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Charles Louis de Secondat Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu's De l 'Esprit des Lois created a sensation when it was first published in 1748, for reasons that I will touch on in this review; but contemporary readers are likely to balk at reading it from end to end. Montesquieu packed, so it seems, pretty much everything he knew into De l'Esprit des Lois. He knew a lot; and it can be a struggle to plow through it all, for example when it comes to his lengthy, and out of date, disquisitions on German law. I will not suggest that readers - even the learned readers of Comparative Legal History - should feel ashamed if they lose steam while trying.
That said, Montesquieu was, in a word, a genius. His thoughts, some of them presented in chapters hardly longer than post-it notes, are always engaging and frequently brilliant, even if now and then they seem comical or even sinister. (More on that anon.) He deserves more credit than he always gets, for example for discovering fundamental principles of proportionality and deterrence that we usually attribute to Bentham. Not least, he brought a kind of intellectual daring to his comparative work that was rare in the mid-eighteenth century, and that remains rare today - so much so that the reaction of this reviewer, after reading this excellent new annotated edition from Gallimard, is to wonder, wistfully, whether we are falling short of the standard he set two and a half centuries ago.
What modern readers undoubtedly know best are Montesquieu's reflections on the functioning of monarchy, democracy and despotism, which occupy the opening books of the Esprit des Lois and still hold a place on the political theory syllabus. There is much more to Montesquieu's masterpiece than that, though, most of which is neglected or dismissed. This is notably true of one of the claims on which he was most insistent, his theory of the formative effect of different climates on the law. 'Climate determinism', as Ralf Michaels drily writes, 'seems eccentric to comparative lawyers today'. So it does, though Michaels makes an audacious case for a creative return to it. I will not defend climate determinism in its original form (and neither does Michaels). But I will defend the scientific, and moral, attitude that led Montesquieu to it. [...]
To read the full review, please click here. Online access is free for members of the European Society for Comparative Legal History.
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