Richter - Montesquieu Comparative Method

Comparative Political Analysis in Montesquieu and Tocqueville
Author(s): Melvin Richter

Source: Comparative Politics, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Jan., 1969), pp. 129-160
Published by: Comparative Politics, Ph.D. Programs in Political Science, City University of
New York
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Comparative Political Analysis
in Montesquieu
and Tocqueville
Melvin Richter*
I
In that small list of classics that make up the canonical books of comparative
political analysis, Montesquieu and Tocqueville both merit more than one
entry.l When this subject's history is written, any account, if it is to be
adequate, will have to include Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Considera-
tions on the Causes of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans, and The
Spirit of the Laws and Tocqueville's Democracy in America and The Old
Regime and the Revolution. Every one of these works was deliberately com-
parative in conception and execution and still repays close scrutiny, not
least on those points at which its author can be demonstrated to have been
in error. Their subject was nothing less than the nature and types of human
society as they affect politics; they are prime examples of a comparative
political sociology that refuses to consider government apart from society
or to reduce politics to a derivative function of social or economic process.
Many of their analyses remain touchstones for anyone approaching such
subjects. Yet a penumbra of tedium has come to surround certain topics,
which all too regularly are introduced by the same limited stock of citations
from these authors. Montesquieu and Tocqueville can scarcely be held
responsible for the use of their work without reference to the processes
by which their conclusions were attained and to their theoretical concerns,
many of which we are only now beginning to identify. The fact is that the
dubious homage of selective quotation has obscured a deep-rooted tradition
of inquiry that has produced some of the greatest achievements of the social
sciences.
* This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at a conference on the com-

parative method, held under the auspices of Comparative Politics at the City University
of New York on May 3 and 4, 1968. It was written while I was a Senior Fellow of the
National Endowment for the Humanities.
I have chosen to use the term "comparative political analysis" in preference to
"comparative method." What is worth keeping in the older term, "comparative method,"
is the implication that comparison is an intellectual operation not limited to political
science, but one that is employed in all the disciplines that study man. In the past, modes
of comparison were based upon logic, rhetoric, philology, "method" (in the Renaissance
sense); often models, metaphors, and analogies were taken from the physical and bio-
logical sciences. Stress upon the autonomy of political science is anachronistic when
we study the work of comparatists prior to the establishment of political science as a
department in the modern university. However, the utility of "comparative method" as
a term is fatally flawed by its potential confusion with that great fiasco in the history
of the social sciences which its practitioners called the Comparative Method and which,
as the text of this article will show, was not unconnected with the origin of the term
"comparative politics." For shifts in the meaning of the term "comparative," see fn. 12.
129
130 Comparative Politics January 1969
Even in the minds of those who esteem Montesquieu and Tocqueville,

the link between them is not always perceived, nor have they been placed
within the lineage that runs back at least as far as Bodin, and forward
through Elie Halevy and Raymond Aron.2 The great tradition of French
social inquiry is still considered to be that extending from Saint-Simon
through Comte to Durkheim. Yet as comparative political analysts of
complex societies, Montesquieu and Tocqueville merit more attention
than they have received. Perhaps because neither cared much for that
form of intellectual legislation known as methodology, it is assumed that
nothing is to be learned from a study of their method. This article is based
on the quite contrary thesis that if we are to discover what comparative
politics is and has been, nothing is more instructive than to analyze in
detail the work done by its great practitioners. And to understand how
they pursued their respective inquiries, it is necessary to look beyond their
declarations of intent, which are always worth noting, but are seldom
definitive as descriptions of their actual operating procedures. A method in
use is not the same thing as a method stated as a program. Some of the
most damaging misinterpretations of Montesquieu have derived from the
assumption that the entire body of theory in The Spirit of the Laws may be
identified with the abstract statements of its opening books. In fact, Montes-
quieu's mode of analysis changed profoundly over the twenty years that he
worked on The Spirit of the Laws, and his late practice as a comparatist is
greatly superior to his early definitions of his enterprise and to the typology
with which he began his work. An additional benefit of considering Montes-
quieu and Tocqueville together is that it becomes possible to separate their
ways of comparing from their contexts. The span of Montesquieu's political
experience ran approximately from the death of Louis XIV to the middle
of the eighteenth century, while Tocqueville's life was dominated by the
American and French revolutions, the revolutions of 1830 and 1848, and
the two Bonapartist empires created by postdemocratic coups d'etat. Mon-
tesquieu was keenly aware of the commercial revolution of his time; Tocque-
ville noted the advent of the Industrial Revolution. Part of Tocqueville's
claim to the title of Montesquieu's greatest disciple is to be found in his
skillful adaptation of his master's method to situations bearing almost no
literal resemblance to that of 1755, the year of Montesquieu's death.3
As Professor Harry Eckstein has noted in his account of the present condi-
tion of comparative politics, Montesquieu and Tocqueville anticipated a
striking number of its actual concerns.4 Both were highly aware of the
dangers arising from the unconscious biases that may distort an observer's
view of a society other than his own. Both were self-conscious about their
construction of types for comparison, and both stressed the great variations
in the social characters and political cultures of their objects of inquiry.
Montesquieu and Tocqueville regarded non-Western forms of rule as signifi-
2 M. Aron is among the most perceptive practitioners and historians of political
sociology. His published Sorbonne lectures give excellent accounts of Montesquieu and
Tocqueville, singly and together. Raymond Aron, Main Currents of Sociological Thought,
2 vols. (New York, 1965, 1967), I.
3 See my paper "The Uses of Theory: Tocqueville's Adaptation of Montesquieu," in
Melvin Richter, ed. Theory and History (forthcoming, 1969).
4 Harry Eckstein and David Apter, eds. Comparative Politics: A Reader (New York,
1963), "Introduction," passim.
Melvin Richter 131
cant in their own right and in their implications for the relationships-
colonial, economic, and racial-of such countries to Europe. Prominent
among their interests was that in the impact upon politics of social and
economic change. And if Montesquieu never gave much attention to the
phenomenon of revolution, he was a sufficiently good political sociologist to
provide Tocqueville with a major hypothesis-that a critical instability is
introduced into a political system whenever there is a contradiction between
it and the social system.5 Tocqueville went on to add a striking number of
other general explanations of how and why revolutions originate and
develop.
Although it need scarcely be said that liberty was the prime political
value of both writers, it is often forgotten that they illuminated this, the
most elusive term in our political vocabulary, by some of the fullest accounts
available in their respective periods of despotic and tyrannical regimes.
Such a procedure was comparative, both in its use of data and in its con-
clusions. And for better or worse, their theories provided the nearest prece-
dent for one of the major enterprises of comparative politics in the twentieth
century, the study of totalitarian systems. It was Montesquieu, who perhaps
more than any other theorist of his time, fixed the Orient as the natural
home of despotism and put China into that category along with Turkey
and Persia.6 Thus he lapsed into what has been called "Europocentrism."
Tocqueville, so sensitive to American ideologies rationalizing injustice to
Indians and Negroes, himself succumbed to colonialist temptation and justi-
fied the French conquest of Algeria.7 That two comparatists, more than
usually aware of European self-righteousness, should themselves have capit-
ulated to this tendency indicates that the history of comparative political
analysis may be instructive in more than one way.
Comparison, not casual and impressionistic but sustained and disciplined,
is one of the distinctive qualities of our intellectual tradition. The question
of whether this concern is peculiarly modern or began with the ancients
may perhaps be waived. As good an anthropologist as Clyde Kluckhohn
declared that his discipline, which is no less involved with comparison than
is political science, originated in classical Greece.8 Few careful readers of
Herodotus, Plato's LQws, or the political, logical, and rhetorical works of
Aristotle would deny the power of their comparative impulse. But there is a
question more significant than that of origins: What sort of conditions
produce men who wish to compare their own political and legal arrange-
ments, their systems of marriage, property, and religion to those of other
societies?
5 Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville's Contribution to the Theory of Revolution," in Carl J.

Friedrich, ed. Nomos VIII: Revolution (New York, 1966). pp. 75-121.
6 Cf. R. Koebner, "Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term," Journal
of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIV (1951), 275-302; Sven Stelling-Michaud,
"Le mythe du despotisme oriental," Schweizer Beitraige zur Allgemeinen Geschichte,
Band 18/19 (1960-1961), 328-346; Franco Venturi. "Oriental Despotism," Journal of the
History of Ideas, XXIV (1963), 133-142; Paul Verniere, "Montesquieu et le monde mussul-
man d'apres l'Esprit des Lois," in Actes du Congres Montesquieu (Bordeaux, 1956), pp.
175-190; Francoise Weil, "Montesquieu et le despotisme," ibid., pp. 191-215.
7 Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville on Algeria," Review of Politics, XXV (July 1963),
362-398.
8 Anthropology and the Classics (Providence, 1961), esp. Ch. 2, "The Study of Man
and a Man-centered Culture," p. 27.
At least three sets of circumstances, occurring singly or together, have

produced the comparative perspective. Rapid change within a traditional
setting characteristically has this effect, particularly when there occurs a
clash among groups conflicting basically in their values, norms, and interests
as they relate to political power and social status. Montesquieu and Tocque-
ville both were aristocrats trained in the law. As such, they found in the
French style of comparative law tools of analysis applicable to the conflict
between the aristocracy and the centralizing tendencies of the Crown and
its bureaucracy.
Another spur to comparison is travel, exploration, colonization, or at-
tempted religious conversion of peoples other than one's own-or, for that
matter, experience of invasion, conquest, or religious persecution and prose-
lytization. Beginning with the sixteenth century, the study of man in Europe
was transformed by a flood of data, uneven in quality but without precedent
in its quantity and the extent of its geographical coverage of the non-Western
world.9 The same effects may be attained by the discovery that there have
existed in the past other civilizations or ages strikingly different from one's
own. This may lead to two sorts of comparisons. The first may consist in
taking as a model another society to be imitated in a way that will reproduce
its grandeur or restore in the present some long-lost excellence. Both the
Renaissance and the Reformation produced comparative enterprises derived
from what their leaders thought to be historical discoveries about classical
antiquity or primitive Christianity. Another conquence may be the location
of societies regarded as markedly inferior to one's own, and the construction
of some developmental or progressive scale. Such a conjectural and evolu-
tionary scheme was what the nineteenth century called the Comparative
Method.
Finally, the compulsion to compare may come either from catastrophic
defeat or the imminent prospect of such a fate. Both Tocqueville's Old
Regime and his Memoirs originated in the effort to explain by comparative
analysis why France lost its liberty in the second Bonapartist coup. Simi-
larly, after the Second Empire went down in the debacle of 1871, which
combined military defeat and the civil war of the Paris Commune, the
lEcole Libre des Sciences Politiques was established in the spirit of inquiry
into what had gone wrong. For obvious reasons, not only Prussia but also
England became the subject of invidious contrast. Among the products of
the "Sciences po" was Elie Halevy's great study of England, which owed
much of its distinctive achievement to the sustained comparisons, implicit
and explicit, with French history.10 How much the concept of totalitarianism
owes to the menaces of enemies in World War II and the cold war need
scarcely be elaborated. What is pertinent here is that depotism, the concept
historically closest to totalitarianism, was developed, although it did not
9 Geoffrey Atkinson, Les nouveaux horizons de la renaissance francaise (Paris, 1935);
Margaret T. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(Philadelphia, 1964); Donald F. Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe: The Century of Dis-
covery (Chicago, 1965), I.
10 History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, and Epilogue (1895-1914)
(London, 1951). For the dates of the French editions, see Melvin Richter, "A Bibliography
of Signed Works by Elie Halevy," History and Theory, Beiheft 7 (1967); for a brief
account of his work, see Richter, "Elie Halevy," International Encyclopedia of the Social
Sciences (New York, 1968).
Melvin Richter 133
originate, in similar circumstances. When the Turks menaced Europe, their

