W. B. Allen on Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws

Welcome back to the New Thinkery. My name is David Barr and with me is always my good friend, Alex Prio. How are you, Alex? Doing well, feeling real strong.

I've got rippling biceps from carrying this gigantic book around. Yeah, me too. I was looking for a weight loss program, as you know, and I was sent this wonderful new edition by W.B. Allen on Montesquieu's This Beer of the Laws, and what's great is it has the French on the left and the English on the right.

So it already took a very long book and just made it heavier. The prayer, how are you? Oh, I'm PG. I can't even look this book.

I had to sort of use, I'd ask two undergraduate students to hold it for me and turn pages. Yeah, I find also that people that deny liberalism and you know, have unkind things to say about philosophers, you can throw the book at them, because it's harm, depending on how strong you are. But so today I have a very, very, you know, I guess that'll be well known to many of our listeners. The father of Daniel Allen, an eminent classicist at corporate university, which we have to talk about your daughter.

I didn't know that. That's really cool. But it's Dr. W.

Allen, how are you? I am wonderful. I'm so glad to be with you. And I can't pass up the opportunity after your initial comments to tell you that I'm always quick to remind people that while it's a thousand page book, you only really have to read half of it.

But I have to say Greg texted me and you know, he's a true American patriot. He said he ripped out every page with French and there was none left. That's right. You know, every other page you're going to miss him.

So yeah, I mean, I don't know, I can make a thousand jokes, you know, the pen is mightier than the sword, especially if you write this many words and have a 10, 10 pound book, but this is a massive undertaking and massive achievement. We should be clear. It's a new critical edition, a Montesquieu's, a spirit of the laws, which includes also affordable commentary. It's a very interesting commentary.

Yeah. And there's a bit of a Montesquieu revival in the air. I don't know if that's fair, but I recall Stuart Warner's new edition of The Persian Letter. So when we found out about that a new edition of the Spirit of the Laws was on its way.

It's rather excited because the last one, WB was when with Ann Kohler. 1995 with Ann Kohler. Yes, the blue book. Yes, from Cambridge.

Yeah, I find book by the way. And indeed, it's part of the story of this book because I was a dear friend. We were both in graduate school at the same time colleagues who would meet at political science association meetings and at the homes of our mentors because we shared a family of mentors who put it that way. People in the Strauss-Cropsey job for family.

And so we were very close, actually, in many ways. But we did not realize that we were both as senior graduate students working on the same project, which was Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws. And she was busy working on her translation. I was busy online.

hers was near completion than mine was by the time it's all surface, at which point I essentially put mine on the shelf. And because I was dear to me, I wanted to have a book to have a full run and see how it was and to give it to her appraisal. And unfortunately, she passed away before it was even in print because she had a sudden brain aneurysm, which made it even harder for me to think about taking up my work. So I really did put mine on the shelf, gave her a full space, taught it several years, read it carefully.

It finally decided it didn't quite do it, possibly potentially because she wasn't the one who finished it. She had to have associates completed for her. But there were elements in the translation itself that I thought really needed to be intended to independently. And that's why I therefore, resume my own project and completed it in the fashion that I have.

That's a really nice story, actually. I thought it was going to be a revenge tale, but you did. So this is a really, actually, that's a nice talk and a friendship. None of my two other co-hosts would ever do this for me.

But how do you guys want to chime in? Yeah, I was going to say, provide an overview for our listeners on familiar with the work. But Greg, how would you suggest me best? I have maybe one question to start with would be, what are the ways in which you mentioned that there's some maybe a couple shortcomings in the previous translation.

Maybe you could just point us to what you thought those were and how those sort of maybe gave you some motivation to work on this. And then even just more generally, I mean, to shell something and then to return to it after a couple of decades, maybe several decades, what urge you to return to it? And I think that's a good place to start. And press, sorry, W.B.

King, remind us of the press that it's published. Yes, it's published by Anthem Publications. And I will give them thumbs up as being a fine commercial press, which is active in marketing, really doing the job on this that I've never seen any academic press I've worked with do. So I'm really happy to have them carry this book forward.

And it takes some courage to issue a critical edition that has both languages. I mean, that's you mentioned it increases size in Butterworth, whom we were talking before we were recording was my professor and Davis professor has just finished an edition of Alfa Robbie's commentary on aerosol's metaphysics, which is Arabic on one side and English on the other. There's such great tools, but I can understand why a publisher would be reluctant to double the length of a book. It's got to be such a more difficult task.

So I mean, I have so many questions, but one would be how much manuscript work did you do? Like you had to choose a translation, you had to actually choose different French manuscript size. So you had to go through like, no, no, I like this edition, not this edition, I don't like this imitation. I mean, you must have to spend any time in France.

That must have been awful if you did. I'm just terrible. I began this project in France in 1969, 17 when I was a Fulbright scholar. And that's when I started working on the manuscripts at the Bibliotec Nationale.

And so I worked thoroughly through the manuscripts at the very beginning before I put the project on the shelf for a while. I've worked through all the editions. I have used the versini text for this because it's in the public domain and it simplifies my work. But I've used it by checking it against everything else.

