Mirza and the Troglodytes

The first iterated exchange begins with Letter 10, the first of five letters between Mirza and (as he is identified in the salutation) “his friend Usbek” (PL 10 [OC 1:145]).Footnote ¹¹ From the salutation and signature lines of this and the following four letters, we know this exchange is conducted between Erzurum in Turkey (where Usbek arrived roughly six weeks after leaving Isfahan, his home in Persia) and Isfahan itself, where Mirza remains.

Who then is Mirza, and why has he written Usbek? Letter 10 offers crucial insight into both questions. For even before posing his substantive question in this letter, Mirza offers Usbek (and thereby the reader) a revealing glimpse into his state of mind and soul. Mirza is, in a word, disconsolate. He begins by lamenting Usbek's absence: “you were the only one who could make up for the absence of Rica, and only Rica could console me for yours.” They were friends among friends, members of a “society” of which Usbek was the “soul,” and Mirza feels this loss keenly. Thus his reflection: “What violence it is to break the engagements that the heart and the mind have formed!” (PL 10 [OC 1:145]).

Only after voicing this lament, with its striking image of violent rupture, does Mirza pose his question, which concerns the nature of happiness. With reference to the debate over “morality” his friends have been having in Usbek's absence, he wants to know “whether men were happy by pleasures and the satisfactions of the senses, or by the practice of virtue.”Footnote ¹² But Mirza turns specifically to Usbek for guidance because he has heard him say “that men were born to be virtuous and that justice is a quality as suited to them as existence.” And Usbek is not the first to whom Mirza has asked his question; in closing Mirza mentions he has already “spoken with the mullahs” about this, but they only drove him to desperation “with their passages from the Koran.” Yet these conspicuously failed to persuade Mirza, who self-professedly speaks “not as a true Believer, but as a man, as a citizen, as father of a family” (PL 10 [OC 1:145]).

In three short paragraphs Mirza tells us a lot about himself: he is sad, he is troubled by a rupture, he is eager for guidance (and not of a religious sort), and he sees himself not as an isolated individual but as a friend, citizen, and father. Mirza has also shown that he thinks in binaries and their disjunctions: Rica and Usbek, heart and mind, pleasure and virtue. Usbek signals his strategy to responding to such an interlocutor in the opening of Letter 11. “You renounce your reason in order to try mine,” he begins, suggesting his awareness that his distraught correspondent may not be at his rational best. In light of this, the approach he proposes to answer Mirza's question takes on a special significance: “In order to fulfill your prescription, I have not believed it necessary to employ highly abstract reasonings; there are certain truths for which persuasion alone is not sufficient, but rather which it is still yet necessary to be made felt. Such are the truths of morality. Perhaps this snippet of history will touch you more than a subtle philosophy” (PL 11 [OC 1:145]). Usbek's professed intention to speak to his interlocutor's sentiments rather than his reason—his concern, that is, to “touch” Mirza and have his lessons be “felt” by him—suggests a sensitivity to his correspondent's sensitive state.Footnote ¹³ And in so doing, Usbek replicates the method Montesquieu himself used. In his “Miscellaneous Reflections on the Persian Letters,” Montesquieu suggests that the force of the epistolary novel lies in its capacity “to make the passions be felt more than any of the descriptions that could be given of them” (OC 1:129; cf. SL Preface [OC 2:229])—a key point of convergence of Usbek and Montesquieu.Footnote ¹⁴

Usbek's professed intention to speak to his interlocutor's sentiments and indeed to redirect these sentiments anticipates the heart of his substantive response to Mirza's question. Usbek delivers this substantive response in the form of his history of the Troglodytes. The Troglodyte sequence is almost certainly the part of the Persian Letters best known to political theorists. Often excerpted and taken out of its original context, the story of the Troglodytes touches on several themes central to Enlightenment political theory, from resistance and regicide to contractarianism and republicanism to austerity and luxury.Footnote ¹⁵ Yet their story is not a free-standing theoretical treatise but a specific response to a specific question asked by a specific questioner with specific concerns. Attending to the methods of this response reveals a side of the substantive response that deserves more attention than it has received.

The political history of the Troglodytes Usbek tells moves through three discrete stages. In the first, a regicide is followed by a long chaotic period of self-interested struggle (Letter 11). In the second, a subset of virtuous men separated from the general fray live in peace and flourish (Letters 12 and 13). In the third, the Troglodytes resolve to establish a formal political order, and specifically a monarchy, to secure the gains they have made (Letter 14). The first stage clearly defines a war of all against all in which the “evil and ferocious,” lacking any principles of equity or justice, give in to “their savage nature”: “all the individuals thought that they owed nothing to anyone” and “each wanted to pursue their own self-interests only, without consulting those of others” (PL 11 [OC 1:146]). Thus the tragedy of the state of nature understood as a state of war in which individuals driven exclusively by narrow self-interest fail to establish the conditions of trust and security necessary for long-term gains. But that is clear enough from the story's surface; what is interesting is how it functions as a response to Mirza. First, the story seems designed to affect its recipient by touching his sympathy. The remainder of Letter 11 tells an iterated series of stories of destructive pursuits of self-interest calculated to awaken the sympathetic resentment of a decent, sensitive friend of virtue; indeed all five stories in Letter 11 end similarly, with the selfish and unjust “the victims of their own injustices”—endings that seem calculated to appeal to a lover of happy endings and just deserts (PL 12 [OC 1:148]). Second, the unjust Troglodytes are depicted not only as self-interested, but as hyperrational utility maximizers. One voices their cold logic: “I will think only of myself; I will live happily. What does the happiness of others matter to me?” (PL 11 [OC 1:146]). Other speeches reiterate this exclusive focus on the self and resolute indifference to others. Cold-hearted rational individualism, ironically, is the only point on which these selfish individualists agree and can find “unanimous resolution” (PL 11 [OC 1:146]).