institutions and practices became the object of comparative inquiry, not
only by the omnivorous Bodin, but also by those Christian propagandists
commissioned to build up a model of "Turkish despotism." However, the
origin and chief use of the concept was in French domestic politics, where
it served the enemies of the royal power.ll
If change generates comparison, this may take more than one form.
Aristocratic theorists in France before the Revolution, counterrevolutionary
theorists after it, both felt strong impulsions to compare and contrast politi-
cal and social forms. When socialist theorists began to appear, they used
comparisons between both the present and the past and the present and
the future. Needles to say, comparative theorists may emphasize either
similarities or contrasts. One sort of comparatist may, by use of a few phases
or categories, flatten out differences; another may see the entire point of
his enterprise to consist in the demonstration of what is irreducible in these
dissimilarities. There is some reason to think that classes and groups who
believe that they hold the key to the future engage in comparison of the
first mode, and that members of social and political formations who regard
themselves as defeated, or as deriving their challenged legitimacy from the
past, prefer the second.
As the notion of comparison is analyzed, it becomes clear that the term
is profoundly ambiguous, holding in suspension a number of quite different
and even incompatible intentions and methods. As practiced in the nine-
teenth century, the Comparative Method was evolutionary in its thrust and
thus envisioned comparison as a means for creating a general theory that
would chart and explain genetic sequences. To trace complex developments
back to a simple beginning by a scheme of stages was the common purpose
of comparative anatomy and comparative philology, both of which subjects
were created toward the end of the eighteenth century. This genetic aim
established the now archaic use of the term "comparative" in these subjects
(in linguistics, the present meaning of the term is typological, the comparing
and contrasting of entire structures by systematic classification).'2 It was
11 Dorothy M. Vaughan, Europe and the Turk (Liverpool, 1954); Clarence Dana Rouil-
lard, The Turk in French History (Paris, 1938); Sven Stellin-Michaud, "Le mythe," p.
332 ff.
12 ". . . The Comparative Method is not a comparative method in the sense in which
the term would be coined today. Everyday usage, as well as the analogy of well-estab-
lished designations such as Comparative Religion, Comparative Law, etc., bring to mind
something like a study of essential analogies, an investigation of entire structures for
essential similarities and differences. They suggest an approach which presumably can
be applied to any or all languages, and, when so applied, should yield a taxonomy.
Of course there is such a branch of linguistics, but we call it typology. The label 'com-
parative linguistics (comparative philology)' is preempted by a different kind of pursuit.
As Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), the German Romantic poet, writer, and Oriental scholar,
said in 1808: 'That decisive factor which will clear up everything is the inner structure
of languages, or comparative grammar, which will give us altogether new insights into
the genealogy of languages, in a manner similar to that in which comparative anatomy
has shed light on higher natural history.' And later Franz Bopp (1791-1867) speaks of a
'comparative dissection of languages,' of 'linguistic anatomy,' and the like. Ever since
then, the term 'comparative' in technical linguistic use has referred, not to comparison
at large, comparison for comparison's sake (i.e., typological comparison), but to a
process whereby original features can be separated from recent ones, and where the
aim of classification is subordinated to the aim of reconstruction. Thus, genealogical
reconstruction, arrived at by the Comparative Method, may well be at variance with
this older usage that E. A. Freeman had in mind when he gave currency to
the term "comparative politics" in the lectures he published under that title
in 1873.13 Freeman declared the Comparative Method to have been the
greatest intellectual achievement of his time, and he took as the model for
politics comparative philology, because it was fully established as science.
It might be remarked that the work of Max Muller, whose version of com-
parative philology was singled out for praise by Freeman, is now quite dis-
credited. In any case, the Comparative Method sought to construct the stages
of human development, social and political, by three means: by conjecture
about the earliest stages of human history and by evidence taken from
"primitive" peoples still extant, who were assumed to be what all human
societies once were; by distinguishing between simple chronological
sequence and what J. F. McLennan called "human progress considered as
development"; and finally, by classifying societies "by their structure, as
higher or lower (in the manner of comparative anatomy) in the scale of
development."l4
Another purpose of comparison may be the almost exclusive concern
with establishing similarities. Investigators with this temperament tend to
ignore differences; their interest extends only to qualities shared by all men
and groups. Much late-eighteenth-century comparative work, particularly in
"philosophical history," was of this sort, a disposition fully described in
A. O. Lovejoy's essay on deism and classicism.15 A later variety of this
intention, and one often combined with the Comparative Method, was work
done with the purpose of classifying all human societies under one or an-
other rubric, conceived as a real type induced from the data, such as
Herbert Spencer's "military" and "industrial" societies, or Durkheim's "me-
chanical" and "organic" forms of solidarity. Sometimes comparison in this
style has been undertaken in order to establish the laws governing all human
associations. Such theorists as Comte-and J. S. Mill, to the extent that he
was influenced by Comte-seem to have cherished comparison because of
its promise of one day making it unnecessary to compare, a state that will
be attained when laws of society are discovered similar to Newton's laws
of thermodynamics.
In other hands, comparison may be intended to prove quite the opposite
point, namely, the radical and irreducible diversity among societies, epochs,
or civilizations considered as individual organisms. Hence, it is argued, the
impossibility of grouping them or finding traits common to them. The notion
of national character, the topos of attributing to every society its own dis-
tinctive mode of politics, or sQcial relations, or music, or lovemaking, is one
that has found adherents for a very long time. In the sixteenth century
Bodin's ascription of a distinctive naturel, or character, to every society
was but an intellectualized expression of a habit of thought almost ubiqui-
tous on every plane, including that of jokes, many of which are still told
typological classification." Henry M. Hoenigswald, "On the History of the Comparative

Method," Anthropological Linguistics, V (1963), 1-2.
13 Comparotive Politics (Oxford, 1873).
14 J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966), pp. 12-13.
15"The Parallel of Deism and Classicism," in Essays in the History of Ideas (Balti-
more, 1948), pp. 78-98.
Melvin Richter 135
about the Irish, English, Scots, and French. Thus the notion of distinctive
character may be used as a comparative concept designed to exhibit singu-
larity. This is its characteristic deployment by certain forms of romanticism,
nationalism, and historicism. Sometimes, however, the emphasis upon na-
tional or societal differences has been combined with the theory of a natural
law common to all men, just as liberal nationalism has stressed international
cooperation, rather than necessary conflict, which integral nationalism has
stressed, among nations each with its own traits. But there exists a version
of comparative analysis that seeks to destroy the periodization or theory
of general laws or categorical apparatus of those comparatists obsessed
with similarity. This attack may take the form of insisting that all phe-
nomena and arrangements are embedded within a unique context. It may, on
the level of evidence, center its attention upon the dangers of generaliza-
tion extracted from reports that have proved unreliable in even the most
carefully studied societies.l6 Finally, it may dismiss similarities on the
ground that they are outweighed by differences.
To round out the inventory of intentions that may prompt comparative
analysis, two more must be mentioned. The first, which will be illustrated
by reference to Max Weber, cares equally about the use of comparison to
develop generalizations, although not universal laws, and its use to explain
particular cases, although not limiting itself to them. The second, which
will be illustrated by reference to Montesquieu, seeks by comparison the
universal laws governing society and politics and yet at different moments,
however inconsistently, uses the same technique to establish the permanent
differences individuating human societies. Weber, for better or worse, did
not believe in universal laws or in theories of stages common to all societies;
nor did he carry Historismus to the length of denying that comparison was
in principle impossible among phenomena drawn from quite different
settings.
In his introduction to the new complete translation of Weber's Economy
and Society, Guenther Roth has made a penetrating analysis of Weber's
method of comparative sociological study. Reference to this way of pro-
ceeding both will clarify Weber's purpose in comparative analysis and
will later enable us better to understand the extent to which Montesquieu
and Tocqueville may be said to have used a variety of ideal-type analysis,
a point critical to any analysis of their practices and purposes. Professor
Roth points out that Weber, in his use of comparison, did not conceive of
his purpose as the creation of a transhistorical, functionalist theory. Rather,
he wished to create the tools for explaining major historical phenomena,
such as the origin and nature of capitalism in antiquity, the Middle Ages,
and modern times, together with the forms of political rule and social strati-
fication peculiar to them. Comparison was meant to establish the differences
between older and modern conditions and to explain the causes of the dif-
ferences. Weber's comparative strategy was directed against theories simply
assuming historical identity (of ancient and modern capitalism, for example)
16 Quite apart from the tradition of German Historismus but startlingly close to the
positions taken by Dilthey, Troeltsch, and their nearest English equivalent, R. G. Col-
lingwood, is E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Comporotive Method in Social Anthropology,
L T. Hobhouse Memorial Trust Lecture, No. 33 (London, 1963).
and evolutionary theories such as the Comparative Method, which estab-

lished stages or phases applicable to the development of all societies.l7
As Weber wrote in his treatment of Roman agrarian law: "A genuinely
critical comparison of the developmental stages of the ancient polls and the
medieval city .. .would be rewarding and fruitful-but only if such a com-
parison does not chase after 'analogies' and 'parallels' in the manner of the
presently fashionable general schemes of development; in other words, it
should be concerned with the distinctiveness of each of the two develop-
ments that were finally so different, and the purpose of the comparison
must be the causal explanation of the difference."'l8
In order to realize this program, Weber made use of a number of com-
parative devices: the ideal type, the identification of similarities as a first
step in causal explanation, the negative comparison meant to elicit differ-
ences and prompt generalization, the illustrative analogy, and the meta-
phor.19 All of these devices appeared in the operational practice of Montes-
quieu and Tocqueville, as will be seen later in this article. But the function
of each such method is determined by the analyst's purpose in undertaking
comparative work. Every purpose is involved in a distinctive set of presup-
positions, although this is not necessarily true of the devices used to realize
the purpose.
In the essay he used to clarify his own thinking about method while
writing The Spirit of the Laws, and even after its completion, Montesquieu
singled out comparison as the single most valuable capacity of the human
mind.20 He even went so far as to evaluate forms of society and politics in
terms of their respective effects upon this mental function. Comparison is
indispensable for the analysis of human collectivities. If we seek to know
why they have the characteristics that they do, our search is best carried
on by reference to general effects learned from comparison of many cases
rather than by reference to particular effects known from a single case.
Tocqueville shared this high estimate: ".... The mind can gain clarity only
through comparison."21 What did Montesquieu and Tocqueville mean by
these assertions? Surely they must have attributed more to comparison as
a method than what has recently been described as its meaning in ordinary
language: ". . . In the widest sense, there is no other method. Comparison,
of course, is one of the essential procedures of all sciences and one of the
elementary processes of human thought. It is also evident that if any general
statements are to be made about social institutions they can only be made
by comparison between the same type of institution in a wide range of
societies."22 At the very least, Montesquieu was claiming that we can under-
stand political and social phenomena only when we can stipulate some other
arrangement alternative to that in question. Second, he insisted that only
17 Economy and Society, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, 3 vols. (New York,
1968), I, xxix-xxxiv.
18 Ibid., xxxi.
'9 Ibid., xxxii.
20 "Essai sur les causes qui peuvent affecter les esprits et les caracteres," in Oeuvres
completes de Montesquieu, ed. Roger Caillois, 2 vols. (Paris, 1949), II, 39-68.
21 Oeuvres completes d'Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Gustave de Beaumont, 9 vols.
(Paris, 1864-1866), VII, 112, letter from Tocqueville to his father, Washington, D.C.,
January 24, 1832. Hereafter this edition is cited as Oeuvres (B).
22 Evans-Pritchard, p. 3.
Melvin Richter 137
by dividing human societies into types could comparative analysis be put

