Interpreting the nature and significance of the British Constitution is a central feature of
practically every study of Montesquieu’s political theory. Indeed, the salience of the British Constitution,
which Montesquieu describes as the one government in the world that “has political liberty for its direct
purpose,” is recognized by commentators maintaining widely divergent interpretations of his political
For those, on the one hand, who locate Montesquieu firmly in the modern natural rights tradition
of Hobbes and Locke, the British regime with its separation of powers and institutional protections for
individual rights is typically lauded as his version of the best or most rational regime. In this view,
Montesquieu presents the British system of government primarily informed by the goal of individual
security and comfortable self-preservation as the constitutional model par excellence the lessons of which
ought to be applied or approximated as much as possible universally (Huiling 1976: 212; MacDonald
2003: 126-9; Pangle 1973: 114-7). On the other hand, for those commentators who understand
Montesquieu to be fundamentally relativist seeing in history an irreducible variety of regimes produced
by facts and causes that cannot yield to substantive universal norms, the British Constitution represents
not the most natural or rational regime, but rather the epitome of one type of regime—the commercial
republic (Cohler 1988: 7; Durkheim 1965: 19). In this interpretation, Montesquieu’s understanding of the
suitability of laws and institutions is not determined by natural law, but rather depends essentially on the
variable historical, cultural, geographical and social conditions that constitute a given people, and thus the
eighteenth-century British Constitution stands as a vivid display of one nation’s response to its specific
circumstances.
While Montesquieu’s account of eighteenth-century British constitutionalism is widely seen as an
important element of his teaching in the Spirit of the Laws, several deeply puzzling, and indeed
problematic, features of this account have typically received little attention. For example, although many
commentators have observed that Montesquieu’s account of the British Constitution in Book 11, chapter
6 and Book 19, chapter 27 does not strictly conform to the regime typology of republicanism, monarchy,
and despotism that he presents in Books 2-8, there has generally been little attempt to push this
1
Montesquieu 1989: book 11, chapter 5, page 156 (hereafter book, chapter and page in text).
2
Convention