Letter 11 is remarkable: to a recipient inclined to privilege sentiment over reason it tells the story of a people who privileged reason over sentiment, and to a recipient who values the ties of friendship and community it tells the story of a people who privilege individualism over social bonds. Letter 12 then turns to how these divisions might be overcome. Usbek directly addresses Mirza's question; just as Letter 11 depicts the unhappiness and unsustainability of the exclusive pursuit of pleasure, Letter 12 suggests that virtue is a surer road to happiness than simple Epicureanism (or Hobbesianism, or Mandevillianism). But to put matters this way is to invite an obvious question: Virtue of what sort? This is a crucial question, especially for readers of Montesquieu. In the Spirit of the Laws, virtue is given a famous definition: political virtue requires “renunciation of one's self, which is always a very painful thing,” insofar as it “demands constant preference of the public interest to one's own” (SL 4.6 [OC 2:267]). And this is the virtue required in republics, in which “virtue demands that one makes to the State a constant sacrifice of one's self and one's reservations” (SL 5.19 [OC 2:303]; cf. SL 5.2 [OC 2:274] and SL 6.8 [OC 2:317]). Republican virtue is an act of painful self-sacrifice for the public good, in which self-interest and public interest necessarily stand in a zero-sum relationship.Footnote ¹⁶ The virtue of the Troglodytes could hardly be more different. Troglodyte virtue shares republican virtue's commitment to public good; the Troglodytes conspicuously “worked with a common solicitude for the common interest” (PL 12 [OC 1:149]). Yet the Troglodytes see no incommensurability between private interests and public interests. Thus Usbek's key claim:

Troglodyte virtue is not a manifestation of republican virtue but its repudiation: where one is painful, the other is pleasant; where one demands sacrifice, the other brings gain; where one claims private and public interest to be incommensurable, the other harmonizes them.

The Troglodytes are also remarkable for a second reason that similarly touches the heart of Mirza's concerns. Mirza, we know, is—at least at present—one who thinks more with his heart than his mind. Conscious of this, Usbek conspicuously emphasizes the cold-hearted rationalism of the early Troglodytes. But not only are the early Troglodytes self-interested and devoid of feeling, the later Troglodytes are virtuous and sentimental. Indeed their capacity for sentimental fellow-feeling defines them as much as anything; not only did they know justice, we are told, “they had humanity.”Footnote ¹⁷ Usbek even suggests that this capacity for affective fellow-feeling with others, rather than any abstract commitment to virtue, made their redemption possible; hence his claim that the two virtuous Troglodytes, “bound together by the uprightness of their hearts as much as by the corruption of the others’ hearts, saw the general desolation and felt only pity for it: this was the motive of a new union” (PL 12 [OC 1:149]). It is precisely this feeling that the Troglodytes sought to encourage via their education, designed “above all” to have their youth “feel” the harmony of self-interest and the public good.

Usbek's education of Mirza is then a replication of the Troglodyte education: both seek to cultivate in their recipients an affective preference of virtue to vice. But the Troglodyte history also contains a substantive lesson. The excellence of the Troglodytes, we have seen, consists in their harmonious alignment of self-interest and public interest: a moderate vision that conspicuously contrasts with the republican virtue of Spirit of the Laws, with its austere and extreme sacrifice of self-interest. But if the defining characteristic of the flourishing social order, as represented by the happy Troglodytes, is the reconciliation of self-interest and public interest, what form of political order best realizes this in practice?

Here Usbek's political education becomes especially interesting. In Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu famously organizes his classification of regimes around a threefold division into despotisms, monarchies, and republics. But neither the first nor the third of these regime types achieves the synthesis of individual and collective self-interest that the prepolitical Troglodytes represent, and in fact for the same reason. Republican virtue, we know, in demanding complete sacrifice of self-interest, runs counter to the Troglodyte synthesis. And however much despotism and republicanism differ in other respects, the despotic seraglio of the Persian Letters aims at the renunciation (or extermination) of individual self-interest that defines republicanism (see, e.g., PL 148 [OC 1:363] and PL 154 [OC 1:367]).Footnote ¹⁸ What then of monarchy? This is the question taken up in the final letter of this series. In Letter 14, Usbek recounts how the peace and prosperity of the prepolitical Troglodytes led them to flourish and grow to such an extent that they felt compelled to choose a king. But this is presented not as victory but as tragedy: thus the speech of the elected king lamenting the sad day the virtuous Troglodytes traded self-rule for submission to a monarch (PL 14 [OC 1:153]).

