Montesquieu’s Liberalism and the Problem of Universal Politics by Keegan Callanan (review)

The aim of this splendid book is not only a fine-grained understanding of one of the founders of liberalism, but a renewed respect for a liberal tradition that transcends those that are found nowadays ‘floating on the mild breeze of rational self-interest alone’ (p. 26). Keegan Callanan’s argument is multi-layered but strikingly cohesive, as he believes there is an overriding unity to Montesquieu’s thought. He claims that the author of De l’esprit des lois was a moral but not a political universalist; that contrary to a long debate over whether he favoured monarchy or republicanism, he was actually a regime pluralist in principle; that his core principle sought ‘free and moderate government’ (p. 105), but that this could be met by a wide variety of types of polity. In Chapter 2, Callanan makes an intriguing case for Montesquieu being in important ways the last of the Humanist Constitutionalists, a late-sixteenth-century school featuring François Hotman and Étienne Pasquier, who used classical scholarship to argue that imperial Roman law ruled too schematic a society and too absolutist a government to fit the quite different circumstances of French history — with the key difference that, unlike his predecessors, the Baron de La Brède did not specify which of the intermediate institutions to which he famously drew attention (the Parlement, the États-généraux) should serve as the designated check on absolutism. Callanan also spends roughly half the book on religion specifically, and the culture of liberalism more generally. Here, he places great weight on Montesquieu’s remark that despotism is an intellectually easy default, whereas moderate government requires constant attention to tempering and balancing different interests and passions. He finds that Montesquieu had thought deeply enough about the requisites of such a liberal culture to serve as a better guide to that contested subject than most of our contemporary models. Part of the blending and tempering, he argues, must come from religion, for Callanan’s Montesquieu is not an Enlightenment secularist. Instead, citing his treatment of examples ranging from Japan to Ethiopia (pp. 192 and 196), he offers us a figure more reminiscent of Tocqueville, with Montesquieu’s view that religion can tone down the need for everything from material gratification to excessive judicial punishment. Likewise, he finds the spread of commerce to be a source not of the atrophy of religion, which would likely be harmful, but of its softening. Interpersonal tolerance is as important a part of Montesquieu’s enterprise, Callanan tells us, as state toleration, and generalized trade is perhaps the most powerful agent of its daily practice. When the Frenchman famously writes that ‘le commerce guérit des préjugés destructeurs’, Callanan is at pains to infer that it is religious prejudices that he probably had in mind (p. 218). Trade, above all, is what prompts the observation, comparison, and reflection that ultimately bring about a kind of ‘reflective commercial tolerance’ essential to liberal culture (pp. 224–25). Patiently researched, meticulously organized, judiciously argued, and elegantly written, this is a work of real distinction.