That's why it remains critical. So yes, I thoroughly worked through all of the various editions and the forms in which it disappeared. And of course, the other two English translations. And only now I'm working through a third translation, which we never do existed until the last couple of years.

And I didn't discover until my book was publishing. And that was by George III, linking of England. How about that? I'll come back to that later.

But it's a huge, important factor, which we'll want to talk about. So yes, I have worked patiently through the Montesquieu. I spent time at Liberad in the library there as well as the Bibliotec Nationale. I've been associated with the Academy of Montesquieu.

I published short pieces essays on it. And of course, I published the small collection of three fables of Montesquieu. And that's called the personal and the political. And I mentioned that now, because to get back to Greg's question about this book and what made it important for me to do, the single important reflection that I would share with you is that it genuinely is a magnum opus, the spirit of the laws.

That is to say, in all of his other works, we find elements that are brought together in the spirit of the laws beginning with the Persian letters, tracking through the history of the Romans. It's not an accident that almost as much as written about the Romans in the spirit of the laws, as was written in the book on the decline and greatness of the Roman Empire, so that he has brought it all together in one place. And then finally, as I emphasize in my initial essay in the commentary, talking about what distinguishes this translation from the previous ones, I begin with the very first word, spirit. And I have a long discussion on both tears, understanding and misunderstanding of that, and also the traditions misunderstanding.

And then I show the various expectations of the word in order to underscore that for Montesquieu, the primary acceptation is mined because this is a work of philosophical inquiry. It is not to be confused with the more modernistic attempts to discover zeitgeist or anything of that character. So that it's being philosophical inquiry is the entry point to understanding what the translation requires. I wouldn't change spirit only because of the way to tradition.

But I've made clear that people understand that we're talking about the mind behind the laws, and therefore it's a philosophical inquiry. And that it covers every significant philosophical topic with respect to politics, at least, all the way up through and including religion itself. And in that sense, it's perfectly parallel to Plato's laws and a number of other such canonical texts. Yeah, you know, that sense about the title of the Republic, for example, it's just nothing that looks like the case science or something like that.

But Greg, I think you're going to jump in. That was David's. No, I had a quick question. So would you say that the one can understand Montesquieu's thought reading this book in isolation, or is it necessary to cobble together other person letters, let's say, in his short book on Rome.

And as a second question, is there anything left untranslated? Yeah, yeah, of importance. Not of great significance. Even though the minor works are translations here, they're not necessarily always very good ones, but they're out there and one can assemble them.

But it is to be observed in terms of your initial question that the works that I say are all captured somehow in the spirit of the laws, all trained in response to important questions. One of the questions, for example, the central to the spirit of the laws and runs all the person that is through all of his works is the whole question of the propagation of religion. Now, what is of course astounding to the modern era is to discover the way in which he presents that, including connecting it with the most modern of things commerce, because he doesn't mean by commerce merely trade in commodities and services. He really means intercourse.

And just as I can't turn spirited to mind, I can't turn commerce into intercourse because of the weight of the tradition. But that's what he's talking about. And it's the intercourse in more mores manners and ideas, as well as intercourse and goods and services that constitute the burden of commerce in the modern world from Montesquieu's perspective. So his intention to respond to Herodotus is explicit, explained, and clearly underscored in the course of the word.

And everything I've said so far is only describing this, but we might call the philosophical apparatus of the work, which is extremely important, and which has been underrepresented in interpretations here to for example, when he identifies Julian, the upper Julian as characterizing Christ as an atheist, he's essentially presenting there what will later show up in Nietzsche as a thesis of the death of God. But that's something that has gone totally unremarked through all the centuries that we've been reading this work of those of us who've read it. And so it's been a burden and important for me to bring out all of these essential elements of philosophical reflection as the core of the spiritual laws in order to liberate it from the prison of a mere sociological or historical anthropological analysis. Was this, you said you've used this way to the tradition a few times when the book first came to light, do you think it was more immediately understood, or was already the confusion amongst the public or at least the public that could access the book?

Well, I think it was in part understood and in part not, for example, I give the example toward the end of the commentary of Daniel Paul in Massachusetts, who applied it in his defense of freedom of the press, clearly understanding book 12, if nothing else, is a period of the laws and the thought that there could be less of a thing as crimes of thought. So it was read, and that was read in the French by Paul at that time, clearly one can see from the translation that he provided. So clearly there was some understanding, and we know what more to me and multiscuit to begin with was a dispute between the federalists and the anti-penterses who interpreted it correctly. And so we know from that that there was some sensitivity in analysis involved, so that when Alexander Hamilton and Petrus IX translate the critical passage and assembly of society of societies, rather than as the anti-penters preferred to translate it, he was actually channeling the French more accurately.

So he could see producing one society out of many societies as the foundation for creating the extended republic, whereas the anti-penters saw the opposite. So there were those differences in analysis throughout the 18th century, and of course they were highlighted in the French Revolution because many of the French Revolutionists actually rejected multiscuit. That wasn't true of someone like Jacques Piochet who understood him very well and later took view, but there were others who at the time, including District of Tracie and others who didn't quite understand multiscuit. So there were variable analyses and interpretations.

It's pretty remarkable. I mean the book was published in 1748, is that right? Yes, that's right. And it must have been immediately celebrated.