Letter 14 closes the Troglodyte series, and the Troglodytes are never again mentioned in the text. By ending Letter 14 as he does, Usbek (and Montesquieu) seems to leave the principal substantive political question unresolved: What form of polity can best realize the conditions of harmonized interests characteristic of the happy Troglodytes, if not despotism or monarchy or republicanism?Footnote ¹⁹ This conspicuous lack of resolution is no doubt deliberate on Montesquieu's part; Montesquieu himself famously insisted that he writes not just to have his readers read but to have them think (SL 11.20 [OC 2:430]), and indeed the open-endedness of the Troglodyte story induces readers to discover for themselves the proper political resolution. At the same time, Montesquieu has not left readers without hints. For while in one sense the Troglodyte story lacks an ending, seen from another perspective it has two.

One ending emerges only once we reconceive the Troglodyte discussion as an exchange specifically between Usbek and Mirza. Mirza only appears once more in the Persian Letters, as the recipient of Letter 85. Letter 85 does not mention the Troglodytes, and discusses matters seemingly far removed. Its focus is religious toleration, and specifically the plan of Suleiman's ministers to compel the conversion of the Armenian minority in Persia to Islam: a thinly veiled allegory of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes by Louis XIV. Usbek, telling this story, makes clear how happy he is this did not come to fruition, as it would have “done in Persian greatness” (PL 85 [OC 1:258]). His argument is that the forced conversion or expulsion of the Armenians would have been an economic disaster for the nation: “proscribing the Armenians would have in a single day destroyed all the merchants and almost all the artisans of the Realm,” serving merely to “ruin industry” (PL 85 [OC 1:258–59]). This clearly refers to the dire consequences of forced Huguenot exile on the French economy. Yet his warning takes on special significance when we consider it as a lesson meant specifically for Mirza. In arguing for toleration over conversion by compulsion Usbek restates his earlier claim to Mirza regarding the flourishing of the prepolitical Troglodytes. Religious minorities living in conditions of toleration, he explains, “ordinarily render themselves more useful to their fatherland than those who live by the dominant religion insofar as, excluded from honors, they can distinguish themselves only by their opulence and their riches, they are carried to acquire them by their labor and to take on the hardest jobs in the Society” (PL 85 [OC 1:259]). Religious toleration incentivizes self-interest in ways beneficial to both individuals and polities; not only does it allow individuals to live in accord with conscience, but it also channels their labor in ways beneficial to the national economy. Whatever other arguments might also be made on its behalf, Usbek's lesson to Mirza is that toleration harmonizes individual and national interests.

Letter 85 thus concludes the Usbek-Mirza exchange by returning to the question of the reconciliation of self-interest and public interest. Montesquieu also returned to this theme in a second ending for the Troglodyte sequence. In an unpublished fragment in his Pensées (OC 1:377–79), Montesquieu picks up their history from the end of Letter 14. Here, with the elected king's successor on the throne, Troglodyte society is thriving and with it their economy—to a point that “towards the end of his reign, some men believed that it was necessary to establish among the Troglodytes commerce and arts” (OC 1:377). This worries the king, who asks his people forthrightly: “Do you wish to prefer riches to virtue?” A representative of the people responds, insisting it may be possible to have both wealth and virtue together so long as the king sets a good example and the people remain committed to that “education” capable of preserving them from avarice and prodigality (OC 1:378). But it is the king who is given the last word, and his first line gives his essential lesson: “Troglodytes, riches are going to come among you, but I declare to you that, if you are not virtuous, you will be one of the unhappiest peoples on earth” (OC 1:379). The king is a realist: he accepts that commerce and wealth will come and that there is no returning to the golden age. But the issue is what this future will look like: an age of self-interest reminiscent of the Troglodytes’ dark days, or a balance of wealth and virtue that preserves what is best about the golden age—that is, whether the Troglodytes, in their opulence, will be able to preserve that singular condition of moderate government in which “each works to the common good, believing it to be in his individual interest” (SL 3.7 [OC 2:257]).Footnote ²⁰

Rhedi and Revealed Religion

Usbek's exchange with Mirza over the Troglodytes ends with the question of the possible compatibility of wealth and virtue, self-interest and public interest. These same themes become central to Usbek's exchanges with Rhedi. And in his exchanges with Rhedi we again see Usbek applying his skills as a political educator who tailors his lessons to the needs and concerns of his student, even as he continues to develop his substantive political teachings.

Rhedi differs from Mirza in several ways. We are first introduced to him in a letter about him. Letter 25 from Usbek to Ibben begins with Usbek announcing receipt of a letter from Ibben's nephew, Rhedi. This letter does not appear in Montesquieu's collection, so whatever we know of it we know from Usbek. But evidently Rhedi used it to announce to Usbek his intention to leave Smyrna for Italy, and that the “sole aim of his trip was that to instruct himself.” Usbek seems impressed by this, congratulating Ibben on a nephew likely to prove “the consolation of your elderhood” (PL 25 [OC 1:167]). This is perhaps because Usbek sees something of himself in Rhedi; like Rhedi, he too once professed eagerness for enlightenment and willingness to go west to find it (PL 1 [OC 1:132]).Footnote ²¹ Usbek later models this inquisitiveness for Rhedi, describing himself as always “examining” things; he is, he says, “like a child”—“everything interests me, everything astonishes me” (PL 48 [OC 1:197]).

