A Lived Experience Well-Understood: What Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws Can Tell Us about Civic Learning in Higher Education ^†

Abstract

This article considers how Montesquieu’s theoretical response to his perceived dangers of modern commerce may guide us on teaching citizenship in higher learning today. I argue that a Montesquieu informed framework for civic learning, which primarily stresses a careful study of the nation’s existing constitutional and positive laws, would (1) entail a baseline level of scientific and economic literacy to deepen our understanding of how commercial modernity’s most recent innovations may undermine the authority of those laws if left unchecked, and (2) cultivate an appreciation for the laws, mores, institutions, and practices that some of these same innovations threaten to dissolve if left unchecked. The article concludes with practical recommendations on how to cultivate resilient future custodians of our self-governing republic. I contend that universities need to provide a learning environment that inspires students to crave different kinds of success or recognition, distinctly highlighting the need for heavy restrictions on the use of electronics in the classroom. I then propose that civics-focused curricula must ensure that students are furnished with the requisite technocratic expertise to (1) recognize how their daily economic decisions as private citizens will impact the public interest and (2) exercise prudent judgment over future legislation aiming to safeguard individual liberties within a techno-mediated twenty-first century commercial world.

1. Introduction: Civic Learning and Self-Understanding

It is fitting to begin with an invocation of my present institution’s motto ‘Disciplina Praesidium Civitatis’—a condensation of the maxim, “A cultivated mind is the guardian genius of democracy”.1 There is great beauty and value in studying pure théoria, in understanding the great thinkers of the Western tradition as they understood themselves, and in being attentive to distant historical echoes when engaging with their works. However, Disicplina Praesidium Civitatis demands that such intellectual cultivation exists in service to our constitutional democracy, that it serves our civic health as it exists today. Oftentimes, what mediates theory and praxis, what bridges the scholar and the proverbial ‘man in the arena’ is the informed citizen, always relating his practical experience to his education, so that both confer deeper understanding. It is therefore incumbent upon us to constantly think about how theory relates to our existing world.

The study of “civics” in universities often connotes a public administration mindset, creating myopia about the range of possible responses to our current political challenges. Many students enter the academy with a deep sense of the public good, unaware that the private sector itself constitutes a field of civic action offering rich avenues for grappling with consequential moral dilemmas. A Montesquieuian approach to teaching citizenship recognizes that moral action is not the preserve of government alone.

In Liberal Education and Citizenship in a Free Society, I argued that “the study of transformative texts is an important adjunct to teaching citizenship”.2 What is justice? What constitutes a happy, purposeful life? In an ever more cosmopolitan and technological world, what are the material prerequisites and institutional bases that sustain an ethical political community? It is vital that universities provide future stewards of our self-governing republic with enough leisure to explore the expansive vista of intellectual, moral, and ethical dilemmas contained in the “Great Books”. Such a classical grounding should not be exclusive to students in the humanities. It benefits those in social science, commerce, and the STEM fields alike, furnishing them with the temperament to become more prudent, socially responsible leaders in their future professions. In this article, I draw from Montesquieu to explain why civic learning is an important adjunct to the study of transformative texts.

A deep misunderstanding among defenders of traditional humanities learning is that it necessarily entails a classicism detached from textual history, civics, or the study of law. Scholars often bemoan arguments emphasizing the practical benefits of Great Books learning. They correctly note that humanities learning is intrinsically good, equipping students to pursue happier, more purposeful lives.3 However, their accounts underestimate the deeply affective dimension that shapes our study of transformative texts.

I previously made the case that the Great Books could be used as instruments of manipulation serving our destructive emotional impulses, if absorbed in the absence of a traditional learning environment that carefully tends to our ongoing complex experiences.4 In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis stresses how reliable reason depends on the careful cultivation of human beings’ sentiments.5 His classic commentary takes aim at fashionable pedagogical approaches that emphasize how we must remain clinically detached from our object of inquiry to prevent emotional bias from distorting our inferences. Lewis cautions, when we abstract ourselves from whatever topic of study, “judgments of value cannot have any ground except the emotional strength of the impulse”. We will “treat…[our] judgment of value as raw material for scientific manipulation to alter at will”. If unattended, our negative emotions will manifest as destructive impulses. As such, he famously proposes that, “the task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles, but to irrigate deserts. The right defense against false sentiments is to irrigate just sentiments”.6 Lewis’s idea of education ‘as the irrigation of just sentiments’ can be seen, from a certain vantage point, as the apotheosis of Montesquieu’s political education, which tends to the irrigation of citizens’ just sentiments.

