What would be needed to put the world in order is a new Montesquieu

Centuries later, great thinkers, those who stand the test of history, prove themselves to be such because they can be used as guides in the confused present, even by cherry picking. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that a new edition of Jean Starobinski’s Montesquieu (Einaudi) has come out right in the middle of these geopolitical brothels and crises of the rule of law, but reading it – or rereading it – we find in the phrases of the eighteenth-century Frenchman, and in the analysis made by the twentieth-century Genevan-Polish, at least a foothold. Understanding the facts is the first step, if not to find solutions, then to avoid going crazy. As the editor of the volume, Martin Reuff, says, Starobinski makes Montesquieu “a theoretician of freedom,” and it is a book that can “preserve us from fanaticism.”

Born as a short biography for Éditions du Seuil, where Roland Barthes' Michelet was published that same year, over the years and with re-editions the essay has become, precisely in its adaptation to the present, a handbook. In the era of extremes, exaggeration and constant spectacle, Montesquieu becomes the model of the "courage of moderation". There is no need to talk about Trump or Putin, even a worldly and already boring - and very Milanese - case like that of the Gintoneria (the new Milan to drink without Craxism) is enough to apply Montesquieu's words: "I have seen suddenly arise, in everyone's heart, an insatiable thirst for riches". Montesquieu manages to be both a conservative and someone who sees in the monarchy, as Marxists do today towards “liberal society,” a system that alienates the courtiers and turns everyone into private individuals who only want to seek “the comforts of life” – “in good republics we say: we. In good monarchies we say: I,” and again, in monarchies “every man is isolated.” But also a conservative, because there was a better world made of heroes in which the only expression of power was not wealth, but nobility (whether of soul or lineage) – from “silent service” we moved on to “flattery.” Montesquieu, writes Starobinski, “is the perfect representative of the rococo style.” If Starobinski uses the eighteenth century to understand the twentieth century, we can use his reading to study our twenty-first century.

The desire to improve society that animates The Spirit of the Laws, “halfway between sociology and ideal legislation, between philosophy of law and anti-absolutist pamphlet”, is the child of moderation, which is not “a reductive virtue”, but, “quite the opposite, is the attitude that makes possible the widest opening to the world and the widest reception”, and is capable of containing contradictions, like the baron himself. Today the term moderate, in politics and elsewhere, is seen almost with contempt in the face of resounding populisms that make a show of everything, in the face of certain radicalisms that make it to the front page, between chainsaws and petty imperialisms. But the mistake, and Montesquieu shows us, is not to see the living creative energy that resides in moderation. As Reuff writes in the preface: “Moderation is not the virtue of the lukewarm: it is a strong act that intervenes. Moderating means taking the measure of tensions, personal, emotional, political, and finding the middle term capable of making opposites coexist”. And this rule of life, as Starobinski says, applies to politics: “The idea of ​​moderation, in Montesquieu, implies perpetual vigilance”.

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