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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 13: THE FRENCH EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ARGUMENT NO GREATER CONTRAST can be envisaged than that between Hume and Montesquieu. Hume breathes the spirit of his own age, while that Montesquieu was much read but little influential is scarcely surprising.

For apart from Vico, whom he almost certainly had not read, the writers whom he most resembles are Durkheim and Weber.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was an Anglophile French aristocrat who grasped in a moment of illumination, not dissimilar to that in which Descartes founded modern philosophy, the great truths that societies are not mere collections of individuals, and that social institutions are not means to the psychological ends of such individuals. In so doing, he broke both with the utilitarianism and with the individualism of his century.

His consequent motive was a practical one; he wished to understand society in order to create an applied science of government by means of which the human condition might be improved. What creates different forms of social life?

“Men are governed by many factors: climate, religion, law, the precepts of government, the examples of the past, customs, manners; and from the combination of such influences there arises a general spirit.” The lawgiver must study the particular society for which he is legislating, because societies greatly differ. The totality of relationships which the lawgiver must take into account compose “the spirit of the laws,” the phrase which Montesquieu used as a title for his major book.

Montesquieu takes the isolated Hobbesian individual to be not only a myth, but a gratuitously misleading myth. If we look at the societies to which individuals belong, we discover that they exemplify quite different types of system. What ends an individual has, what needs, what values, will depend upon the nature of the social system to which he belongs.

But social institutions and the whole framework of legal, customary, and moral rules are devices not to secure ends external to themselves, but native to the psychology of the individual-rather, such institutions and rules supply the necessary background against which alone the ends and needs of the individual can be intelligible.