Arsehole aristocracy (or: Montesquieu on honour, revisited)
| Author | Christopher Brooke |
| DOI | 10.1177/1474885118783603 |
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
E J P T
European Journal of Political Theory
2018, Vol. 17(4) 391–410
Arsehole aristocracy
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DOI: 10.1177/1474885118783603
honour, revisited)
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Christopher Brooke
Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS),
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
The 18th-century French political theorist the Baron de Montesquieu described honour
as the ‘principle’ – or animating force – of a well-functioning monarchy, which he
thought the appropriate regime type for an economically unequal society extended
over a broad territory. Existing literature often presents this honour in terms of lofty
ambition, the desire for preference and distinction, a spring for political agency or a spur
to the most admirable kind of conduct in public life and the performance of great
deeds. Perhaps so. But it also seems to involve quite a bit of what the contemporary
philosopher Aaron James calls ‘being an asshole’, and the article will explore what
happens to Montesquieu’s political theory of monarchy – which is foundational for an
understanding of modern politics – when we reverse the usual perspective and consider
it through the lens of the arsehole aristocracy.
Keywords
Arseholes, aristocracy, history of political thought, Istva´n Hont, Montesquieu
Until the 1970s the dominant narrative – both popular and scholarly – understood
the French Revolution as an attack on an aristocracy characterised, in the words of
Jay M Smith (2006: 1), by its ‘arrogance, decadence, and parasitic habits’.
There followed a wave of ‘revisionism’ from scholars who ‘especially took aim
at crude versions of Marxist explanation built on rigid social categories and a
teleological vision of class conflict’, and who ‘showed that nobles of the eighteenth
century had been as modern and progressive as anyone’ and that ‘the most for-
ward-thinking among them had helped to spearhead the assault on the old order in
Corresponding author:
Christopher Brooke, Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of
Cambridge, Alison Richard Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DT, UK.
Email: cb632@cam.ac.uk
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European Journal of Political Theory 17(4)
1788–89’ (Smith, 2006: 2). But as the revisionist wave has subsided, having perma-
nently reshaped the historiographical beach, scholars have begun to think afresh
about social relations – and the aristocracy – once again.
A somewhat parallel story can be told about the interpretation of
Montesquieu. As Johnson Kent Wright (2006: 227) notes, ‘[t]he claim that De
l’esprit des lois was fundamentally a work of aristocratic apology found expres-
sion in a series of striking midcentury statements’ by Franklin Ford (1953), Louis
Althusser (1959) and RR Palmer (1959–1964). This was followed by a prolifera-
tion of alternative interpretations, with two 1970s volumes by Mark Hulliung
(1976) and Thomas L Pangle (1973) both rejecting the thesis of aristocratic
apologism as they argued for Montesquieu’s partisanship for classical and
modern liberal republicanism respectively. A distinguished tradition has contin-
ued to press a republican interpretation of Montesquieu, with Nannerl O
Keohane (1980: 419), for example, judging that once he had ‘cast in his lot
with the Ancients against the Moderns. . . he never reversed himself’, and with
subsequent development of this liberal republican view by Judith N Shklar (1990)
and, most recently and at the greatest length, by Paul A Rahe (2009). But the
swing of the pendulum these days is heading back towards the view that
Montesquieu is best read as offering a qualified defence of the ancien re´gime
monarchy, rather than expressing a sustained preference for a radically alterna-
tive political trajectory, and hence also as offering a qualified defence of the
pre-Revolutionary French aristocracy, given his core claim, ‘no monarch, no nobi-
lity: no nobility, no monarch’ (Montesquieu, 1989: 18).1 So the aristocracy is back
in the sphere of Montesquieu interpretation, just as it is in the broader historio-
graphy of 18th-century France, and one question for this article is whether
Montesquieu’s aristocracy is best understood as the arrogant, decadent, parasitic
aristocracy of the older literature, or as some other variety?
