More than twenty years, and a necessary relation

To understand The Spirit of the Laws only inside the frame of “law,” the notes feel, leaves something wanting, because the Europe the author saw — its society, economy, culture and religion — is all melted into the book. Reading it, one can almost fall into the illusion of reading world history, and come to see that law is only a product human beings have made, and so cannot be cut away from the problems of humankind at large. After more than twenty years of effort, they write, the book was finished in a manner that draws a hypothesis from observed historical fact and then applies it back to actual life. Law, he held, is not a universal, transcendent command, but stands in a necessary relation to the particular conditions of each society: climate, custom, religion, national character. His inquiry into the spirit of the laws is an empirical, sociological comparison of the forms and systems of law in each country. In the widest sense, he defined law as a necessary relation derived from the nature of things. Those identifications stay as the notes give them.

Natural law, positive law, and three kinds of regime

Without any background in law, they write, it would have been easy to lose the thread, so they needed a way of learning, from the table of contents, in what flow the spirit of the laws should be understood. Through that work they came to distinguish natural law from positive law, and to understand the characters of a republic, a monarchy and a despotism, and to read on with the thought that legislative, executive and judicial power should keep a balance with one another. Before the book appeared, they guess, most countries practised monarchy or despotism — law in a state of nature, a natural law, in which the political power of a few monarchs and dictators was itself the law, a norm that led a people who were only the ruled. Unlike animals in a state of nature, human beings, through greed beyond need, fell into conflict, and positive law was born so that individuals or groups would be governed by norms and rules. Without positive law to lead and restrain state and society, human society might become a shambles stained by desire. Positive law is what was institutionalised so that people of different desires could live together, keeping order, in one society.

Three powers, and a constitution across the sea

Among the claims the book puts forward, the one that struck them most, and that they think can still teach in their own country, is the system of the separation of powers. The author, they write, was the first to set out the separation later organised as legislative, executive and judicial power, and that achievement greatly influenced the making of the United States federal constitution and the political theory of the modern rule-of-law state. Many trials and errors preceded the theory, and all those processes existed as law reflecting the age. Political regimes may be various, from monarchy to democracy, but for law to do its work inside freedom, a separation of the three powers is always indispensable. Law arose to mend human incompleteness, yet it is made by equally incomplete human beings, so legislation and execution must themselves be watched and controlled if law is not to act arbitrarily. To keep a monarchy from sliding into despotism, a ruler’s power must be limited, and legislative and judicial power must hold equal force and check each other in a principle of balance. Montesquieu, they conclude, saw law as an organic order formed together with a society’s climate, custom, religion and national character, and proposed a separation of legislative, executive and judicial power to prevent the abuse of authority — a view that still applies when laws are revised and newly made to fit a changing time. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. The notes, a student reading of Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws, with a definition of law as a necessary relation and a first statement of the separation of three powers left as the notes give them.

Last updated: 15 November 2026