Scholarly interest in Montesquieu, the eighteenth-century French political thinker, has blossomed over the last 20 years. In addition to further analyzing his longstanding link to the American Founders, scholars have looked to him for thoughts on international relations, despotism, and the relationship between culture and law.

In line with that renewed interest, Anthem Press has recently released a new translation and commentary on Montesquieu’s magnum opus, The Spirit of the Laws, from William B. Allen. Allen, who served under the Reagan and Bush administrations and has published extensively on the American founding, certainly did not need to publish this translation and commentary out of any professional need. Instead, his work exudes not just intellectual curiosity but also personal love for the subject.

This volume also has a long backstory. In his preface to The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu writes, “I request a consideration which I fear some may not accord me: that is, not to judge by a moment’s reading a work of twenty years.” William B. Allen has been working on this translation for more than fifty.

I cannot do justice to Allen’s effort. He engages the immense complexity of The Spirit of the Laws with a range and depth worthy of his subject. He speaks of and with Montesquieu as an old friend with whom he has conversed warmly and beneficially for much of his life.

To understand Allen’s distinct contribution to the study of Montesquieu, we must touch on other views of the work to which he responds. For some interpreters, Montesquieu’s “spirit” consists of something akin to the zeitgeist. The laws have an underlying sentiment that the lawmaker must perceive, react to, and to some limited extent, guide. Moreover, The Spirit of the Laws lacks any real foundation in nature. Instead, Montesquieu acts as a kind of sociologist, dispassionately observing the infinite variety among peoples, their societies, and their political orders as part of pinpointing the spirit of each. His answers to political problems consist largely of a moderation built around economic commerce that seeks peace at the cost of the noble, comfort instead of virtue. His system of separation of powers, too, partakes in this lowering of the political by seeking to limit governmental power to thwart despotism. These answers, moreover, remain subject to the deterministic limitations of climate and terrain that constrain human possibility and thus, ultimately, human political achievement.

Allen’s extended commentary challenges these and similar interpretations. His Montesquieu looks more like Aristotle than he does a modern sociologist. At the same time, Allen’s Montesquieu does not merely reprint Ancient thoughts. Instead, Allen writes, “Montesquieu labored to integrate what was thought prior to modernity with what surfaced in modern theorizing.” This Montesquieu has one foot in the classical world and another in the early modern, seeking to place them in helpful conversation in pursuit of a politics superior to either.

To begin, Allen argues that most analyses of Montesquieu have misunderstood the French word espirit, a word essential for the substance of the book and from which we derive the word “spirit” found in the work’s title. Instead of a collective historical movement of sentiments, Allen sees espirit’s “foundation in reason.” The “Spirit of the Laws,” in other words, is seeking out the reason underlying and informing the laws enacted by particular political regimes across time and place. Thus, human law itself should be the application of reason in response to the circumstances the state encounters. Allen argues that human law’s basis in reason shows Montesquieu to hold to a natural law not that distant from the classical world. This view, moreover, is prescriptive, not descriptive. Not all laws follow reason, but all should.

Despite these classical echoes, Allen sees Montesquieu as starting from a decidedly modern position, “a regime of libertarian individualism.” Montesquieu’s individualism privileges “human personality” over claims of the community. The synthesis with Ancient thought pertains to how human personality relates to what Allen refers to as the Frenchman’s four “cardinal goods,” themselves derived largely from the reason-based spirit. These four consist of virtue, liberty, justice, and constitutionalism.

Of the four, we must start with liberty. Liberty for the Frenchman is a complex concept. It does not reside in complete independence but exists under external and internal limits, seeking instead to choose within the realm of the possible. In this sense, Montesquieu’s liberty “threads the needle between necessity and opportunity.” These seem to include for Allen both moral and material spheres of possibility within which the human may choose. Montesquieu is known by some for claiming a kind of climate or terrain-based determinism. Allen pushes back that Montesquieu sees these material factors as influences but far from destroying human choice. India, for example, legislates to make climate factors worse, reinforcing elements of despotism. Book 18 puts the final nail in on this point for Allen. Allen gives a subtle interpretation of Montesquieu’s reading of Thucydides and Herodotus to make the case for politics having agency in contrast to climate or terrain.

With this set-up, liberty includes a philosophical component of free will, a political component pertaining to the government, and a civil one in relation to other persons. This concept of human personality, expressed in libertarian individualism, understands that “people are as independent and consenting at it is possible for them to be when living in society.” At the same time, natural personality is a “non-atomistic individualism.” The individual occupies a privileged place but is created with the need for community, especially the family but also, ultimately, the political community. Thus, Allen sees Montesquieu as prioritizing the family as the building block of society and an institution that the community serves in pursuit of its more fundamental goal of serving the individual.

