In these two volumes, Paul A. Rahe sets out to understand how and why modern democracies have veered from their fundamental roots by drawing on the work of Montesqueiu, Rousseau and Tocqueville. There are good reasons for seeking guidance from these authors: “We live today in the world first discovered by Voltaire and Montesquieu. We profit from the accomplishments of liberal, commercial republicanism, and we grapple with the difficulties first discerned in turn by Montesquieu, Rousseau and Tocqueville” (Soft Despotism, p. 273). The result is an absorbing diagnosis of contemporary liberal democracy, its character, propensities, and vulnerabilities. The analysis seeks to effect a shift in the way we think about liberal modernity, to reverse the tide of soft despotism, and to formulate a better conception of liberalism. Just as important, the footnotes in the two books add up to about 150 pages of insightful observations and trenchant reflections on the state of learned professions and public intellectuals and are a provocative study on the practice of Anglophone scholarship in their own right.

As befits a historian, Rahe is a master storyteller about events and people. He successfully recreates, for the reader, the time and place contingencies experienced by Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Tocqueville and the responses they developed. Their insights went beyond their own conditions, thereby shaping future thoughts and deeds. Rahe's portrait of the character, personality, and life experience of these thinkers is effective in giving added meaning to their thoughts and actions.

The first volume under review is a study of Montesquieu. To be sure, Rahe is not the first author since the authors of The Federalist to turn to Montesquieu for insights into constitutionalism, representative government and, commercial republicanism. A recent collection of essays edited by Rebecca E. Kingston on Montesquieu and His Legacy (2009) has brought together many scholars who individually have tackled different aspects of Montesquieu's thought. The truth is that Montesquieu has not sat well among the great liberal thinkers; the scholarship on such figures as Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau over the years far exceeds that on Montesquieu, whose writing style seems to have deterred many Anglophone efforts at treating his political thought in all its depth. Working with primary texts that are far from straightforward, and drawing on a secondary literature in several languages, Rahe succeeds in treating Montesquieu's political thought as whole and in showing why the latter deserves to be ranked high among liberal thinkers. This in itself is an important contribution.

Montesquieu spent about a year in Italy between 1728 and 1729, but his work shows little or no knowledge of the considerable work then being done there on the multiple nature of political rule and civil economy. His grasp of what made the Republic of Venice the longest-lived self-constituted commercial republic is almost nonexistent, and the sources he relied on for his superficial dismissal of the rich Venetian experience betray the then-typical anti-Italian and ahistorical prejudice prevailing among the French literati and upper class of his time. Rahe does not address these issues, but he is on more solid ground when he turns to Montesquieu's analysis of England for what that country's experience can offer for understanding representative government and commercial republicanism.

Following Montesquieu's emphasis on the practice of freedom rather than abstract theorizing, Rahe draws attention to the famous Battle of Blenheim of 1704 as marking the end of Louis XIV's project for a universal monarchy and the beginning of the ascendancy of the English form of government (pp. 44–60). By carefully and patiently going through the writings of Montesquieu on England, Rahe suggests several conclusions (pp. 64–144).

A major conclusion is that Montesquieu's opus is the culmination of 20 years of labor to articulate a new political science capable of making sense of the new world that he had discovered when he crossed the English Channel (p. 64). Montesquieu realized that in order to avoid the fate of Voltaire, he had to be more prudent in disseminating what he had learned. For this reason, he decided to reveal his work in parts, over many years, and in the form of a complex 31-book arrangement that has often been interpreted by many readers as “hopelessly obscure” (pp. 86–94). Montesquieu's reticence in clearly spelling out how he proceeded was often temporary, tactical, and rhetorical (p. 148); he minimized the radical nature of his inquiry by repeatedly declaring that he did not wish to offend anyone (p. 214). In short, Rahe persuasively argues that there is a logic to Montesquieu's disorganization and contradictions.

Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty helps to better situate certain facts about The Spirit of the Laws than can be found in many interpretative analyses since the work was first cited by the authors of The Federalist: Montesquieu was not a republican; he did not favor a sharp break with the past; his admiration for the English constitution was not unqualified; and his preoccupation with the separation of powers is, indeed, part of modern constitutionalism. Yet it represented continuity, not discontinuity, with medieval or ancient constitutionalism (Soft Despotism, pp. 69–70, 123)—a point often missed in standard accounts of modern constitutionalism.

