No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
From Plato onward, western moral and political philosophy has been dominated by a monist impulse manifest in a search for the best way of life, the best form of government, the perfect society, the highest human faculty, the highest or the best religion, the single most reliable way to acquire knowledge of the world, and so on. In ethics it has taken the form of moral monism or the view that one way of life can be rationally shown to be the highest or truly human. This view has commanded the allegiance of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Locke, Mill, Marx, and others. Because monism despises neglected human faculties, virtues, and ways of life and has been a source of much violence and oppression, we cannot hope to provide a coherent theory of human liberation and freedom without developing a coherent theory of moral and cultural pluralism. Although moral monism was challenged from the very beginning by the Sophists, the skeptics, and others, a systematic critique of it was not mounted until the eighteenth century by such writers as Vico, Montesquieu, Montaigne, Herder, and others, who stressed the inevitability and even the desirability of cultural diversity.
1 For a critical discussion of moral monism, see my ‘Moral Philosophy and Its Anti-pluralist Bias’ in Philosophy and Pluralism, ed. Archard, David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).CrossRefGoogle Scholar Although moral and cultural pluralism are closely related and often overlap, they are distinct. The former refers to the view that the good life can be lived in several equally legitimate ways, the latter to the view that human life and its constituent activities and relationships can be given different and equally plausible meaning and significance.
2 For a useful summary, see the introduction in The New Science of Giambattista Vico, ed. and trans. Bergin, Goddard and Fisch, Marx Harold (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970)Google Scholar (hereafter cited as NS). See also Lilla, MarkG.B. Vico: The Making of an Anti-Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Berlin, IsaiahThe Crooked Timber of Humanity (London: Fontana Press, 1990)Google Scholar and Against the Current (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
3 NS, 22, 25.
4 NS,53.
5 NS,5.
6 NS,373.
7 NS,313.
8 NS,381.
9 NS,383.
10 NS, 372, 383 f.
11 Lilla, G.B.Vico, 210.Google Scholar
12 NS, 372.
13 NS, 380 f.
14 For good discussions of Montesquieu, see Pangle, ThomasMontesquieu's Philosophy of Liberalism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989)Google Scholar, Richter, MelvinThe Political Theory of Montesquieu (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977)Google Scholar, and Shklar, Judith N.Montesquieu (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.
15 “We do nothing so well as when we … follow the bent of our national genius,” Bk. xix, chap. 5 in the The Spirit of the Laws, tr. Nugent, Thomas (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1949)Google Scholar. See also Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy, 225 f.Google Scholar
16 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xvi, chap. 4.Google Scholar
17 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xix, chap. 4.Google Scholar
18 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xix, chap. 14Google Scholar.
19 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xv, chap. 7Google Scholar.
20 Montesquieu, preface to The Spirit of the Laws.
21 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. 1, chap. 1Google Scholar.
22 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. 1, chap. 2Google Scholar.
23 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xv, chap. 1Google Scholar.
24 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xv, chap. 1, 5, 11 and 12Google Scholar.
25 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xvi, chap. 2 to 7 and 13Google Scholar.
26 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bk. xxiv>, chap. 11, 14 and 19,+chap.+11,+14+and+19>Google Scholar.
27 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Bks. xx and xxiGoogle Scholar.
28 In Pangle, Montesquieu's Philosophy, 207 ff.Google Scholar
29 See Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, 334Google Scholar.
30 Richter, The Political Theory of Montesquieu, 35Google Scholar, thinks that Persian Letters is “remarkably fresh and detached” and relativizes “almost every aspect of French life.” He offers little supporting evidence for this view.
31 Shklar, Montesquieu, 46Google Scholar.