Usbek seems drawn to Rhedi for his curiosity. But they are also curious about many of the same things. Rhedi nods at some of these in his first letter, which opens with Rhedi's notice that he has arrived in Venice, a place designed to “surprise” and “astonish” (PL 31 [OC 1:177]). But it is not just the sights that have captivated him; at least part of Venice's attraction is that it provides Rhedi opportunities to study the very things that elicit his curiosity. Musing about his future, Rhedi tells Usbek he “would be charmed to live in a town in which my mind forms itself daily. I instruct myself in the secrets of commerce, the interests of princes, of the form of their government” (PL 31 [OC 1:177]). This is supported by his later retrospective comment that “one of the things that most excited my curiosity on arriving in Europe was the history and the origin of republics,” a state of which “the majority of Asiatics have no idea” (PL 131 [OC 1:327]). Yet it is not just politics that interests Rhedi. “European superstitions” have also caught his attention. Further: “I apply myself to medicine, to physics, to astronomy; I study the arts”—with the result, he says, that “finally I am emerging from the clouds which covered my eyes in the country of my birth” (PL 31 [OC 1:177]).

Rhedi, in short, is curious, dedicated, and eager. And at least some of his interests are shared by Usbek. Small wonder then that Rhedi becomes Usbek's most frequent correspondent (by a significant margin). But another side of Rhedi's self-presentation also deserves notice. For all his enthusiasm for Venice, Rhedi also harbors a reservation that comes from his faith. For all its virtues and attractions, his new home is “profane” insofar as it lacks the “living water” (eau vive) without which “it is impossible to accomplish a single legal ablution,” and thus can only be regarded by the heavens “with anger” as “an abomination” (PL 31 [OC 1:177]).

Thus Rhedi: not just a promising student but a young man of divided inclinations, caught between affinities for the progressive sciences of the West and the traditional religion of the East. And it is to Rhedi that Usbek will write fifteen letters over the next four years, all of which, in one way or another, treat religion, and indeed in a very particular way. This is evident from the very beginning of Usbek's first letter to Rhedi. Seemingly apropos of nothing, Usbek launches into a discussion of drinking: “Wine is so expensive at Paris, by the taxes put on it, that it seems that they have tried there to put in practice the principle of the holy Koran that forbids drinking it” (PL 33 [OC 1:178]; cf. PL 114 [OC 1:300]). This seems an odd place to begin. But it may be that Usbek starts here because he knows it will capture Rhedi's attention. As a student of commerce, Rhedi would have been interested in matters of luxury taxation and its impact on consumption. But Rhedi is also concerned with matters of religious observance, and Usbek's reference to holy writ in his first line is sure to have grabbed him. In it Usbek seems to signal agreement with divine precept; conscious of wine's “evil effects,” he is sympathetic to prohibition. But this owes less to the evidence of the effect of alcohol on the monarchs of the West than on those of the East. Indeed, “if anything has blackened the reputation of our monarchs, it is their intemperance”—a point he reiterates in noting that “the Law prohibits to our princes the use of wine, yet they drink it to an excess that degrades humanity itself” (PL 33 [OC 1:178]).

This must have been a lot for Rhedi to take in. The law he admires may be good, but his kings, in practice, are hypocrites. The question of what effect this realization may have on his faith will carry forward into their subsequent correspondence. But in his decision to frame his opening response to Rhedi in this manner, Usbek lays out a crucial political question: What relationship is there, and ought there to be, between divine law and political practice? Usbek signals his approach to this question in the crucial paragraph of Letter 33:

Usbek, in his first letter to Rhedi, here reprises the theme of his first letter to Mirza: in addressing human beings we best address them as feeling rather than rational beings. And here again this observation guides not only the methods but the substance of his political education. For as Usbek will show, the value of practices and institutions lies in their capacity “to treat man as a feeling being.”

In the letters that follow, Usbek first develops this point with reference to religion. His key claim is the fundamentally Spinozistic point that political utility is the proper measure of religious ideas and practices.Footnote ²² Almost all of the critiques of religion that follow ring changes on this theme: from the debates of the theologians (PL 36 [OC 1:182–83]) to the vows of the dervishes (PL 57 [OC 1:214]) to the hair-splitting of the casuists (PL 57 [OC 1:215]) to the zeal of the proselytizers (PL 61 [OC 1:220])—to Usbek, it is all equally futile.Footnote ²³ Further, this is not merely harmless wheel-spinning; what worries him most is that these crowd out things of greater value. Thus his key critique of the religious man:

Religion properly understood privileges dispositions over dogmas. In particular, it privileges the affective dispositions of humanity and love, regarding these as surer routes toward earning God's pleasure than “observation of such and such ceremony” (PL 46 [OC 1:194]). Properly conceived, Usbek suggests, religion itself treats man as a feeling being.