Montesquieu’s works emphasize the dangers of exploring questions concerning justice and morality detached from an organic civic culture that has been shaped by the interrelationship of its various sources of law. He is part of a tradition in the history of political thought, dating back to Aristotle, that stresses the importance of studying civic institutions to understand human phenomena. Some scholars today lament how the United States supposedly lost its classical moral founding, and they now flirt with post- and/or illiberal responses to restore its ethical foundations (Deneen 2018b). In his own time, Montesquieu acknowledged the profound influence of Western philosophy and Christianity on the moral formation of European societies. However, this did not mean that pre-Enlightenment notions of morality were co-equal with these European foundings. Every constitutional founding is an admixture of ideational principles and practical compromise within a historical moment,7 accommodating the given nation’s ‘general spirit’—comprising a people’s culture, mores, geography, climate, commerce, history, and religion.8 Montesquieu writes, “[l]aws should be so appropriate to the people for whom they are made that it is very unlikely that the laws of one nation can suit another”.9 One cannot state whether a law is good or bad without understanding the culture that birthed those laws. Therefore, universities must cultivate interdisciplinary thinkers by encouraging dialogue among the relevant academic fields to deepen students’ grasp of their nation’s ‘general spirit’. On this point, a Montesquieuian approach to civic learning presupposes an emotional quality necessary for citizenship in free societies.

With the advent of early capitalism, Montesquieu was concerned by how a preoccupation with paltry luxuries and material comforts beguiles citizens; a spirit of commercial innovation and hyper-rationalism beguiles statesmen; a spirit of uniformity/utopia continues to beguile philosophers.10 The remainder of this article will show how Montesquieu’s education tends to the irrigation of citizens’ just sentiments in the liberal commercial world. The second section provides a brief overview of Montesquieu’s theoretical assessment of modern commerce. It then explains how his foundational liberal theory channels human beings’ desire for honors to counteract the dangers of unchecked commerce. The third section explains how Montesquieu’s theory of honor is crucial for grasping his political education, which presupposes that justice depends on the emotional constitution of a country’s citizens, including its leading magistrates. The fourth section examines Montesquieu’s preoccupation with the civic spirit of the philosopher-legislator in The Spirit of the Laws, where he arrives at a new basis for approximating or approaching certainty on questions that concern the political realm. Drawing from my analysis, the conclusion offers some practical suggestions on how to cultivate resilient future custodians in a free society. First, I stress how universities need to provide a learning environment that inspires students to crave different recognitions, distinctly highlighting the need for reasonable restrictions on the use of electronics in the classroom. I then propose that civics-focused curricula, such as those featured at Arizona State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill among others, must ensure that students achieve a baseline level of economic and digital literacy to (1) recognize how their daily economic decisions as private citizens will impact the public interest and (2) to exercise prudent judgment on future proposed legislation that aims to safeguard individual liberties, as outlined in the Bill of Rights, within a techno-mediated twenty-first century economy.

2. Commerce and Virtue in a Free Society

A central question that preoccupied Montesquieu throughout his writings is how liberal societies can cultivate a deep sense of public responsibility as modern commerce amplifies a spirit of hyper-rationalism and avaricious greed among citizens. In Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen argues that our elites’ most recent moral failures merely reflect liberalism’s success at becoming fully secular and technologically progressive, as originally intended by liberalism’s philosophical forebears.11 If Deneen’s thesis could be distilled with the axiom, “liberalism failed because it succeeded”, (Deneen 2018b, p. 179). Montesquieu’s thought could be distilled with a slightly more generous, nuanced axiom: that commerce might fail because it succeeded. Montesquieu believed that we cannot understand eighteenth-century Europe’s emergent liberal practices and mores outside of commerce, arriving at a more nuanced critique of liberalism. Whereas Deneen believes liberalism is beyond redemption, Montesquieu would observe today that commerce is out of balance, but we could find salvation within our existing institutions. In short, liberalism might fail … but, it does not have to.