on a rigorous basis. Finally, at his most ambitious, he claimed to have dis-
covered by his method certain general laws applicable to all societies, so
that every individual datum could be explained by them, while every law
could be linked to another, or could be derived from another and more
general, law.23
The first of these contentions implies that prerequisite to comparative
analysis is a certain "distancing" on the part of the person doing the com-
paring-a capacity, that is, to treat his own and other societies as phenomena
to be investigated objectively as well as comparatively. Writing in his
Pensees, which were not designed for publication, Montesquieu claimed:
"When I act, I am a citizen. But when I write, I am a man, and regard all
the peoples of Europe with the same impartiality as I do those of the Island
of Madagascar."24 He had more than earned the right to this assertion by
his performance in his first book, the Persian Letters, a work which, perhaps
because it is delightful as well as profound, is too seldom read by political
scientists. Yet in it, for probably the first time in a major European study
of man, is the unmistakable application of that double optic which makes it
possible for an analyst to regard his own society in all its aspects as a sub-
ject for comparative analysis like any other. Montesquieu constantly used
the perspective of his two Persian visitors to France as the means for view-
ing French society in a new light. As Roger Caillois has written, the great
positive construction of types and laws in The Spirit of the Laws presup-
posed a prior revolution in perception and theory: ". . . that of daring to
consider as extraordinary and difficult to understand those institutions,
those habits, those moeurs, to which one has been accustomed since birth,
and which are so powerful, so spontaneously respected that in most situa-
tions, no alternative to them can be imagined."25
Unless the comparatist learns to know himself and his society as products
of a specific training, he will never be able to comprehend the meaning and
function of behavior in another society. It was this point that Montesquieu
perceived when living in England:
It is lamentable that foreigners in London, especially the French, never

cease complaining. They say that they cannot make a single friend, that the
longer they stay, the more the very possibility of doing so seems to disap-
pear; that their acts of courtesy are taken as insults.. . . But why should the
English like foreigners? They do not like one another. Why should they in-
vite us to dine with them? They do not invite one another.... Thus one must
behave as they do, live, that is, for oneself, without concern for anyone else,
without caring for, or counting upon, anyone. Finally, countries must be
accepted for what they are. When in France, I am friendly with everyone;
when in England, with no one. When in Italy, I compliment everyone; when
in Germany, I drink with everyone.26
Tocqueville, perhaps the most acute of Montesquieu's disciples, assimi-

lated his master's insistence upon taking countries for what they are and
23 Montesquieu, "Preface," De l'Esprit des Lois, ed. Caillois, II, 229.

24 Ed. Caillois, I, 997.
25 Ibid., I, v.
26 Ibid., I, 876-877.
upon the need for self-awareness about the attitudes and values acquired
in the investigator's society. In a remarkable letter to a friend about to begin
a long stay in Germany, Tocqueville analyzed the obstacles to achieving and
communicating an adequate understanding of another society. Characteris-
tically, he counseled the use of comparison in two different senses-first,
the comparison between one's original view of the society in question and
the reasoned, revised view gained by subsequent knowledge; and then the
sustained comparison between the object of inquiry and another society,
such as one's own:
The difficulty will be in creating for the French reader a comprehensible

picture of the spirit of a society in a condition so different from our own.
And this will be not only because of the discrepancy between what it is and
our conception of it, but above all because of what our feelings about our-
selves lead us to imagine. The principal obstacle is not so much our ignor-
ance as that natural prejudice that stems from our reflections upon our own
country, and our memories of its history. Unfortunately, on this point I can
offer you no advice, except to return to yourself again and again, to ask your-
self what you originally had believed about Germany, and then to recon-
stitute the steps by which you moved from that instinctive view to your
present reasoned opinions. It is this process that you must make your read-
ers repeat. I am certain that this is your goal, but how can it be attained?
Should you explain the resemblances and differences between the two
countries, or write so as to enable the reader to find them out? . .. In my
work on America, I have almost always adopted the latter plan. Although I
seldom mentioned France, I did not write a page without thinking of her,
and placing her before me, as it were. And what I especially tried to draw
out and explain about the United States was not every aspect of that foreign
society, but the points in which it differs from, or resembles our own.... I
believe that this perpetual silent reference to France was a principal cause
of the book's success.27
In the Persian Letters Montesquieu had imaginatively arrived at alterna-

tives to even the most fundamental aspects of the society into which he
had been born, and had not as yet left. But it was in The Spirit of the Laws
that, after twenty years of travel and research, he specified in the greatest
empirical detail then possible "the laws, customs, and varied usages of all
peoples."28 His mature work is perhaps best described as a political soci-
ology both comparative and historical, based on the conscious analogy be-
tween the aspects of a society and the qualities of a system. In comparing
French and English laws punishing false evidence, Montesquieu wrote, "The
three French laws form a system whose parts are closely interrelated and
mutually dependent; the same is no less true of English laws on the same
question."29 Tocqueville's concepts "aristocracy" and "democracy" were
what Weber called "general ideal types," contrasting systems. Aristocratic
society, like democratic society, was conceived by Tocqueville as what J.-J.
Chevallier has called "a Whole" (un Tout). Its structure can be understood
27 Oeuvres (B), I, 338, letter from Tocqueville to Louis de Kergolay, November 10,
1836.
28 Ed. Caillois, II, 1137.
29 Ibid., II, 872.
Melvin Richter 139
only by reference to its spirit, and in this way can be grasped its advantages
and defects, its sources of power and weakness.30
Both Montesquieu and Tocqueville believed that essential to the under-
standing of any functioning system is the dimension of time, that is, history.
To explain why laws or institutions exist, it is necessary to follow the tem-
poral process by which they assumed their relationship within their sys-
tem.31 This method Tocqueville called the analysis of le point de depart.
By it may be compared not only two different societies, but the same society
at different times.
What, then, constitutes an adequate explanation of why a society has its
laws, political organization, and social structure? Montesquieu insisted that
such explanations systematically take into account two major types of
causes. Principal among physical causes, in his view, is that of climate,
which produces a number of physiological and mental consequences. Also
to be examined are the quality of terrain, the density of population, and the
territorial scale of a society. Montesquieu is still excessively identified with
the emphasis upon such physical and ecological causes. The fact is that he
quite specifically rejected the notion that physical causes directly and irre-
sistibly determine a society's mode of life. It was his position that moral
causes may predominate over physical ones, that political and religious
means may minimize and overcome the effects of climate.
Montesquieu's most comprehensive concept was that of a society's esprit
generale, which is determined not only by physical causes, but by what he
considered to be moral forces: religion, laws, maxims, precedents, mores
(moeurs), customs (manieres), economy and trade, and style of thought,
usually created in capital or court. The resultant of such moral and physical
forces is a certain ordering of every important aspect of a society. This
general spirit, as formulated by Montesquieu, possesses none of the meta-
physical attributes found in the notion of the Volksgeist. For him the gen-
eral character is to be discovered empirically from the style of the upbring-
ing or education it imparts to its members. This is done in three ways:
through the family, the schools, and the social relationships of the wider
society, or world. These settings may all teach the same thing; they may
contradict one another. The modern world is critically affected in this
regard by the contradiction between what is taught by religion, on the one
hand, and by the world, on the other, a state of affairs unknown to classical
antiquity.32 Thus Montesquieu's theory calls attention to the integration or
contradiction among all the aspects of a society. Its general character de-
rives from a number of causes, physical and moral, whose respective effects
may be assessed after careful investigation. To the extent that any one
cause is established as predominating, the rest recede in importance. Nor
is it assumed that integration always is the characteristic state of a society;
Montesquieu allows for contradictions.
30 Chevallier, "De la distinction des societes aristocratiques et des societes demo-

cratiques en tant que fondement de la pensee politique d'Alexis de Tocqueville," Revue
des Travoux de l'Academie des sciences morales et politiques, CIX (1956), 118. M. Che-
vallier gives an excellent summary of the qualities attributed to aristocracy and democ-
racy by Tocqueville.
31 Montesquieu, ed. Caillois, II, 1103.
32 Ibid., 54, 266.
The notion that each society possesses some general principle that dis-
tinguishes it from others is not without significance in Montesquieu, who
warned of the dangers to a ruler who disregards the spirit of his people.
There are a number of national character sketches scattered throughout
Montesquieu's work. On the whole, they are difficult to reconcile with the
project of arriving at a science based on a few laws applicable to all societies.
Tocqueville likewise was attracted by the notion of national character, al-
though he rejected any racial explanations such as those of his one-time
secretary, the Comte de Gobineau. Social character must be explained by
reference to all those potential causes charted by Montesquieu, including
differing national experiences. Yet Tocqueville chose to close the only com-
pleted volume of The Old Regime and the Revolution by an extraordinary
page detailing how the French national character affected the Revolution.33
As will be seen, he began with aspirations toward the sort of law sought
by Montesquieu. Later Tocqueville abandoned this hope. But like Montes-
quieu, Tocqueville is better understood as a comparatist when placed within
the context of three types of inquiry that have not been considered together
in terms of their confluence in the thought of these two great aristocrats: the
French tradition of comparative law, whose greatest figure had been Jean
Bodin; the literature of travel and exploration; and finally, the philosophical
history of the eighteenth century, to which the work of both bore such an
ambivalent relationship.
II
In that collective representation of its history which so dominates American
political science at this time, no studies are regarded with such disfavor as
those of constitutional and legal systems. These are identified with formal-
ism, arid research and inadequate theory, neglect of behavior and context,
a narrowly Western perspective-everything unusable about political sci-
ence as practiced in the past. No doubt such approaches to law and consti-
tutions did in fact exist. Not so long ago American students of political
theory found themselves involved in interminable discussions of sover-
eignty; students of comparative politics were committed to equally unfruit-
ful analyses of the public law and overt institutional structures of Western
states, taken one by one. But in large part, such emphases can be traced
back to needs originating at the time when political science was established
as an autonomous subject within universities. To prove that it was a sepa-
rate subject, political science had to claim that it had the "state" for its
object of study. It is quite indefensible to project backward into the remote
past a similar conjunction between the comparative study of public law
and a static institutional approach to Western states. In fact, comparative
law provided one of the most powerful impulses to comparative analysis.
And as though to show how selective is our view of our subject's past,
sixteenth-century developments in the French style of comparative law were
both summarized and advanced by Jean Bodin, who now is largely read in
selection as the theorist of sovereignty.
33 L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution. Oeuvres completes, ed. J. P. Mayer, 2 vols.