This is a striking reconceptualization of religion. And it was surely designed by Usbek to appeal specifically to Rhedi. Rhedi, we know, has certain religious sensibilities of his own, and has given no indication yet that he is prepared to part with them. In response, Usbek seems less concerned to disabuse Rhedi of his religion than to direct him toward a religion of the heart, and away from a religion of ceremonies—a move in some sense in keeping with the emotive turn evident in his education of Mirza. Rhedi himself, as we know from his first letter, is especially concerned with one such ceremony, ablution. Usbek explicitly raises the concept of ritual purification by water on two separate occasions in his later correspondence with Rhedi. In Letter 46 he uses a pious man to voice a frustration with the contradictory dictates of various authorities on the proper methods of worship (PL 46 [OC 1:195]). In Letter 75 he insists that Muslims “are very naive to refuse to settle and make easy conquests in happy climates, owing to the fact that the water is not pure enough for us to wash ourselves according to the principles of the holy Koran!” (PL 75 [OC 1:245]). Even if Montesquieu had not here included his note that “the Muslims did not care to take Venice because they would not find water there for their purifications” (presumably a reference to the seventh Ottoman-Venetian war which would have been in its second year at the date of Letter 75), it would be clear enough that Usbek has Rhedi in mind. And the critique may have had purchase. Letter 75, sent to Rhedi in Venice in 1715, comes three presumably ablution-free years after his arrival. Indeed, the very fact that Rhedi, for all these worries, chose to stay in Venice through at least 1720 (see PL 146 [OC 1:362]) suggests an evolution of his faith.

Usbek's focus to this point has been on the relationship of religion to his understanding of man as a sensible being. But ultimately Usbek's concern is less religion than politics. His early letters to Rhedi are largely exercises in ground-clearing: “My dear Rhedi, why all this philosophy? God is so high that we cannot even see his clouds” (PL 69 [OC 1:240]). Only after having completed this ground-clearing does Usbek come to politics. Here his important letters are Letters 80 and 83, which contain the key lesson to which everything to now has been building: his teaching on the best regime.

Letter 80 begins with Usbek telling Rhedi that his European travels enabled him to see a variety of governments. These stand in sharp contrast to Asia, “where the rules of politics are everywhere the same.” This wide empirical study enabled Usbek to draw his key conclusion: “I have often sought to discover what government is most in accord with reason. It seems to me that the most perfect is that which advances to its end at the least cost; such that the most perfect is that which conducts men in the manner that most accords with their predilection and their inclination” (PL 80 [OC 1:252]). Usbek's striking redefinition of the best regime looks back to several claims he has already made and forward to a key teaching of the Spirit of the Laws. Like the religion that he described to Rhedi, government does best when it treats human beings as beings of feeling and inclination rather than reason. Like the golden age of the happy Troglodytes that he painted for Mirza, the perfect government harmonizes with the inclinations and interests of a people. And all of this directly anticipates Montesquieu's later claim that “the government that is most in accord with nature is the one whose particular disposition is connected to the disposition of the people for which it is established” (SL 1.3 [OC 2:237]; cf. SL 11.5 [OC 2:396]; SL 19.5 [OC 2:559]).Footnote ²⁴

Letter 80 establishes the principle that the best regime is to be judged not by external but by internal standards; the excellence of a given order lies in its fittingness for its populace rather than its commensurability with a transcendent standard. The implications of this are explored in Usbek's next letter to Rhedi. Letter 83 begins: “If there is a God, my dear Rhedi, he must necessarily be just” (PL 83 [OC 1:256]). This is clear enough: if God exists, justice also exists. But Usbek's argument concludes on a different note: “even if God does not exist, we must still always love justice—that is to say, we must always strive to resemble that being of which we have so beautiful an idea, and which, if he exists would necessarily be just” (PL 83 [OC 1:256]; cf. SL 1.1 [OC 2:233]). There is a great deal at work in Usbek's argument here, some parts of which are more convincing than others. But his main claim is that while there cannot be God without justice, there can be justice without God.Footnote ²⁵ Yet if justice exists independently of God, where is it to be found? Usbek's answer: in “a relationship of agreement, which is truly to be found between two things” (PL 83 [OC 1:256]; cf. SL Preface [OC 2: 229] and SL 1.3 [OC 2:237–38]). The standard for justice, like the standard for the most perfect regime, is congruence of interests and sentiments. Injustice, seen thus, is the fruit of self-interest and the result of a lack of such congruence. Men “do injustices because they have an interest in committing them,” and because “they prefer their own satisfaction to that of others”—it is “reason” and specifically “reasons of interest” that drive injustice (PL 83 [OC 1:256]). And if interest drives injustice, it is the sentiments that resist it; hence Usbek's insistence that justice itself is a matter of “the heart” (PL 83 [OC 1:256]).