My recent book builds upon and challenges the classic commentaries that present Montesquieu as an unmitigated promoter of commerce (Pangle 2010; Hirschman 1977). I argue yes, Montesquieu embraces commercial modernity. He witnessed how self-interested commerce fueled ingenuity, industriousness, and prosperity in advanced European societies,12 and how commercial innovation produced the material conditions for greater individual liberty.13 Yet, he constantly warns readers how an unchecked spirit of commercial self-interest and innovation could veer free societies towards despotism—with new forms of liberty come new forms of despotism.

Montesquieu’s misgivings about modern commerce initially surface in an often-cited allegory from his first major work, Persian Letters.14 He introduces the allegory after the epistolary novel’s main character, Usbek, receives a letter from his friend, Mirza, asking him to clarify a previous assertion, that “men were born to be virtuous, and that justice is a quality as natural to human beings as existence itself”.15 Usbek responds, “there are certain truths, for which it is not enough to be persuaded, but which one must also be made to feel”.16 He then recounts a historical fable about a community of Troglodytes whose original constitution was founded upon the principle of unchecked commercial self-interest. This arrangement quickly proved unsustainable, leading to vast material inequality, famine, and an eventual collapse of interpersonal trust. The Troglodytes then nearly fell into extinction after a deadly plague ravaged the community. In this crucial part of the story, Usbek tells Mirza when the Troglodytes became ill, they desperately turned to a doctor from a neighboring community for help, only to be turned away because they did not pay for his services the last time he treated them. The doctor then diagnoses the Troglodytes with a more noxious disease, telling them “you have a poison in your soul more mortal than the one for which you want to be cured…you have no humanity, and the rules of equity are to you unknown”. The story follows that the surviving Troglodytes founded a new constitution, organizing themselves upon the principle of selfless civic virtue. This marked the happiest period in their history, as the self-ruling Troglodytes developed a deep sense for the public good, taking joy in the material sacrifices they made to ensure their fellow citizens’ security and material well-being. However, this golden age of humanity, equity, and commercial prosperity turned out to be fleeting as well. Usbek writes to Mirza that as the population expanded, the Troglodytes grew more prosperous. At the same time, their commerce demanded greater attention, heightening their desire for private gain. Their fixation on wealth eventually compelled them to give up their sovereignty, entrusting a virtuous king to rule over them. The fable ends with the new king soberly informing his subjects how they gave up their liberty and happiness, to securely “…satisfy ambition, amass riches, a life of ease and self-indulgent pleasure”.17

This slippery narrative continues to be the subject of spirited debate among scholars, and the present article cannot do justice to its full richness (Nelson 2004; Sher 1994; Desserud 1991).18 However, I provided enough to build on the fable’s core takeaways—that the state cannot merely function as a vehicle for Hobbesian material comforts, nor is justice merely dependent on the presence of good, impartial laws. Recall, Usbek prefaces his story by telling Mirza that justice is a truth that must be felt. Otherwise stated, abstract justice does not drive people in the same way as a visceral love for their institutions will.

Note how Montesquieu chose to convey his powerful message by telling a story about “Troglodytes”—a descriptor that connotes their primitive uncivilized character—to stress that commercial and moral progress are not always coequal. Our commercial prosperity may potentially dehumanize us by atrophying the sociable, other-regarding human sentiments that keep free, liberal societies on an even keel.

Montesquieu echoes his anxieties about modern commerce in The Spirit of the Laws, written 27 years later. He cautions how, if left unchecked, the ‘spirit of commerce’ will blunt human beings’ other-regarding impulses, yielding ‘a spirit of exact justice’, where “the smallest things were done or given for money”.19 Throughout his writings, he stresses that to remain viable, free, commercial nations’ institutions must enliven a ‘feeling of justice’ which “detach(es) man from himself to attach him to his neighbor…without that everything is common, and there remains nothing but a base self-interest, which is properly nothing more than the animal instinct of all men”.20 As we shall see, Montesquieu’s theory of honor aimed to make citizens more “assiduous, obliging, tender, affectionate, sensitive…” when engaging with one another in commercial life.21

Montesquieu wrote an unpublished sequel to his ‘Tale of the Troglodytes’, which adumbrates the full development of his theory of honor in The Spirit of the Laws. The short addendum ends with a subsequent Troglodyte king warning his subjects, “(as) you seek to distinguish yourself solely by wealth, which is nothing in itself, I will certainly have to distinguish myself by the same means, and not remain in a state of poverty that you disdain”.22 As citizens prioritize commercial distinctions, wealth will eventually determine praiseworthiness across all spheres of human activity, stunting their capacity to differentiate civic honors and commercial honors. As we will observe, Montesquieu’s theory of honor aims to establish a hierarchy of value in free societies, where citizens deem civic distinctions more praiseworthy than commercial ones.

