Montesquieu and Vico
pp. 491-505
in: Enrico Pattaro, Damiano Canale, Hasso Hofmann, Patrick Riley (eds), A treatise of legal philosophy and general jurisprudence 9-10, Berlin, Springer, 2009Abstract
Montesquieu's De l"esprit des lois (1748)1 is an astonishingly original work, and Émile Durkheim was wholly justified in viewing Montesquieu as the father of "the sociology of law."2 But in many ways the least original part of Montesquieu's treatise is its vocabulary—the notion that laws are produced by des causes générales (both physiques and morales), and that "natural" laws are rapports de perfection or rapports de convenance which are as "eternal" and "necessary" as the axioms of geometry (Montesquieu 1963a, Book 1; 1963b, 106). In fact Montesquieu inherited this language of causes générales and of rapports from Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)—the most famous member of the Oratorian Order, which gave Montesquieu his education at the Collège de Juilly (Shackleton 1961, 98–9; Hillenaar 1967, 286–7; Desautels 1956, 26–31).
