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PARTISAN REVIEW
and England need the riches of Poland and Muscovy as one of their
Provinces needs the others; and the State that thinks it increases its
power through the downfall of its neighbor, usually weakens along
with it.
Such a universalizing argument, which, as I pointed out, is based on
reflections related to a nation's economic and social policies, both for–
eign and domestic, surprisingly leads to a premature warning (which for–
shadows Hannah Arendt's position) against distinguishing the "rights of
man" from the "rights of the citizen"; for it is indeed true that with
Montesquieu any political policy, in the full sense of the term, is implic–
itly a cosmopolicy because it includes the totality of human beings, the
"general spirit." Montesquieu's cosmopolitanism was more than the
outgrowth of a naturalistic rationalism that might have been derived
from the stoics. Concurrently with the birth of modern political
thought, a historical necessity has taken shape, which the nationalism of
the two centuries that followed Montesquieu's time has bypassed, but
whose urgency, for us, he has heralded. If
The Spirit of the Laws
is to
remain faithful to the fundamental sociability and the moderatable
ideality that the distinguished political thinker has presupposed, Nation–
States must give way to higher political systems.
Now, assuming that such a cosmopolicy is the expression of the
associative and integrative spirit that governs Montesquieu's political
t\:lought, it goes hand in glove - need this be restated? - with setting up
a safety network that should prevent the brutal integration of differences
(and, to begin with, that of the
social
and the
politica0
into a totalizing,
univocal set that would eliminate any possibility of freedom. The separa–
tion of powers, the preservation of a constitutional monarchy whose
possible excesses would constantly be checked by a reasonable judiciary,
the very belief in a social peace based on the freedom of individuals and
obtained by upholding the dichotomy between the social and the po–
litical that is represented by the organic enactment of power in the royal
figure - those are the strong features of Montesquieu's thought, which
resurfaced in the liberal, post-revolutionary conservatism of Benjamin
Constant or Alexis de Tocqueville; they constitute the saftey network I
referred to and should be pondered in the light of his cosmopolicy.
The obliteration of the very notion of "foreigner" should para–
doxically encourage one to guarantee a long life to the notion of ...
"strangeness." From such a viewpoint it is essential to respect what is
pri–
vate,
or even
secret,
within a fully-social domain that would not be ho–
mogenous but preserved as a union of singularities. The singular should
not be confined only to the figure of the monarch, who might be