Montesquieu believed that human beings’ desire for honors, or what he defines as, our “demand” for “preferences and distinctions”23 could be channeled to counteract the dysfunctional features of modern commerce that blunted human beings’ just sentiments. He presupposed that honor is an essential human need, “useful to society when it is well directed [emphasis added]”. “It is up to morality, which would work on man’s heart to regulate his sentiments, not to destroy them”.24 In essence, self-interested honors, or the pursuit of ‘false honors’, are not ends in themselves but means for enlivening a general feeling of justice. In Moderate Liberalism and the Scottish Enlightenment, I argue that Montesquieu’s theory of honor “is grounded in the idea that existing political and institutional configurations need to reflect human beings’ divided wills”.25 He presupposes that human beings have a deep moral sense, “a general feeling of justice” buried under the increasing weight of their self-interested passions.

This is why Montesquieu promoted France’s System of Venality—a remnant feudal practice allowing rich merchants to exit commercial life by purchasing aristocratic offices and joining the ranks of France’s “nobility of the robe”. These titled officeholders typically held prominent roles in the French parlements—regional courts that administered justice throughout the Ancien régime while also being tasked with registering royal edicts. Yes, self-interest fueled the pursuit of these titles. But Montesquieu observed how, if unabused, the practice of venality could foster a culture that deems civic honors more praiseworthy than wealth, without stifling France’s commercial dynamism.26 What is more, the “nobility of the robe” played a critical role in French political and commercial life. With their legal expertise and knowledge of the commercial arts, they were best equipped to exercise judgment over complex affairs of state. Montesquieu’s perception of the “nobility of the robe’s” vital civic role in France mirrors Tocqueville’s perception of lawyers’ civic role in the United States, with both classes serving as institutional and cultural liaisons between the people and leading government actors.27

Interestingly, without ever citing Montesquieu, Benjamin Franklin drew inspiration from France’s System of Venality in a speech he delivered at the 1787 Federal Convention in Philadelphia, where he emphasized the critical importance of keeping commercial and civic honors distinct and separate.28 The elder statesman’s speech mirrors Montesquieu’s theory of honor, presupposing that if a nation prioritizes civic honors over commercial honors, then citizens will crave different recognitions. Consequently, future leaders will become more adept at discerning when commercial innovation threatens free societies.

3. Commercial Innovation and the Modern Statesman: A Need for Prudent Wariness

Montesquieu constantly warns how free societies will become prone to the hazards of commercial innovation as market logic affects all corners of the political community’s cultural background. The risks became evident through the figure of John Law, a Scottish financier who persuaded his friend and France’s Regent, the Duc D’Orléans,29 to appoint him as Controller General of Finance in 1716. The appointment enabled Law to establish France’s first national bank, giving him the ability to introduce an innovative debt-conversion scheme that sought to resolve France’s debt crisis following The War of the Spanish Succession. Through a series of royal edicts, Law incentivized government debtholders, most of whom were members of France’s titled nobility, to swap their bonds for public shares in the Mississippi Company—a government-owned conglomerate based in the Americas. At the same time, he encouraged, and eventually coerced French subjects to trade in their specie currency for paper money pegged to the value of the Mississippi shares. With each new series of Mississippi shares that Law issued, the company’s value became inflated, precipitating a stock bubble that eventually collapsed. In the end, Law succeeded at wiping most of France’s debt, but at the cost of vast amounts of individual wealth that got wiped out following the bubble’s collapse.

In Book 2.4 of The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu introduces John Law as one of Europe’s greatest promoters of despotism.30 Notwithstanding the short-term economic fallout following the bubble’s collapse, Law’s System undermined the long-standing intermediary institutions in France that checked the Crown’s authority and preserved the country’s moral foundations. More specifically, his new monetary regime threatened to starve the nobility by removing a principal source of its revenue. Moreover, having won the French Regent’s confidence, Law successfully managed to institute his System despite the Parlement de Paris’ frequent public remonstrances, further undermining the latter’s political influence.