On Montesquieu’s account of the comparative dynamics of regime types, as is
well known, each distinctive regime has its own principe, or animating spirit, or
passions that keep it in motion and forestall decline (Montesquieu, 1989: 21). In
republics, it is virtue (Montesquieu, 1989: 22), which is understood as ‘love of the
homeland, that is, love of equality’ (Montesquieu, 1989: xli) in a democratic repub-
lic, such as ancient Athens was held to be (Montesquieu, 1989: 23); and as a certain
kind of moderation in an aristocratic republic (Montesquieu, 1989: 24–25), such as
mediaeval or modern Venice (Montesquieu, 1989: 51 n. 20). For despotisms, it is
crainte, which is sometimes translated into English as ‘fear’ (Montesquieu, 1989:
28); though a case can be made that this word is better rendered as ‘dread’, partly
because the more usual French word for ‘fear’ is peur, and crainte is to be under-
stood in contrast to peur,2 and partly because translating it as ‘fear’ makes us think
of Thomas Hobbes, for whom fear was the political passion par excellence with
which we had to reckon, and Montesquieu’s argument does not really follow any
kind of Hobbesian logic.3 For what he called the ‘English constitution’, which he
described, not entirely straightforwardly, as ‘where the republic hides under the
form of a monarchy’ (Montesquieu, 1989: 70),4 one key psychological factor
(though he did not quite label it the principe) was a kind of uneasiness or
Brooke
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restlessness, for which he used the Jansenists’ term inquie´tude (Rahe, 2009: 99–117).
And for monarchies, it was honour (Montesquieu, 1989: 26).
Taking monarchy seriously, then, requires taking honour seriously. And honour
sounds like a fine thing – on the whole, we think well of honourable men and
women. But what does Montesquieu mean when he talks about honour, and why is
it so important to the good functioning of a monarchy? Montesquieu doesn’t in
fact say that much about honour in The Spirit of the Laws. What he says is
concentrated in Book 3, Chapters 5–8, and then in Book 4, Chapter 2, which
specifically considers education, all of which are encompassed within 10 pages of
the Cambridge edition (Montesquieu, 1989: 25–34). The three points of theoretical
detail that stand out are, first, that honour is to be distinguished from virtue – with
virtue being used in its distinctly political sense, when you ‘love the state less for
oneself than for itself’ (Montesquieu, 1989: 25–26); second, that the ‘nature of
honor is to demand preferences and distinctions’ (Montesquieu, 1989: 27); and,
third, that ‘[s]peaking philosophically, it is true that the honor that guides all the
parts of the state is a false honor, but this false honor is as useful to the public as
the true one would be to the individuals who could have it’ (Montesquieu, 1989:
27). This is pretty telegraphic, and requires interpretation, and we are fortunate by
now to have quite a range of interpretation in the recent scholarly literature.
Mark Hullliung’s Montesquieu is, as noted above, a partisan of the classical
republic and a critic of the ancien re´gime, and this is reflected in the account of
honour that he supplies. In Montesquieu’s account of monarchy, ‘analysis
and indictment’ go hand in hand, as he presents ‘[n]ow a series of damaging
close-ups of particular institutions and groups, now a landscape showing the
hideous relationship of these particulars’ (Hulliung, 1976: 28), with Hulliung
insisting that, ‘[t]o understand all is to forgive nothing’ (Hulliung, 1976: 29). The
‘description-critique’ of the ‘aristocratic ethos’ is ‘pitiless’. Hulliung’s framework is
Mandevillean, ‘equating private vices with public order’, but while he emphasises
the vices – ‘[a]t bottom’, he tells us, honor is sham, conceit, and pretense’ (Hulliung,
1976: 30) – he does not have much that is at all positive to say about the public
order that results. Montesquieu ‘described privilege as the abuse it was’ (Hulliung,
1976: 31), and while honour enables the nobility to act as a check on the king and
draws them into the service of the state, it also ‘promotes conduct in office that is
totally unbecoming to the bureaucrat’ (Hulliung, 1976: 31), and monarchical pol-
itics more generally involves over-centralisation and provincial decline (Hulliung,
1976: 32), a dysfunctional economics of luxurious consumption (Hulliung, 1976:
32–33), grotesque inequalities in standards of living (Hulliung, 1976: 34), rural
depopulation (Hulliung, 1976: 35) and a ‘dangerously absolute’ politics revolving
around the ‘changing moods and whims of the most spoiled person in France’
(Hulliung, 1976: 35) which reduces ‘to the pettiness of court jealousies and
intrigues’ (Hulliung, 1976: 37).
Hulliung’s book began life as his 1973 PhD from the Government Department
at Harvard; from the same milieu, and in the same spirit, there is also the later
remark from Shklar (1984: 219) in Ordinary Vices that in monarchies ‘men must be
brought up to defend their honor, a mentality Montesquieu deplored along with
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European Journal of Political Theory 17(4)
everything else that went on in royal courts’.5 Another broadly critical account
contemporaneous with Hulliung’s came...
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