Montesquieu on political liberty - and Harper

The French man of letters, Montesquieu, is best known for his famous work The Spirit of the Laws (1748), where he develops the idea that political liberty follows from the separation of powers – the legislative, executive and the judicial.  Montesquieu had studied and admired England’s mixed system of constitutional government – the Houses of Parliament, the Crown, the king’s minister (Walpole), and the respective checking of power.  His work had an enormous influence on the American founders of the U.S. Constitution in 1787, and he was referred to extensively in May 1789 at the Meeting of the Estates General, considered the start of the French Revolution.[1]  (His influence waned as the Revolution became more extreme). It is worth noting that Montesquieu dictated The Spirit of the Laws to any number of secretaries over 20 years as the author was becoming blind.  It was placed on the Pope’s Index of Prohibited Books in 1751

Here is an excerpt from Montesquieu’s text, and it has bearing on Harper’s Canada:

Democracy and aristocracy are not free states by their nature.  Political liberty is only found in moderate governments.  But it is not always in moderate states.  It is present only when power is not abused, but it has eternally been observed that any man who has power is led to abuse it; he continues until he finds limits.  Who would think of it!  Even virtue has need of limits.

     So that one cannot abuse power, power must check power by the arrangement of things. …[2]

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[1]Judith N. Shklar, Montesquieu. Past Masters. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 111.

[2] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, eds.and trs. Anne Cohler, Basia Miller and Harold Stone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 155 (Part 2, Book 11, Chapter 4).