In an earlier writing, Montesquieu recounts the Law debacle through a mythical Greek dialogue to explain how the Scottish financier beguiled the Duc D’Orléans with his innovative designs.31 Interestingly, the story depicts the French Regent as a just, moderate statesman. Why then did the Regent ignore the Parlement’s warnings about the potential hazards of Law’s elegant system? Montesquieu identifies two flaws that corrupted his judgment. First, in esteeming “the talents rather than the virtue of men” he could not differentiate “the honest and the wicked man”. Second, he “has always been more struck by what is wrong than by the disadvantage involved in rectifying it”.32 But Montesquieu stresses that the Regent merely mirrors the culture of an advanced commercial society infused with a spirit of techno-optimism—a prevalent impulse during enlightened ages. As Montesquieu explains in his Preface to The Spirit of the Laws: “The prejudices of magistrates began as the prejudices of the nation. In a time of ignorance, one has no doubts even while doing the greatest evils; in an enlightened age one trembles while doing the greatest goods. One feels the old abuses and sees their correction, but one also sees the abuses of the correction itself. One lets a good remain if one is in doubt about a better. One looks at the parts only in order to judge the whole; one examines all the causes that result”.33 When Law first established France’s national bank, Montesquieu sounded the alarm in one of his lesser known economic writings, offering several proposals on how to manage the post-war debt crisis while preserving France’s remnant pre-modern institutions and aristocratic social orders that formed a critical part of France’s civic infrastructure.34 Detached from France’s immediate circumstances, it would appear Montesquieu was defending an anachronism in the face of Law’s innovative System. But the true anachronism is one’s failure to recognize the moral relevance of the institutions that Law’s System endangered. Montesquieu’s cautionary tale about the Regent’s deference to the hyper-rational ‘man of system’ should give current-day readers pause. Consider our government actors’ increased dependence on the modern-day technocrat in the face of ever-increasingly complex financial crises, or how the current generation of social media and generative AI technology continues to disrupt commercial and institutional life in the United States.

4. The Moderate and Civic Spirit of Montesquieu’s Philosopher-Legislator

If hyper-rationalism beguiles the statesman, utopia continues to beguile the philosopher in commercial modernity. In The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu sharply criticizes previous philosophers in the Western tradition, whose political philosophies unwittingly promoted despotism. In 29.18, he writes “[t]here are certain ideas of uniformity that sometimes seize great spirits…but that infallibly strike small ones…Is the ill of changing always less than the ill of suffering? And does not the greatness of genius consider rather in knowing in which cases there must be uniformity and in which differences?”35 He introduces James Harrington as one of those great figures seized by a spirit of single-mindedness and uniformity, near the end of his most famous study of England,11.6, the chapter most often cited for its influence on the U.S. Constitution. Montesquieu writes, “Harrington built Chalcedon with the coast of Byzantium before his eyes”.36 The great seventeenth-century English republican philosopher erringly constructed an ideal commonwealth, ‘Oceana’, which combines the best features of past and present republics as a model for England to follow. In abstracting away from his concrete circumstances, Harrington did not recognize how England’s existing institutions were crucial in propelling it to becoming Europe’s freest, most prosperous nation.

In 29.19, Montesquieu situates Harrington with good company, among the great philosophers in the Western tradition whose spirit of single-mindedness and uniformity led them awry, having failed to recognize in “which cases there must be uniformity and in which differences”.37 He writes, “Aristotle sometimes wanted to satisfy his jealousy of Plato, sometimes his passion for Alexander… Plato was indignant at the tyranny of the people of Athens. Harrington saw only the republic of England, while a crowd of writers found disorder wherever they did not see a crown… The laws always meet the passions and prejudices of the legislator. Sometimes they pass through and are coloured; sometimes they remain there and are incorporated”.38 Observe how Montesquieu pathologizes the philosopher’s impulse for uniformity, for reducing a complex reality to one idea, as a sentimental affliction that must be tamed. It is why a core aim in The Spirit of the Laws is to “… make it so that men were able to cure themselves of their prejudices. Here, I call prejudices not what makes one unaware of certain things but what makes one unaware of oneself”.39