Usbek, as we have seen, describes the “most perfect” regime in terms of what is best suited to a people and their inclinations; for Usbek, there is no one best regime in practice but only a multiplicity of regimes that are more or less fitting.Footnote ²⁶ This has the potential to raise questions of “relativism”—a charge that has notoriously been levied against the Spirit of the Laws.Footnote ²⁷ Yet the Persian Letters helps to clarify just how far removed this position is from relativism. To say government's perfection consists in harmonization of government and inclination is not to deny standards but to commit to a specific standard: namely, that government is to be judged by its suitability to the inclinations of a people, and not, say, its capacity to form the inclinations of a people in ways that suit the government. Moderation and mildness ought not to be confused with relativism; in Usbek's words, “mild government” (gouvernement doux) is government that simply rejects “severity” (PL 80 [OC 1:252]).Footnote ²⁸

Usbek's commitment to moderate and mild government compels him—at least in his capacity as political educator if not in his capacity as master of the seraglio—to reject despotism as a candidate for the “most perfect” government. In Letter 80 he thus forthrightly insists that mildness in pursuit of justice and equity is less to be found “in Turkey, in Persia, among the Mughals, than in the republics of Holland, Venice, and even in England” (PL 8 [OC 1:253]). This surely caught Rhedi's attention; not only is the “most perfect” government not to be found in his native East, but it is in fact to be found in Western “republics,” including his adopted republic. Yet the virtuous republics of the Spirit of the Laws, as we have seen, require a self-renunciation Usbek would have seen as more akin to “severity” than to mildness and moderation. Usbek's naming of the republics of Holland and Venice and England as the exemplars of good government in his letter to Rhedi thus demands that we ask: What kind of republics are these, and how do they differ from republics of virtue?

This issue is further complicated by a second question, one that concerns not Rhedi's new city but Usbek's. The Paris from which Usbek writes is a city in a nation in transition. In Letter 92, Usbek announces that “the monarch who has so long reigned is no more” (PL 92 [OC 1:267]). The death of Louis XIV on September 1, 1715, Usbek knows, marks the end of an era; France is in flux, and he and Rica are witnesses to “une époque incertaine” and “un monde en pleine mutation.”Footnote ²⁹ The political form of France is thus changing—but into what? Usbek lays out the possibilities in a letter contemporaneous with this series: “The majority of the governments of Europe are monarchies, or rather are called such; for I do not know if such have truly ever existed—at least it is difficult for them to long subsist in their purity. It is a violent state, which always degenerates into despotism or a republic: power can never be equally divided between the People and the Prince; the equilibrium is too difficult to maintain” (PL 102 [OC 1:281]). Thus the challenge, laid out simply and starkly: Will France's monarchy-in-transition evolve into a despotism or a republic?Footnote ³⁰ Put in terms of the way these issues have been presented to Rhedi: Is France to become like Persia and Turkey, or like Venice and England?Footnote ³¹ And put in terms of the political education of the reader of the Persian Letters: Is France to resemble the golden age of the Troglodytes, with its harmonization of private and public interests, or the corruptions of the Troglodyte dark ages? For his part, Usbek sees reasons for concern. “Liberty and equality,” he tells Rhedi, “reign in Paris” (PL 88 [OC 1:263]). But with Louis XIV gone, “everyone thinks of their own affairs and how to draw advantages during this change” (PL 92 [OC 1:267]). Usbek sees the death of the French king as a playing out of the death of the Troglodyte king, with the fatal question hanging in the balance: Will France realize moderate, mild government, or succumb to what he calls, with reference to the parlements, “the destiny of human things,” replete with the “corruption of morals” (PL 92 [OC 1:268])?Footnote ³²

Rhedi and the Commercial Republic

At this point, five years have passed since Rhedi's first letter to Usbek, during which time he received from Usbek no fewer than fifteen letters in response. Through all of this Rhedi has been silent. But he has been attentive. For when he finally breaks his silence, he poses to his teacher a question that compels Usbek to refine and restate his political teaching.

Rhedi breaks his five-year silence by reminding Usbek of a past letter: “You have often spoken to me, in one of your letters, of the arts and sciences that are cultivated in the West.” Yet years of listening to Usbek's one-sided lectures and perhaps also years of observing life in Venice have led him to be skeptical about things for which he used to be enthusiastic. Now he is ready to speak his mind: “You'll think me a barbarian, but I'm not sure that what one gets from them [the sciences and the arts] compensates men for the evil uses to which they're put every day.” His main worry is military technology: the bombs that “stripped all the people of Europe of their freedom,” the gunpowder that deprived men of a “refuge against injustice and violence,” the possibility that more effective weapons of mass destruction remain to be discovered: “I constantly tremble that ultimately someone will discover some secret that will provide an even more efficient way to kill men and destroy entire peoples and nations.” He also worries about trade with foreign nations, which “communicates to us their pestilences as much as their riches.” All of this leads him to long for a return to the faith of his youth (“Happy ignorance of the children of Mohammed”) and the political forms of his homeland. For he claims to see where all this is headed: “almost all monarchies are founded merely on ignorance of the arts and have been wrecked merely by cultivating them too much” (PL 105 [OC 1:285–86]).

