13 - Political Economy

Summary

This chapter situates Montesquieu’s economic writing within broader political and economic developments that favored the emergence, in France and all over Europe, of political economy. For Montesquieu, the rise of international trade; the increasing dominance of mobile forms of wealth; and transformed expectations for material well-being in modern societies undermined traditional social structures and the forms of political authority that went with them. In this context, Montesquieu’s political thought can be read as a kind of political economy insofar as it employed a moral psychology of other-directedness and self-interest that was better adapted to an emerging commercial society than traditional models of duty and virtue. But Montesquieu, unlike the more straightforwardly economic writers of his time, did not organize his inquiry around questions of plenty so much as he sought, through his comparative method, to explore the diverse ways in which statecraft in the age of commerce could contribute to his ideal of moderate government.