Venus's Temple: Pleasure and Politics in Montesquieu

Liberty is Montesquieu's decisive political good, and so contemporary scholarship often debates which political path he thought best to secure it. But as for why liberty is good, most scholars leave that question unexamined. In this article I argue that Montesquieu justifies liberty and politics by a romantic hedonism, and we understand this hedonism if we compare him to the ancient hedonist he most admired, Lucretius. Uniting Montesquieu's best-known works and restoring his neglected Temple of Gnidus , this article explores the reasoning behind Montesquieu's political thought, the paradoxes that result, and a twist in Lucretius's early-modern reception.