The two books under review welcome the conception of Montesquieu as a founding Enlightenment thinker who ushered in important modern perspectives. Andrew Bibby focuses on Montesquieu's consideration of commerce as a key to uncovering his political philosophy, while Brian Singer takes on the separation between the social and the political in his thought. It is refreshing to read two monographs that tackle Montesquieu's thought, with each perspective—the economic and the social—offering great interpretive insights and new evidence that Montesquieu is indeed a major modern political philosopher.

Bibby's focus on political economy is not, as he makes clear, an attempt to identify an underlying economic system. Rather, he is focused on how Montesquieu's economic philosophy relates to his “political philosophy of liberalism” (1). He intends this as a way to elucidate Montesquieu's place on a scale between radical and reactionary Enlightenment thinkers. Bibby ultimately supports Thomas Pangle's and, more recently, Paul Rahe's contention that Montesquieu belongs to the radical rather than the reactionary Enlightenment that sought to entrench and defend the monarchy's and, with it, the nobility's entitlements (113).

Bibby's efforts to show the relationship between Montesquieu's economic and political arguments are extremely fruitful. While I might quibble with the claim that Montesquieu scholarship is increasingly affirming disorder and lack of design in his work (1), Bibby's accounts of the nature, historical context, and place within the corpus of Montesquieu's economic arguments do indeed help show the thinker's commitment to liberal politics. For instance, Bibby does a masterful job of demonstrating that Montesquieu's arguments in favor of allowing the nobility to profit from commerce is in the service of ennobling commerce rather than enriching the nobility (54, 69). And, in perhaps an even more original and important contribution, Bibby provides a historically sensitive and theoretically convincing interpretation of Montesquieu's seemingly tentative support for the natural right to property in the context of monarchy and its resistance to self-ownership property justifications (124).

Bibby's recounting of Montesquieu's regime preferences through the lens of economics leads to his conclusion, again in line with Pangle, that the thinker preferred the English regime to French monarchy, as well as to earlier forms of republicanism, from ancient versions to the more recent Dutch option. The arguments Bibby marshals to make this argument are convincing. He demonstrates that commerce thrives in a nexus of several factors, including political liberty, property rights, and religious toleration, all of which points to a necessary relationship between economic and political liberalism.

While Bibby rejects attempts to interpret Montesquieu as a monarchist whose economic ideas are in some fashion statist, he also wants to split the difference between some of the disagreements between Pangle and other prominent interpreters of Montesquieu. On the issue of religion, Bibby seems to reject Pangle's secularization thesis, and more modestly suggests that Montesquieu's strategy regarding religion is to provide modern liberalism with the tools to accept religious opinions that support liberty and commerce and jettison ones that do not (see 13, 147). In his section on religious toleration, however, Bibby does not fully flesh out his differences with Pangle on religion and largely appears to agree that religion, one way or another, ought to be subordinated to commercial concerns. On the other hand, Bibby provides a useful clarification of Montesquieu's seemingly contre coeur promotion of commerce. Against Manent's argument that Montesquieu promotes commerce not as natural but as a historical phenomenon, Bibby aptly shows that Montesquieu's presentation of commerce is driven by his refusal to erect a new ideal in place of the ones he helps tear down.

Singer's book offers a detailed and far-reaching account of Montesquieu's so-called discovery of the social. The overarching purpose of the exercise, as we discover largely in the final chapter of the book, is to look back to Montesquieu as a way to gain clarity about the concept of the social, which Singer understands to have been frayed by the many iterations it has undergone since discovery. For the most part, however, the book offers powerful interpretive insights into key aspects of Montesquieu's work. Singer's focus on Montesquieu's discovery of the social takes him through accounts of the thinker's approach to law, discussion of regime types, and the importance of moeurs, frequently contributing meaningful interpretive insights on these and other significant topics in The Spirit of the Laws.

Singer begins with a discussion of the meaning of laws in general for Montesquieu, convincingly demonstrating that Montesquieu's hierarchy of laws is not meant to present a coherent moral order. Rather, all the types of laws Montesquieu identifies in the first book—so difficult to interpret—are more a “post hoc principle of intelligibility” (24) than a principle of order. Singer shows how Montesquieu brings to the fore various types of law, all of which have their own logic, without an overarching unity. The first step in establishing the social is achieved by Montesquieu (and not, contra Wolin, by Locke [99–100]) through fragmenting “centralized legal systems” and “conceptual universals” (26).

This fragmentation permits us to conceive of symbolic meanings, and complicated relationships between power structures and edifices of meaning which are neither fully constructed nor fully given. Singer credits Montesquieu with separating law from power (particularly through his account of despotism), leaving room for horizontal relations in society that are not fully determined or subsumed by political and hierarchical ones. Against Durkheim, who argued that Montesquieu represents an incomplete epistemic move towards a positivist conception of the social, Singer embraces Montesquieu's rich understanding of the relationship between the political and the social, without reducing one to the other (7–8).

While Singer does not engage directly with the question of whether Montesquieu has a preferred regime type, he does identify monarchy as the regime type that most accords with Montesquieu's discovery of the social. Despotism lacks a thick symbolic order; democracy fetishizes law and carries a “sadomasochistic strain” (63); and the English situation is paradoxical, in that the political realm provides almost none of the symbolic order and the social realm comes into its own, but the antisocial attributes of the English make this a society of dysfunctional individuals with a peculiarly thin social symbolic life. Monarchy is the “sole regime with a properly social bond distinguishable from the familial and political bonds” (117). In Singer's view, honor—the spring of monarchy—establishes a horizontal bond among subjects that is separate from both law and power, though it is tied to these as well.

It is possible to wonder if honor is appropriately understood as something that is both social and political when Montesquieu also states that honor is bound tightly to serving the crown, if according to one's own sense of propriety. Honor may be analytically separate from law and power, but it is bound up with both such that the distinction between vertical and horizontal relations is not as deep as it might need to be for Singer to claim it as a key moment in the development of the social. The social is a slippery concept, sometimes difficult to nail down in the course of Singer's monograph. If the social is an epistemic category wherein we conceptualize regimes as something other than expressions of law or power, then it would seem England is analytically the locus of the social in Montesquieu's thought. Yet Singer is also using the term “social” to mean something like sociable, which then becomes a standard for a functioning regime—which French monarchy is but the English regime is not. It is admirable that Singer manages to unfurl as much of what Montesquieu offers with respect to these concepts as he does, and his desire not to reduce either the notion of the social or Montesquieu's contributions to its development are admirable, but perhaps something of clarity regarding the social fails to emerge as well.