(\lectures\Montesq) (pruned for lecture Oct. 2000)


LECTURE 2: LIBERTY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF SOCIAL THEORY TO 1750

The Background to Montesquieu

Structural change, but within a circular framework: to Columbus.

The classical and medieval periods roughly up to the sixteenth century (Columbus) have the view that there is indeed structural change, but this does not lead to permanent change. There is still circularity; a moving equilibrium model if one likes: K. Thomas 'the cyclical view of history, the view that change did occur, but that in the long run everything came back to where it started.' He continues that 'This notion that history waxes and wanes like the moon, so influential in classical times, enjoyed a new vogue during the Renaissance, when it could be maintained that the highest aesthetic and ethical virtues lay in imitation, or rather emulation, of the standards of antiquity.' The very word 'Renaissance' implies merely re birth, not anything new.

Thus we know roughly what happened, but why is another matter. As Keith Thomas put it, the reason 'for the replacement of this cyclical view of history by a linear one is one of the great mysteries of intellectual history.'

A. Technological changes and associated social and intellectual changes.

1. General.

K.Thomas 'hazards a guess' by saying that what is most necessary to produce a sense of change is the fact of change.' 'In particular, it takes discernible technological or intellectual movement to drive into the minds of contemporaries an awareness of the differences between their world and that of their ancestors.'

2. Tools of communication: intellectual.


a) Printing and reading.
The development of printing occurs just at the right time to produce the right effect i.e. late fifteenth and the sixteenth century. Possible ways in which it could alter concepts of time and history are suggested by K. Thomas: 'Printing certainly did much to emphasize the difference between the present and the past; for every book had a date of publication, and those which survived stood as monuments to past assumptions and ideas. Old books, like old buildings or old genealogies, were relics of the past, but, unlike buildings or genealogies, could not be silently adapted to suit the needs of new generations.' Thus there grew up a sense of development, of serial growth. New books, new thoughts, emerge it is not merely a matter of copying in hand portions of the classical authorities. In a sense the printing press, as no doubt McLuchan would argue, not only gives man the power to manufacture new meanings, and also a serial and lineal view of truth as lines of print but it was palpably a technology which no ancient or medieval civilization had available. It made a gap.

b. Tools of time.

A second technological factor often suggested are clocks tools of time. The spread of mechanical clocks is cited by Burke as the other major probable factor affecting attitudes to history and time. Of course there had been clocks before; but they were run by natural forces the circular processes of water, sun or sand. The idea that time was independent of nature that it moved in a mechanical way, could be split into tiny units and measured very precisely, that it passed and could never be retrieved, is both a cause and consequence of the mechanization of time. Time even takes on its own sound which had been absent before the ticking of seconds and minutes.

c. Tools of Destruction.

A third technological factor, lay in the tools of destruction and war. 'It was notoriously the existence of gunpowder' with clocks and compasses, Thomas states, which 'did most to remind the men of the Renaissance that they could never really recapture the world of the Greeks and Romans...' Gunpowder, of course, can be accommodated within an unchanging cosmology, as in China. But its rapid development and the development of firearms, not only provided one of the bases for Europeans dominance, but was in itself a sign of massive change. Seventeenth century soldiers were technologically superior to medieval archers a new force had come into the world.

d. Tools of Travel and Exploration.

The last major area usually singled out are the improvements and changes here, particularly in relation to the ship and its accompanying paraphernalia. Very considerable improvements in ship construction, the use of cannon, and the compass, suddenly made it possible to open up the world; not only to repel the forces from the East latterly the Turks, e.g. at Lepanto, which had since the Fall of Rome threatened Europe but to go out and explore. What was found and its influence takes us into a second major area of possible causes.

The great period of expansion and reconnaissance was after the mid fifteenth century.

B.The Widening of Space and the Alteration of Time.

a) The way in which concepts of time and space linked.
Evans Pritchard noted that 'It will have been noted that the Nuer time dimension is shallow...How shallow is Nuer time may be judged from the fact that the tree under which mankind came into being was still standing in Western Nuerland a few years ago! Beyond the annual cycle, time reckoning is a conceptualization of the social structure...It is less a means of co ordinating events than of co ordinating relationships...'


b) Exploration and discovery.
The technological advances were 'combined with shifting of the world's features under the impact of the geographical discoveries' to make it clear that the world was not the same world as that known by the ancients. The interrelationship between the discovery and physically new worlds and of the discovery of new mental worlds is extremely complex and will require much further investigation. Here we can merely draw attention to two statements about some of the possible dimensions of the transformation. e.g. America

c) Development of the trade travel exploration complex.

'A second important kind of encounter arises from voyages of travel and exploration in which members of one community go to live temporarily amongst members of a culturally alien community, with the express aim of intellectual and emotional contact at all levels from the most superficial to the deepest...in the western Europe...these voyages were such important features of social life that they coloured everyone's outlook on the world.'
Missionaries: 'But the more intelligent missionaries saw that effective evangelization required a prior understanding of the faiths of those to be converted; and they set themselves, however reluctantly, to acquire such an understanding. The result was a body of records of alien world views that came to colour much of the thought of the times, and that was undoubtedly one of the important contributions to the genesis of the open thinking of the seventeenth century.

