Abstract
The European debate about human diversity, whose terms had been dictated for two centuries by biblical criticism, received a fresh burst of impetus with the publication, in 1748, of Montesquieu’s Esprit des lois. By treating human laws as physical laws, this work contributed to turning the discussion about different peoples into an evaluation of different societies. Montesquieu’s concept of the general spirit showed how societies could be analyzed by looking at the functional connections of different factors, such as climate, religion, laws, customs, and manners, which also made it possible to compare and classify them. This perspective emphasized the multiplicity of causal links. However, in the immediate stir generated by the text throughout Europe, Montesquieu’s relativistic approach remained in the background. It was the salience he gave to physical causes, especially climate, that drew attention.
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Notes
David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), ed. Lewis A. Selby-Bigge, II edn. rev. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), book II, part III, sect. I, 402–3.
Charles-Louis de Secondat de Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois (1748), in Œuvres complètes, ed. André Masson, 3 vols. (Paris: Nagel, 1950–55), I: lix.
See Sergio Landucci, I filosofi e i selvaggi, 1580–1780 (Bari: Laterza, 1972), 74–75.
Roberto Romani, National Character and Public Spirit in Britain and France 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2002), 7–25.
Francine Markovits-Pessel, “Althusser et Montesquieu: l’histoire comme philosophie expérimentale,”, Althusser philosophe, ed. Pierre Raymond (Paris: PUF, 1997), 31–74.
Jean-Baptiste Dubos’s Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et la peinture, published in 1719, were translated into English by Nugent in 1748; Espiard de la Borde’s Essai sur le génie et le caractère des nations, originally published in 1743, was reprinted in 1752 with the title of L’Esprit des Nations, and translated into English in 1753 as The Spirit of Nations; John Arbuthnot’s An Essay Concerning the Effects of the Air on Human Bodies came out in 1733 and was translated into French in 1742. In 1735, in his Enquiry into the Life and Writings of Homer, Thomas Blackwell also made extensive use of climate theory.
See Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise (Paris: Gabalda, 1909), 206–11.
Lucien Febvre, La terre et l’évolution humaine (1922) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1970), 11–27, 105–28.
Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 551–622.
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XIV, chaps. 2–5, 305–12; book XXI, chap. 1, 467–68. See Franco Venturi, “Oriental Despotism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 24 (1963): 133–42.
Sharon Krause, “Despotism in The Spirit of Laws”, in Montesquieu’s Science of Politics. Essays on the Spirit of Laws, ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2001), 231–71.
Joan Pau Rubiés, “Oriental Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu,” The Journal of Early Modern History 9, 1–2 (2005): 109–80.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du contrat social (1762), in Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), book III, chap. VIII, III: 414–16; Rousseau was the first to use the expression “caractère national.” See Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 36–37.
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XIV, chaps. 2–3, book XIX, chap. 2, 306, 310, 410–41. See Georges Benrekassa, Montesquieu, la liberté et l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 1996), 91–95.
Carlo Borghero, “Libertà e necessità: clima ed ‘esprit général’ nell’Esprit des lois”, in Libertà, necessità e storia. Percorsi dell’Esprit des lois di Montesquieu, ed. Domenico Felice (Naples: Bibliopolis, 2003), 137–201.
Alison K. Howard, “Montesquieu, Voltaire and Rousseau in Eighteenth Century Scotland: A Check List of Editions and Translations of Their Works Published in Scotland before 1801,” The Bibliotheck 2 (1959): 44–46
Both Jesuits and Jansenists attacked Montesquieu’s work, respectively in the Journal des Trévoux in April 1749 and in the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques in October. The Défense de l’Esprit des lois, anonymously published in February 1750, further irritated ecclesiastic circles by ignoring religious issues. On November 29, 1751, L’Esprit des lois was blacklisted. See Robert Shackleton, Montesquieu: A Critical Biography (London: Oxford U. P., 1961), 356–77.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Recherches sur le causes des progrès et de la décadence des sciences et des arts ou réflexions sur l’histoire des progrès des esprit humaine (1748), in Œuvres de Turgot et documents le concernant, ed. Gustave Schelle, 5 vols. (Paris: Librairie Felix Alcan, 1913–23), I: 140.
Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Plan des deux discours sur l’histoire universelle (1750), in Œuvres de Turgot, ed. Eugène Daire, 2 vols. (Paris: Guillaumin, 1844. Reprint Osnabrück: Otto Zeller, 1966), II: 646. For Turgot’s Plan I have used the Daire edition, which reproduces the integral text as bequeathed by Dupont de Nemours, rather than the Schelle edition, which expunged some parts of it.
Turgot, Plan d’un ouvrage sur la géographie politique (1750), in Œuvres, ed. Schelle, I: 255–74.
See Montesquieu’s Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caractères—written between 1736 and 1743, and published posthumously (Œuvres, III: 419–21), on which see Rolando Minuti, “Ambiente naturale e dinamica delle società politiche: aspetti e tensioni di un tema di Montesquieu,”, Leggere l’Esprit des lois. Stato, società e storia nel pensiero di Montesquieu, ed. Domenico Felice (Naples: Liguori, 1998), 139–63.
Montesquieu, Réponses et explications données à la Faculté de Théologie, in Œuvres, II: 173. See Jean Ehrard, L’Idée de nature en France dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle (1963) (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), 691–736.
Sergio Moravia, “Moral-Phisique: Genesis and Evolution of a Rapport”, in Enlightenment Studies in Honour of Lester G. Crocker, ed. Alfred J. Bingham and Virgil W. Topazio (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1979), 163–74.
Salvatore Rotta, “Quattro temi dell’Esprit des lois,” Cromohs 7 (2002): 1–35.
Jean-Patrice Courtois, “Le physique et le moral dans la théorie du climat de Montesquieu,”, Le Travail des Lumières: Pour Georges Benrekassa, ed. Caroline Jacot-Grapa et al. (Paris: Champion, 2002), 139–56.
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XIV, chaps. 5 and 11, 311–19. See Rolando Minuti, Oriente barbarico e storiografia settecentesca: Rappresentazioni della storia dei Tartari nella cultura francese del XVIII secolo (Venice: Marsilio, 1994), chap. 2.
Jacques Pereira, Montesquieu et la Chine (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2008).
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XIX, chap. 4, 412. On Montesquieu’s relativism, see Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought (1989), trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1993), 353–99.
Paul E. Chamley, “The Conflict between Montesquieu and Hume: A Study of the Origins of Adam Smith’s Universalism,”, Essays on Adam Smith, ed. Andrew S. Skinner and Thomas Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 274–309.
See Ernest C. Mossner, The Life of David Hume (1954) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 229.
See also Frank T. H. Fletcher, Montesquieu and English Politics, 1750–1800 (London: Edward Arnold, 1939)
Emilio Mazza, Falsi e cortesi: Pregiudizi, stereotipi e caratteri nazionali in Montesquieu, Hume e Algarotti (Milan: Hoepli, 2002), 27–32.
David Hume, “Of National Characters,” (1748) in Essays Moral, Political and Literary, ed. Eugene F. Miller (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985), 197–215.
See Hume, The Letters of David Hume, ed. John Y. T. Greig, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), I: 21.
Emilio Mazza, “David Hume e i caratteri nazionali,” Materiali per una storia della cultura giuridica 32 (2002): 476–80.
Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity 1689–1830 (Cambridge, Cambridge U. P., 1994), 5–10.
Hume, “Of the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences” and “Of Refinement in the Arts,”, Essays, 111–37 and 276–78. On which see Duncan Forbes, Hume’s Philosophical Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1975), 226–27; Romani, National Character and Public Spirit, 159–69.
Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688 (1754–62), 6 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), Appendix IV, V: 132.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), in Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Lewis A. Selby-Bigge, III edn. rev. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 83. Forbes rightly stresses the coherence of Hume’s historic approach, in Hume’s Philosophical Politics, 106–21.
David Hume, “A Dialogue,”, Enquiries, 330–37, on which see Daniel Carey, “Method, Moral Sense, and the Problem of Diversity: Francis Hutcheson and the Scottish Enlightenment,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 5 (1997): 275–96.
Carey, Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 2006), chap. 5.
