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uniqueness of societies. “[Laws] should be related to the physical aspect of the country; to the climate, be it freezing, torrid, or temperate; to the properties of the terrain, its location and extent; to the way of life of the peoples, be they plowmen, hunters, or herdsmen; they should relate to the degree of liberty that the constitution can sustain, to the religion of the inhabitants, their inclinations, their wealth, their number, their commerce, their mores, and their manners; finally, the laws are related to one another, to their origin, to the purpose of the legislator, and to the order of things on which they are established. They must be considered from all these points of view” (1, 1, 3). Clearly, Montesquieu argued that foreign governmental systems and laws do not necessarily serve the best interests of other countries, and he would object to their application by American jurists to interpreting the U.S. Constitution.

Montesquieu’s concern is with the imprudence, and worse, the danger of republican government attempting to transform the civil society—including superseding the effects of religion, family, commerce, traditions, customs, mores, etc.—through legal coercion. In a chapter titled “How some legislators have confused principles that govern men,” he wrote, “Mores and manners are usages that laws have not established, or that they have not been able, or have not wanted, to establish. The difference between laws and mores is that, while laws regulate the actions of the citizen, mores regulate the actions of the man. The difference between mores and manners is that the first are more concerned with internal, and the latter external, conduct” (3, 19, 16).

Montesquieu also believed that republican government does not work well over large regions, for the people are too diverse, their interests are too dissimilar, and their connection with the government is too distant. “It is in the nature of a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise, it can scarcely continue to exist. In a large republic, there are large fortunes, and consequently little moderation in spirits: the depositories are too large to put in the hands of a citizen; interests become particularized; at first a man feels he can be happy, great, and glorious without his homeland; and soon, that he can be great only on the ruins of his homeland. In a large republic, the common good is sacrificed to a thousand considerations; it is subordinated to exceptions, it depends upon accidents. In a small one, the public good is better felt, better known, lies nearer to each citizen; abuses are less extensive there and consequently less protected” (1, 8, 16). The issue of geographic size and diversity would become a major point of contention between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists during the ratification debates over the Constitution.

Furthermore, Montesquieu argued that a republic has the best chance of surviving if it consists of states that are also republican in nature. He wrote that “the federal constitution [a confederate government] should be composed of states of the same nature, above all republican states” (2, 9, 2). He recognized further that the states within a republic will be different in certain respects. “It is unlikely that the states that associate will be of the same size and have equal power. The republic of the Lycians was an association of twenty-three towns; the large ones had three votes in the common council; the medium-sized ones, two; the small ones, one. The republic of Holland is composed of seven provinces, large and small, each having one vote” (2, 9, 3). Of course, the United States Congress consists of two bodies—the House of Representatives, whose members are apportioned on the size of the population of each state, and the Senate, with two members from each state.

Obviously, Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws had virtually nothing in common with the utopias in Plato’s Republic, More’s Utopia, Hobbes’s Leviathan, and, later, Marx’s workers’ paradise. Montesquieu’s greatest concern was with despotism’s threat