History must be illustrated by the laws, and the laws by history.
When I read Montesquieu, I envision him holding the globe in his hand, or rather in his mind, as he studies the history of mankind, the laws and customs of nations and peoples around the world. The Laws are deposits of wisdom, and indirect reflections of the characters and histories of the peoples. If one comprehends the spirit of the laws, one comprehends the world.
Montesquieu is to political science what Darwin is to biology, in that he subsumed all the diverse elements in the field into a unified system, and laid the groundwork for further studies. Unlike Darwin’s magnum opus, however, The Spirit of the Laws is full of humour, so much so that Montesquieu had to check himself, “lest I should be suspected of writing a satire”. (Book III. Ch. VI)
The framers of the Constitution of the United States cited Montesquieu as an preeminent authority on the principle of separation of powers, the bedrock principle of the constitutions of some of the greatest nations; The fact that he, an 18th-century Frenchman who had never been to China, captured the spirit of that ancient empire, long before modern scholars arrived at similar conclusions, is another testament to his acumen as a philosopher-scholar.
The Laws of the Chinese
[The legislators of China] confounded together their religion, laws, manners, and customs; all these were morality, all these were virtue. The precepts relating to these four points were what they called rites; and it was in the exact observance of these that the Chinese government triumphed. They spent their whole youth in learning them, their whole life in the practice. They were taught by their men of letters, they were inculcated by the magistrates; and, as they included all the ordinary actions of life, when they found the means of making them strictly observed, China was well governed.
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FROM hence it follows that the laws of China are not destroyed by conquest. Their customs, manners, laws, and religion, being the same thing, they cannot change all these at once; and, as it will happen that either the conqueror or the conquered must change, in China it has always been the conqueror. For, the manners of the conquering nation not being their customs, nor their customs their laws, nor their laws their religion, it has been more easy for them to conform, by degrees, to the vanquished people, than the latter to them.
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THE principal object of government, which the Chinese legislators had in view, was the peace and tranquility of the empire: and subordination appeared to them as the most proper means to maintain it. Filled with this idea, they believed it their duty to inspire a respect for parents, and therefore exerted all their power to effect it. They established an infinite number of rites and ceremonies to do them honour when living, and after their death. It was impossible for them to pay such honours to deceased parents without being led to reverence the living. The ceremonies at the death of a father were more nearly related to religion; those for a living parent had a greater relation to the laws, manners, and customs: however, these were only parts of the same code; but this code was very extensive.
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We shall now shew the relation which things, in appearance the most indifferent, may have to the fundamental constitution of China. This empire is formed on the plan of a government of a family. If you diminish the paternal authority, or even if you retrench the ceremonies which express your respect for it, you weaken the reverence due to magistrates, who are considered as fathers; nor would the magistrates have the same care of the people, whom they ought to look upon as their children; and that tender relation, which subsists between the prince and his subjects, would insensibly be lost. Retrench but one of these habits, and you overturn the state. It is a thing in itself very indifferent, whether the daughter-in-law rises every morning to pay such and such duties to her mother-in-law; but, if we consider that these exterior habits incessantly revive an idea necessary to be imprinted on all minds, an idea that forms the ruling spirit of the empire, we shall see that it is necessary that such or such a particular action be performed.
References:
- Montesquieu. Complete Works, 4 vols. (1777). Online Library of Liberty. Retrieved July 31, 2022. https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/montesquieu-complete-works-4-vols-1777