(Paris, 1953), I, 249-250. This edition is hereafter cited as Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M).
Melvin Richter 141
Because of a set of conditions peculiar to France, comparative law by the

time Bodin came to it was both empirical and relativistic. It emphasized
those social and contextual structures upon which the meaning and func-
tion of legal systems depend. Its data were drawn from non-European, as
well as European, sources, although peoples regarded as primitive received
little attention. Apart from this omission, its focus was as much sociological
or anthropological as political. Bodin receives extensive discussion in the
most recent history of early anthropology; he was also a significant contrib-
utor to historiography.34 Given the state of knowledge in his time, it was
essential that men learn how to deal in a critical and systematic way with
historical materials, including such matters as devising a chronology appli-
cable to the past records of all civilizations and states. Even before Bodin,
comparative law, the literature of travel and exploration, and historiography
had converged in France.
In a book of great importance to the history of comparative analysis,
J. G. A. Pocock has emphasized the uniqueness of the English common-law
tradition in the seventeenth century and has contrasted it to the French
legal mind.35 The effects of common-law thinking were many and great: it
defined England's view of its history; it made an ineradicable contribution
to the English political vocabulary, categories of legitimacy, and perception
of what political arrangements might exist as alternatives to those in exis-
tence. Because in England there was one and only one legal system, its prac-
titioners and historians neither confronted nor resolved those problems
about law in general and its feudal development in particular which formed
the staple of legal studies in France at just this time. Thus political percep-
tions were crucially affected by the respective traditions of legal thought
in both countries.
On the continent, legal theory during the Middle Ages consisted in large
part of exegesis and commentary upon the Roman law as found in surviv-
ing and, as it turned out, corrupt texts of the Corpus Iuris codified under
Justinian. But along with Roman law, there existed customary law. Hence
arose the intellectual possibility, indeed the practical necessity, of compar-
ing these two bodies of law, so strikingly disparate in their origins and
forms. As late as Montesquieu's time, he, as a magistrate, had to administer
the Roman law, such royal ordinances as extended to Guienne, his province,
as well as ten different sets of local customary law. In England, there existed
no similar incentives to compare legal systems.
In France, the initial sixteenth-century developments in comparative law
grew out of the humanist attempt to restore its original meaning to the
Roman law, that great product of classical antiquity that the French placed
so high above their feudal past and its legacy of customary law.36 Their
original approach was philological, based on a growing knowledge of Latin.
34 Hodgen, Ch. 7.
35 The Ancient Constitution ond the Feudal Law [New York, 1967), Chs. 1-3.
36 In this account of Bodin and French comparative law, I am relying principally
upon Jean Moreau-Reibel, Jean Bodin et le droit public compare (Paris, 1933); Julian H.
Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law
and History (New York, 1963); Pierre Mesnard, I'Essor de lo philosophie politique au
XVIe siecle (2d ed.; Paris, 1951); and Walther Hug, "The History of Comparative Law,"
Harvard Law Review, XLV (April 1932), 1027-1070.
As this progressed far beyond the level attained by medieval jurists, French
humanists sought to establish the meaning of the law's sources by relating
them to other knowledge being discovered about their original context in
Rome. Interpretation now increasingly took the form of assuming that the
Roman law formed a single system, rather than a collection of texts to be
treated casuistically or analogically. The unintended consequence of legal
humanism was to break with the legal authority of the Roman past, formally
regarded as valid for all time. The humanists concluded that the Roman law,
as found in the codification of Justinian, was imperfect or incomplete, in part
because many of its provisions had been dictated by needs peculiar to Rome,
in part because the historical record of Roman law was defective.
And in French political and religious disturbances of the sixteenth cen-
tury, law came to be the center of theoretical dispute. Protestant spokesmen,
such as Hotman, opposed medieval constitutionalism to the centralized doc-
trine found in the Roman law, which was being turned to good use by the
Crown's lawyers. In Hotman, the appeal to French medieval history went
along with a principled rejection of a purely Roman jurisprudence. It is not
difficult to see how a type of relativism grew out of the Huguenot necessity
to deny the universal applicability of the Roman law. But other French
Protestant magistrates and lawyers took the side of the Politiques, rather
than that of the Huguenots. The Politiques' theory of the French constitution
as a monarchie temperee, at once absolute and limited, was difficult to recon-
cile with the Roman theory of the ruler as princeps, whose will could not
be limited by law. Hence this political position produced another impulse
toward relativizing legal theory. The Politiques came to view the French
monarchy as peculiar to their country. Legal theorists concluded that if it
were possible to construct public law on some set of universal principles,
these should be sought, not exclusively in Roman law, but in the systems
of France and other nations as well.
It was against this background that Bodin set out his program for reform-
ing law on the basis of all information available from universal history, that
is, from all known human records of law and legislation. This was to be
done by systematic comparison, analysis, and synthesis. Bodin proposed
three methodological departures profoundly important for the future: "an
exposition of the ius gentium in the sense of a common law of nations, a
system of comparative jurisprudence, and a sociological theory of legal
history."37
Bodin amassed so much data that by common consent he is considered
to be the most thoroughly informed practitioner of comparative politics
between Aristotle and Montesquieu. But Bodin was not a crude empiricist.
In his view, human behavior cannot be studied systematically without resort
to classification and comparison: "Such is the multiplicity and disorder of
human activities . . . that unless the actions and affairs of men are confined
to certain definite types, historical works cannot be understood."38 After
having collected the laws, institutions, and history of the Romans, Bodin
added to his materials for comparative analysis those of the Greeks, Egyp-
37 Franklin, p. 69.
38 Bodin, Method for the Easy Comprehension of History, tr. Beatrice Reynolds (New
York, 1945), p. 28.
Melvin Richter 143
tians, Persians, and Hebrews. His categories were also intended to make
possible further comparisons among the national sovereignties emerging
in his time from feudalism. Hence Bodin also amassed extensive data on
the political and legal arrangements of contemporary England, Spain, Italy
and Germany. He took great interest in the laws and government of the
Turkish Empire, then at the height of its power; he did significant original
research on Scandinavia and Poland; he made use of such materials as were
available on eastern Europe, Muscovy, North Africa, and America; his con-
cern extended to all histories, travel reports, and geographies he could find.
In his own country, he carried through primary archival research of impor-
tance, such as the collection of coronation oaths. Nor did he neglect the
politics of his own time. Information gained from his position as an ambas-
sador and royal counselor was supplemented by intensive interrogation of
diplomats, French and foreign, of travelers, and of foreign scholars. Because
of these sources, Bodin's Republic contains some of the best-informed dis-
cussions of his time about how international agreements were in fact reached
and about the extent to which they were kept. Although Bodin is often
identified with a narrowly political set of interests by those who know him
only from his theory of sovereignty, a recent assessment takes quite the
opposite point of view:
... It . . . cannot be said that Bodin left history, geography, politics, and
ethnology exactly where he found them. By him, each of these humane dis-
ciplines, full-fledged or still embryonic in the sixteenth century, was brought
into touch with all the others, and thus renewed and modified. The majority
of scholars before and during the early Renaissance had viewed man above
all as a moral being. The moment when he could be thought of or studied in
his social, economic, political, or ethnological aspects, with these aspects
disassociated mentally from value judgments, had been slow in coming.
Compare the works of earlier scholars with the Methodus and the Repub-
lique.... Compare these earlier attempts to win an argument by logic alone
with Bodin's plan to achieve knowledge of man by using not only logic but
evidence, both historical and geographic.... Note again his insistence upon
the comparison of the histories, the religions, the languages, and the com-
monwealths of peoples; and note the absence of such comparisons in the
Middle Ages.39
Bodin was no less ambitious in his project for classifying all known forms
of government. It was at this point that he introduced his innovation of
attributing an indivisible sovereign power to all states. Among other things,
it made it possible for Bodin to dismiss the ancient theory of the mixed
constitution. Yet he did not abandon the categories of democracy, aris-
tocracy, and monarchy, but fitted them into his forms of sovereignty. To
take into account the balancing of social interests, as had been done in the
theory of the mixed constitution, Bodin made a highly significant distinction
between the form of government and the form of state. As Professor Frank-
lin has summarized it: "The form of government, or the political principle
by which offices and honors are distributed, may be either democratic, aris-
tocratic, or monarchical, or some combination of these three; it need not
be in correspondence with the form of state, and indeed some contrast
39 Hodgen, p. 280-281.
between the two is recommended by Bodin as a help to political stability.

Thus the classical commonwealth of Rome was democratic in its sover-
eignty, but aristocratic in its government, while the 'mixed' constitution
of contemporary Venice is really a pure aristocracy with certain democratic
tendencies in government."40 This system of classification Bodin applied
to every state known to him, and he cited data on the size, composition, and
status of the organs of government.
Finally, Bodin classified the basic types of national character, or naturels,
to which laws must be accommodated. Every society, because of the influ-
ence of climate or geography, has such a character. Although these forces
do not necessarily determine the naturel, for training may successfully
counter their effects, nevertheless the statesman must grasp a people's humor
and nature before expecting anything from an alteration of the state or laws.
Bodin's relativism manifests itself in two ways: in his insistence, first, that
institutions and legislation must conform to a people's character and, second,
that they be appropriate to the form of state. In short, basic types are the
unit of analysis, not a universal human nature.
Montesquieu was still working in the tradition of comparative law when
he wrote The Spirit of the Laws. His work, on its face a treatise on law, in
fact puts much of its emphasis upon the necessity of making the legal system
appropriate to a number of other forces shaping the society. His title page
reads, "Concerning the Spirit of the Laws, or the relation laws ought to have
to the constitution of each government, its mores [moeurs], climate, religion,
commerce, etc." Similarly, in his Democracy in America, Tocqueville de-
clared his principal purpose to be a study of American laws, but his con-
clusion was that although the American constitutional and legal systems
were more important than geography, the greatest single force behind the
success of the United States was the power of its citizens' moeurs. The
connection with Bodin is clear: on the one hand, the desire to arrive at gen-
eralizations valid for all societies belonging to the same type-in short, com-
parison of similarities; on the other hand, a strong sense of what is unique
in the mores, the distinctive character (naturel) of each society, and even
in its historical development-in short, comparison of differences. Nor are
comparisons made in purely structural terms; there is also an effort to utilize
them in constructing explanations of "general causes." The omnivorous
reading done by Montesquieu in his twenty years' work was a continuation
of Bodin's indefatigable pursuit of data. And if universal history was Bodin's
province, so too was it Montesquieu's. And Bodin's search for a universal
law underlying all the diversities he had discovered was still present in
Montesquieu's theory of natural law. Intervening theorists such as Grotius,
Pufendorf, and Althusuius, who had acknowledged their debt to Bodin,
were in turn hailed by Montesquieu as having done their work so well that
he did not propose to repeat it. But as Meinecke has demonstrated, Montes-
quieu's growing relativism and sociological determinism were at war with
those original forms of natural law he could not bring himself to abandon.4'
40 Franklin, p. 75.
41 Friedrich Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus (Munich, 1946), p. 133. Mein-
ecke, however, points out that natural law theories are not all of one kind. Following
Troeltsch's distinction between absolute and relativistic forms of natural law, Meinecke
Melvin Richter 145
Of course, there were important differences between the political posi-