Thus the world which had seemed closed and cyclical, now seemed open and progressive: two effects (other than the technological) may be pointed out:

i. The discoveries 'called attention to new and far reaching problems in the social sciences, in economics, in anthropology, and in the arts of government...in all branches of science, as the Reconnaissance proceeded and became less tentative, as the European picture of the world became fuller and more detailed, so the idea of continually expanding knowledge became more familiar...' In other words, it was not merely a matter of re discovery of ancient wisdom, of circularity. There were new things: 'there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.'

ii. In every human field, it was now impossible to be certain. As we have already quoted, 'by the end of the century it was increasingly apparent that men were doing more than simply treading the paths of their ancestors. For Robert Boyle it was impossible to construct a complete system of truth because at any given moment things were still happening, and new phenomena might refute previous hypotheses! Put in other terms, this could be seen as the movement from a 'closed' world to an 'open' society, in Popper or Horton's sense. There were many new things under the sun; the numbering of the beasts and foods and continents etc. of the ancients was not sufficient, just as there system of astronomy and laws of physics were not sufficient.

But all this happened within a curious setting cf. China/India etc.

Thus need pre existing contexts. What was special about the West to have this effect, i.e. already there?

a) Religion special
b) Social structure special within the country
c) Considerable variations within Europe

Non cyclical time in Christian thought.

In the first place, for a Jew and for a Christian, history was not repetitive or cyclical (as it had been for the few Greek and Romans who had thought about the matter). Nor was it a story of decline from a period of primitive innocence to one of degenerative corruption; and this despite the attractive parallells between the Age of Gold and Paradise, despite the analogy which some ancients and some early Christians drew between the ages of man and the ages of human history for it was into an aging world that the Redeemer had come. The Jewish and the Christian scheme was linear.

Development of culturally heterogeneous communities.
Horton notes that the 'open' predicament seems to flourish in trading communities Arabia, Iberian Peninsula and coastal Italy, finally to N.W. Europe. Why? 'Whereas in Africa intercultural boundaries tended to coincide with inter community boundaries, in these Mediterranean and European cities they cut right through the middle of the community. In these centres, people of diverse origins and cultures were packed together within single urban communities...Under these conditions, relations between bearers of different cultures were much broader in scope than the purely commercial relations which typically linked such people over much of traditional Africa.'

In sum, technological and geographical changes, during the period 1450 1700 were in combination so dramatic as to give the sufficient jolt to change the whole view of the world and its development. There was a sense of difference. The first scientific and intellectual revolution had been achieved in a double comparison:

A late seventeenth century European could feel that:

a) He was living in a different world from the world of the past. Hence we get at this very period the growth of new forms of history, the discovery of the fact that civilizations differ in principle e.g. the discovery of 'feudalism' (cf Pocock) etc. A feeling of 'medium aevum' (when was the idea of a 'middle age' first used it suggests modernity), a feeling that there were periods, a sense of anachronism. This developed later in some areas than others e.g. we are told that not until the later eighteenth century did English theatre audiences expect the players to be dressed in period costume.

b) That he was living in a different world from the world of other civilizations. All sorts of strange peoples, with civilizations and customs very different from our own, were being found. This gave a real sense of shock and undermined many of the assumptions. Their marriages, their sexual habits, their gods, their eating habits, their sense of decency and dress all became subjects of interest and speculation. Just as there were real, discrete, differences in time, so there were in space.

Montesquieu as the modern founder of anthropology. (Esprit des Lois 1748).

E P: 'if one has to begin somewhere or rather with someone, it must be with Montesquie. I agree with Professors Aron and Durkheim that it is he who should be called, not a precursor of sociological thought, but its modern founder...'


LIBERTY: MONTESQUIEU

(NB. different order on their sheets take life first etc. )

Life:
1689 born near Bordeaux

1721 published Lettres Persanes

1728 31 travel in Europe (including two years in England)

1734 publishes his Considerations on the Decline of the Romans

1748 publishes his The Spirit of the Laws

1755 dies, aged 66


Contradictions in his personality and experience:

aristocrat yet also a peasant

aristocrat yet involved in commerce

Gascon French

Catholic Protestant wife etc.

France England


Some contemporary events that influenced him:

the wealth and trade of Bordeaux


Louis XIV's absolutism


the Ottoman challenge (Persian Letters) and power of Islam


the emergence of Britain ; 1688 and Locke visit to England


the continuing power of the Catholic Inquisition

shift of power from Catholic South to Protestant North


the scientific revolution and Newtonian methods

the new information on China and Japan

the new information on tribal civilizations (Lafitau)
Theoretical methodology:

the balance between necessity and chance

the complexity and levels of causation, multiple etc.

ideas of time, progress and development

comparison and ideal types

a structural approach, relations not things

social structures and concept of the machine

balance between induction and deduction

conflicts between models and data



A few of his conclusions:

the fragility of liberty

the tendency to the abuse of power, and exceptions

the effects of war on lessening liberty, taxes etc.

difference between Europe (free) and Asia (despotic)

reasons for the difference geography, climate, religion

link between piety, commerce and liberty

effects of agricultural systems rice and population

effects of size and diversity of political systems

the balance of powers in England due to

equality of law

intellectual freedom

effects of liberty on wealth

marginal groups as innovative

an island, hence neither conquered nor conquering

easy taxes, government credit etc.

theories on why China absolutist

the separation of spheres, preserving separation, tensions

theories of western origins in Germanic civilization; Roman law