What was the early sort of initial reception, and then how did it gain such currencies so quickly that it's basically helping form? It's one of the most quoted texts by the founders. It's already helping form a whole new frame of government. Obviously there's all this other philosophical background that Montesquieu is sort of writing, but that's pretty remarkable that already across an ocean there, they're sort of using it as a kind of text spoke for a frame of government.

I think he was a text book is a wonderful expression to use because I don't think it's so much that he caught the wave as that coming at the tail end of a previous wave, the half-stellock wave, he changed directions and there was an eagerness to grab it. That's why George III ended up studying it so closely. That's why the Duke of Richmond studied it so closely. That's why Berwick was attentive to it.

So what was going on at this point in time, and once the work appeared, was that everyone realized that it's something powerful and unexampled. And when he tells us early on in Spirit of the Laws in Book Three that the British Constitution is a republic disguised as a monarchy, he opened the world to a new line of thought that had not previously been considered. And the rest of the book develops that. Such that eventually we reach the point where the whole movement, and we forget about the American Revolution for the moment.

The whole movement of modernity comes to be the movement to throw off the disguise. Can we talk a little bit about his education and learning that he develops? Where is this in his life? What was his upbringing?

I mean, the sheer volume of references, the depth of reading. That's the first thing that he has a student. The depth of insight as well. There's a lot of scholars can read a lot and they get only so far, but he seems able to synthesize all sorts of material.

Can you talk a little bit about Montesu the man, how he got to be so wise? Yeah, he read pro-raciously. If you were to visit this library of his at the bread, you would understand immediately it is an absolutely extraordinary facility and absolutely beautiful. It'd be hard not to read sitting in a space like that with these high vaulted ceilings with this very richly textured wood all around you, exuding warmth packed from floor to ceiling with books of every stripe.

And essentially they were the fruits of his own collecting efforts. So he was a voracious meeting. He was trained in the law initially. He of course spent time as a jurist there in the Baltimore region where he began his professional career, but not for very long, because he was still very young when he published the Persian letters and went off to join the Calabé Frontes in Paris.

And really never looked back after that. He became a man of letters by 1723, and that's what he remained for the next 30 years, a man of letters. And yes, he read not only all things ancient, but he read copiously in the modern literature, commentaries, journals, etc. So the breadth of exposure that he identifies in the course of his writings is perhaps the most distinctive feature of his entire background.

He read, he took notes, and remember, for a substantial portion of his career, his sight was not very good. And he had to work with secretaries. And he would dictate to them. And they would write down his thoughts.

So you just have to imagine this 18th century nonelectric noncomputer based society reading as much as he read, composing as much as he composed, and having to use the conventions that were accessible to him. Clearly, he was completely committed to the life of the mind. That's the fundamental point you have to observe. Go right ahead.

Oh, so I had a quick question. Some philosophers, they're not stuck in the same mode, or mode of presentation. But many are the trans, I'm curious if you read any personal letters that explain the transition from the highly stylized, and almost like a fun who done it of the Persian letters to this transition to deciding to write the spirit of the loss. Because stylistically, they're different.

He has an incredible sense of humor. It reads like a detective novel, obviously, and in store Warner brings this out, but anybody that kind of decides to do the math on the dating with the letters, as some don't have date, understand that there's something peculiar at play. And of course, he begins the spirit of the laws with this idea of a thread that he unravel oneself. But anything about the transition between works in mode of presentation and why?

Well, I fundamentally maintain that there's not really a transition. He says they end up as preface the spirit of the laws in moral seizures we've had. I too, with the radio, I'm an artist. Now, we all know he never painted anything.

And therefore, we have to try to penetrate what he means by calling himself an artist. And I think that has to do with the mode of presentation that you're now describing. That is to say, he addresses certain topics pro-séically, but with structure, with form, with purpose, so that he's up co-regio only in the sense that co-regio is more or less like the poet Marat, who has explicit poems on this theme, and which seem to describe the work that Montesquieu is about. And then finally, the one thing that really snared me with the spirit of the laws, which is my first Montesquieu remember, not any of the other works, was to discover just how poetic it is.

It is an extraordinarily beautiful book in terms of this prose style. And yes, he's joking. The wonderful terms of phrase, the use of the vernacular were appropriate. And of course, when he says, my aim at the end of the book 11 is not to make you read, but to make you think, he's underscoring what the design of all that stylism is about.

So that you have a man there who doesn't hesitate to speak in terms of how shall we say this of paradoxes. So take the most evident paradox, all virtue has needed limits. Can you really have too much virtue? Well, in a certain context, yes, what you're paying attention to is what virtue requires.

That is to say, you can be more exigent than the contingencies permit. And that's what he's talking about when he says all virtue has needed limits. But he doesn't deny virtue. So you have an application of Aristotle that is not merely a risk to tell you.

And when he says that the self-governing soul, the self-governing human being is the free soul, that that embraces from his perspective the whole of Aristotle. And when he says, if you want to understand that you have to compare me to Plato in Aristotle, he really means it. He really means exactly that. So what we have to just do is to see that what we're dealing with with Montesquieu, unlike saying, I will say, Phon Den, to take just another example, highly stylized, very poetic, who says, among other things that the purpose of his poetry is to make men good.

