 Wes: Although meritocracy in our society does preserve quite a bit of this and in a way that we just simply don't acknowledge. Obviously privilege is getting passed down as a hereditary thing generation to generation.

35:12 Mark: It's just that Montesquieu would think we need to have incentives to ensure that that happens. Like we need to have additional incentives to ensure that you rich people, that your kids are also going to go into high paying rat race positions and not just become artists and drop out.

35:29 Dylan: Abolish the death tax. Oh, I'm sorry, the estate tax.

35:33 Mark: Well, I'm not sure which that would do.

35:35 Seth: Right.

35:35 Mark: Because abolishing it would make them need to work harder. Right. It would make them have to become lawyers and doctors and not fritter things away.

35:43 Dylan: No, it doesn't do that at all. The tax on estates redistributes wealth, especially very, very large amounts of wealth. And the reason to have it was so that you would motivate people to not just live off a scourge of hereditary wealth. That was too much.

36:01 Mark: Yes.

36:02 Dylan: Do you think that having estate tax makes it so that people or not having an estate tax motivates people more to go out and work hard and take rat race jobs?

36:13 Mark: It's the double negatives that were throwing me off. Just the fact that the incentives are opposite to what Montesquieu says. Right. That he would want to not have an estate tax. He would want the estate to stay intact and that is what will keep you on top of your game. Whereas we're saying that no, no, we need virtue. We're a republic. We need your even you aristocrats. We need your characteristic virtue to be working hard and that's what will keep the aristocracy going.

36:41 Dylan: He would object to the estate tax.

36:44 Seth: Glad we got that cleared up.

36:45 Wes: Move on to the next issue. What does he think about health care

36:53 Mark: impeachment? He definitely seemed to think that you can't just have the legislature judge the executive that is contrary to their interest. I mean the whole way that he talks about.

37:03 Wes: Well, he sets him up an impeachment function though, doesn't he? He basically says, you know, the house will be the accuser, the legislature will be the accuser and then the nobles will be the judiciary.

37:13 Seth: In that circumstance that falls under the category of the power checking power. The fact that there is a possibility that somebody might be removed from office in that way is really just a representation of the power checking power. Which is why he likes the constitutional monarchy, as you mentioned earlier.

37:32 Mark: I think that, yeah, coming up with basically the House can accuse and the Senate can actually try. It is a compromise because earlier, page 162, the legislative body should not have the power to judge the person. And constantly the conduct of the one who executes his person should be sacred because as he is necessary to the state so that the legislative body does not become tyrannical. If he were accused or judged, there would no longer be liberty.

37:57 Wes: But then he says you can punish their cabinet members, their staff. But then he later on, you know, it's not much farther down where he seems to set up an impeachment type process. But yeah, you know, Mark, as you pointed out, all very familiar stuff to us. It's really interesting to. I don't know how much I knew about any of this stuff before reading this. I just had a general idea that our Constitution and the organization of our government were rooted in English common law and tradition as well as considered as well as philosophy, you know, Locke and others.

So. But sort of put together by our founding fathers. And, you know, I guess I didn't really understand how much was already, you know, here in someone like Montesquieu, how much it was just taken whole cloth. These institutions are very well established and thought about. Not just thought about, but were actually in practice for quite some time before they are incorporated and refined in the system that we have in the United States.

39:00 Dylan: It makes the American Constitution seem very much like the English Constitution 2.0, where maybe the biggest thing that you leave out is all the formalization of aristocratic privilege and noble birth. There's pieces in the Constitution that explicitly exclude titles, that kind of thing. And so what you're left with is the implied nobility, aristocracy of commerce and wealth. But nothing is formal in law about that.

39:36 Mark: I'm glad we got this much out of this reading because I really felt it seems that the practice of just going through a historical document and looking to see how well did he get it right. In other words, accounting is getting it right, is matching what we have now. It seems that there's a limited use to that. Like, it's interesting to see what he has to say about slavery or what he has to say about does he really believe everybody should vote or does he think that is he still backward and think that only people that own property should vote? And it seems like there's very little value other than just, you know, it seems like an idle study of history.

If your whole point is just merely to go check off the Boxes of how modern was he? And so I'm glad there was seemed to be enough meat in here that we could go beyond that, that there's enough, you know, wit, literary merit, insight. Even though he says wacky things about the climate.

40:26 Wes: And your favorite part, of course.

40:30 Mark: Oh, if you like that part, you should see his part about relations between the sexes. So it kind of follows.

40:36 Wes: Does it track the second sex very closely?

40:44 Dylan: I'm sure it does.

40:46 Mark: I mean, even in the part we read in this last book that we looked at, he's basically going through and talking more about England and then talking about the American colonies and saying women are so modest. Yeah, page 332. I just wrote that the women are modest and men are debauched.

41:05 Wes: Yeah, that's what will lead to.

41:07 Mark: And he definitely has the whole like. Well, you can understand why in warm climates they would have harems. Like in colder climates the women are going to be more virtuous. In the first place. It's just not even worth unpacking the various weird prejudices he has in this area. Any other summing up the vast effect. Was this a. An essential or a skippable reading? What do you think?