tions and modes of thought of Bodin and Montesquieu, although their styles
of comparative analysis belonged to the same family. Bodin had a theory
of sovereignty and a belief in the importance of order, both notions com-
prehensible in a Politique who had lived through the Fronde, but unpalat-
able to an aristocratic magistrate who believed that the ancient constitu-
tion of France had been subverted by the centralization and strengthen-
ing of the royal power against the constitutional intermediary powers
of the noblesse de robe, the group to which Montesquieu belonged. Mon-
tesquieu went on to construct a group theory of politics and to argue the
utility of conflict in a political system meant to maintain liberty, points
antithetic to the main thrust of Bodin's thought. And although both Bodin
and Montesquieu conceived themselves to be men of science, the science
of Bodin's day allowed him to resort to astrology and the belief in witch-
craft, while Montesquieu, an admirer of Descartes, Bacon, and Newton and
a member of the Academy of Bordeaux and the Royal Society, was pre-
cluded from such modes of thought. On balance, however, in addition to
their common legal formation, their resemblances are more significant than
their divergences. Both put much stress on climate as one of the forces
shaping a nation; both, while regarding religion as an indispensable form
of political and social control, were probably some sort of believer in natural
religion. The weakening of Christian orthodoxy made it possible for all
branches of comparative study to progress. Relativism, as exhibited in com-
parative religion, was a powerful spur to the systematic exploration of both
similarities and differences among societies.
Of all the impetuses toward comparative study, no source was more
powerful than the new information about the non-European world brought
in by the voyages of exploration, trade, missionary activity, and coloniza-
tion that began in the fifteenth century. One effect of such knowledge, not
only of the primitive cultures of the Americas, but also of the high cultures
of Asia, has been effectively stated by Professor Donald Lach: "But perhaps
what is most significant of all is the dawning realization in the West that not
all truth and virtue were contained within its own cultural and religious
traditions. The century of the great discoveries, viewed from the perspective
of the present, can be taken as the date from which Westerners began self-
consciously to question their own cultural premises, to weigh them in a
balance against the presuppositions and accomplishments of other high
cultures, and to initiate fundamental revisions in their own views of the
world, man, and the future."42 Yet it must not be assumed that the flood of
new information was in itself enough to guarantee comparative analysis
based upon relativism, objectivity, or even adequately sifted and criticized
data. As Professor Lach has warned us, European reactions were to some
argues that Montesquieu never resolved his hesitations between these two alternatives
within natural law, nor between it and empirical-relativistic thought. M. Aron has replied
to Meinecke that no thinker has been able to follow relativism through to the point of
abandoning the effort to ground at least some values on the nature of reality. Thus
M. Aron concedes the difficulty in reconciling these two aspects of Montesquieu's
thought, but refuses to acknowledge that the problem has been or is likely to be resolved
by anyone else.
42 Lach, Asia in the Making of Europe, Vol. I, Book II, 835.
extent determined by domestic conditions and perspectives: "Clearly, the

Europeans' view of Asia was not a static one. Europe responded to the vari-
ous overseas cultures with constantly changing degrees of enthusiasm or re-
vulsion. It followed that the techniques, art forms, and ideas from the East
had a different appeal in Europe at different times and that Europe's own
climate of opinion in a given epoch helped to determine the selections that
Europeans made from the new cultures revealed to them."43
Much else beside the climate of opinion was to determine European atti-
tudes toward non-Western peoples. Religious disputes, heresies, and skep-
ticism; acceptance or rejection of unification and centralization, of mercan-
tilism and war as instruments of national policy; the political and social
positions of groups and classes-these were to help determine what use
was to be made of the information that was transforming knowledge of the
world. As has been pointed out about the development of relativism in
comparative law, the increasing bureaucratization and centralization of the
means of violence and justice by the national monarchies threatened not
only the interests and style of life but also the continuing existence of cer-
tain groups. Their perspective was apt to be relativist in unmasking and
combating whatever universalistic claims were made by the centralizing
authority. Knowledge of other civilizations could reinforce such corrosive
skepticism. But in other branches of their own thought, such threatened
groups might turn to older universalistic criteria, such as the natural law,
in order to combat the belligerent foreign policy of a Louis XIV.44
Nor were data from the non-European world received on a tabula rasa.
Categories taken from the ancient and medieval world views, from various
versions of humanism and Christianity, from agreed-upon inventories of
matters to be investigated by travelers, missionaries, and explorers-all
these affected both those making reports and those servants and populariz-
ers who assessed their significance. From the sixteenth century on, the
European mind was preoccupied by debates about how best to compare and
about the significance of diversities and similitudes. Such authors as Bacon,
Bodin, and Montaigne were of great importance for the development of
Montesquieu's choice of subjects and categories of comparison.
The same sort of ambivalence that characterized comparative work in
law appeared as well in studies of the non-Western world based on the ex-
plorations and travels of Europeans. On the one hand, no collection of the
customs and institutions of non-European peoples was possible without
classification of uniformities; on the other, the principal categories tended
to be Europocentric, so that there was a considerable probability that peo-
ples who failed to fit into the European scheme of things might be classified
as barbarian, primitive, aboriginal, or like man before his fall. Both out-
comes are to be found in European thinkers: those of the late eighteenth
century often preferred to emphasize what was common to all men every-
where, while in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and again in the
nineteenth, it was perhaps more often the case that the dissimilarities were
stressed to point up the superiority of European religion, commerce, or gov-
ernment. Montaigne, for example, wrote of the Brazilians that they were "a
43 Ibid., Book I, xiv-xv.

44 Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the
French Enlightenment (Princeton, 1965).
Melvin Richter 147
nation,-that hathe no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no in-

telligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superiorite; no
use of service, of riches, or of poverty; no contracts, no successions, no
dividences, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no
apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, come, or
mettle."45
Miss Hodgen, whose valuable account I am for the most part following
here, notes that Hobbes, in his famous description of the state of war, is
following this same well-established Europocentric but negative mode of
description: "In such condition, there is no place for industry; . . . no cul-
ture of the earth; no navigation; nor use of the commodities that may be
imported by sea; no commodious buildings; no instruments of moving, and
removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of
the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society...."48
Montesquieu characteristically managed to respond with extraordinary
sympathy, flexibility, and logical inconsistency to both tendencies. It was
his clear intent to formulate categories that would group similarities among
human societies regardless of time and space. In many regards, his work
was a triumph of curiosity, research, and objectivity over parochial preju-
dice. In his first work, the Persian Letters, he succeeded in achieving a re-
markably fresh and detached view of France. Almost every aspect of
French life was relativized and made both problematic and amusing. Such a
perspective is more than the product of change; it soon comes to serve as
a solvent of traditional values and modes of thought, even though Montes-
quieu was no champion of reform for its own sake. Montesquieu, the critic
of established religion, the censor of religious intolerance and racial pride,
by no means favored wholesale changes in the society: "It is sometimes
necessary to change certain basic laws. But the case is rare, and should be
undertaken with trembling hands."47 It is possible to find a positive political
theory in some parts of the Persian Letters, but from the point of view of
contemporary political analysis, there is nothing that equals the sequence
of letters that passes among the master of the seraglio, absent in Paris, his
eunuchs, and his wives in Persia. Older critics tended to dismiss these let-
ters as mere exoticism and sensual titillation (although our jaded age finds
them somewhat faded on this score). Actually, this purported correspond-
ence is the single most sustained psychological analysis of despotism as a
system of fear, jealousy, and mutual suspicion in Montesquieu's work, and
quite possibly in any writer up to our own time, when such accounts have
ceased to be works of the imagination and have become instead factual ac-
counts of totalitarianism. What Montesquieu created was the image of a
triangular relationship, which because of its inhumanity and absence of
liberty, failed to provide even its ostensible beneficiary, the master of the
seraglio, with the fulfillment he sought. And this was connected to the mas-
ter's need to rely upon force and fear, operating through his eunuchs, to
maintain the conditions regarded by him as prerequisite to love. With ex-
traordinary flexibility, Montesquieu made his readers perceive the situation
4" Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p. 107.

46 Cited ibid., p. 201.
47 Lettres Persones, CXXIX; see Montesquieu, The Persian Letters, tr. George R.
Healey (Indianapolis, 1964). I have provided my own translations.
from the perspectives of the master, the women, and the eunuchs in turn.
What makes the Persian Letters superior to The Spirit of the Laws in the
treatment of despotism is that the master is shown to be incapable of en-
forcing his apparently unlimited power, or of satisfying himself.
In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu composed a far more detailed
model of despotism than in his earlier imaginative work. But his treatment
of despotism in the later treatise suffers from his frequent departures from
the claim he had made that he had derived his politics not from prejudice,
but from the nature of things: "It is impossible to speak of such monstrous
governments without becoming infuriated."48 The despot rules by fear alone;
he is unrestricted by any basic law. Despots do not usually exercise rule
directly, for they prefer to depute their power to a vizier. Abandoned to
brutal passions, pursuing in a prostituted court every extravagance, despot-
ism demands abject obedience from its subjects. It has none of the charac-
teristics found in the politics of a free society-moderation of power,
accommodation of groups conceded to have some autonomy, discussion be-
tween them and the sovereign, consideration of proposals alternative to
those judged as damaging to their interests by parties affected by legislation.
From the despot's viewpoint, unquestioning obedience is the only proper
response to authority. Education, therefore, is designed to produce that type
of character. The ruled must be ignorant, timid, broken in spirit, requiring
little in the way of legislation. In a despotism, every family is, as a matter of
policy, isolated from every other. Men, instead of being trained to live to-
gether on the basis of mutual respect, are made to feel only fear and isola-
tion. Esprit de corps is hateful to despots, who cannot endure the indepen-
dence of aristocrats who scorn life if it is ignoble. Only religion and custom
can moderate despotism, and these are both less effective and less regular
than law. Even in the sphere of economic life, despotism exerts a noxious
influence. The general uncertainty impoverishes the mass of men; com-
merce is unrewarding.49
Montesquieu's concept of Oriental despotism was much critcized in his
own time on the question of its factual basis. Voltaire, who wished to jus-
tify some kinds of absolute rulers, began the onslaught, which reached its
height in the writings of Anquetil-Duperron, the first Frenchman with an
accurate knowledge of the culture and politics of India. Montesquieu had
declared that, under despotism, the ruler could seize the property of any of
his subjects and was subject to no restraints in the exercise of his power,
except for those of religion and custom. Anquetil-Duperron denied that this
constituted an accurate account of the situations in any of the countries
adduced by Montesquieu as examples of despotism.50
There can be little doubt that the concept of Oriental despotism had been
used by the aristocratic opposition to Louis XIV as a way of criticizing royal
48 De lEsprit des Lois, Book III, Ch. 9. The best edition is that by Jean Brethe de la
Gressaye, 4 vols. (Paris, 1950-1961). The only English translation is none too accurate
and is in any case misleading because of changes in usage since the time it was made in
the middle of the eighteenth century (New York, 1949). I have provided my own trans-
lations.
49 This follows the account I have given in "Montesquieu," International Encyclopedia
of the Social Sciences (New York, 1968).
50 See Venturi, "Oriental Despotism," pp. 136 ff.; Weil, "Montesquieu et le des-
potisme."
Melvin Richter 149
rule by declaring it to be contrary to French constitutional practice. The