So he makes what sounds like an almost platonic claim, though he's not nowhere near a platinous. And Montesquieu is almost the opposite of that. He doesn't make platonic claims. He doesn't even make Aristotelian claims, but he claims to answer platonic Aristotelian questions.

Can you say something more about that? Let's just push forward. We'll see him ahead. How is he asking this question without being clear about this aim?

Or how is somehow the subdued theme of his work? Well, to get to the answer of that, you have to go to the beginning of the book and understand why he dismisses Hobbes and why he's silent about Locke. And both of those things are very important. He dismisses Hobbes and he takes it for granted almost as if he were anticipating Leo Strauss, that when you dismiss Hobbes, you dismiss Locke.

Then what he needs to say by that is this. What he says of Hobbes is he treats human beings in nature as if they were in society. People only need to lock their doors once they have societies, not before. And so he's going to make an argument for natural society, which means he's returned to Aristotelian anthropology.

So the foundation of his entire edifice is an Aristotelian anthropology, but it's not frayed with an argument for a tea loss. It's frayed with an argument for the necessary response to contingencies governed by laws of nature. Now, whether that's a modern or an ancient concept, one has to struggle through. And that's where the philosophy enters into his reasoning.

Go right ahead, Rick. Interrupt me anytime. I just had a question. I see the aerosol bit.

I'm just I was wanting to float a hairbrained idea past him. This mentioned a poetry. I mean, he's got this invocation of the muses later on. There's this Eric Theus right at the beginning.

I wondering if there isn't some lacretius in the background as well with the anthropology, but also like the way that this is going to sound really hairbrained. But the way he repeats the phrase, the nature of things at the beginning several times. Wasn't this around the time that sort of lacretius was being dis-reiscovered. It seemed to me a little later, but I don't know.

It's a little later than a humanist era, but he's certainly very aware of lacretius. He mentions the cresis. I think what you can do is look at that one expression he makes when he says it's a thousand times easier to do good than to do well in order to sum up what the entire enterprise is about. Why is he not a plakeness?

It's hard to do well. It's hard to do well. Everybody can do some good, but it's hard to do well. So you might call this a kind of philosophy of realism if you want to descend to that level of analysis.

So it seems to be that in that sense, if you consider lacretius a realist, well, that would be a Lucretian element in his thinking. And he certainly did pay a lot of attention to the stoics. Okay, thank you. One thing we neglected to do is to describe the structure of the book, how it's broken down the part in their parts to it, and then their chapters.

Some chapters say to be continued, which is strange because you can just combine chapters. So I was wondering if you could talk about the structure and then, oh, numbers time, numbers time. Wow, this is great. That's a big numerologist.

He's staring directly at the sun yesterday. My eyes hurt. It makes it very seriously. And it may be later, or if it makes sense now, I would love to some advice for our younger listeners on approaches to this book, especially to some of the games that he's up to.

But first, maybe the superstructure. Let me put it this way. He never says to be continued. Rather, he says, continuing the same.

Oh, that's important distinction. It's a important distinction. No, no, no. David, it's not Batman.

I think 60s. Not one of his careful readings. David keeps waiting for the sequel. It's a block of spirit card.

Yeah. But so I'm not going to descend into numerology, but I will say this to you. It is clear that 31 books is clear. There's a central to the whole edit this, and that's books 1516 and 17.

It's clear that the central books are a rejection of slavery in every form. And so it starts with that, asking, why is it so important to reject slavery? And I think if you then go back to the beginning of the book, carrying that question in mind, you begin to understand the distinction in the forms of law, the laws of nature, laws of God, laws of philosophy, laws of religion, political laws, each carefully parsed in that initial book of the spirit of the laws, because one needs that in order to lay the foundations for the emergence of a natural society, which is going to awaken in human beings, those tendencies to seek power from the moment the advantages of collective agency become apparent. So you have the family, that's no big deal, causes no greater problems, but families grow, they become extended families, so they become communities.

And then what we can discover is that the community has a collective agency that exceeds what any individual has, and whoever gets to command that collective agency can not only exercise great influence to his or her own advantages in the community, but more importantly, these are the external communities. And so then you have set in motion quite by nature, not by design, a system or a process which has perverse consequences, which is the in principle unlimited growth of power, ultimately despotism against that background politics emerges. So we have been under the impression according to Motosue, that politics is somehow a natural human response to nature. Motosue is argument is no, politics is a response to the excessive power, the whole purpose of politics is to limit power.

And that's what therefore gives rise to deliberate constitutions. And has the book moves immediately into discussion of constitution. So for the first section of the book, the first eight books are really all about those deliberate constitutions with a carrot around despotism, which is not properly a constitution, but the thing against which everything else is responding. And so he used that as a field clearing exercise.

And when he completes the field clearing, then he can talk about the actual circumstances people now face in human society. And that leads him to the books dealing with offensive and defensive postures, perfectly consistent with the emergence of power and politics. Once that's done, everything else becomes a matter of constitutionalism. You have had deliberate constitutions based on simple principles of virtue, honor and fear, which prove insufficient for different reasons that are laid out.

