ABSTRACT
Despite its relativism, Montesquieu’s is not an ‘anything goes’ philosophy. The bottom line for judging whether a social order is acceptable is not whether any other society’s customs are similar to European ones, but whether they attend to people’s basic human requirements – for security, and for a degree of stimulating pleasure. As these requirements sometimes work against each other, meeting their demands, while simultaneously directing their effects away from incoherence, collision and catastrophe, is an art – the art of producing and maintaining practical and fulfilling modes of living (customs and practices). This art is the activity of constituting and governing a social order of life. It is what we call ‘politics’, and Montesquieu’s point is that, contrary to the arguments of the absolutists of his time, it is necessarily riddled with uncertainties. In addition to the art of balancing potentially opposing impulses, political government is made more difficult by the unique circumstances imposed on the society to be governed by its particular environment. The practical needs and problems faced by each society will be unique, and the overall diversity of needs among various societies makes a single method of government impossible. The spirit of each people provides the fertile bed from which each political culture must grow, so one will find as many different polities as there are different societies. None of these are perfect, but those political systems that work do so by reinforcing the features of social life that enable the society they govern to endure. These features are those that meet the human needs of social members to a degree they find acceptable. Those that fail to meet these basic human needs cause dehumanisation and misery, and, since they violate the fundamental principle of all social life – the collective establishment of security and a modicum of happiness – they must eventually collapse in catastrophe. This is not a simple categorisation into good and bad socio-political orders. Montesquieu, possibly with one eye on the French monarchy of his time, argues that the imperfections of systems which appear to be working well create the potential for them to grow out of shape, to become lawless and to turn into catastrophic failures.