same was true of English uses of the term by the country party against the
Crown. But the question remains whether the best evidence in travel books,
such as Chardin's on Persia, in fact gave Montesquieu adequate grounds
for constructing his model of despotism. On this, the authorities disagree.
The author of the most careful study of Montesquieu's knowledge and use
of travel literature is of the opinion that Montesquieu had read everything
available and had, on the basis of his comparisons of these works, con-
cluded that Persia, the Turkish Empire, and other Oriental societies were
actually despotisms.5' The point is an intriguing one, not least because it
shows how ambivalent were European attitudes toward the reports of exotic
societies and how comparison could be of considerable political significance,
for both domestic and internatonal politics. In any case, the concept of
Oriental despotism included the assertion that certain societies had never
known constitutional liberties, as had Europeans, even during feudalism.
Later, when European powers came to dominate the Oriental ones, the
earlier notion served the purpose of justifying a different system of rule for
the indigenous population than that practiced at home by the metropolitan
power. It might be asked whether Europeans have ever managed to devise
a comparative scheme that has not distorted the shape of the non-European
world in one or another way. Montesquieu's exposure to the literature of
travel was vital to his comparative work, but his concept of despotism was
at least as much a reaction to domestic politics.
Another important strand in the comparative styles of Montesquieu and
Tocqueville had its origin in philosophical history.52 Montesquieu's greatest
contribution to this approach to history is his Considerations on the Causes
of the Greatness and Decline of the Romans. Gibbon wrote that his own
great study of the subject had been inspired by Montesquieu, and Tocque-
ville's first conception of the form that he would give to his l'Ancien Regime
was likewise taken from the model of Montesquieu's Considerations.53 What
did this view of history imply for Montesquieu?
History is to be explained neither by reference to theological final causes,
such as Providence, nor by chance, even to the limited extent allowed for by
Machiavelli: "It is not fortune that rules the world. . . . The Romans had a
series of consecutive successes when their government followed one policy,
and an unbroken set of reverses when it adopted another. There are general
causes, whether moral or physical, which act upon every monarchy, which
create, maintain, or ruin it. All accidents are subject to these causes, and if
the chance loss of a battle, that is to say, a particular cause, ruins a state,
there is a general cause that created the situation whereby this state could
perish by the loss of a single battle."54
51 Muriel Dodds, Les recits de voyages, sources de l'Esprit des Lois (Paris, 1929).
52 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, "The Historical Philosophy of the Enlightenment," in
Studies of Voltaire and of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Theodore Besterman (Geneva,
1963), pp. 1667-1687; Frank Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (Stanford, 1965);
Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism (New
York, 1966).
53 Tocqueville, Oeuvres (M), II, ii, 13.
54 Montesquieu, Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et leur
decadence, Ch. 18; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and
Their Decline, tr. David Lowenthal (New York, 1965). I have provided my own transla-
tions.
A second emphasis of philosophical history, if a negative one, consisted

in the rejection of fact, detail, or erudition for its own sake. The style of
Montesquieu in the Considerations is sparse, clear, and analytical. His gen-
eralizations are what survive the defects of his historical scholarship, which
was faulty even at the time he wrote. Already scholarship had attained to
higher standards than he applied to his evidence, for he did not criticize his
sources and in each chapter relied on but one classical author. Although
archaeology was beginning to make considerable contributions to the study
of Roman history, Montesquieu did not avail himself of such findings.
A third characteristic of philosophical history was its turning away from
teaching by example taken from great heroes, as had been done in the
Renaissance, when Plutarch had called forth so much admiration. On the
whole, Montesquieu played down military heroes. He detested the world
that had been created by the balance of power, and he defined his interest
as being in people rather than wars. One of the major conclusions of his
study was that, by a process of a sort that a later age would call dialectical,
Rome was first made and then ruined: "Here, in a word, is the history of the
Romans. By following their original maxims, they conquered all other peo-
ples. But after such success their republic could no longer be maintained.
It became necessary to change the form of government. The new principles
caused the Romans to fall from their former grandeur."55
Montesquieu here combined judgments of fact and value in a way dear
to him. On the one hand, he was generalizing about the effects of scale upon
a government's structure and functions; on the other, he was concluding that
the Romans had fought too much and conquered too much. Violence, first
used as a weapon against other nations, was in turn employed at home.
Roman decadence was inherent in the means used to attain greatness.
Montesquieu was here recasting themes that had recurred among opponents
of the foreign policy of Louis XIV and of mercantilism.
Montesquieu's movement away from splendid heroes and martial vic-
tories pushed him in the direction of sociological and economic analyses.
Not the state exclusively, but the society-its nature, its internal logic, de-
riving from its structure and type-became to an equal extent the object of
his investigation. The explanation of history is to be sought not in political
but in social and economic history. The way in which property is distributed
and inheritance provided for, the means of creating wealth and creating new
techniques in agriculture and industry, the attention given to commerce, the
understanding of the effects produced by different sets of institutions and
legal systems-these were to stand at the center of the historian's concerns.
History was, in the phrase of Giannone, to become "historia civile," that of
civil society. Professor Trevor-Roper has pointed out in this connection the
significance of the fact that Montesquieu once planned to write "une histoire
civile du royaume de France comme Giannone a fait l'Histoire civile du
royaume de Naples."56
The last article of philosophical history was that historians, rather than
confining their work to those societies that were Christian or that had
played a part in the historians' own development, should break out of such
55 Montesquieu, Considerations, Ch. 18.
56 "Historical Philosophy," 1675-1676; Montesquieu, ed. Caillois. I, 1256.
Melvin Richter 151
bounds and write truly universal history. All great civilizations deserved
consideration as part of the human past. It must be noticed that Montes-
quieu differed from later philosophical historians in that he did not hold to
any form of the theory of progress. Unlike those who believed that history
should principally record those advances that had been made and analyze
the reasons for them, as well as the obstacles to further progress, Montes-
quieu in his Considerations was much interested in decline and corruption
and their causes in the structure of politics and society.
III
It is intriguing to follow minds of the quality possessed by Montesquieu
and Tocqueville when they are applied to the comparative enterprise. Mon-
tesquieu's interest was almost equally divided between establishing simi-
larities among classes of societies or politics widely separated in space and
time and arriving at the perception of what is individual and irreducibly
different about each of them. Montesquieu is one of those thinkers whose
greatness and historical significance derive from his ambivalences and even
contradictions. On the one hand his success in comparison, his effort to
establish the basic laws governing the major types of political and social
structures, won him Durkheim's praise (in his view, Montesquieu was the
authentic precursor of sociology). On the other, Montesquieu was clearly
attracted to diversity and was endlessly curious about everything human
that related to his vast study. One part of his mind aspired to be scientific,
as he understood the term;57 he was determined to reduce the bewildering
variety of political and social phenomena to similarities, simple types gov-
erned by no more than a relatively few general laws. But Montesquieu was
also in love with differences, complexity, organic and unplanned historical
development, the hidden wisdom of custom, the generally beneficent, if
unintended, consequences of faith. Nowhere is this ambivalence better dis-
played than in Montesquieu's discussion of feudalism, which Marc Bloch
called the first treatment of feudalism as a social system. Yet this vast piece
of comparative historical sociology appended to The Spirit of the Laws began
with an extended organic metaphor, in which Montesquieu likened the sys-
tem formed by feudal laws and practices to a venerable oak that lifts its
majestic head to the skies. As one approaches from afar, the trunk is visible,
but not the roots. In order to find them, it is necessary to penetrate deep be-
neath the surface.58 Thus the organic approach to feudalism as a system
involved in this metaphor is combined with the scientific spirit of analysis
applied to all phenomena as susceptible to comparative investigation of a
sort that will produce general laws. Montesquieu compared not only differ-
ent societies and polities, but the same society at different periods.
Tocqueville as a comparatist was perhaps more limited in his aims than
Montesquieu, a gentleman scholar who had little connection with the prac-
tical politics of his time. Tocqueville, who took his political career far more
57 Montesquieu scholars have differed profoundly in their judgment of his scientific

model. Among the leading candidates have been Descartes, Malebranche, Bacon, and
Newton.
58 Montesquieu, De 1'Esprit des Lois, XXX, Ch. 1.
seriously than has been suspected until quite recently, was rather more
pragmatic and didactic, concerned to derive from comparison conclusions
more immediately applicable to his own political situation than those drawn
by his master.59 Yet he had assimilated Montesquieu and had learned how
to turn comparison to both practical and intellectual uses. In writing the
l'Ancien Regime, he had learned German so as to be able to contrast France
to the German Rhineland, which was geographically contiguous, and thus
find in what respects conditions in 1789 were better or worse.60 On the basis
of the differences he found, Tocqueville constructed some of his most power-
ful explanations of when and why revolutions occur: when things are going
from worse to better, and when an oppressive government seeks to reform
itself. Similarly, his analysis of political leadership and its effects upon
revolution is comparative, with particular emphasis upon the differences be-
tween the English and French aristocracies in the eighteenth century.61
Yet it is perhaps even more instructive, if we are to perceive how spon-
taneously he turned to comparison, to examine a work so minor that it was
omitted from his Oeuvres completes published by Beaumont. This is his
talk delivered to the Royal Society of Cherbourg in 1835, the year of the
publication of the first part of Democracy in America.62 Tocqueville began
his talk with the proposition that the incidence of poverty varies inversely
with prosperity: the poorest countries have the fewest indigents; the most
prosperous and advanced countries such as England have the highest pro-
portion of their populations on relief. What is in point here are not so much
Tocqueville's conclusions, interesting as they are, but his method. Within a
few pages, he utilizes at least three modes of comparison. First he compares
the incidence of pauperism in France to that in England, Spain, and Portugal.
Then he turns from comparing countries to the examination of different
areas within the same country. Finally, he constructs a historical comparison
between society as it was in the Middle Ages and modern society. These
profiles emphasize the development of new needs and expectations, the in-
creasing division of labor, the transition from an agricultural to an indus-
trial society, the replacement of ascribed status by equality, and the con-
sequent disruptions accompanying this great change. The generalization
that emerges from Tocqueville's comparisons is that those societies or
regions which are richest and technologically most advanced are those with
the highest proportion of citizens needing charity. Here again he used com-
parison to establish differences, which he then explained. This mode of
proceeding does not differ in kind from that advocated by Max Weber in an
earlier citation.63
Tocqueville again and again used comparative analysis to elicit key dif-
ferences among phenomena that were similar on their face and to draw
59 This has recently been confirmed by the publication of the Tocqueville-Beaumont

correspondence, Oeuvres (M), VIII, i-iii. See my review, American Political Science
Review, LXII (March 1968), 234-236.
60 Tocqueville, l'Ancien Regime. . ., Book II, Ch. 1; Book III, Ch. 4.
61 Ibid.; and "1'lttat social et politique de la France avant et depuis 1789," Tocque-
ville, Oeuvres (M), II, i, 33-66.
62 "Le Pauperisme," Bulletin du Comite des travoux historiques et scientifiques, Sec-
tion des sciences economiques et sociales (1911), pp. 16-37; in Tocqueville and Beaumont
on Social Reform, ed. and tr. Seymour Drescher (New York, 1968).
63 See fn. 17.
Melvin Richter 153
significant theoretical conclusions from his explanation of these differences.