Rhedi's castigation of the arts and sciences is as striking for its condemnation of what he once loved as it is for its anticipation of themes Montesquieu's reader Rousseau would develop three decades later.Footnote ³³ Longing for a return to a lost golden age—“amiable simplicity, so dear to our holy Prophet, you recall me always to the naiveté of the ancient times” (PL 105 [OC 1:286])—Rhedi articulates more directly than Rousseau what Rousseau is by many often taken to have believed. But the key point here is Rhedi's skepticism with regard to modern progress. He sees modernity as degenerate when compared to antiquity. This becomes clear in Letter 112, in which he argues that the world's population has declined over time, a subject of much eighteenth-century debate (cf. SL 23.19). But Rhedi and Usbek agree that population is a reliable proxy for economic and political health, and that if modernity has brought a decline, some explanation is needed. Rhedi attributes it to some “interior vice, a secret and hidden poison,” which leads to his (literally millenarian) suggestion that there are only one-tenth as many people alive today as before, and that in ten centuries humanity will be extinguished (PL 112 [OC 1:297]).

These are dark thoughts. But in response, far from backing down, Usbek doubles down: “Either you're not thinking about what you're saying, or you act better than you think. You left your homeland in order to instruct yourself, and you despise all instruction. You come to form yourself in a country where the fine arts flourish, and you deem them pernicious. Shall I lay it out for you, Rhedi? I'm more in accord with you than you are with yourself” (PL 106 [OC 1:287]). Usbek's response is spirited, but it is also subtle. Usbek does not reject Rhedi's position. Instead he claims that Rhedi has strayed from his original position: a position Usbek now occupies better than Rhedi himself. Thus Usbek's aim: not to disabuse his pupil of his wrongheadedness across the board, but to disabuse him of false opinions so that he can recover the truth to which he was originally rightly inclined. In terms of their substantive debate, Usbek's challenge is to disabuse Rhedi of his exaggerations and misunderstandings with regard to the arts and sciences so that he can more accurately judge their value.

Letter 106 unfolds as a point-by-point rebuttal of Rhedi's most misguided claims; the following seven paragraphs, six of which begin with the second-person singular pronoun, offer direct replies to Rhedi on weaponry and civilization and empire. Only after all of this does Usbek address Rhedi's general claim that the arts and sciences “make people soft” and “render men effeminate.” Usbek's response to Rhedi's quintessentially republican objection is founded on the idea that in order to judge the arts and sciences one needs to see their social as well as their moral effects: “It isn't then a question about the people who enjoy them. Rather, in a civilized land, those who enjoy the commodities of one art are obliged to cultivate yet another for its sake—and, lest they be reduced to a shameful poverty, it follows that laziness and softness are incompatible with the arts” (PL 106 [OC 1:288]). Usbek's reply to Rhedi is remarkable for its defense of the benefits of commerce. In this sense it stands as the most direct defense of commerce in the Persian Letters. It also anticipates Montesquieu's later and fuller defense of modern commerce in the Spirit of the Laws, which likewise connects luxury consumption and civic flourishing.Footnote ³⁴ Within the Persian Letters, this account of commercial Paris serves to reprise the central theme of the Troglodyte history; in both France and among the happy Troglodytes, private interests and public good harmonize. Thus the republics that meet the standard of Usbek's “most perfect” government: not republics of virtue, but mild and moderate commercial republics.

Yet Usbek is well aware that Paris is far from perfect. This becomes evident in what immediately follows:

For all the benefits of its luxury-driven consumerism Usbek clearly sees its shortcomings—including, especially, the abuses and injustices of a system in which the rich few command and the poor many obey. Usbek ends his letter on a troubling note: “from all this, one must conclude, Rhedi, that if a prince is to be powerful, it is necessary that his subjects live among delicacies; it is necessary that he works to provide them all sorts of superfluities, with as much attention as the necessities of life” (PL 106 [OC 1:289–90]). The love of luxury and superfluity that has become a necessity for the Parisians is far removed from the simplicity of the Troglodytes; Usbek, like Montesquieu, knows that for all their benefits, commercial republics built on luxury have considerable shortcomings.Footnote ³⁵ Even so—or perhaps because of this—Usbek's defense of the commercial republic to Rhedi is a pedagogical masterpiece. In forthrightly presenting both the benefits and the costs of the commercial republic, Usbek enables his student to see its vices and its virtues. Usbek's education thus serves as an exercise in vision expansion, enabling Rhedi to see the whole in its entirety. To use Usbek's own terms, Rhedi is being trained to see matters as a legislator rather than a mere politician; where “small minds” are limited by “prejudices” and “fantasies,” Rhedi is learning to see matters in all their complexity, from “a general view” (PL 129 [OC 1:322]). Rhedi tended see the arts and sciences as either all good or all bad, tacking from extreme enthusiasm (Letter 31) to extreme disillusionment (Letter 105). But Usbek knows the truth is more complex, and that even the best regime in practice will necessarily have its all-too-human faults.

