Vickie Sullivan’s commendable Montesquieu book defends a dramatic thesis with scholarly panache. It is generous and meticulous regarding the contributions of other scholars. However, Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe is not the book for those who turn to an Enlightenment author in order to contrast European illumination to the irrationalities that prevail on other continents; nor is it for opponents who inscribe “Orientalist” on the cover of the Spirit of the Laws. It turns out that for Montesquieu, as Sullivan portrays him, the rot lies in Europe itself: in European ideas and practices from the pagan Antiquity of Plato and Aristotle to the founders of modern European political philosophy (Machiavelli and Hobbes), by way of the Christian Scholastic inheritance of the Middle Ages.

For Sullivan’s Montesquieu, who hated Sparta more than any other Greek city, Plato’s works, founded on a secret attraction to the tyrannical practices of Lacedaimonia, were a vehicle for the projection of cruelty into successor civilizations. “The orders of the magistrate were totally [totalement] absolute,” Montesquieu declares, “and weakness [la foiblesse] the greatest crime” (Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1989, Book 29, Chapter 9). Modern readers are forgiven the anachronism if their minds should leap to the twentieth century fascist mind set. Like Plato, Aristotle taught natural slavery and did not free himself from its harshest form, having a “personal” slave. When Aristotle spoke of the “leisure” needed by “citizens,” Montesquieu called it “voluptuousness.” Idleness and luxury contradicted republican equality. Aristotle’s strong sense of Greek difference from “barbarians” was to have a wildly successful “nationalist” future. Finally, the philosopher conveyed a ruinous understanding of finance that paralyzed the growth of commerce.

For Christians in command of states, heresy was equated to treason. Torture (the Inquisition) was justified by a higher authority whose earthly purpose was to condone what otherwise would be regarded as atrocity. Here, Sullivan argues that Montesquieu saw no difference between Christianity and Islam. Machiavelli’s “realism” entertained fantasies of coups d’état and nonchalantly encouraged eliminating whole classes of people, most prominently the “gentlemen.” This idea has perhaps still not lost at least its metaphorical prestige, but it is obviously connected to other terrible eliminatory projects. On Sullivan’s reading of Montesquieu, Machiavelli’s ideas merged with Christian fanaticism, and were responsible for the Catholic massacre of Huguenots, and no doubt entered into Protestant calculations as well. Montesquieu identified despotism as precisely arising from the “principle” of “fear,” which, by contrast, Hobbes counted as the normal passion upon which every stable state relies. For Montesquieu, this led to state-centric thinking that was suspicious of every initiative from society that was not sponsored by the state.

In 1998, Mark Mazower upended the celebratory view of modern Europe in The Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century. Racial and religious hatred and the spirit of imperial conquest were not an exception, a blemish on the inheritance, but rather the inheritance itself. Hannah Arendt’s 1951 Origins of Totalitarianism is another version of Mazower’s story. Sullivan’s Despotic Ideas is, in effect, if not in intent, a guide to the ancient sources of those ideas. Karl Popper’s Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) saw in Plato, Hegel, and Marx the “enemy” opposed to an otherwise “open” Western tradition. In Sullivan’s book, advocates of an open society are hard to find, at least before Montesquieu, which brings us to a question from the sociology of knowledge. Montesquieu knew he needed “new words or new meanings” (“Author’s Warning,” Spirit of the Laws), but could he explain how he broke free of the old heritage?

For Sullivan, despotic ideas/practices are dormant viruses in the spiritual body of Europe, which can spring into feverish infection at any time. This is to adopt the premise of continuity. As such, it is indistinguishable from the method that Lynn Hunt (Inventing Human Rights, 2007) and others optimistically invoke to trace the genealogy of now-fashionable claims for “human rights.” If it is fair to believe that good ideas like rights linger on to blossom in later centuries, it is also fair to think that old vices and evils can return as well. Both are cut from the same methodological cloth: Good things and bad persist over time. But I think that a more effective opposition lies in adopting the currently fashionable premise of contingency. Things do not persist over time. Each era sits on its own causal bottom, which puts in doubt claims of intergenerational heritage as well as the project of Sullivan’s Montesquieu.

In Sullivan’s account, Montesquieu was able to recast modern political philosophy for two reasons. The first was Christianity. Sullivan distinguishes between the goodness of an original Christianity (charity) and the nasty consequences of its institutional capture. The hope of extracting one from the other reveals, I think, her own faith, which may allow her better to tolerate this European secular heritage, and gives her a motive for showing how badly it turned out. Whether these are Montesquieu’s convictions is another matter.