In the opening paragraph of his Preface, Montesquieu boldly states, “Plato thanked heaven that he was born in Socrates’ time; as for me, I am grateful that heaven had me born in the government in which I live and that it wanted me to obey those whom it had me love”.40 In differentiating himself from Plato, he adumbrates a new basis for overcoming the prejudices that “that make one unaware of oneself” and achieving intellectual clarity on questions concerning politics. Plato’s dialogues provide the model for approximating philosophical truths, whereas Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws provides the model for approximating or approaching certainty over questions concerning politics. Throughout The Spirit of the Laws Montesquieu comparatively examines past and present regimes, identifying the institutional sources of free, moderate government in classical Athens and Rome, contemporary England, throughout continental Europe, to China, and beyond. However, his aims differ from Harrington’s. Rather than construct an ideal model of government, he wishes to impart an epistemic framework for understanding and evaluating positive and political laws, in relation to the nation’s general spirit. In employing this approach, he posits “Many of the truths will make themselves felt here only when one sees the chain connecting them with others. The more one reflects on the details, the more one will feel the certainty of the principles”.41 A close study of the complex interrelationship of a nation’s laws will attune legislators to “the abuses of the correction itself”. This is why Montesquieu concludes The Spirit of the Laws with a long, torturous historical account of France’s institutional and legal development.

The ‘man of uniformity/utopia’ mirrors the hyper-rational ‘man of system’ in two distinct ways. First, we have already seen in matters that distinctly concern the public good, great spirits are prone to be misled by their Promethean sense of greatness. Second, Montesquieu alerts readers to how a single-minded and despotic temper could potentially seize great spirits. He writes,

“By a misfortune attached to the human condition, great men who are moderate are rare; and as it is always easier to follow one’s strength than to check it, perhaps, in the class of superior people, it is easier to find extremely virtuous people than extremely wise men…The soul takes such delight in dominating other souls; even those who love the good love themselves so much that no one is so unfortunate as to distrust his good intentions; and, in truth, our actions depend on so many things that it is a thousand times easier to do good than to do it well”.42

As legislators—of laws and of thought—the statesman and the philosopher must embrace their fallen characters. The commercial spirit of hyper-rationalism and the philosophical spirit of uniformity are intoxicating, potentially despotic passions when detached from their public institutions. It is why Montesquieu proclaims in his Preface, “[i]f I could make it so that everyone had new reasons for loving his duties, his prince, his homeland and his laws and that each could better feel his happiness in his own country, government, and position, I would consider myself the happiest of mortals”.43 He is not urging readers to adopt a Panglossian view of their countries, but to affirm their fate as citizens—a precondition for recognizing what is good and distinct about their constitutions. If we examine our institutions with cold detachment, their pathological features will more likely shroud us from recognizing how these same institutions provide the nation’s moral anchors. If all we see is rot and corruption in our institutional practices, then our political recommendations will merely reflect those prejudices that “make one unaware of oneself”.

5. Conclusions: Civics, Complexity, and Self-Aware Humility

Montesquieu is among the progenitors of a moderate strand within liberal thought that rejects uniform understandings of liberalism and sees the Enlightenment project as a complex and ongoing enterprise that must be embraced but constantly saved from its self-destructive tendencies. Notwithstanding his maligned thesis, Francis Fukuyama was not wrong in identifying liberal democracy as the end stage of the Enlightenment project. However, his ‘End of History’ is not a mere historical fact. It is a morally prescriptive statement, stressing how liberal democracies need to satiate human beings’ natural desire for recognition in salutary ways to maintain their viability.44

In The Malaise of Modernity, Charles Taylor warns how the excesses of enlightenment on the one hand, and the excesses of romanticism on the other, can degrade into their perverse forms. He argues that liberal democracies will always be doomed to save the political culture either from commercial hyper-instrumentalism and hyper-rationalism or from a desire for organic community fascism. Liberal democracies must therefore “steer these developments towards their greatest promise and avoid the slide into debased forms”.45 Taylor’s analysis sharply criticizes Allan Bloom for his wholesale cynicism towards the modern university which he sees as a microcosm for liberal modernity, as the subtitle of Bloom’s classic commentary suggests. Taylor notes how in The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, Bloom lionizes and erringly gives epistemic privilege to the philosopher vis à vis the proverbial ‘man of the arena’ in the latter’s lament “over the loss of the more stringent ideals formerly dominant in our culture”.46

Anticipating Taylor, Montesquieu compellingly demonstrates how politics is a distinct category of human understanding requiring a temperament of humility. By contrast, those seized by an insatiable impulse for rationalism and utopia unwittingly promulgate a vision of politics that accommodates those destructive passions and prejudices that “make one unaware of oneself”. Montesquieu alerts readers to how free societies have multiple functional versions, each containing the seeds of despotism. His political education, which stresses the critical importance of honor, aims to lock in the gains of commercial ambition and technological innovation while irrigating the just sentiments necessary for preventing free societies from degenerating into their pathological forms.

