Montesquieu frames reason and law as opposites of blind fate

Evidence

Montesquieu opens The Spirit of the Laws-a book that explicitly tends toward an articulation of “political virtue” -with a kind of “grand enfermement” of his own, the exclusion of subjection, of blind subjection to fate, from the realm of reason into absurdity. “They who assert that a blind fatality produced the various effects we behold in this world talk very absurdly; for can any thing be more unreasonable than to pretend that a blind fatality could be productive of intelligent beings? There is then, a prime reason; and laws are the relations subsisting between it and different beings, and the relations of these to one another” (I.I). Laws, therefore, do not provide an escape from the realm of subjection constituted by blind fatality, for out of such a realm, reasonable beings who are ruled by reasonable laws could not emerge. Rather, reason, a prime reason, une raison primitive, is the condition of emergence of laws. Laws exist only insofar as they are in relation to this reason (“Law in general is human reason, 1. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 620

Categorization

• XREF: Anidjar will map this reason-vs-fate dichotomy onto the Jew (reason/law) vs Arab (fatalism/despotism) split this chapter builds.