Krause / THE UNCERTAIN INEVITABILITY OF DECLINE
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after references to The Spirit of the Laws will be inserted parenthetically into the text, with roman
numerals indicating book and arabic numerals indicating chapter.
2. Montesquieu himself speaks of “distributed powers” (pouvoirs distribués) (XI.7) not
“separate powers.” In fact, the balance of power established by a moderate constitution presup-
poses a certain interaction between powers, such as the executive right to veto legislative deci-
sions, rather than a strict separation. For analysis of Montesquieu on the balance of powers, see,
for example, Sergio Cotta, “L’idée de parti dans la philosophie politique de Montesquieu” in
Actes du congrès Montesquieu réuni à Bordeaux du 23 au 26 mai 1955 (Bordeaux, France:
Delmas, 1956), 257-63; C. P. Courtney, “Montesquieu and English Liberty” in Montesquieu’s
Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of Laws, ed. David Carrithers, Michael Mosher, and
Paul Rahe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 273-91; Joseph Dedieu, Montesquieu et
la tradition politique anglaise en France (New York: Burt Franklin, 1909); F. T. H. Fletcher,
Montesquieu andEnglish Politics (London: Edward Arnold, 1939); Gabriel Loirette,
“Montesquieu et le problème, en France, du bon gouvernement” in Actes du congrès
Montesquieu réuni à Bordeaux du 23 au 26 mai 1955 pour commémorer la deuxième centenaire
de la mort de Montesquieu (Bordeaux, France: Imprimeries Delmas, 1956), 219-39; Harvey C.
Mansfield Jr., Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (New York:
Free Press, 1989), chap. 9; Henry J. Merry, Montesquieu’s System of Natural Government
(Lafayette, IN: Purdue Research Foundation, 1970), especially 313-45; Thomas Pangle,
Montesquieu’s Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), espe-
cially 114-63; John Plamenatz, Man andSociety , vol. 1 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963), 276-
93; Paul Rahe, “Forms of Government: Structure, Principle, Object, and Aim” in Montesquieu’s
Science of Politics: Essays on The Spirit of Laws, ed. David Carrithers, Michael Mosher, and
Paul Rahe (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), 80-97; Judith Shklar, Montesquieu
(Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1987), 79-104; George C. Vlachos, La politique de
Montesquieu: Notion et méthode (Paris: Éditions Montchrestien, 1974), especially 98-162.
3. For examples of this interpretation, see Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu andRousseau:
Forerunners of Sociology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960); Raymond Aron,
Main Currents in Sociological Thought, vol. 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), 13-72.
Robert Alun Jones offers an appraisal of this interpretation in “Ambivalent Cartesians:
Durkheim, Montesquieu, and Method,” American Journal of Sociology 100 (1994): 1-39. Pierre
Manent also reads Montesquieu as the proponent of a fundamentally sociological approach to
politics in The City of Man, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1998). In a challenge to this reading, Catherine Larrère points out that it is ironic to call
Montesquieu a founder of sociology because “his domain is not that of necessity but of reason.”
Catherine Larrère, Actualité de Montesquieu (Paris: Presses des Sciences Po, 1999), 10.
4. One exception is Badreddine Kassem’s Décadence et absolutisme dans l’oeuvre de
Montesquieu (Paris: Librairie Minard, 1960), which treats the subject of regime decline exten-
sively. Kassem carefully describes Montesquieu’s account of the varieties of corruption, or the
“denaturation” of political systems (p. 9), ranging from the Orient to Spain, Italy, France, Eng-
land, and ancient Rome. He effectively charts the particular progress of each but is less persua-
sive in his account of the general underlying causes of decline. Specifically, in the third part of
the book, he identifies four “great causes of decline”: war, depopulation, religious intolerance,
and absolutism (pp. 213-66). Ultimately, he says these causes resolve themselves into a single
“essential cause of decline to which all others can be traced,” namely, despotism (p. 274; see also
p. 20). This explanation is inadequate, however, because it leaves untouched the causes of despo-
tism. Moreover, while in these passages Kassem treats despotism as a fundamental cause of
decline, elsewhere he treats it as the final effect of decline, saying that “despotism is the limit
toward which the degeneration of the other regimes tends” (p. 247). The latter assertion strikes