In 1789, when the deputies of the National Assembly in France composed the "Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen," the goal was to establish once and for all "solemn declaration" of the "natural, inalienable and sacred rights of man (Hunt 77)." These rights, universal, immutable and self-evident, were intended to advance the cause of personal liberty and stem the tides of tyranny. In this, the National Assembly was applying the wisdom of the Enlightenment to concrete matters of governance, advancing the legacy of the philosophes that had flourished throughout the 18th century. One such political theorist was Baron de Montesquieu, whose seminal work The Spirit of the Laws lays out a canopy of human laws and social institutions and attempts to explain them. Montesquieu's thinking on matters of liberty, security and democracy are at once conducive and contradictory to the assertions enumerated in the Declaration.
To begin, Montesquieu understood that of the three forms of governmentùrepublican, monarchical and despoticùthe republican form was the most desirable. However, this is not to say that he assumed that one set of laws was the best for all people in all parts of the world. On the contrary, Montesquieu believed that the law should be adapted to the people for whom they have been designed and in accordance with the nature of the government that exists. For Montesquieu, even the quality of a nation's soil can impact the formulation of the laws. It is a unique balance that is struck when laws are devised, and this balance works when law takes into account all relevant contingencies: the peoples' religion, social habits, numbers, origins, etc. On this view, the laws and institutions that the world will produce will not all conform to the exact same set of general, basic, and least of all natural, principles.
These views stand in direct opposition to those contained in the Declaration, which insists that the...