This query was first raised by Hume on December 4, 1754 in a meeting over which he presided. See Mossner, Life of David Hume, 281–82. On the Select Society, see Roger L. Emerson, “The Social Composition of Enlightened Scotland: The Select Society of Edinburgh 1754–1764,” Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 114 (1973): 291–329.
Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (I edn. 1759; VI edn. 1790), ed. David D. Raphael and Alec L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1984), 202–3.
Ibid., 629–30 (which records the footnote as it appears in the 1753–54 edition) and 208 for the final version of the footnote, as published in 1777. The changes made for the 1777 edition are discussed in chapter 4 of this book. Hume’s nineteenth-century editors, Thomas Hill Green and Thomas Hodge Grose, erroneously presented the version given above as the definitive one, thereby influencing the historiographic debate: it was thought that Hume made no further changes to the passage, displaying total disinterest in the ongoing debate on the subject. It was only in 1985 that the error was corrected by Eugene F. Miller. See John Immerwahr, “Hume’s Revised Racism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992): 481–86.
Aaron Garrett, “Hume’s Revised Racism Revisited,” Hume Studies 26 (2000): 171–77.
Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 253.
Roxann Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), 183–86.
Carl Linnaeus, Systema Naturae (I edn., 1735; X edn., 1758), XII edn. (Stockholm: L. Salvii, 1766–68), 20–24.
See Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge and London: Harvard U. P., 1999).
Richard H. Popkin, “The Philosophical Bases of Modern Racism,”, Racism in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Harold E. Pagliaro (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve U. P.), 1973.
Popkin, “Hume’s Racism,”, The High Road to Pyrrhonism, ed. Richard A. Watson and James E. Force (San Diego: Austin Hill Press, 1980), 251–66.
Popkin, “Hume’s Racism Reconsidered,”, The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Thought (Leiden and New York: E. J. Brill, 1992), 64–75.
Paul Wood discusses the essay on “National Characters” in relation to David Doig’s and Samuel Stanhope Smith’s criticism of Kames’s polygenism, but does not mention Hume’s footnote; see his Introduction to Samuel Stanhope Smith and David Doig, An Essay on the Causes of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species & Two Letters on the Savage State, addressed to the late Lord Kames (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995), 7. According to Anthony Barker, it was James Beattie’s reaction in 1770 that drew attention to Hume’s footnote, ignored up to then by the supporters of slavery, who maintained that the commerce of slaves gave Blacks opportunities they were denied in Africa: The African Link: British Attitudes to the Negro in the Era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1550–1807 (London: Frank Cass and Co., 1978), 115ff.
However, the consensual comments in the 1760s by Immanuel Kant in Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen (Königsberg: Kanter, 1764) and by Jean Bernard Mérian in his French translation of Hume’s essays show how the passage on Negroes did not remain unobserved: Essais moraux et politiques, trans. J. B. Mérian, II edn. (Amsterdam: J. H. Scheider, 1764), 434n.
Peter J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of the World in the Age of Enlightenment (London, Melbourne, and Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982), 246;
Jordan, White over Black, 253; Henry Louis Gates, “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes,”, Race, Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 10–11.
Giuliano Gliozzi, “L’insormontabile natura: clima, razza, progresso” (1986), in Differenze e uguaglianza nella cultura europea moderna: Scritti (1966–1991), ed. Anna Strumia, Introduction Carlo A. Viano (Naples: Vivarium, 1993), 89–90.
Aaron Garrett, “Hume’s ‘Original Difference’: Race, National Character and the Human Sciences,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004): 127–52.
Robert Palter, “Hume and Prejudice,” Hume Studies 21 (1995): 3–23.
Emmanuel C. Eze, “Hume, Race, and Human Nature,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61 (2000): 691–98.
Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751), in Enquiries, 183–204.
See James Moore, “Hume’s Theory of Justice and Property,” Political Studies 24 (1976): 103–19.
David M. Levy and Sandra J. Peart, “Sympathy and Approbation in Hume and Smith: A Solution to the Other Rational Species Problem,” Economics and Philosophy 20 (2004): 331–49.
