Despotism and Its Principle

Despotic government is animated by fear: the subjects obey because they are afraid, not because they are virtuous or honour-seeking. This means despotism is inherently self-undermining. A despot who governs through terror must constantly intensify the terror to maintain obedience — moderate despotism is an unstable halfway house. The despot himself is enslaved by his own regime: surrounded by flatterers, deprived of honest counsel, governing through intermediaries who distort every communication, he becomes increasingly unable to know what is actually happening in his realm.

Montesquieu argues that liberty is protected not only by the formal separation of powers but by the existence of intermediary bodies — aristocracies, churches, municipal corporations, guilds — that stand between the ruler and the individual subject and provide structural resistance to arbitrary power. These bodies are not democratically elected; they are often self-interested and conservative. But their very existence — their insistence on their own privileges and prerogatives — constitutes a check on the expansion of central power. The destruction of intermediary bodies is the first step of despotism.

Montesquieu connects despotism to the absence of commerce and secure property. Where property is insecure — where the despot can seize assets at will — commerce cannot flourish, because merchants will not invest where they cannot expect to reap the returns. Conversely, where commerce flourishes, it creates a class of independent property-owners whose interests are antagonistic to arbitrary government and who therefore provide a social basis for constitutional rule. The relationship between commerce, liberty, and law is one of Montesquieu's most fertile themes and anticipates later liberal political economy.

Montesquieu's analysis of despotism occupies Books II–V of The Spirit of the Laws (1748). His use of Asian despotism — particularly the Ottoman Empire and China — as the paradigmatic negative example has been extensively criticised, most influentially by Edward Said's discussion in Orientalism (1978).