Liberty is the priority among the cardinal goods. Montesquieu posits liberty’s centrality most famously in Book 11, where it receives a privileged status among the purposes regimes might seek. Yet Allen sees other clues, understanding books 15 through 17 as central to work with their focus on the liberty of the individual from civil, domestic, and political slavery. Liberty also holds an ordering relationship to the other cardinal goods that Allen lists, enabling them or serving as the higher goal that those other goods pursue.

Consider the other cardinal good of virtue. Allen sees Montesquieu’s virtue as not merely the “political virtue” that is the principle of democracy with its love of the laws and equality. Instead, Allen says Montesquieu holds to a “moral virtue” consisting of “moral excellence” whose standard is a form of natural law. As the Ancients would say, we should pursue virtue. Yet liberty must precede virtue because virtuous actions need to stem from goods wanted and thus freely chosen. Thus, laws pursuing this liberty-grounded virtue will permit people to express and live by errant conceptions of the good while still seeing them as errant. Allen boldly claims that placing this liberty as virtue’s prerequisite improved upon the Ancients by better facilitating their purposes.

Allen’s most important challenge comes in articulating Montesquieu’s view of justice. Many readers of Montesquieu declare his work to contain no such view, at least not one beyond situational ethics bound to time and place. Allen admits that “no direct argument on behalf of justice is made in the entire book” but he insists that The Spirit of the Laws contains a substantive, natural view of right not entirely subject to circumstance. It begins with the basic concept of giving to each his or her due. However, such a vague notion hardly could carry a substantive view of justice without much more. To find that much more, the reader must proceed inductively, amassing universals from myriad particulars. Montesquieu tells us that he took that same approach himself in composing The Spirit of the Laws as well as admitting that he did not exhaust the analysis of his subjects for, “it is not a matter of causing one to read but of causing one to think.” “Justice as a norm of nature” entails seeing what is universally true and particularly situated with the answers to the former often coming, piecemeal, out of discussion of the latter. In so doing, Montesquieu provides his careful readers with training in the kind of reasoning befitting a political thinker.

Despite maintaining some natural view of virtue and justice, Montesquieu does urge moderation, even of virtue and justice (“even virtue has need of limits”). Montesquieu sees the Ancient demands regarding these concepts as in some sense too harsh and too prone to lead to despotism in practice, even if they are good in themselves. At times one should accept what is less good, even in itself bad, for the sake of the best possible overall. Thus, Montesquieu takes a realistic view of what is possible and advises using what a political community already has rather than instituting massive reform (or revolution) in pursuit of purity. The best does not change whereas the good might do so in its pursuit of the best in reaction to limitations of circumstance.

This point also comes out in Allen’s discussion of Montesquieu and religion. Montesquieu is no atheist or agnostic, as some interpreters claim. Instead, for Allen, Montesquieu separates the truth about religion and the study of politics for two reasons, neither of which involve a rejection of the former. First, religion involves matters that reside outside of human reason whereas politics resides within reason’s limits. Religion does not reject Montesquieu’s spirit but does involve another, higher One. Thus, Allen states different though not conflicting ends for the two: “Human laws legislate about the good, while the law of religion legislate about the best.” Second, “false religions” exist but “may yet have some political utility.” Allen notes that even false religion provides “certainty” which people desire. Montesquieu also pinpoints other political goods that even false religions provide as well as even noting some downsides politically to the true faith. This caution, again, does not deny the existence of the good or the perfect, politically or religiously. However, it tempers human efforts at their attainment.

Allen also wishes to modify how we understand another important contribution from Montesquieu: the relationship between politics and commerce. Allen writes from the perspective that people focus too much on commerce as economic trade in goods. He thinks something broader is taking place in this work. Along these lines, Allen wishes he could translate the French word rendered “commerce” in English as “intercourse” but cannot due to the longstanding practice. That change, he believes, would have helped readers to focus on commerce as broader interactions among peoples, not just in goods but in manners, mores, principles, religion, and more. “It is concerned,” Allen argues, “not with gains of trade but with the interpenetration of peoples.” The idea that economic intercourse facilitates other, more cultural, exchanges is not controversial. The idea that such exchanges moderate regimes, sometimes for the good, is broadly accepted as well. But Allen’s concern seems to be that we have made non-economic exchanges too connected, even dependent, on economic ones for Montesquieu. The real relationship should be reversed. Thus, in discussing the ancient republic of Marseilles, Allen concludes that Montesquieu thinks commerce as cultural intercourse “bears advantages for a well-constituted regime that intends to benefit from it, while a commerce of trade alone does not do so.”