Both Montesquieu’s and Taylor’s liberal projects share the same normative concern—to rescue modernity from the excesses of commerce—but their practical recommendations differ. Taylor’s answer to the Enlightenment’s excesses focuses on material conditions, leading him to prescribe pro-forma democratic socialism. By contrast, Montesquieu is more attentive to preserving individual freedom in the liberal commercial world. Whereas Taylor’s project seeks to foster a social-economics dispensation among readers, Montesquieu’s project seeks to revive pre-modern sources of honor and timocratic identification to foster a public-minded temperamental dispensation among contemporary and future stewards of free societies. Several scholars have commented on how Montesquieu’s foundational liberal project adapts pre-modern sources of honor in the face of commercial modernity. However, few have explored how his pre-modern ideals of an honorable and civic-minded politics are baked into the founders’ constitutionalism.47 Consider how the underappreciated final sentence of the Declaration of Independence dually expresses Montesquieu’s idea of honor and a transcendent dimension for making self-government viable: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”.48 Or, consider how Publius (here Madison) embodies this spirit in The Federalist, where he defends the integrity of republican self-government as proposed in the Constitution: “that honorable determination which animates every votary of freedom to rest all our political experiments on the capacity of mankind for self-government”.49 A careful study of Montesquieu’s ideas of honor, as instantiated in The Spirit of the Laws, would undoubtedly deepen our understanding of these two great American declarations that shaped the direction of institutional and civic life in the United States.

In light of the above considerations, I conclude with some practical suggestions for teaching citizenship in modern universities. (1) Universities must create a healthy academic environment where professors and students can differentiate between higher and lower forms of success or recognition. As we saw, Montesquieu worried that in free societies, wealth might become the primary measure of praiseworthiness in the absence of oppositional poles of identification to counteract parochial self-interest. Universities reinforce wealth as the primary barometer of value so long as a pervasive spirit of careerism pervades campus life, with professors primarily focused on meeting publication benchmarks and students primarily focused on amassing credentials to ensure future gainful employment. To be sure, the evidence strongly indicates that a college diploma is a strong predictor of family stability and upward mobility.50 It is therefore in the public interest for university administrators to remain committed to maximizing student ROI and ensuring post-graduation employability. But it is also in the public interest for universities to promote a diversity of values; with a diversity of values comes a diversity of recognitions that students will pursue after graduation. It is a truism that the more dialed in and focused students are, the more likely they are to enjoy the experience of learning rather than solely the outcome of learning; being fully mindful of an activity increases the likelihood of enjoying that activity. Universities must therefore provide a learning space that fosters an appreciation of learning for its intrinsic worth, not just for its practical benefits—an environment that incites students’ wonder, curiosity, and eros for learning. However, as electronic devices become permanent fixtures in the classroom, students are less likely to experience a heightened, transformative sense of wonder that drives them to crave diverse recognitions.

Recent scholarship demonstrates that even disciplined students who refrain from taking “electronic breaks” during class are negatively impacted by their neighbors’ frivolous use of electronics in the classroom.51 A near-complete ban on electronic devices in humanities and most social sciences classrooms will increase students’ appreciation for the learning process rather than its outcomes, exclusively. By eliminating the obstacles that hinder student focus in the classroom, universities will cultivate graduates with a more diverse set of values alongside the intellectual and social capital requisite for climbing the meritocratic ladder. Over time, civil society will come to appreciate higher education as a good ‘both for its intrinsic value and for its consequences’.

However, a flat-out ban on electronics would be impractical and undesirable. The technologies that undermine higher learning also enable universities to accommodate students with special needs. But student accommodations must be reasonable. For instance, any prospective electronics ban should include exceptions for students with hearing or visual impairments. We should continue leveraging technological innovation to provide such students with unprecedented access to the meritocratic ladder. However, the remedies to many other existing inequities discernable within the democratized university lie beyond the classroom’s scope. Universities cannot accommodate every existing student affliction without severely compromising the learning experience.