You need something more than that. And so you now you need a deliberate constitutionalism that goes beyond the choice of principles, and that focuses exclusively on what is required seriously to limit power. So the modern constitution will be a power limiting framework. That's how it becomes detached from virtue and honor.

So that's the outline of what you might call the political mission of the spirit of the laws is. But that mission cannot be satisfied unless you also respond to the fundamental questions underlying the human condition. So he starts over in book 14 with climate or material determinism. And from there through 18, he just blows his own material determinism.

It's real, it exists. It's a contingency people face. It's not determinative. It's like the Dutch, the Dutch can conquer it in the Japanese.

And there are other examples of people who are able to come there. That was a dumbbell. Remember Greg, that was when we read it. That was such a stumbling block for us in class.

What the heck's going on with his climate? I like the discussion of how the polygamy stuff was kind of fun. But yeah, well, of course, I mean, in several directions, right? And then also like a good law giver will counteract the ill effects of climate, but a bad law giver will exacerbate the ill effects of climate.

Precisely, precisely. So that shows the element of deliberateness that's involved, which means the element of mind. So it turns out to be a work of the mind that's critical. Yes, culture is important, climate's important, traditions, and all these things are important, soil, terrain, more ways, manners, religion, especially so.

But ultimately, it's the question of mind addressing all these questions in a way that is able to construct what we would call the deliberate constitution in the truth. I like the way you're focusing on spirit as mine instead of spirit, because I always sort of, because even he defines the spirit laws, sort of comprising all these things, right? Yeah. At one point, it's all that, but then your emphasis on mine says, no, no, the mind can comprise all these things, but then the mind sort of signs a priority to mind, whereas if the spirit would sort of treat them as they're all, that's all the mix together in a mash.

That's right. We're spirit, treats it as something that just springs forth. Right. Right.

But he's talking about a creative force. Yeah, it's very good. But not merely positivist. That's very helpful.

You make this point in your commentary right up front that the primary meaning of a spree in French is like way down the list in the OEG. Yeah. So like, we're bound to misunderstand it, even though it's a cognate word, right? Yes.

We're bound to misunderstand it because it's a very remote and rarely used meaning of the word spirit. We usually think of, you know, somebody with like, you know, I don't like, yeah, it's only coming out. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But of course that was both terrorist mistake too, not that he had the English problem, but because there are other meanings of this spree in French and including wit and so his his jocularity about whether there was spirit or wit mind or wit in the book was meant to be depreciating. But sure, but do you any thoughts on why? So honestly, you would have known surely that the word was equivocal. Why not choose something that more unequivocally sort of points to mind?

It just doesn't sell, Greg, you know, it doesn't sell. Well, that's pure itself. But remember, it's free in French is it's equivocal in terms of having many acceptations, but the primary acceptations really is mind. Okay.

Fair enough. So every little bit of pressure would also recognize that. But Mr. Zoot that Voltaire.

Yeah. Yeah, that's not going into the sense of arué. I mean, he's got problems. There you are.

So anyway, just to get back to the structure of the book for a moment. So what I'm seeing is that there's clearly an orderly progression through the book that becomes more complicated as you advance. And then you reach the final books. And this is the thing that I described in my acknowledgement when I point out that what Leo Strauss led me to understand that I had not really seen through all my close study of the work.

And like most people, I read it through it. I landed on book 11, The Separation of Powers, checks and balances, independent judiciary, all those things that are so familiar to us. And those things are familiar to us actually getting the way of understanding often because we glom on to the what we know. Right.

And so when I returned from France up to that first trip, spending a year working on this and Leo Strauss was living in Annapolis and I began working at the American University in Washington, D.C. One of my very first things was to hop in the car and go over and call on Leo Strauss just to give a report what I've been doing. And so I sat in his small cottage there in Annapolis telling him about my adventures, teaching French students, studying once a few. And he started talking and he began talking about the spirit of the laws.

He began quoting. Yeah, we didn't have any text in front of us, just quoting from memory from the final books of the spirit of the laws. It just blew me away. I mean, we all know what those last three books are like.

So, French history of the most. Yeah, I was a mistake. Most of us, we didn't we just get right over that pass by it and don't pay much attention. And I'm wondering why is Leo Strauss quoting from memory from those books?

And that more than anything else shaped my eventual study of the spirit of the laws and forced me to work my way through the whole thing and put it in perspective. So whether Strauss did that deliberately or just his habit, I cannot tell you he didn't explain himself, but he certainly put me in a posture where I could not possibly fail to do anything other than wrestle with those chapters before I thought I had completed the spirit of the laws. So two questions. One is, did you ever consider maybe he was just reading it that morning and it happened to be fresh on his mind?

We were all familiar with that. But the second question is, what did that I mean, I'm joking, but what did that lead you to? Like, what was the significance of these apparently less significant chapters? It may be take seriously the historical dispute that Montesquieu carries on in the last three books with people like New Bull and others.

Well, I see digging so deeply into this. I'd like to see up through book 28 when you're dealing with the questions about trial by combat and those kinds of things that that makes some sense. Just talking more reason manners then and you're talking about the discontinuity between what human reason calls for and what human practice provides. All of that fits in a broader philosophical conversation.