Relatedly, Allen argues that our reading of Montesquieu needs refinement regarding the control or at least freedom politics holds in relation to economic trade. Allen sees in Montesquieu that regimes take the political health and priorities of the regime into consideration in whether or how they engage in commerce. Even England for Montesquieu, though deeply concerned with economic gain, operates its trade ultimately from “political necessity” or “political needs.”

The above points to the conclusion that Montesquieu does lower the standards for which politics will act coercively in comparison to the Ancients. But Allen claims he does not deny that excellence is good and thus that politics might encourage it. It is a delicate balance of Ancient and Modern that hinges on the capacity of individuals and societies to ensure safety by force, if necessary, and virtue by persuasion. This point makes education an important point for Montesquieu, for, “nature makes men to be free but does not endow men either with the full range of capacities to make freedom self-executing, or the circumstances with respect to strength and the passions as to make it necessarily a first choice.” In his discussions of America here, Allen sees our regime as one of the best at walking this fine line.

The final cardinal good, constitutions, operates more as a means to the others, especially liberty, than as a purpose in itself. That constitutions serve this purpose does not mean this good lacks importance. Allen notes that “simply positing liberty as the end would not be sufficient. It does take deliberate, orchestrated design in order to accomplish it.” In other words, a noble goal needs the right means to be achieved. Those knowing American history and its first written constitution, the Articles of Confederation, will see an example of this point.

Allen gives extensive discussion here to separation of powers, the concept in which Montesquieu most influenced the American Founders and for which he receives his broadest recognition. He thinks separation of powers is better rendered “separation of authorities.” In this correction, Allen sees Montesquieu trying to move political life from the raw coercive force of despotism toward a shared and thus limited command known as authority. The goal is to achieve a feeling of security in relation to others that is crucial to liberty. Allen here sees Montesquieu developing a “hybrid constitution” grounded in liberty that transcends seemingly permanent class conflicts that dominate ancient political histories in favor of a regime based on basic equality among all.

With this underlying spirit or reason to the laws, Allen delves into the myriad discussions that Montesquieu writes regarding how the laws of particular regimes should respect human personality and the cardinal goods. Society itself, while a constraint in theory, actually expands liberty through the protection of the law, both from governmental despotism (political liberty) and oppression from fellow citizens (civil liberty). Yet within these constitutions, human laws, both customary and statutory, should aim for a kind of moderation both in expectations and in enforcement.

Allen’s analysis is impressive in its engagement with the text and often insightful in what he brings to light. His argument for a more reason-based meaning of “espirit” is persuasive as is his position that Montesquieu holds to a form of natural law. That Montesquieu consciously tries to synthesize Ancient and Modern on a grand scale gives a greatly helpful lens through which to understand the work as a whole.

One wonders, though, whether Allen’s Montesquieu succeeds as much as Allen at times seems to think he does. First, individualism both “libertarian” and “non-atomistic” seems like a difficult combination to hold together in experience. Can the communities of family and city maintain themselves in a healthy form in a regime that so prioritizes the individual? Can the basis of liberty as Montesquieu conceives it long sustain justice and virtue?

Second, Allen’s discussion of Montesquieu’s separation of powers/authorities might sell the Frenchmen a bit short. Allen focuses, as most do, on separation of powers/authorities as limiting the exercise of political might. Yet Montesquieu argues that the distinction of legislative, executive, and judicial powers is a natural classification of permanent elements of political power. The division among institutions according to this principle is conducive to free government acting effectively, not just restraint of despotism.

Third, Allen might oversell Montesquieu’s intent, much less success, in a hybrid constitution that can fix social and economic class division. His discussion of Aristocracy in Book 11 seems to underplay the overall power of the aristocracy and even its legitimacy. He admits they always will exist because differences will exist. But he seems to underplay that aristocrats don’t just have more wealth but often more influence in social, political, and religious matters. We seem stuck with class divisions as a permanent political matter, even if some regimes better address them.

Still, these matters do not take away from an impressive and important achievement. Allen demands we look at Montesquieu as a political philosopher first and foremost, not as a historian or sociologist. He then pushes us to consider The Spirit of the Laws as a monumental work of such philosophy, one synthesizing the wisdom of the ancients and the moderns into something both familiar and new. The study of The Spirit of the Laws has been greatly improved by Allen’s work. We would be greatly improved by careful, sustained use of this new edition.