Usbek continues to develop his arguments in his next ten letters to Rhedi. Collectively these letters constitute the longest uninterrupted sequence in the book, and have been read as a self-standing treatise.Footnote ³⁶ Usbek first addresses religious institutions inimical to population growth, including Muslim polygamy (Letter 114), Christian divorce prohibition (Letter 116), and Christian monasticism and celibacy mandates (Letter 117). He then examines secular institutions—the European slave trade (Letter 118), primogeniture laws (Letter 119), the mœurs of precivilized societies (Letter 120), and colonialism (Letter 121)—all of which are likewise neither moderate nor favorable to growth.

Yet alongside his critique of these pernicious institutions Usbek presents a defense of several others. Perhaps the most interesting is his account of how the Roman peculium served to incentivize self-interest (and the self-interest of the least and lowest in particular), redirecting it so that pursuit of self-interest benefited the collective good (PL 115 [OC 1:302]).Footnote ³⁷ In this way the Roman Republic furthered the harmonization of individual and collective interests central to Usbek's idea of the best regime. Usbek also suggests that these policies could be found in modern republics. Letter 122 reiterates the fundamental lesson Usbek has been seeking to teach Rhedi: “Mildness in government contributes marvelously to the propagation of the Species.” And his models are the mild modern republics of Holland and Switzerland, whose “liberty and opulence” draw foreigners to them in hopes of increasing their fortune, with these new arrivals contributing to the growth of the state—sharply contrasting with systems of “arbitrary power” in which the people suffer in “extreme poverty” (PL 122 [OC 1:312–13]). Thus while both Usbek and Montesquieu know well the precariousness of the modern commercial state (see esp. PL 146 [OC 1:360]), here it is presented as the foil to despotism and an exemplar of mild and moderate government, and thus heir to the excellence idealized in the story of the happy Troglodytes.

Political Education and Political Action

Our focus thus far has been on Usbek the political educator, and in particular his skill at tailoring his lessons to the inclinations of his students. Yet Usbek is of course more than just an educator, and the Persian Letters more than just a book about education. Usbek is a political actor as well as a political educator, and the Persian Letters is a chronicle of his tragic failings as a political actor—a side of his story that reaches its culmination in the collapse of the seraglio with which the novel ends.Footnote ³⁸ This ending, together with the brutality and tyrannizing that led up to it, compel us to ask how Usbek's talents as an educator comport with his conspicuous failings as a leader, as well as what lessons Montesquieu means for readers to take from his conspicuous juxtaposition of Usbek's two contrasting sides.

Usbek is a man of clear contradictions whose practice departs from his principles. Where Usbek the teacher is moderate and patient, Usbek the ruler is cruel and impetuous. Where Usbek the teacher is sensitive to and solicitous of the inclinations and interests of his interlocutors, Usbek the master of the seraglio is resolutely indifferent to the true interests of his wives. And where Usbek the teacher strives to individuate his lessons and tailor them to the specific needs of their recipients, Usbek the despot imposes a heavy-handed uniformity on the seraglio. In short, the very traits that are indispensable to Usbek's successes as a teacher are, when absent, the causes of his failure as a ruler—and in this sense his character and the lessons we are meant to take from it are anything but contradictory. Usbek's two sides are not inverses but obverse faces of the same coin, each serving to reinforce Montesquieu's consistent lesson on the necessity of moderation and individuation in education and legislation alike.

Herein lies a key lesson of the Persian Letters. Usbek's educative project is founded on individuation, as seen in the differing ways he addresses Mirza and Rhedi. Yet Usbek's project as a political ruler is inimical to individuation. Thus not only is Usbek a despot who governs by fear (SL 5.14 [OC 2:292]), but he also uses force to impose uniformity on the seraglio. Several of Usbek's correspondents attempt to warn him of the shortsightedness of this approach. In Letter 62 Usbek's wife Zélis criticizes those parents who make their children “violently embrace a way of life to which they ought to inspire them” (PL 62 [OC 1:221]). In the very next letter Rica argues that the superiority of Paris to Persia is due to the fact that in Persia, “characters are all uniform, because they are forced; people aren't seen as they are, but as they are compelled to be. In this servitude of heart and mind, only fear is listened to (which has only one language), and not nature, which expresses itself so differently, and which appears under so many forms” (PL 63 [OC 1:223]). Usbek ignores these and many other warnings; he may be a talented teacher, but he is a terrible student. But this is important insofar as Zélis's and Rica's claims are also Montesquieu's. Book 29 of the Spirit of the Laws, dedicated to the important theme of “the manner of composing the laws,” begins with the claim that moderation is the chief political good (SL 29.1 [OC 2:865]), and ends with a warning against indiscreet imposition of uniformity. Earlier Montesquieu explicitly associated uniformity with despotism (SL 5.14 [OC 2:297]), and here he notes that uniformity “infallibly” impresses small minds, who find in it “a type of perfection that they recognize because it's impossible not to see it.” Yet legislation requires “the greatness of genius,” which itself consists “in knowing in what cases uniformity is necessary, and in what cases differences are necessary” (SL 29.18 [OC 2:882]; cf. PL 9 [OC 1:141]). Usbek the teacher knows this. Usbek the ruler, blinded by his rage, forgets it. But in both capacities his example is meant to further Montesquieu's political education of his readers by demonstrating the indispensability of moderation in both political education and political action.