And then you have the chapter on all the book on founders, legislators, which seems to be not to be terminating everything. And instead he closes and he goes into this death's historical work. And so I then what it did was force me to pay attention to that dense historical work. And then some things began to emerge among them was an appreciation for the first time of what the contingencies were that he was really concerned about, which were not the contingencies of climate or material contingencies, but there were the moral contingencies in the way in which people navigate.

He owes the potential for that navigation that can eventually an opportunity to form a deliberate constitution so that he was actually foreshadowing a French future in those final chapters, which he's not discussed throughout the book there to for remember. That's one of the most extraordinary things about the entire book. You might find a straight passage here there that somebody interprets as referring or bleakly to France. And certainly in book 18, when he's talking about the South laws, we get some of those ancient France region there.

But it's not until those last three books that you actually see a focus on the emerging France and what a projected future might be. And that's so I had to stay with it long enough to appreciate that what he was doing there was projecting. This historical development was not explanation. It was projecting.

And he gives this diplomatic signature to it by closing the book with Italian I Have Bound Rome. Because otherwise your eyes are just gloss over with Charles the Bald. It's hard to keep all that stuff in mind because we read it in other contexts and we don't. It's just hard to separate petting and the short man on the rest of them, one from another at a certain point.

But he had a purpose. You had mentioned one at talk about slavery and you'd sort of talked about that already a little bit as being literally central to the book and sort of informing what it's up to. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say. I've taught some of those books before and I admit that I find them really fascinating.

But like some of it, like students these days can not realize some of the sarcasm that's going on. Most famously, they kind of black slavery and stuff like this and not miss how he's sort of really taking people to task for this. I don't know if there's anything else you want to say or those chapters or books in particular. But yeah.

I think that's the great observation. And that's where going back to his style, see the poetry of it all. That book 15 is incredible that way. It's so funny.

It's so very funny. It's the first secular attack on race-based slavery. But that's dramatic. That has shaped the world in ways that people might even appreciate it all.

But then it carries its food with women and with social distinctions means that there's a broader base. So he's not concerned with race as a fundament. That's just one thing that has to be knocked down because it's a recently emerged perversion. But he's actually going back to the end of book five when you remember he has a chapter called the administration of women.

Now, that's another one of those translation problems that I have pointed out. I don't translate the administration of women. I translate the management of women. And because we can get the subtleties involved in what he's saying, we use management in English.

And that will be conveyed in French by a ministracian, but not when you translate transliterate. That ministracian into the administration. So when he makes the observation, but yes, of course, we can rule the state, but they must not rule the household. Well, that sounds like a paradox to us, but it's not a paradox.

It's perfectly consistent with the broader argument that he's making. And that is the feed that's carrying through those chapters on slavery. I.e., the distinctions must be made in terms of human capacity and not in terms of conventions. It's no different than Aristotle's attack on conventional slavery.

Yeah. Yeah, that's right. Very good. I mean, you're reminded of like, when I teach the students I try to draw out, I mean, it's the way that he sort of attacks punishing witches even in sort of, he's like, what do you guys do?

Who cares? Like, they don't, they're either really witches in which case you can't do anything or they are and they aren't, which is probably more likely, which case there's no point, like just leave these crazy old ladies be. And it's similar in matters of religious things. It's an amazing sort of liberalism, really, sort of just like there's no reason for us to be involved in this and such things.

And what over the state can't do anything you use for the relationship to them. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The idea that Julian failed to stop the spread of Christianity in Rome is hugely important, right, because Julian was trying to save the empire.

And of course, he lost the empire. But when he lost the empire, Christianity did not fall. Right. That's something that people often overlooked to remark.

Not only did it not fall, but the conquering barbarians became Christians. So trying out in the midst of the fall of Rome, Montesquieu is deeply impressed by that, much more impressed in Machiavelli was. And that may have a lot to do with what he means when he says we're curing ourselves of Machiavellianism every day. I hadn't considered that.

It's really interesting. His account of the emergence of monotheism in general is also very impressive, just thinking through of how these things emerge in sort of response to sort of Newtonian physics, offsetting the powers of the government of the state or something like this really, really needs to be observed on your part. It's not President of the Lords per se, but I have an essay on the commentary on the natural laws. They're derived almost exclusively from his understanding of Newton's mechanics and the sense in which Newton, as in his de gravitation, sees that one has to contemplate God in relationship to the material as that which is capable of creating the effect of the material without being material, which is a very interesting way of phrasing the notion of God, and which Montesquieu appreciated in his reading of Newton.

So all of his technical experiments is freezing of lamb's tongues and one thing on the other hand. These all fall with the most broad parameters that somehow at the end of thinking, and I'm only emphasized at the end of the thinking, not the end of the day, not the end of the universe, but at the end of thinking. This is where Montesquieu stands. These things all must be seen in that light in which one can understand them as but more belonging together, even if one can't adequately comprehend or express them.

That's Montesquieu's perspective. I just wanted to ask Montesquieu tough on slavery, soft on witches. Soft on witches, that's right. I don't know anybody gots before we...

