ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the importance Montesquieu gives to the role of the nobility as a bulwark against encroachments of absolutist power, and his praise of aristocratic morality and honor. It aims to extract from Montesquieu's writings on virtue the elements of a theory of aristocratic exchange, and to highlight the political relevance for his own time of ancient virtue to the relationship between the state and civil society. The chapter examines some pertinent themes in contemporary accounts of archaic, aristocratic economies, as they appear in the ethnographic work of Marcel Mauss, Georges Bataille, and Roger Caillois. It shows that Montesquieu uses literary material from his classical education in the Oratorian college much as an ethnologist in the Maussian tradition. Montesquieu illustrates the coming to consciousness of modernity as a condition of loss and displacement, of inquietude and disunion. The Aristotelian language of magnanimity does not lose its moral and political connotations, but it does assume a wider, metaphorical significance.
