Monesoquieu, Rousseau Marx : Politics and history

It is a received truth that Montesquieu is the founder of political science. Auguste Comte said it, Durkheim repeated it and no one has seriously disputed their judgement. But perhaps we should step back a little in order to distinguish him from his ancestors, and to see clearly into what it is that thus distinguishes him.

For even Plato stated that politics is the object of a science, and we have his Republic, Politics and Laws to prove it. All of the thought of antiquity lived in the conviction, not that a science of politics was possible, which is a critical conviction, but that one could go ahead with it straight away. And the moderns themselves took up this thesis, as is clear from Bodin, Hobbes, Spinoza and Grotius. Of course, the Ancients should be criticized not for their claim to reflect on the political, but for their illusory belief that they had produced a science of it. For their idea of science was borrowed from their own knowledges. And as the latter, with the exception of certain areas of mathematics, not unified before Euclid, were no more than immediate glimpses or their philosophy projected into things, they were complete strangers to our idea of science, having no examples of it. But the Moderns! How could the mind of a Bodin, of a Machiavelli, of a Hobbes or of a Spinoza, the contemporaries of the already rigorous disci plines triumphing in mathematics and physics, have remained blind to the model of scientific knowledge that we have inherited?

And in fact from the sixteenth century on we can see the birth and growth in a joint movement of a first, mathematical physics, and of the demand for a second, soon to be called moral or political physics, which aimed for the rigour of the first. For the opposition between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man was not yet in season. The most metaphysical exiled into God this science of politics or history, which seemed to be the con junction of the chances of fortune and the decrees of human freedom: Leibniz, for example. But all that is ever handed over to God is the errors of man- and Leibniz entrusted to God the human idea of a science of man. As for the positives, the moralists, the philosophers of law, the politicals, and Spinoza himself, they did not doubt for a moment that it was possible to treat human relations like physical relations. Hobbes only saw one difference between mathematics and the social sciences: the former unites men, the latter divide them. But that is only because in the former the truth and men's interests are not opposed, whereas in the latter whenever reason goes against man, man is opposed to reason. Spinoza, too, intended that human relations should be treated in the same way as natural things, and by the same routes. For example, take the pages that introduce the Political Treatise: Spinoza denounces the pure philosophers who, as the Aristotelians do with nature, project into politics the imaginary of their concepts or ideals, and he proposes to replace their dreams with the real science of history. How then can we claim that Montes quieu opened routes which we find completely mapped out well before him?