What role did civic virtue play in Montesquieu’s vision?

0:04[Music] Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws 1748 he essentially revives this Aristotelian idea that the best governments have this mix of monarchy and and aristocracy and and popular government but he also says that essentially governments are not given to us by God they are human creations and we should try to understand their essential natures and that's where he gets this term the spirit of the laws he identifies three basic kinds of government Each of which has its own sort of spirit right and we can just pull out our favorite one a republic so a republic is essentially based on what what the people within it want but it relies on the civic virtue of the people and if you don't have enough people with civic virtue your Republic is going to fall probably to a monarchy where

1:07they don't rely on the civic virtue of the people as monu tells us it relies on people who are lusting after honor uh these are Societies in which you know men are swashbuckling feather wearing Aristocrats and they don't care anything about civic virtue they just want glory and honor and that's why they work so well in a way because they don't really ask a lot of us to dig deep uh and give they they allow us to be preing Aristocrats so montue gives to someone like Jefferson a typology of governments and to say government is not some mysterious thing out there that we can't understand we can be social scientists we can think actually of Montesquieu as the first social scientist and we can identify

1:59different types of governments and we can understand what fundamentally makes each of them tick what is the spirit of the laws in each of these form of governments once we have mastered that we can then turn to our own governments and the governments around us in the world and say aha I know now what I need to do and I know what you need to do and suddenly the world just becomes a much clearer place to understand we have a discipline today political science that does that for us it it looks around the world and says oh yes each government has its own types but political science was actually invented in the 18th century by people like montue and actually especially in The Federalist Papers where they coin the term a science of politics but Montesquieu gives to Jefferson this tool of uh a

2:51typology of governments that he can understand