Montesquieu’s Case for Honor in Publius and Adams: Transposing the Society of Orders to the Commercial Republic

Montesquieu’s philosophy of moderate government offers only a qualified endorsement of commercial republics. Recent scholarship has increasingly recognized the extent to which he advocated a monarchy balanced by an aristocracy. This article explicates Montesquieu’s understanding of honor as a vital aristocratic motive and one more consistently favorable to liberty than mercantile self-interest. It then compares this argument to the constitutionalism of the American Federalists. Whereas Publius attempts to create a balance of powers on the basis of representing aggregates of individuals, Adams throughout his writings affirms Montesquieu’s assumption that the impulse for honor creates enduring hierarchies in society, which must be explicitly accounted for in constitutional design. It concludes by suggesting that, amid today’s concerns about oligarchy, inequality, and populism, Adams’s realism points toward a healthier relationship between elites and people.