The second was the practice of “commerce,” the rise of market societies. Both Christianity and commerce “soften” mores and lead to what Sullivan calls a “relative quieting of violence” (p. 207). The ideas, if not always the practices, lead eventually to the eradication of slavery and to an increase in equality between men and women.

One could dissent from the optimism or finality of this conclusion. Montesquieu had the insight to see that these were the important issues, but we should not suppose that he had anything like a satisfactory answer, for instance, to questions about the stability/instability and distributive consequences of changing state forms and surging capitalist economies in the (then as now) globalizing world. Montesquieu is not best treated as a Whig ideology for an early end to history.

Besides Christianity and commerce, there was for Montesquieu a third formative event, the growth of the empire of Rome. Without that empire, Christianity could not have conquered the West. Did Montesquieu really believe in a separation of doctrine and institution? Conquest was also implicated in commerce. Sullivan appropriately dwells on the figure of Alexander, for Montesquieu a man out of his time, a founder of modernity trapped in antiquity. Alexander’s conquests opened up East–West trade. The utilitarian motive was accompanied by moral engineering. By requiring intermarriage of conqueror and conquered, and incidentally repudiating his teacher Aristotle’s despotic disdain for non-Greeks, Alexander removed the sting of inequality, a move which, had he lived, presumably might have smoothed the way for a more peaceable interstate commerce. Nevertheless, in Montesquieu’s Alexander one sees the modern story of trade by means of imperial conquest. One detects this as well in Montesquieu’s blunter claim that “a conquest can destroy harmful prejudices” (Montesquieu 10.4), which is a thoroughly Machiavellian insight.

Against the importance that Machiavelli and Hobbes conferred on the makers of states, Montesquieu pinned his hopes on an expectation regarding the growing solidity and self-sustaining capacity of “society.” The predictable regularities of the latter would discourage Machiavellian coups. They would blunt the redemption that Hobbes expected from the awakened attentiveness of the political sovereign. Nevertheless, Montesquieu’s regime models are not wholly given over to invisible hand functionalism.

Despite the atrocities and the absence of respect for upholding criminal procedure that Montesquieu saw in Machiavelli’s writing, in some respects he was closer to the Florentine than to the Oxford philosopher. It is not wholly unprecedented to find in Machiavelli’s strange mix of utopian citizen activism, elite manipulation, and collective risk taking a suitable guide for reflecting on the revolutionary turmoil of the modern era. By contrast, we tend to assume that Montesquieu’s moderation, prudence, and search for balance do not make him an especially good guide. But in Montesquieu’s portrait of English public life—“the frenzy of liberty” (Montesquieu 19.27)—we have premonitions of trouble ahead, a free life spinning out of control, combined with denials and surmises regarding how that turmoil might be anchored. A question whose time had not yet arrived—did enlightenment rationalism lead to freedom or to revolutions that skidded off the road?—is already presupposed in Montesquieu’s principal effort to anchor hyperactive public life: “In a free nation it often does not matter whether individuals reason well or badly; it suffices that they reason; from that comes the liberty that protects them from the effects of these same reasoning” (Montesquieu 19.27).

Montesquieu holds that reasoning involved in the “frenzy of liberty” might suggest otherwise: Each individual “would often change parties, he would abandon one and all his friends.” If “terrors arose on the occasion of the overthrow of fundamental laws, they would be insidious, lamentable and heinous and would produce catastrophes.” Leaders might persuade a people to “undertake enterprises against its true interests.” “To defend . . . liberty, a nation might sacrifice its goods, its ease, and its interests.” “It could happen that [a people] would undertake something beyond the forces natural to it.” Such a people could feel “themselves capable of insulting others everywhere.” Here “one would often see the form of an absolute government over the foundation of a free government.” And, finally, he tells his readers: “Those who govern would have a power that revives, so to speak, and is remade daily” (Montesquieus 27.19)

Montesquieu’s description of a political life that involves “stretching all the springs of government and making all the citizens attentive” (Montesquieu 19.27) is everything that Machiavelli wanted for the Roman Republic redux of the Discourses. Admiration oozes from these passages, moderation not so much.

In these images from Montesquieu, I think we find a middle ground between Sullivan’s Montesquieu, who repudiates Machiavelli root and branch, and those who believe Montesquieu did not recast political philosophy but dwelled in the shadow of the Florentine. However, this should not distract the reader from noting my admiration for the text that Vickie Sullivan has published, which is an original argument that has been thoroughly researched, elegantly written, and generously referenced.