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Starting in junior high school, Japanese students are taught that Montesquieu was the author of The Spirit of Laws and the originator of the idea of “separation of powers” and that Rousseau was the author of The Social Contract and an advocate of “popular sovereignty.” This book seeks to refute such conventional simplifications found in textbooks by reconsidering the political and philosophical significance of Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Diderot through carefully reading of their political writings.
 
The book focusses on the “Legislator,” a figure that appears repeatedly in the writings of the 18th century French philosophers. “Legislator” in question refers to a mythical figure who, since ancient Greece and Rome, has provided the people with a legal order (nomos) to institute a people at the same time, and thus constructed a political community (polis) to initiate its history. The 18th century French philosophers took a highly ambivalent stance towards this “Legislator.” This is because, although they all regarded the Legislator as essential to the creation or re-creation of a political community, they were aware of the danger that the Legislator might wield tyrannical power and neglect the legal order itself.
 
This was due to the deep-seated distrust of absolute monarchy held by 18th century French philosophers following the reign of Louis XIV. It is not surprising that Hobbes, who was the greatest theoretician of absolute monarchy, emerged as their greatest antecedent and opponent. Hobbes started from the hypothesis that the state of nature is a state of war and argued that the sovereignty of the state is based on a mutual contract (agreement) among members and the transfer of the natural rights of each member to a third party. In Hobbes’ view, the sovereign (monarch), as the absolute Legislator, puts an end to the state of war and reigns “absolutely” over the people. In contrast, the Enlightenment philosophers attempted to abolish the absoluteness of the Hobbesian sovereign by repositioning it within the relative relationship between the sovereign and the citizenry.
 
It is for this reason that the 18th century French philosophers all began with a critique of Hobbes’ state-of-nature = state-of-war hypothesis in examining the nature of law and political communities. A common thread among these philosophers is a recognition that the vertical relations of domination/submission or governor/governed are preceded by mutual and horizontal relations among members of a political community. Political and vertical relations are merely part of a circuit that begins with and returns to these mutual and horizontal relationships. They are part of a circuit of “political autonomy” in which the political community relates to itself and governs itself in order to maintain itself. The “law” is the essential measure for establishing “political autonomy”, while the “legislator” serves as the mediator or catalyst for creation of this “law.” It is for this reason that the philosophers of the French Enlightenment viewed the “Legislator” as an entity that should “vanish”, once the circuit of “political autonomy” is established and a new historical cycle is initiated, either by going out of the political community or by being absorbed into the historical process it inaugurated.
 
This is the basic outline of the political thought of the Enlightenment that runs through this book. However, the reader of this book will undoubtedly witness how this outline evolves as the book unfolds, from Montesquieu’s The Spirit of Laws to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and Discourse on Political Economy, and further, through the confrontation between Diderot in his Encyclopédie entry on “Natural Right (Droit naturel)” and Rousseau in his Geneva manuscript of the Social Contract, to end with the latter’s Social Contract. To Montesquieu, who argued that “it is the legislator that should follow the general spirit of a nation,” the “Legislator” is a governor who, starting from a given political community, works within the causal chain of history and should “disappear” in the course of that history. In contrast, in Social Contract, Rousseau argues that the “Legislator,” who exists “by right” and is positioned before all “facts”, is tasked with guiding the “general will” of a sovereign people in a suitable manner and with obtaining consent for the legislation that he or she formulates without any authority derived from the state. Moreover, whether or not a Legislator is a “true Legislator” can only be determined based on whether or not the people continue to exist centuries later under the same laws left by the “Legislator.”
 
According to this interpretation, for Rousseau, it is the “social contract” and the “Legislator” placed in the foreground of history that allow us to see the emergence of the “general will” of a sovereign people under or at the end of an existing system of government . Here we see the radical consequences of Rousseau’s theoretical inversion of Montesquieu; that said, the reader is invited to examine for themselves the relationship between Montesquieu and Rousseau, which lies at the heart of this book, as it plays out over the lengthy narrative of this book. We would be most pleased if this book inspires readers to reread the writings of the philosophers of the Enlightenment.
 
In addition, the end of the book features a discussion of the Jesuit missions of Paraguay from Raynal/Diderot’s History of Two Indies as a preview to the next volume on Diderot’s political thought.
 

(Written by OHJI Kenta, Professor, Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology / 2023)