Thus in treating what later was called the frontier theory of American his-
tory, Tocqueville, while conceding the importance of the phenomenon, had
no difficulty in demonstrating the Montesquieuan point that the opportu-
nities afforded by nature are less decisive than the social characters of
peoples.64 This he established by comparing the attitudes toward land use,
community, the Indians, and the wilderness held by the Canadians of French
origin to the attitudes of the Americans who were willing to become pioneers
purely because of economic rationality. The French Canadians, who wished
to continue the patterns of traditional village life they had lived as French
peasants, were willing to pay high prices for land, as though land were as
scarce as in France. They also regarded the wilderness and the Indians with a
certain romanticism. The Americans, on the contrary, recognizing that land
was free or cheap, became pioneers, not because of any attraction to the wild
and uncivilized, but because they recognized that they could advance them-
selves economically by expelling the Indians and turning the forest into a
place as much like what they had left as possible.
Did Tocqueville compare so as to arrive at general laws of society? In
his first book, there is evidence to indicate that he conceived of his work on
the model of comparative anatomy: "Societies, like organic bodies, follow in
their development [formation] certain fixed rules from which they cannot
deviate. They are made up of certain elements found in all times and places.
It will always be an easy matter to divide in principle [idealement] any people
into three classes."65 The first part of the Democratie appeared in 1835 with
this passage. By the early 1840's, he had apparently altered his views. In
the manuscript he began but never finished on the British conquest of India,
Tocqueville wrote that the time had come to connect this extraordinary
achievement to the general causes that rule human events. Then, upon re-
reading what he had written, he added in the margin "Trop ambitieux."66
When he wrote his Souvenirs, Tocqueville denounced all deterministic
theories of history with a vehemence and power that is now classic. But if
he rejected general laws, he did not forsake causal explanation as part of his
strategy of comparison. In his treatment of the revolution in the Souvenirs,
Tocqueville divided causes into classes called primary and secondary.67
He asked not only why certain events had occurred, but the reasons or causes
for their having done so in some times and places rather than others. Thus
comparison played an essential part in his analysis of revolution. His scheme
was one that used rational explanation of causes, but did not depend upon
deductions from general laws.
IV
It is one thing to arrive at the realization that genuine comparison presup-
poses sufficient self-knowledge to make one's society a subject for investiga-
tion like any other; it is quite another to be able to proceed to construct a
64 Oeuvres (M), I, i, 295-298.

65 Ibid., 216.
66 Ibid., III, i, 445.
67 Souvenirs, ed. Luc Monnier (Paris, 1942), p. 72.
typology of the sort requisite for analysis of complex societies. Both Montes-
quieu and Tocqueville were sophisticated about problems of method. Al-
though they had their roots in several established traditions of inquiry, they
themselves thought that they were breaking new ground, a judgment subse-
quently accepted by some of the best-informed historians of the social sci-
ences. Ernst Cassirer wrote: "Montesquieu in fact grasped a new and fruit-
ful principle and founded a new method in social science. The method of
ideal-types which he introduces and first applies effectively has never been
abandoned; on the contrary it reached its full development only in the soci-
ology of the 19th and 20th centuries."68
Franz Neumann, although he disliked the method in general and thought
that Montesquieu had chosen the wrong types, concurred with Cassirer's
view.69 Tocqueville, separated from Montesquieu by the French Revolution
and the other developments of the century extending from Montesquieu's
death to his own, devised a new typology with only two categories (democ-
racy-aristocracy) as against the three chosen by Montesquieu (republic,
monarchy, and despotism). But there can be little doubt that his method was
in principle the same as Montesquieu's.
Ideal-type analysis has been subjected to severe criticism. The point at
issue here, however, is not its merit, but whether Montesquieu and Tocque-
ville in fact used it.70 Ideal types are not hypotheses, but guides to construct-
ing hypotheses. Although not intended to provide descriptions of political
and social arrangements, ideal types are designed to give the most definite
forms attainable to such descriptions. An ideal type is formed by accentu-
ating a point of view and by compressing many concrete individual phenom-
ena into a single analytical construct. Such a concept, built up by logic, can-
not be found realized in all its aspects. It is the task of empirical research to
determine the extent to which any given state of affairs approximates, or
diverges from, an ideal-typical construct.71
When Montesquieu presented his three types, he did so in terms of the
nature and principle of each of them. Of his method he wrote: "I have had
new ideas; I have had to find new terms, or else to give new meanings to
old ones. ... It should be noted that there is a great difference between say-
ing that a certain quality. . . or virtue is not the spring that moves a govern-
ment, and saying that it is nowhere to be found in that government. If I
say that this wheel, this cog are not the spring that makes this watch go,
does it follow that they are not in this watch? . . . In a word, honor exists
in a republic, although political virtue is its mainspring; political virtue, in
a monarchy, although honor is its principle."72
Despite Montesquieu's anticipation of criticism, those who did not under-
68 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. F. C. N. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove

(Princeton, 1951), p. 212.
69 Neumann, "Editor's Introduction," in Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (New
York, 1949).
70 An excellent survey with bibliography is to be found in Don Martindale, "Socio-
logical Theory and the Ideal Type," in Symposium on Sociological Theory, ed. Bertram
Gross (Evanston, 1959), pp. 57-91. See also Guenther Roth's "Introduction," Max Weber,
Economy and Society, I, xxix-xxxiv.
71 Max Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. and tr. Edward A. Shils
and Henry A. Finch (Glencoe, 1949); Economy and Society, I, 19-22.
72 De I'Esprit des Lois, "Avertissement de l'auteur."
Melvin Richter 155
stand him or who disliked his position in the politics of his time nevertheless
acted as though he had committed an obvious error of observation, rather
than having made a deliberate choice of method. Tocqueville was to have
much the same experience. On the whole, the second part of Democracy in
America, which makes extended use of ideal types, was received with a good
deal less enthusiasm than the first. One notable exception among the review-
ers was John Stuart Mill, who hailed this more abstract section of the work
as the beginning of a new era in the scientific study of politics. Tocqueville
replied to Mill that no other critic had so well grasped his intention. Ponder-
ing the reasons for the otherwise general discontent with his intention and
method, Tocqueville reflected that no doubt he would have been better
understood had he confined himself to democracy, either in France or in
the United States. "But using concepts [notions] derived from American and
French society as my point of departure, I attempted to paint the general
features of democratic societies, of which no complete model [modele] yet
exists."73 Readers had little reason to mistake his intention, for at the be-
ginning of the second part of the Democracy, Tocqueville emphasized that
in attempting to determine the effects of social equality, he was not pre-
senting a monistic causal explanation for every aspect of American society:
"I must warn the reader immediately against an error that would be very
prejudicial to me. . . . Many of the opinions, sentiments, and instincts of
our time have their origins in circumstances that have nothing to do with
the principles of equality. ... I recognize the existence and efficacy of these
causes, but they do not compose my subject. I have not undertaken to point
out the origin and nature of all our inclinations and ideas. I have attempted
to show the extent to which both have been affected by the equality of con-
ditions."74 Again this clear statement of method went largely unheeded.75
It must be noted that this aspect of Tocqueville's method was not purely
synthetic, applied to a late stage of organizing his ideas. Rather it came into
play when he decided on what ought to be investigated. And comparison
was essential throughout the process of gathering data, questioning inform-
ants, compiling checklists. The role of ideal types in heuristic analysis, or
the identification of questions to be asked, or the sort of research necessary
to discover those places where answers are to be sought have seldom been
put more cogently than in Tocqueville's letter describing his operative
method: ". . . Since arriving here, we have had but one idea, and that is to
come to know the country. To do this, we are obliged to decompose society
a priori, to determine what are its constituent elements at home so that we
can put significant questions here without leaving anything out. Such a study,
very difficult but full of compensating attractions, makes us perceive any
number of details that would remain obscured without resort to such analy-
73 Oeuvres (M), VI, i, 330, letter from Tocqueville to J. S. Mill, October 18, 1840.
74 Ibid., I, ii, 7.
75 As late as 1938, Professor G. W. Pierson, in an otherwise excellent study, made the
two following criticisms of Tocqueville's method: "In his mind, Tocqueville created a
stuffed image of the past and labelled it as aristocratie just as he had already made a
dummy model of the future with the cognomen of democratie. ... In effect, he was
analyzing the whole of modern civilization, yet trying to explain it all by the develop-
ment of one great idea. Obviously such an effort could be scientific neither in method
or result." George Wilson Pierson, Tocqueville and Beaumont in America (New York,
1938), pp. 762, 765.
sis. . . . Already the result of this work has been a series of questions that
have occupied us in continuous inquiry. Knowing precisely what it is that
we seek, the slightest conversations are instructive, and we are in a position
to say that we can learn something from everyone, whatever his echelon of
society."76
At first glance, the types used by Montesquieu and Tocqueville in their
respective theories appear to be traditionally political-classified, that is,
in terms of the number of those holding formal power in the state. Durkheim
was among the first to point out that although Montesquieu could not bring
himself to discard the nomenclature in use since Aristotle, the objects of his
study were types of society, rather than political regimes.77 Until Montes-
quieu, Durkheim argued, political philosophers had assumed that human
associations could be classified systematically only on the basis of their
regime, while all other aspects of the society were regarded by them as being
purely fortuitous and hence not amenable to systematic study. Thus Montes-
quieu was the authentic precursor of sociology because he was willing to go
beyond the number of those holding political power and to base his types
on certain qualities of the society, because he abandoned the notion that
human institutions may be deduced from human nature, and because he did
not believe that the legislator could simply impose his will upon a people,
but rather that laws only confirmed what had already been accepted in a
people's mores. Much of what Durkheim said about Montesquieu was
cogent and still remains among the best analyses of one great practitioner
by another. But even though such judgments are apt to have a particular
insight denied the nonpractitioner, there is some danger of distortion. Durk-
heim's view of Montesquieu is subject to challenge on at least two grounds.
First, Durkheim, who was engaged in formulating his own version of socio-
logical theory in The Division of Labor (his major doctoral thesis in French;
his minor Latin thesis was this study of Montesquieu), considered types as
real rather than ideal. Thus Durkheim praised Montesquieu for not having
deduced his types from abstract principles, but having induced them from
the nature of things.78 The second reason for qualifying Durkheim's judg-
ment is that, against considerable opposition, he was attempting within the
French university to create an autonomous science of sociology. In order to
do so, he had to argue that society constitutes a separable scientific field of
inquiry, as distinguished from politics. In emphasizing the sociological ele-
ments in Montesquieu, Durkheim did not consider the possibility of regard-
ing Montesquieu as a political sociologist who refused to reduce either poli-
tics or sociology to a mere derivative function of the other. And other distor-
tions occur as the result of Durkheim's belief that the proper object of
scientific inquiry is the discovery of general laws and that vital to social
science is the distinction between the normal and the pathological state of
every social type.
Why did Durkheim argue that Montesquieu had not followed the classical
scheme? First, because under the rubric of "Republic," Montesquieu in-
cluded both democracy and aristocracy, which differ in the number of those
76 Oeuvres (B), VII, 22, letter from Tocqueville to his father, June 3, 1831.
77 Emile Durkheim, Montesquieu et Rousseau (Paris, 1953), Ch. 3, p. 46.
78 Ibid., p. 56.
Melvin Richter 157
holding power; on the other hand, "Monarchy" and "Despotism" were sepa-
rated by him, although both consisted of one-man rule. Second, Montes-
quieu reserved the title of "Republic" for the classical Greek and Roman
city-states and the Italian cities of the Middle Ages. Although many bar-
barian peoples ruled themselves, Montesquieu never considered them to be
republican in form. As for "Monarchy," this was reserved for modern Euro-
pean states of his own time. Finally, "Despotism," although it could arise as
a corrupt form anywhere, was natural only to Oriental states such as the
great empires of the Turks and Persians. Durkheim approved of this typol-
ogy, remarking that it is impossible to deny that essential differences sepa-
rate ancient city-states, Oriental empires, and modern Western nations.
Montesquieu also, in Durkheim's view, distinguished these species by the
number, disposition, and type of cohesion characteristic of each. In a re-
public, especially a democracy, all are free and equal. Thus the city-state
was made up of a number of similar elements, each of which has the same
nature but none of which is superior. No one element should surpass any
other by too large a margin. All are concerned with public life and the com-
mon interest. The role of private life is to that extent diminished. All this
resembles what Durkheim called mechanical solidarity. The social tie is
virtue.
In monarchy, not only public but also private life is made up of radically
different elements: classes with different functions. Society is like a living
being, in which the elements, each following its own nature, fulfill different
functions. For this reason, Montesquieu defines liberty as essential only in
monarchy. The type of solidarity is organic. Men need not aim at virtue
directly.
Montesquieu and Tocqueville both made much of the aristocracy-democ-
racy dichotomy. Their comparative method was similar; their conclu-
sions, discrepant. In part this discrepancy derived from their historical eras.
Montesquieu began by a set of ideal types ostensibly focused on the tradi-
tional distinctions made in political theory among regimes, classified in terms
of the number of those holding political power or participating in the political
process. But he also regarded both democracies and aristocracies as small
polities belonging essentially to the past, while monarchy was the form of
free state characteristic of middle-sized European commercial societies.
Thus Montesquieu used the theory of the natural identity of interests, of the
invisible hand by which private vices may be transformed into public bene-
fits, as a way of explaining how a modern monarchy may be both rich and
free. If the entire corpus of his work on England is taken into account,
there can be no doubt that his method was that of comparative political
sociology. After ascribing the essence of freedom to a political order in
which groups compete and conflict in their demands on the central power,
in which they bargain and obtain compromises based on concessions by both
sides, Montesquieu fits commercial society into his scheme.79 Particularly
in his treatment of England in Book XIX, he pays tribute to the energy pro-
duced by a society in which individuals are free to pursue their own eco-
nomic interests and passions, and political life functions on the basis of
competition among parties and conflict among parts of the government,
79 Montesquieu, De l'Esprit des Lois, III, x.
significant components of which are representative. Although he did not