Robert Wallace, A Dissertation on the Numbers of the Mankind in Ancient and Modern Times: In Which the Superior Popolousness of Antiquity Is Maintained. With an Appendix Containing Additional Observations on the Same Subject and Some Remarks on Mr. Hume’s Political Discourse, Of the Popolousness of Ancient Nations (Edinburgh: G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1753; reprint Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1992). The content of the Dissertation had been presented by Wallace to the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh sometime before 1745, when, due to the Jacobite revolt, the society was closed until 1752. When Hume wrote his essay, he therefore knew Wallace’s argument. The publication of “Popolousness” prompted Wallace to print his Dissertation. See Wallace’s “Advertisement” and Hume’s letter to Montesquieu, June 26, 1753, in Hume, Letters, I: 177. The Appendix, which comprised about half the Dissertation, was instead an entirely new part, and served to confute Hume’s arguments one by one. Montesquieu, who played a central role in the dispute between Hume and Wallace, praised its refined and disinterested tone, and arranged for the French translation of both the Dissertation and the Political Discourses, which appeared in 1754. See Montesquieu to Hume, July 13, 1753, where he referred to Wallace’s translator Élie de Jancourt; Montesquieu to the Abbot Le Blanc, translator of Hume’s Discours politiques, September 13, 1754: Montesquieu, Correspondance, in Œuvres, III: 1516–17, 1470–71.
On the Philosophical Society, see Roger L. Emerson, “The Philosophical Society of Edinburgh, 1737–1747,” British Journal for the History of Science 12 (1979): 165–209.
Emerson, “The Scottish Enlightenment and the End of the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh,” British Journal for the History of Science 21 (1988): 33–66.
Wallace, Dissertation on the Numbers of the Mankind. In a later text, Wallace began to express fears about the overpopulousness of the earth in relation to its limited resources, paving the way for the reflections of Malthus: Various Prospects of Mankind, Nature and Providence (London: A. Millar, 1761).
See James Bonar, Theories of Population from Raleigh to Arthur Young (1931) (London: Cass, 1966), 163–90.
Ernest C. Mossner, “Hume and the Ancient-Modern Controversy, 1725–1752: A Study in Creative Scepticism,” University of Texas Studies in English XXVIII (1949): 139–53.
Mossner, The Life of Hume, 262–68. See also The Rise of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Tatsuya Sakamoto and Hideo Tanaka (London and New York: Routledge, 2003).
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XV, chap. 8, 333–34. Benjamin Franklin’s Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, written in 1751, was published in Boston and London in 1755.
On Montesquieu’s economic argumentation, see Catherine Larrère, “Montesquieu: Economics and Commerce,”, Montesquieu’s Science of Politics: Essays on ‘The Spirit of Laws’ ed. David W. Carrithers, Michael A. Mosher, and Paul A. Rahe (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 335–73.
Céline Spector, Montesquieu et l’émergence de l’économie politique (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2006).
The different conception of labor in antiquity and modernity is viewed as a dramatic split by Aldo Schiavone, La storia spezzata. Roma antica e Occidente moderno (1996) (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 2002), 173–82.
John G. A. Pocock, “Cambridge Paradigms and Scotch Philosophers,”, Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1983), 242–43.
Jacques Roger, Buffon: un philosophe au Jardin du Roi (Paris: Fayard, 1989), 135–51.
Thierry Hoquet, Buffon: histoire naturelle et philosophie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2005), chap. 9.
Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767), ed. Duncan Forbes (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U. P., 1966), 108–21, esp. 112. Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XIV, chaps. 2–3; book XIX, chap. 2; book XVII, chaps. 1–8.
Montesquieu, Esprit des lois, book XV, chaps. 1–19, 325–48; book XXI, chap. 21, 517–21. See Russell P. Jameson, Montesquieu et l’esclavage: Etude sur les origines de l’opinion antiesclavagiste en France au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1911), 330.
Carminella Biondi, ‘Ces esclaves sont des hommes’: Lotta abolizionista e letteratura negrofila nella Francia del Settecento (Pisa: Goliardica, 1979), 111–76.
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Sebastiani, S. (2013). Hume versus Montesquieu: Race against Climate. In: The Scottish Enlightenment. Palgrave Studies in Cultural and Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137069795_2
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