I had one final question. I was campaign against Montesquieu, he's tough on witches. I just had one final question in WB. And it's spending this much time with a thinker in a word of this magnitude and depth.

Did you start to begin to think of Montesquieu as someone who's mind you began to inhabit? Like you became a friend and you began to think like him or began to think, well, this isn't what all Baron D would think about X, Y, or Z. Or like, I mean, I've not spent nearly as much time in it as much short work, but I don't know how to translate him as an offend him. I feel like when you spend that much time in the original language, you just begin to think that you're talking to the person.

I mean, that's a weird way of putting it. But what are you saying here, Montesquieu? What are you saying here, Montesquieu? What's the point of being translate that in English?

Or how should I do this? It's not gonna work. Yeah, it's just talk to when nobody's around. But the feedback on that, when you hang out with the living Montesquieu in France, do you ever set him aside?

Like, let me tell you something about your ancestor that you may not appreciate. This is all very interesting that you would make these comments. And I always have that feeling. When I translated it, it's under parmesan, I felt like son of a man.

I really did. I think that's a powerful little guy. I didn't know you did that. Gosh, don't you?

I didn't do it. I didn't translate it. But when I did all the work with George Washington, I was reading all the manuscripts I could possibly leave my hands on. I became George Washington, frankly.

It's unavoidable. I was a small point on that, by the way. I was talking to a friend of mine today, and he described you as George Washington. He said, I'm not joking, but Jeff's saying, he has a very statesman way about him.

He reminds me of George Washington. That made me imagine when you were writing that book. I mean, when Bill gets angry, he has furious uncontrollable rage. Yeah, it's something like that.

Yeah. But anyway, it's true. But he said, I do have a friend who is a generation grandson of Montesquieu, who is Charles Montesquieu, Charles II, who lives in Versailles. And when the book was published, I immediately, a lot of immediately, but a fitting moment.

I brought up because he had a winery himself, Paul Chateau Rimmel in Bordeaux, over which I have had several volumes for decades. And I had a few of that. And I pulled up in 1983, Chateau de Montesquieu, Baron de Montesquieu, from the Chateau Rimmel, and opened it as we opened the book. And I couldn't tell Charles because he wasn't here.

He's over there, but he and I were exchanging notes. I toasted it. So, yeah, he was part of the family. I felt like part of the family.

So much part of the family that my son was 14 years old. I was able to send him over to France to spend a couple of weeks with Charles's son, Cyril, a boy scout expedition in the French countryside. So, and yes, these things have a way of taking over your wife. That's amazing.

Don't need to put it. Yeah. So, I was just saying, we're going to transition this way. But when we get off, when we fish recording, you're going to have to send me a translation of something that just has to happen if we've got to lying around.

But at this point, maybe, time for some biographical questions. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

Sure. Absolutely. Absolutely. This will be this part and Greg finishes with lightning round questions, which is exactly what it sounds like.

So, as long or short as you wish, your path approaching the philosophic life, was there a turning point or as a young man? Were you predisposed towards these type of books? Or was there was there an event or a teacher that turned you? And then as you got on with your studies, if there are any mentors or fellow students that you just wish to remember, we really like hearing those stories.

Well, you asked that question at a precious moment, because a couple of things are happening. One of those just might seem your memories book from my graduation from high school. I still have it. And it closes with my stating what my future was going to be.

And I was going to go to college, graduate, get a job, save money, and go to medical school. That was where I was headed. Well, I did graduate and I did go to college and I was a pre-med student for three years. But several things happened along the way.

Jerry Fornell was one of them. Jerry was my political science professor at Pepperdine, who was a wonderful mentor in political theory, who was a science fiction writer and ultimately left the academy to right, especially Niven, his partner Niven, several important science fiction books. But nevertheless, it began that process of my thinking through political science or political theory, not political science so much as something I wanted to explore further. But it happened that he did that at a time when I was also a political activist.

And that meant I had become relatively prominent in California politics, both as active in the Reagan campaign and prior to that slightly so the Goldwater campaign. And I had also been, therefore, on the speaker circuit and such things. And I was invited to give a talk on the new lab at the initial video of the Philadelphia Society of Central and Cisco. And that must have been in 1966.

And so I appeared there and gave my talk and sat down. It turns out that Harry Joffa was also one of the panelists in that program. And Harry Joffa got up and gave his talk. And I relate this in my essay on what Harry Joffa taught.

But he got up and gave his talk when he was finished, my mouth hung open. And I said to myself, I have no purpose being here. I shouldn't be on the same platform. I don't know anything.

And the only thing I can do is go wherever he is and learn something. And from that moment, I was headed to graduate school. And I finished, applied, got in where he was teaching graduate school and had a good fortune to begin with the summer before graduate school started with a seminar with the people of other brave souls, the old Strauss, who was just then be located the Claremont. And so I became the student of Strauss Joffa and Martin Diamond in those critical years.

Every single one of them played a very important role in my development. Go right ahead. He shared a couple of anecdotes. This got to be a funny story there.

I don't mean like Strauss Lieutenant, Banana Peel or something like that. No, no. Any particularly interesting, funny moments or interesting moments. There were many learning moments.