(2) The Constitutional Studies component of university civics curricula should emphasize a comparative or federalism approach to foster an appreciation for the complex particulars that birthed both the federal and the individual states’ positive and constitutional laws in the United States. Well-designed civics curricula will vary by state, enabling students to relate the subject matter to their concrete circumstances while enhancing their understanding of the material and cultural factors that shaped their state’s laws in comparison to others, alongside the constitutional development of the United States since its founding.52

(3) Academic curricula must impart a baseline level of economic literacy, better equipping students to navigate the civic and ethical dilemmas they will face in their future professional lives. In a similar vein, academic curricula must impart a baseline level of scientific literacy, equipping our future stewards with the expertise to identify how various technological innovations may be employed to strengthen rather than subvert the civic order. Without a sophisticated understanding of eighteenth-century high finance, Montesquieu would not have understood how John Law’s innovative schemes undermined the institutions and practices vital to France’s civic infrastructure. On the one hand, Law’s System brought to light how free societies could swerve out of balance when wholesale commercial hyper-rationalism drives politics. On the other hand, Law’s financial engineering scheme demonstrates how with future advancements, the same innovations that enabled liberty in the modern commercial world might eventually become co-opted by the state to wield power over citizens.

Commercial innovation remains a double-edged sword in twenty-first century free societies. Take, for instance, how platforms such as Twitter/X and TikTok have empowered previously disenfranchised voices, becoming vessels for shedding light on injustices that previously evaded the blunt instrument of the law. At the same time, recent discussions over TikTok’s arms-length relationship with the Chinese government underscore how a state’s direct access to information-gathering devices could potentially threaten citizens’ 4th Amendment digital privacy protections. But is the recent TikTok controversy a red herring,53 distracting citizens from the broader emergence of corporate surveillance as a feature of the modern economy?54 Would laws that force divestment prevent the CCCP from accessing sensitive data at the granular level, when it could easily be purchased in the free market from third-party data collectors? Given how citizens unwittingly consent to share their data, a more sophisticated understanding of how these applications could potentially circumvent our 4th Amendment protections will encourage more prudent, responsible use at the individual level. Greater economic literacy will deepen our understanding of how these and future innovations are shaping the direction of the modern economy; equipping citizens to reason freely over the extent to which, for example, insurance companies and mortgage lenders should be permitted to mine citizens’ online behavior to determine their insurability and creditworthiness.55 To recap, civics curricula in higher education must ensure that our future stewards graduate with a robust understanding of our increasingly techno-mediated modern economy, allowing them to recognize how their daily economic decisions will impact the public interest. More generally, future leading citizens should be furnished with the requisite expertise to exercise prudent judgment on future legislation that aims to safeguard individual liberties in the face of commercial innovation.

(4) It is critically important that university curricula ensure digital literacy while promoting an appreciation for legacy media’s value. Legacy media may seem like an anachronism on its face, but again, the true anachronism is failing to understand the continued moral relevance of this institution. In a recent essay that invokes Neil Postman’s famous “Technopoly” thesis,56 Cal Newport compellingly shows how we have reached a point where citizens no longer question the media that facilitates how they absorb the world. Social media has become the background assumption, while a growing number of citizens, naïve to the algorithmic processes mediating our interactions, are losing the capacity to differentiate misinformation from fact.

(5) As academics, we must be mindful of how civic engagement on social media disrupts the sentiments of students and professors. We need to exercise greater self-restraint when promulgating our intellectual and political outlooks on various social media, many of which have become de facto civic platforms attenuating the institutional checks against direct democracy that the Framers had designed with a view to keep our despotic and tribal impulses in check. We need to acknowledge that X and TikTok bear no resemblance to the Greek agora and the Roman stoa. Such virtual platform monopolies pervert the public discourse by design, amplifying those destructive passions and prejudices “that make one unaware of oneself”.

(6) As with all previous suggestions for teaching civics in higher education, universities should foster a learning environment that encourages students to recognize that they, and their fellow citizens, deserve better, one that encourages them to embrace the duty of expending the efforts requisite more maintaining a free and prosperous society.

To recap, a Montesquieuian framework for teaching citizenship in the modern-day university would help students better understand their lived experience by emphasizing a baseline level of scientific and economic literacy, so as to deepen their understanding of commercial modernity’s most recent innovations, while cultivating an appreciation for the laws, mores, institutions, and practices of honorable freedom and self-government that some of these same innovations threaten to dissolve if left unchecked. More broadly, it would aim to impart a temperament among future stewards, that recognizes how it is possible to benefit from capitalist ambition, innovative entrepreneurship, and our technological visionaries’ latest designs without succumbing to the idea that commerce is self-correcting.