This article draws attention to the importance of early eighteenth-century debates about the nature of the French monarchy for our understanding of Montesquieu's masterpiece The Spirit of the Laws. By contrasting and comparing Montesquieu's views with those of, amongst others, Henri de Boulainvilliers and Gilbert-Charles Le Gendre, this article shows that The Spirit of the Laws defended an orthodox monarchist position. The evidence presented in this article therefore has important implications for the ongoing debate about Montesquieu's place in the history (...) of ideas, suggesting that The Spirit of the Laws was written to bolster rather than to undermine the regime under which he lived. (shrink)

The thesis that republicanism was only suited for small states was given its decisive eighteenth-century formulation by Montesquieu, who emphasized not only republics' need for homogeneity and virtue but also the difficulty of constraining military and executive power in large republics. Hume and Publius famously replaced small republics' virtue and homogeneity with large republics' plurality of contending factions. Even those who shared this turn to modern liberty, commerce and the accompanying heterogeneity of interests, however, did not all agree with or (...) know about Publius' institutional responses to the problems of executive and military power. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and on both sides of the Atlantic, it remained a live question whether large states could be stable moderate republics, with responses ranging from embraces of Montesquieuian limited monarchy, to denials that there was any real large-republic problem at all, with a variety of institutional solutions in between for those who thought there was a real but soluble large-republic problem. (shrink)

Previous edition, 1st, published in 1971.