Abstract
Montesquieu’s lifelong interest in matters of political economy can be divided into three major themes: first, the controversy over public debt, coinciding with the period of the Regency (1715–26) during which Montesquieu wrote the Persian Letters (1721). Second, the problem of war finance, coinciding generally with Fleury’s France (1726–34), during which time Montesquieu composed and wrote Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline (1734). Third, the emerging “science of commerce,” a topic that interested Montesquieu during what Colin Jones has called the “Unsuspected Golden Years” (1743–56) in France. During this time, Montesquieu put the finishing touches on The Spirit of the Laws and published “In Defense” of The Spirit of the Laws (1750).1
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Notes
See, for a useful starting point of biographical sources, François Cadilhon. “Biography of Montesquieu.” <http://dictionnaire-montesquieu.ens-lyon.fr/en/article/1376476261/en>; see also Pierre Ferdinand Barrière. 1951. L’Académie de Bordeaux. Centre de culture internationale au XVIIIe siècle (1712–1792). Bordeaux: PUF
Robert Shackleton. 1961. Montesquieu: A Critical Biography. London: Oxford University Press; Louis Desgraves. 1985. Montesquieu. Paris: Mazarine
Louis Desgraves. 1985. Montesquieu. Paris: Mazarine;
François Cadilhon. 1996. Montesquieu ou l’ingrate réalité du quotidien bordelaise. Mont-de-Marsan: Éditions interuniversitaires.;
Ehrard, Jean. 1998. L’Esprit des mots: Montesquieu en luimême et parmi les siens, Genève: Droz.
Mauldon, Margaret and Andrew Khan, eds. 2008. Persian Letters, Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
David W. Carrithers and Patrick Coleman, eds. 2002. Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation. 161.
For more see Michael Sonenscher. 2007. Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Jean Ehrard has compared Montesquieu’s plan to the other proposals; quoted in Carrithers, David W. 2002. “Montesquieu and the Spirit of French Finance: An Analysis of His Mémoire sur les dettes de l’état (1715).” In Carrithers and Coleman, Montesquieu and the Spirit of Modernity, 161.
See Carrithers, David and Patrick Coleman, eds. 2002. Montesquieu and Modernity, Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 177. For some commentators, the plan was too cautious, in that it left the privileges of the intermediary bodies unmolested.
See Joel Felix. 2001. “The Economy.” In Old Regime France: 1648–1788, eds. William Doyle. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Colin Jones. 2002. The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to Napoleon 1715–99. New York: Columbia University Press.
William J. Bernstein. 2004. The Birth of Plenty: How the Prosperity of the Modern World Was Created. New York: McGraw-Hill.
See Antoin E Murphy. 1997. John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 5. Some historians think Hume missed the mark here (see Jones, The Great Nation, 71). But Jones is slightly off in suggesting that Montesquieu “bemoaned” the social mobility, as a result of the system.
See Phillippe Fontaine. 1996. “The French Economists and Politics, 1750–1850: The Science and Art of Political Economy.” The Canadian Journal of Economics 29 (2): 383.
See Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller, and Harold S. Stone. Eds. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, xv; and Jones, The Great Nation, 113, for the intendants as police.
See Sonenscher, referring to Melvin Richter. 1977. The Political Theory of Montesquieu, Cambridge: University Press, 41–45;
and Paul Rahe. 2005. “The Book That Never Was: Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Romans in Historical Context.” History of Political Thought 26: 43–89.
Montesquieu’s revision of Hobbes is well-known. Yet Montesquieu appears to have come to appreciate an important pillar in Hobbes philosophy. Hobbes had argued that “every man who has power tends to abuse that power; he will go up to the point where he meets with barriers.” Considering Montesquieu’s apparent rejection of Hobbes, it is all the more interesting to observe that Montesquieu carried, in his notebook, a scribbling that he had copied an English phrase he had read, from 1730, during his stay in England; it was a passage from The Craftsman, Bolinbroke’s journal. Here it was: “The Love of power is natural; it is insatiable; almost constantly whetted, and nevery cloyed by possession” (OC-II, 1358). See also Simone Goyard-Fabre. 1980. Montesquieu: Adversaire de Hobbes. Paris: Minard. It is clear that his interest in Hobbes did not leave him; he came to own an edition of the Latin works of Hobbes, including the French translations of De cive. From 1725 to 1750 Montesquieu constantly referred to the “terrible system.”
John Locke and Peter Laslett. 1988. Locke: Two Treatises of Government. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 12–13.
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Bibby, A.S. (2016). Montesquieu Économiste. In: Montesquieu’s Political Economy. Recovering Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137477224_2
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