ABSTRACT
In his analysis of monarchy in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Montesquieu endorsed ambition as a positive motive. In so doing, he embraced recent, interest-based explorations of human moral psychology, while he ran counter to most classical approaches to public morality. In some of the international responses to Montesquieu, his devaluation of virtue and its replacement with ambition and the quest for honour as the principle of monarchical states met with criticism. In Hungary, as elsewhere, the reception of The Spirit of the Laws began immediately after its original publication and remained intense into the nineteenth century – a feature which puts the chronology of the Enlightenment into relief. This chapter focuses on the last phase of this reception history, the Reform Era of the 1830s and 1840s, which saw the first complete Hungarian translation of The Spirit of the Laws and further profound engagements with the book. As before, while Montesquieuan topics like climate theory, political liberty, international commerce, and especially the separation of powers received broad attention, the themes of ambition and honour do not stand out on their own. The nature of the relevant publications, all of them arising from the context of the moderate civilising project of the new Hungarian Learned Society (Academy of Sciences), might explain the apparent lack of interest in Montesquieu’s provocative views on political ambition. Other reasons include the resilience of the republican discourse of civic virtue (especially in view of the widely diagnosed corruption of estates politics) and the centrality of the notion of ‘unification of interests’ to the same moderate liberal agenda, which was hardly compatible with an explicit emphasis on individual ambition.
