One finds in Montesquieu's masterpiece, Voltaire (or a pseudo-Voltaire) apocryphally said, “plus d’esprit que d’esprit.” I fail to document the very apothegm. However, what Voltaire did say suffices to establish credibility for the attribution. For he did, indeed, say that Esprit des lois manifested greater “esprit” than “raison.” In doing so, Voltaire identified the single, most important dimension of Spirit of the Laws that any commentary must account for and which, heretofore, none whatever has done. Voltaire, easily the most comprehensive among the commentariat, indicates as much in his magisterial production, Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756). For in that work, and in contrast to his exhaustively critical Commentaire on Montesquieu's work, he elaborates at great length the alternative account of universal history and manners that he would have wished Montesquieu to provide. In the course of that account, he speaks continually of the “esprit,” in fact some 475 times, using the term in nearly all of the multitude of acceptations consistently referenced in French dictionaries. That induces us to inquire why he seemed so consistently to imply the fairly remote acceptation, “wit” or “cleverness,” to Montesquieu's use of the term in the title of Montesquieu's seminal work.

The purpose of the present review is neither to develop a philological analysis of Esprit des lois nor, for that matter, a review of the by-now legion commentaries on the work. Rather I want to focus attention on gaining access to the “spirit” of Montesquieu by focusing intently on the initial signpost he provided to reveal his “spirit” in the very first word (the preposition aside), not only of the title but, in consequence, of the entire work. The tradition has consistently carried the English translation “spirit” to the word without pausing to account for the acceptation to be accorded it. That habit was manifest already in the mid-eighteenth century, and therefore prior to the age of unquestioning assumption that, by spirit, Montesquieu meant something akin to Hegelian Geist or the late eighteenth-century innovation, ideology, and its subsequent partner, “world view.” That assumption is unwarranted. For the very structure of the title—the singular spirit of the plural laws— conveys an acceptation in tension with the idea of a single, pervading collective conformation that is suggested by the notion of a “spirit of the people.”