In Montesquieu, Rahe presents a very learned, and at times not easy-to-follow, reinterpretation of the dark and positive side of English psychology and the English way of life and political liberty (pp. 99–117). He has Montesquieu singling out inquietude as the peculiar disposition of the English, which, he says, was another way of addressing an important contemporary debate initiated by certain Jansenists in France in the sixteenth century (p. 103). This has important implications for the organization and conduct of government (p. 108). Rahe speculates that the very organization of government transformed the characteristic uneasiness of the English into a passion capable of setting their polity into motion (p. 114). The character of the English was formed well before commerce—without denying the role of commerce in softening customs and manners, in overcoming obstacles to freedom, and in undermining the nature and principle of monarchy that was not well suited to the emerging political economy of Europe (pp. 229–36).

Rahe is very good at describing the complex interplay of several factors that allowed Great Britain to enjoy the economic and moral superiority that virtually guaranteed its long-term survival against Napoleon and the like (Montesquieu, p. 239–40). For Rahe, this furnishes the key for understanding the strength of liberal democracies against modern tyrannies like communism and fascism. At the same time, he recalls that Montesquieu did acknowledge the fragility of human artifacts and the potential of losing liberty and perishing like Rome, Sparta, and Carthage. Hence, Rahe argues, friends of liberal modernity need to be concerned about the sources of decay and corruption faced by modern democracies (p. 241). He may be stretching the parallelism between the Britain of the past and the United States of the present but he is on less sketchy grounds when he suggests that we can learn a lot from the analysis of Rousseau and Tocqueville. Their ideas constitute the core of the companion book, Soft Despotism.

Rahe reminds his readers that The Spirit of Laws, more than any other work, provided Rousseau with the conceptual framework and the key concepts for his indictment of the Enlightenment (Soft Despotism, pp. 74–89). Rahe explains the difference between the two thinkers this way: “[W]hat the French aristocrat consciously embraces, albeit not without grave reservations, the self-styled citizen of Geneva in a great fury rejects.” Montesquieu was not complacent about the future but he did “entertain the hope that, in France and in Europe more generally, something like commercial republicanism on the English model will become the norm, and he [foresaw] the possibility that the various peoples of Europe will learn to live alongside one another for the most part in prosperity and peace. Rousseau was far less sanguine” (Soft Despotism, p. 87, also pp. 103–5).

Rahe gives credit to Rousseau for being the first to recognize that in modern society, what we now call political ideology performs a function comparable to that served in earlier times by religious doctrine and that as ideologues, scientists, men and women of letters, and artists occupy a status once reserved for high priests. Equally, Rahe is not unsympathetic to Rousseau's warnings on the self-destructive strain in modern liberty and philosophy. But, as he puts it, the problem is that Rousseau also taught us to view, with contempt and disdain, bourgeois society. Rahe clearly regards Tocqueville, who drew on both Montesquieu and Rousseau, as the more beneficial interpreter of Montesquieu and one whose insights are of greatest benefit to the current crisis of liberal modernity.

No serious reader of Democracy in America can fail to appreciate Tocqueville's praise of local government and civic responsibility, the role of Christianity in undergirding this and other practices of liberty and self-government, the importance of the traditional family and private associations, the polycentric nature of American democracy, and the rule of law. Equally, I think, no serious reader can reject Tocqueville's concern about the danger of majority rule and democratic despotism. What Rahe does in Soft Despotism is to argue that Tocqueville's prophetic vision has fully materialized, first in Europe and now in America. There is a rich literature in comparative and American politics—from Abram de Swaan's In Care of the State (1988) to Vincent Ostrom's The Meaning of Democracy and the Vulnerability of Democracies (1997), to mention only some recent studies—that lends empirical support to Rahe's argument about the serious perils faced by modern republican liberty. Clearly, and without in any way diminishing or detracting from his reflections, he is no voice in the wilderness. What he does is to add a polemical edge to these concerns because he seeks to reverse the trend. He seeks to awaken the attentive public to the perils we face as citizens in giving up, unwittingly, the great achievements of moderate liberalism, including constitutionalism. But, again here, not all is lost. There are many university centers, educational foundations, and an emerging intellectual community in the United States promoting the importance of citizenship, civic initiative, and public services.

Those who will experience disagreement and discomfort with Rahe's account will probably have to admit that with boldness and insight, he has raised many legitimate concerns and made many telling points. They can test their ideas against the experience of liberal modernity in their own lives and formulate a renewed conception of liberalism as a practice of both research and public life. Rahe's analysis is no argument for skepticism, merely one against intellectual hubris and pretensions to omniscience. His is high scholarship, as exact as it is imaginative.