41:34 Seth: It's a good point. I came prepared to be annoyed and disappointed and I was pleasantly surprised. There's a lot of what I would consider to be modern insights for a text that we would not think of as modern or pre modern or I think his diagnosis of when he's talking about virtue and a democracy and he says when that virtue ceases, ambition enters those hearts that can admit it and avarice enters them all. Desire changes their objects. That which one used to love, one loves no longer. One was free under the laws, one wants to be free against them.

Each citizen is like a slave who has escaped from his master's house. What was a maxim is now called severity. What was a rule is now called constraint. What was vigilant is now called fear. Their frugality, not the desire to possess, is avarice. Formerly the goods of individuals made up the public treasury, the public treasury has now become the patrimony of individuals. The republic is a cast off husk and its strength is no more than the power of a few citizens and the license of all that struck me as ridiculously. I don't want to say prescient, but it's insightful and it brought me to think about this notion of civic duty.

I think, Mark, in some of our lead up to this, you were pleasantly surprised that he was not just some kind of a rehash of Aristotle or that he wasn't just, you know, a modern recapitulation of Aristotle. But I kind of felt like he was in a not very offensive way making a call to a kind of civic duty. And this notion that participation, civic participation is really critical for the sustenance of a republic. And this is very pragmatic, very clear, very level headed, very unemotional, I'd say description of these various governments and what motivates them.

It doesn't seem dated or antiquated to me. Now there are pieces he's missing about a variety of things that came up obviously in the 20th century that he couldn't have anticipated. But his sense that civic virtue is critical to the success and existence of the republic, just as honor was to a monarchy is spot on. Even as we look at all the changes that have happened in the 20th century, 21st century and this understanding the way that we're manipulated in media and all these things that he couldn't have anticipated. But there's still this sense that civic virtue, this idea that you're participating in some kind of broader community, national community is really critical.

And then the second point is just that he didn't anticipate and could not have anticipated that global commerce which he champions here, the idea of commerce between nations really is what it means for him that enriches all the people and brings prosperity and liberty and a variety of other things. He I don't think could have anticipated what a global economy in the sense that we have an interconnected global economy. He was thinking more of sovereign independent nations engaging in commerce with each other. He didn't anticipate what that would do and how that would impact this right of nations as he described it, which is what we're experiencing right now.

45:03 Mark: And I know maybe it was just in the Stanford that he was aware of the fact that commerce kind of takes on a life beyond the nation. Which in the part we read, I know it was like trade brings peace,

45:12 Wes: trade is good, cures prejudices, it makes people more gentle. It founded on mutual need, it's attenuating, gives people a feeling for exact justice instead of banditry. Although it does decrease hospitality.

45:28 Dylan: Screw hospitality, man.

45:30 Mark: Yeah, so there's some transcendence of national identification when you get to we come

45:37 Wes: into contact with other nations and cultures and peoples. This is. Adam Smith made the same, these same claims.

45:44 Mark: I don't know if that's the same as anticipating extra corporations that are in effect larger and richer than states states. It's perhaps a step farther we didn't mention that he took 17 years to write this.

45:57 Seth: Yeah.

45:57 Dylan: You asked. Is it worth the read or not? I think that if you are interested in the motivating thinking behind the founding, if you're interested in reading the Federalist Papers, this would be something you're interested

46:12 Mark: in reading, maybe not the whole thing.

46:14 Wes: Well, I think the reading that we did was pretty much the perfect sample.

46:19 Dylan: It was a very good selection.

46:20 Mark: Yeah. The second sex, I could see, you know, wanting to dive in. Maybe two discussions wasn't even enough. Maybe we could have three or four and still have Rich. I don't want to have more than one on this. Seems like it'd be more of the same. It seems Diminishing returns. There's a lot of historical detail that I don't know. If you like reading a lot of ancient Roman history, then maybe you'd really like that part. Next episode, we're going to return to modern analytic philosophy, covering David Lewis, Chapter 4 of his 1973 book Counterfactuals, the essay scorekeeping in a language game from 1979, and a little bit of truth in fiction, another essay from 1978 that will feature the return from one of our favorite guests, Matt Teichman of the elucidations podcast.

Our closing song is King of the Hill by Minutemen. I was honored to interview Mike Watt from Minutemen on my Nakedly Examined Music episode 108. Find that@nakedleaguexamusic.com Good night, everybody.

47:14 Dylan: Good night.

47:15 Wes: Night.

47:15 Seth: Good.

47:38 Unknown speaker: What is peace to the people who work the lamb and dying war horns? And it was learning a game that was played by Saul who held the top of the hill from the rest was called the king and I I can't believe it all what's good for humankind? Is it peace? Deport those guns Is it war? To follow those guns? We would run with all our might Push a king off to take the hit and to learn who was king and who makes the better servants? And I can't believe it all was good for humankind. Sa. Happy alive.

50:06 Seth: Sa.