Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline
Montesquieu
Twenty-three short chapters on why Rome grew and why it fell, written in 1734 by a judge who thought a country's dissensions were a sign of life.
Political philosophy
Books that argue about how power should be arranged — who holds it, what stops them, and what happens to a country when nothing does.
Political philosophy asks a small set of questions and keeps asking them. Who is entitled to give orders. What makes an order worth obeying. What a person may keep for themselves whatever the government wants. How a country stops the people running it from running it for themselves. The books on this shelf answer those questions by argument rather than by telling a story.
The method varies more than the subject. Montesquieu's Considerations on the Romans takes one country over two thousand years and asks what made it strong and what killed it. His Spirit of the Laws sets the laws of dozens of societies beside each other and looks for the causes — climate, terrain, trade, religion, and the character a nation picks up from all of them together. Both books reason from cases, which is why they read more like history than like philosophy, and why readers who dislike abstraction can get through them.
The Spirit of the Laws is also the place to see what a book of this kind can do to the world outside it. Its Book XI argues that a state's power to make laws, its power to carry them out and its power to judge must sit in different hands. The men who wrote the United States Constitution took the argument seriously enough to argue with it in public: James Madison opened Federalist 47 by calling Montesquieu the oracle always consulted on the subject, and then spent the essay explaining what he thought Montesquieu had actually meant.
The political philosophy we recommend
The Spirit of the Laws
Montesquieu
Twenty years of comparing the laws of every country Montesquieu could find out about, and the Book XI argument that split power three ways in the United States Constitution.
Other styles on the shelf
The Friday Letter
One remarkable political philosophy pick, when it earns it.
The Friday letter explains one book at a time — what style it works in, why that matters, and where to go next.