ignore the aristocratic elements of English society, Montesquieu classified it,
like France, as a monarchy. Within this form, the aristocracy is assigned the
important task of moderating the central power by its functions as an inter-
mediate group seeking its own honor and interest.
Tocqueville, writing about the United States, and doing so from the per-
spective of an aristocrat whose class had been permanently defeated in the
French Revolution, took elements from Montesquieu's typology, but made
important changes in it. Like Montesquieu, Tocqueville made use of two sets
of categories: first, he classified states as either free or unfree; second, he
classified them according to the number of those participating in the political
process or according to the means by which individual volitions were trans-
formed into political outcomes. But Tocqueville, close student though he
was of Montesquieu, had to recognize that the United States was a phenom-
enon that could not literally be treated in the categories of Montesquieu. In
order to preserve the spirit of the earlier theorist, considerable change had to
be made in the letter of his analysis.
Tocqueville's approach to American democracy derived from a profound
understanding of Montesquieu's theory of order. Both Montesquieu and
Tocqueville believed that political society requires a certain amount of re-
pression of men's wills and imagination. However, this repression may be
accomplished in a variety of ways, either directly by a centralized and
omnipotent state or ruler or indirectly by such means as religion or prin-
cipled self-repression on the part of citizens brought up to put the common
interest above that of each of them taken as an individual.
Tocqueville found a democracy much larger and wealthier than the classic
varieties known to Montesquieu. He concluded that for a number of reasons,
democracy, which by its nature presupposes equality, would characterize
all modern societies in either its free or despotic forms. Living after the
French Revolution, he could perceive that monarchy and aristocracy formed
parts of the same political and social system, the essence of which was an
ascribed status based on inequality. Montesquieu had assigned a prominent
place in his typology to despotism, which he treated as an authentic political
and social system and which he distinguished carefully from tyranny, a
form of government only, and one that, strictly speaking, was postdemocratic,
while despotism, as it so often appeared in the Orient, was a form virtually
undisputed in areas long accustomed to dominion of this sort because of
their great scale of peculiar climate. Tocqueville did not maintain this dis-
tinction between despotism and tyranny. Modern conditions, he felt, had
made these terms obsolete.80 And so he reduced the types to two and allowed
for a free and unfree form of both aristocracy and democracy. For Montes-
quieu, monarchy was the form shared by those modern societies of moder-
ate size that were at once commercially prosperous and politically free.
Tocqueville believed instead that democracy was this form. And he shifted
what Montesquieu had called honor, and the principle of monarchy, to
democracy. It was necessary to explain how, in a society where men were
animated not by a disinterested patriotism but rather by an insatiable de-
sire for personal gain, the minimum degree of repression requisite for the
80 Oeuvres (M), I, ii, 324.
Melvin Richter 159
maintenance of order could be attained. Tocqueville seized upon the prin-

ciple of interest rightly understood. That is, in a society in which men pursue
gain, a form of repression comes into existence connected with the qualities
necessary to succeed in making money. Although not morally worthy, never-
theless these qualities may serve as surrogates for moral impulses, especially
if reinforced by religion and by institutions, participation in which trains
citizens to perceive the link between their individual interest and that of their
society as a whole. Thus Tocqueville availed himself of Montesquieu's
starting point and of many of his modes of reasoning. In his subsequent
analyses of revolution, Tocqueville began with this same assumption that
men's passions and imaginations must be repressed to some extent by their
government, society, or belief systems. Total revolution, a phenomenon he
refused to believe could be beneficent, produced its remarkable effects be-
cause of the attempts to abandon simultaneously all three modes of repres-
sion. This made total revolutions uncontrollable even by their ostensible
leaders.
The analysis made by Tocqueville of modern democracy is worthy of
notice for a number of reasons. Although he willingly conceded that the
phenomena he was attempting to classify, compare, and explain were quali-
tatively new, Tocqueville did not abandon previous schemes and set out
afresh. Rather he chose to modify the categories of Montesquieu and to
maintain the theoretical emphases of the earlier theorist with his complex
comparative political sociology. Again and again, Tocqueville sought func-
tional equivalents to phenomena stressed by his predecessor. Despite his em-
phasis upon the transformation of the world by revolution of an unprece-
dented thoroughness, Tocqueville maintained the conceptual scheme he
inherited. Of course his own individual brilliance was crucial to his success
in refurbishing Montesquieu's method. But conversely, there must have
been something in this style of comparing and generalizing that remained
fundamentally sound.
Ultimately, the style of comparative analysis used by Montesquieu and
Tocqueville might be traced back through Bodin and Machiavelli to Aris-
totle.81 What are the basic types of human groupings? By what means may
they be preserved? What laws and institutions are appropriate to each of
them? What characteristic errors lead to the downfall of each type? What are
the true explanations of decline and fall, and how may they be applied before
deterioration has proceeded too far? For each type there is a structure with
its nature and principle, a set of dispositions and attitudes that must charac-
terize it if it is to persist and function. This mode of analysis is to be found
in the fifth book of Aristotle's Politics. But to make comparison meaningful,
each subsequent theorist has to alter, sometimes very profoundly indeed,
the categories he has found.
Montesquieu and Tocqueville made the focus of their inquiry far more
sociological than it had been before. Their work could not have been an-
ticipated, nor could it have been deduced in advance from that of their
predecessors. After an analyst's work is done, it becomes possible to see
how it is related to certain elements present in the scheme of someone
earlier. But in addition to what is taken, much else besides is ignored. And
81 Meinecke, Die Entstehung des Historismus, p. 125.
often the borrowed element that has been enlarged upon turns out, because
of selection and emphasis, to have become something other than what it had
been originally. So it is with the categories of comparative analysis used by
Montesquieu and Tocqueville and with the explanations they put together
from the similarities and differences among the phenomena they treated.
Their operative practice as comparatists displays considerable ingenuity and
creativity within their tradition. Indeed, if investigators and students seek
to understand by what standards the comparative enterprise ought to be
judged, they would do well to return to these and other classic achievements
in the genre. The history of comparative political analysis remains to be
written. If it is done and done properly, it will have much to contribute to
our thinking today about how best to compare. Before looking for models
in other subjects, it might be well to examine what has been done in the
great works of our own discipline.

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Comparative Political Analysis in Montesquieu and Tocqueville

Author(s): Melvin Richter

Comparative Politics, Ph.D. Programs in Political Science, City University of New

* This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at a conference on the com-

Even in the minds of those who esteem Montesquieu and Tocqueville,

5 Melvin Richter, "Tocqueville's Contribution to the Theory of Revolution," in Carl J.

At least three sets of circumstances, occurring singly or together, have

originate, in similar circumstances. When the Turks menaced Europe, their

typological classification." Henry M. Hoenigswald, "On the History of the Comparative

and evolutionary theories such as the Comparative Method, which estab-

by dividing human societies into types could comparative analysis be put

It is lamentable that foreigners in London, especially the French, never

Tocqueville, perhaps the most acute of Montesquieu's disciples, assimi-

23 Montesquieu, "Preface," De l'Esprit des Lois, ed. Caillois, II, 229.

The difficulty will be in creating for the French reader a comprehensible

In the Persian Letters Montesquieu had imaginatively arrived at alterna-

30 Chevallier, "De la distinction des societes aristocratiques et des societes demo-

33 L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution. Oeuvres completes, ed. J. P. Mayer, 2 vols.

Because of a set of conditions peculiar to France, comparative law by the

between the two is recommended by Bodin as a help to political stability.

Of course, there were important differences between the political posi-

extent determined by domestic conditions and perspectives: "Clearly, the

43 Ibid., Book I, xiv-xv.

nation,-that hathe no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no in-

4" Hodgen, Early Anthropology, p. 107.

rule by declaring it to be contrary to French constitutional practice. The

A second emphasis of philosophical history, if a negative one, consisted

57 Montesquieu scholars have differed profoundly in their judgment of his scientific

59 This has recently been confirmed by the publication of the Tocqueville-Beaumont

significant theoretical conclusions from his explanation of these differences.

64 Oeuvres (M), I, i, 295-298.

68 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, tr. F. C. N. Koelln and J. P. Pettegrove

significant components of which are representative. Although he did not

maintenance of order could be attained. Tocqueville seized upon the prin-

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