This thoughtful and well-written account of Montesquieu’s political thought addresses questions of liberalism and its claim to universality. Keegan Callanan argues that against an abstract, homogeneous and inflexible model of liberalism, whose credibility has been worn by numerous failures, Montesquieu offers “another liberalism” (to borrow a term from Nancy Rosenblum) that provides a robust set of considerations for maintaining liberty while abjuring a demand that there be only one set of institutions or one model by which these take shape. On Callanan’s reading, this is a form of liberalism that can embrace particularism, adapting a commitment to liberal ends to a broad array of cultural, political, and psychological conditions that allows for multiple paths of implementation and expression. The implicit claim here is that Montesquieu’s liberalism can dodge the characterizations of imperialism and intolerance which have sometimes been used by liberalism’s critics to deride and even undermine it.
Callanan reconstructs Montesquieu’s liberalism through a number of strategies. In the first instance, he develops a picture of classical political particularism, a broad doctrine found in Plato and Aristotle that points to reciprocal causation between institutions that help to shape a people, and characteristics of a people that help to determine which form of regime is most appropriate. For Callanan, the bottom line is that close consideration of political phenomena requires thinkers to abjure the idealism of universal solutions in politics, looking instead to the characteristics of a people and considering regimes in a holistic way. Montesquieu drew on this heritage while rejecting an ancient model of republicanism. Curiously, though not acknowledged as such by Callanan, he shows how Montesquieu served up extreme examples (largely Greek, via Lycurgus and Plato) to highlight republicanism’s strangeness, demonstrating its incompatibility with commerce, and modern attitudes toward censorship and mutual supervision.
Another strand leading to Montesquieu’s own brand of particularism is the constitutionalist tradition. Theorists such as Etienne Pasquier and Bernard de Girard du Haillan (following from Claude de Seyssel) painted a picture of the evolution of French public institutions, keeping a central role for the parlements and ongoing consultative mechanisms of governance as inherent to the nature of French monarchy. They were concerned that monarchs, bolstered by prescriptions of Roman law, might abuse their power. Callanan reminds us again (as Nannerl Keohane and other scholars had done earlier) of the debt Montesquieu has to these thinkers. Still, it is the spirit of particularism distilled by this school of constitutionalism that is most evidently translated into Montesquieu’s analysis, no longer as a set of historical narratives but as a set of principles acknowledging the play of a number of factors in shaping the contours of what can be deemed appropriate in public life and law.
Callanan also suggests that a “plurality of decent regimes” (strangely reminiscent of John Rawls) is at the heart of Montesquieu’s liberal commitments. Without a theory of liberal perfectionism, Montesquieu draws on principles of natural law, such as the needs for peace, nourishment, and society, that allow him to define a boundary between decent and despotic regimes, concluding: “When a political form makes of a man something less than a man, it places itself outside the circle of decent regimes” (p. 122). Montesquieu’s praise of moderate government does not champion one form of monarchical or republican moderate regime over another as best suited for promoting liberty. Callanan’s reading on this score is further vindicated by Montesquieu’s conceptual separation of the liberty of the citizen (dependent on the relative autonomy of criminal law systems) and the liberty of the constitution (relating to whether power remains checked or not). Given that liberty in one sphere is not directly connected to liberty in the other, it means that liberty can be manifested in practice in distinct ways, thereby supporting the idea of regime pluralism.
In subsequent chapters, Callanan explores the hearts and minds question, or the question of how to characterise and sustain a liberal culture. He addresses the sometimes double-edged quality of religion in its relation to political moderation, acknowledging that Montesquieu did not advocate for an overcoming of revealed religion, but rather an infusion of a spirit of toleration alongside it. He also explores the way Montesquieu depicted some of the laudable effects of commerce, such as helping to spread an ethos of toleration, arguing that for Montesquieu, “commerce enters as an indirect and noncoercive means of liberalizing culture” (p. 253). Still, it may be here where Montesquieu’s analysis requires further scrutiny and possible criticism. Arguably, the more pressing challenge to contemporary liberalism today is less its presumed traditional inflexibility and inability to adapt to various cultural circumstances, and more the motivational deficit. Those who feel themselves disadvantaged, holding the short end of the stick in the wake of the spread of commerce (with its technological innovations) and movement of peoples, today may often not feel the spirit of toleration as predicted by Montesquieu. Indeed, contemporary circumstances have often demonstrated the opposite. Does his theory offer us any resources in the face of this?
Callanan’s analysis is thorough and supported with important citations from the text. There are other questions it raises, however, particularly regarding how systematic Montesquieu’s account is meant to be. In the first instance, Montesquieu’s commitment to diversity is not always as consistent with liberal principles as depicted here. The most obvious case, curiously neglected by Callanan, is that of China. One could also cite Montesquieu’s rather strange treatment of slavery. Montesquieu champions liberty in various forms. Still, in instances where moral, social, political and/or material causes work in other ways he does not always expect politics to be driven by liberty as a goal of reform. His thought thus may reveal less a commitment to universal liberty as a political project than a celebration of liberty where it happens to appear (which is mainly in Europe on his account).
In a second instance, Montesquieu’s liberalism might be seen in a much more minimalist way. It offers a celebration of liberty through the rule of law, but without other features we have come to associate with liberalism, namely, an abolition of prescriptive social identities, such as caste and class. To the extent that his defense of liberty in the case of France rests on the requirement of legally sanctioned class divisions between the Second and Third Estate, a division which helps to sustain the relative independence of the parlements, we might say that Montesquieu offers us a proto-liberalism (liberty without equality), rather than one that conforms fully to contemporary expectations.
While admirably harnessing Montesquieu’s thought to address issues that have confronted contemporary liberalism for many decades now, Callanan’s attraction to systematicity here may be done at the cost of overriding some of Montesquieu’s more exasperating, but also most curious and challenging, moments.
