Paul A Rahe

Abstract Peter Simpson has performed a great service by highlighting three things: the manner in which the longings that make man a political animal make him a religious animal as well, the intimate connection that always in the past subsisted between the political and the religious spheres, and the degree to which the modern liberal polity’s institution of an artificial separation between the two marks a break with all previous theory and practice. Although I think this separation fragile and always in need of defense, in sharp contrast with Simpson, I argue on Aristotelian grounds that it is highly advantageous both for politics and religion—especially, within Christendom where, in earlier times, doctrinal disputes repeatedly threatened the public peace. Finally, I suggest that the administrative centralization that Simpson rightly laments was due to the Progressives who embraced a critique of the classical liberalism of the American Founders not unlike Simpson’s own.

When Woodrow Wilson, in the course of his campaign for the Presidency in 1912, attacked Thomas Jefferson and Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, he knew what he was about—for the constitutionalism articulated by the latter and embraced, in turn, by the Framers of the American Constitution was a systematic attempt to put into practice something very much like the first principles spelled out in the Declaration of Independence. Montesquieu was not a doctrinaire. He feared that, in his own country and elsewhere, revolution would eventuate in the establishment of a despotism, and so he gently, quietly promoted unobtrusive reform. But the cautious, prudential political science that he outlined in his Spirit of Laws was anything but value-free. If the American framers found his legislative science of use, it was because the hatred of despotism and love for liberty animating its author was grounded in an account of natural right closely akin to the one, espoused in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, that had inspired their revolution.

Democracy in America never mentions the Declaration of Independence. Is this perhaps a sign of hostility to the Declaration’s natural-rights teaching or to abstract principles? Or is it no more significant than The Federalist’s silence on this matter? Both are books of political science, not political philosophy; yet, when appropriate, Tocqueville addresses first principles, and endorses a natural-rights doctrine similar to Locke’s. He wrote primarily for the French, addressing issues he thought decisive for them, especially reconciling the ultra-royalists and the French Catholic Church to the new democratic order. This guided the aspects of American democracy he wanted to emphasize. Thus Jesus Christ’s coming to earth was a political turning point in human history because he “made it understood that all members of the human species are naturally alike and equal.” Given aristocratic dominance in ancient society, without that event the principle of equality might never have been discovered.

► Montesquieu's book on the Romans is a response to Machiavelli's Discourses on Livy. ► Montesquieu prioritizes the security of the individual. ► Machiavelli prefers the well-being of the sovereign. ► Montesquieu sides with Hobbes against Machiavelli. ► Montesquieu embraces commerce; Machiavelli, war. Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name in his extant works just a handful of times. That, however, he read him carefully and thoroughly time and again there can be no doubt, and it is also clear that he couches his argument both in his Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline and in his Spirit of Laws as an appropriation and critique of the work of the predecessor whom he termed ‘this great man’. In this paper I explore the manner in which the Frenchman redeployed the arguments advanced by the Florentine for the purpose of refuting the latter's conclusions.