My first paper for Harry Joffa was learning how to die, which is perhaps some of the paper. That was the title of my paper. Oh, OK. There's this fresh, ungrag, just doing a pondering death.

What's wrong with this? Something's wrong with the picture. And then in my first class was Mr. Strauss on the ethics.

I was wrapped up writing on book two of the Dachomiki and ethics in some point made some statement, which I can't even remember the substance of at this point that led him into one of his classic moments in which he lived in his eyebrow, looked up at me, and he said, an extreme of the me. I'm sounding like could I do the time? So things like that, of course, happened. But the most profound thing, I think, were just the classes themselves.

And certainly Martin Diamond, who was the most compelling classroom performer I have ever seen in my entire life. He was a simply extraordinary craftsman in the classroom. You don't talk about him enough on this podcast. Share some more about that.

What he was like as a teacher and mentor. Well, he was a monkey. He left for one thing. In some way, the old trustee, I can be a bunkular.

And he was certainly highly, what's the word to use? He spoke with a Greek facility of language. So very colorful. The language was at the same time elevated.

There was nothing banal about it. And he was able to address the fundamental questions in ways that gave them a liveliness. So you're talking about the federal speakers for heaven's sakes. And he made them sound like the greatest drama that was ever written.

It was really rather remarkable to just sit before him and listen to them. So, and of course, we all had conversations and some wonderful times together. So things like that were the substance of my graduate education and made all the difference. It was interrupted by my being drafted and sent off to the military, which left me how to get back because I lost fellowship and everything in my heads to go and sign up with the army.

So I was out for half a year in the wilderness, so to speak. And then out of nowhere, Marty called me up and said, I got a fellowship before you come back to school. So he was my angel at that moment. And he restored what I thought I had lost.

So I got a number of things like that over the years that were just quite compelling for me and made the difference. So I was able to move on and finish my work, go to France and everything else has been history since. That's great. Thank you.

Well, WB, if you'll excuse the indignity of asking someone with stature of George Washington, we have some silly questions we like to ask folks just so that folks can get to know you and see what kind of personality you have. It's been a delight speaking with you so far. So, well, honor. Thank you.

Yeah, it has been an honor. So I just got some random questions and you should feel free to answer them as quickly as you like or say, not answering move pass, whatever, but we'll start easy. Who's your favorite philosopher? My favorite philosopher.

I cannot escape the platonic heritage. Very good. Do you have a favorite work of philosophy? Well, I have devoted a fair amount of time to Plato's laws.

There are others that the Beatrice seek to cry to the god, yes, the needle and many of them, including the Republic that I pay close attention to, but I have never been able to escape the laws. Laws? We'll have to have you backstop by the laws sometime. Yeah.

Spirit laws, laws and very good. Yes, there's a connection there. I'm thinking so. What about a favorite work of literature?

Yeah, that's harder to pour us because as you know, I've written a book on Harriet Beecher Stowe, which I found heard of you a very compelling intelligence. But I also like Madeline Lengels, a regular time. Oh, I love that book. Wonderful, wonderful book.

There are so many other things that I thoroughly enjoy, but those two really stand out for me. I can reread that since I was a child. I should get back to that. It was such a delightful book.

So imagine it. I read it to my children and I go back to it and I read it again and again. That's very nice. What was your first job?

My first job was cutting mowing lawns when I was 12 years old. Very good. What was your first car? I wish I could remember.

I think it was a Pontiac Tempest, but I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Okay. Yeah, my first car was used.

Favorite place you've ever visited? Oh, that's so much harder. I've been so many places. Favorite place I've ever visited.

I don't know that I can answer that question with any precision. I've just so many places. I love watching the whales sitting on a patio Cape Town. I'll put it that way.

That sounds wild. Who is the best US politician in your lifetime? Roble Reagan. Very good.

Do me pets. I am not a pet person. Fair enough. I don't have pets.

I had these stuff with my children having pets. Going off the call and sticking me with the pet. I had to be the one to bury it and I've never given them. That sounds awful.

That's not very nice. Well, you know, they go off to college and you say it's the darnest thing. The car is after you left. Something happened just croaked.

A couple hours. Well, please watch out for your dad. All right. Last question.

If you hadn't become a professor, what do you think you would have become? Dead. The first graduate research paper was really this is learning how to doh. I thought that was my question.

You said, Jappus, did you come to the right place Mr. Allen? Let's make sure the folks at home get this one more time. Just so we know this is your new edition, a critical edition.

Monast used the spirit of the laws, which includes a translation. A critical edition's got an interesting, excellent notes. It also has a very long commentary, which is really sort of laying out the argument of the entire work. This is with Anthem Press.

Much kudos to Anthem Press for the courage to put out such an impressive tome. It was a delight having you on. I do hope you come back. Thanks for everything.

David Alex, any final words? Alchee L'Xumberg. Were you out just stargazing yesterday? No, I've just been reading in the sun.

What does he call it? The non-faking of I was reading Frankenstein. He talks about the land of eternal light. Yes.

That was quite a good turn of light, asking the sun the forms and all that. Well, I want to thank you all for this conversation. It's been wonderful. It's been wonderful to be sure that their library is going to copy.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. We will.

It's been a real fun. We'll see you guys next week on the new thing.