The French philosopher Montesquieu’s principle of moderation taught the founders to reconcile Lockean liberalism, classical republicanism, and Christianity—a balance we could use today.

America’s Moderate Liberalism: Rediscovering Montesquieu, Recovering Balance

by Paul O. Carrese

Two decades ago, Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that Americans were inured to “defining deviancy down,” and should not settle for such moral and social decline. Some might say the interval has brought improvement of our social and moral fabric, but many would not. My hope is that things have become so desperate that we might be willing to take counsel from a Frenchman.

America’s progressive liberals typically criticize markets, greed, and inequality, while America’s conservatives worry about corrosion of or attacks on basic forms of social order, moral standards, and liberty. The triumphs of progressive liberalism in public and private life—liberation from standards and traditions, with increasing reliance on the state—have provoked, in recent conservative discussion, a reaction toward an opposite extreme.

Progressive liberals have attacked America’s founding or dismissed its ideals as bygone relics for over a century. Its constitutional principles of individual rights and complex government are said to impede development of a new, fairer social state and national government. Some traditionalist conservativeshave worried, for their part, that the concepts of social contract and individual rights embedded in our founding documents have corroded our culture over time, through materialism, atomism, and an inevitable decay of religious, communal, and even natural standards.

Does the deviancy or decline that we suffer arise inevitably from flaws in America’s founding principles? I answer that a now mostly neglected French philosopher, Montesquieu, was a deeper influence on the American founding than most scholars appreciate. Understanding his work can help us with both the historical question and its continuing policy relevance.

To lay my cards on the table: I admire America’s founding principles and seek to understand them properly. I believe we would suffer much less deviancy, and defining down thereof, if we better understood those principles, debated them (as the founders themselves did), and used their internal resources to address new problems and even address flaws of the principles themselves.

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