“Le système de John Law” and the Spectre of Modern Despotism in the Political Thought of Montesquieu

In the early eighteenth century, Europe was rattled by a series of financial shocks, stemming from the impropriety of government and economic actors who grew increasingly interdependent as governments relied on private lenders for imperial expansion. New institutional arrangements redefined the relationship between class and power and led to original notions of political justice, inconceivable in the premodern economic era. Political thinkers increasingly placed emphasis on how existing notions of freedom could be squared with bringing unwieldy and chaotic economic situations under political control. Some concerned themselves with how commerce stifled the civic character, while others held a more optimistic view, suggesting commerce was a source of political stability that engendered certain forms of virtue commensurate with eighteenth-century political exigencies. Among these thinkers, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brde et de Montesquieu astutely observed France's transition from an orderly but stultifying feudal order towards a progressive but often unstable commercial society, and he sought to reconcile these two positions throughout his political works.

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