After Montesquieu: the possibility of republican liberty in a world without virtue

This thesis reassesses the political thought of three 18th-century political thinkers—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785), and John Adams (1735-1826). Despite their differences, I argue that each should be read as deeply engaged with and responding to the analysis of republican government offered in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), by Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. This engagement prompted each author to develop new ways of thinking about the possibility of free government in the modern world. Montesquieu was notoriously pessimistic about the prospects for republican government in modern, commercial societies. He had argued that republican government would require a strict regime of civic education, as well as restrictions on luxury and foreign trade. These features made republican government impossibly difficult to achieve, as well as unattractive, in his day. However, for the authors on which this thesis focuses, Montesquieu had issued not a fatal blow but a challenge worth taking up. Recognizing that there was a genuine problem in realizing republicanism in the large, unequal states of 18th-century Europe, they did not simply demand a return to the past, nor did they assume an optimistic future in which progress and enlightenment would secure the conditions for free government. In the shadow of Montesquieu, a cautiously hopeful republican discourse emerged. Through this re-reading of Rousseau, Mably and Adams this thesis challenges a widespread characterisation of 18th-century republicans as nostalgic for a bygone era and thus as unable to theorize in response to the demands of the modern world. At least for the republicans explored here—which includes Rousseau and Mably, two of the figures most often condemned for such nostalgia—it was clear that the civic virtue and equality of the ancients was no longer possible. They accepted Montesquieu’s view that the absence of such virtue posed a threat to republican politics. This thesis argues that we should nonetheless read these authors as attempting to find what I call sites of republican possibility. For Rousseau, this included locating unexpected contexts—such as stereotypically ‘weaker’ and less wealthy nations—in which cultivating virtue and solidarity was more realistic than attempting to engage in commercial competition with other nations. In the large monarchies of Europe, Mably argued that the privileges of the nobles could be leveraged to start a ‘revolution’ that would bring liberty to the people. He acknowledged that such large European nations would not be able to withdraw from international commerce altogether, but he proposed ways to limit it in such a way as to protect the well-being of the average citizen. Even as other republicans came to believe that moral and material progress, as well as the end of hereditary distinctions would create a natural habitat for republican government in Europe, the thinkers I examine argued that commercial society could produce distinctions and inequalities that were just as detrimental to republican politics. Mably and Adams were derided by their contemporaries for being overly pessimistic, but they in fact presciently diagnosed the problem that material inequality posed in formally equal societies. For Adams, however, this correct diagnosis was combined with an overwhelming sense of doubt about the possibility of limiting such inequality. This meant that compared to Rousseau and Mably, he espoused diminished republican ambitions. By returning to these allegedly outdated republicans, we can see that they revealed a very real problem: to put it in the language of the thinkers I investigate, that there was a potential tension between the imperatives of commerce and those of republicanism. This tension remains alive today. It may be useful, then, to return to those who in some sense anticipated the challenges we face today in protecting our republican democracies.

Keywords: John Adams
Gabriel Bonnot de Mably
Montesquieu
republicanism
Rousseau
commerce