The Design of Montesquieu'sThe Spirit of the Laws:The Triumph of Freedom over Determinism

Abstract

One of the perennial puzzles of Montesquieu'sThe Spirit of the Lawsis whether it has a coherent design. Although the dominant line of thinking is that this work has no unified structure, another believes it to have some organizing principle, even though proposals as to what it may be have failed to convince for lack of ability to account for various features of the work. I propose thatThe Spirit of the Lawsis organized in a dialectical way, juxtaposing the antitheses of human freedom and determination. The tension between these is manifest in the first half of the work and resolved in the middle, and human freedom worked out and advanced in the second half. This article solves the long-standing question of the design ofThe Spirit of the Lawsand reveals that the work's ultimate purpose is to champion human liberty over determination, contrary to the views of those who read the work as deterministic.

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