Montesquieu’s Forgotten Warning: Extreme Equality Is the Gateway to Despotism

Ask a well-read American what Montesquieu contributed to political thought and you will almost certainly hear the phrase separation of powers. That answer is not wrong. James Madison called the French philosopher the oracle who is always consulted and cited on the structure of government, and the American Constitution bears his imprint on every page. But if you stop at the division of legislative, executive, and judicial power, you have only half the lesson, and arguably the less urgent half for our own day.

Montesquieu wrote something else in The Spirit of the Laws that reads like a diagnosis of modern American politics. He warned that a free republic is corrupted not only when legal equality is lost, but when equality is pushed to an extreme, when citizens demand equal results rather than equal rights. That warning has been largely forgotten because it cuts against the dominant ideology of our time. It deserves to be recovered before we trade the last of our liberty for a promised leveling that never arrives.

The Republic Runs on Virtue, Not Transfers

Montesquieu divided governments into republics, monarchies, and despotisms. A republic, in his terms, is a government in which the people, or a part of them, hold sovereign power. But elections alone do not make a republic free. A republic survives through what Montesquieu called virtue: the citizen's attachment to the laws and the public good. That attachment is not manufactured by giving people other people's money or by teaching them to see themselves as victims of every unequal outcome. It is built on responsibility, restraint, and the knowledge that you will live with the consequences of your choices.

The modern confusion is to treat equality as the purpose of government rather than a condition of liberty. Montesquieu reversed that order. Equality under law is a foundation of freedom. It is not a result the state should deliver through coercion. When government becomes an agency for equalizing outcomes, it stops being a protector of rights and starts being an allocator of life chances. That is not republicanism. It is soft despotism with a friendly vocabulary.

Consider what this means in practice. If the state decides that all citizens must have equal wealth, equal health, or equal social status, it must control the choices that produce unequal results. It must direct what people study, where they work, what they earn, how they raise their children, and even what they say. A government narrow enough to protect equal rights is too limited to equalize outcomes. A government broad enough to equalize outcomes is too broad to respect rights. The two visions cannot be held together indefinitely.

When Equality Turns Against Itself

The neglected passage sits in Book VIII of The Spirit of the Laws, where Montesquieu analyzes the corruption of the principles of government. He writes that democracy is corrupted not only when the spirit of equality is lost, but likewise when it is carried to an extreme, and each would be equal to those whom he has chosen to command him. Read the second half of that sentence carefully. The danger he fears is not that citizens will demand too little power. It is that they will demand so much, so indiscriminately, that they will refuse to tolerate any authority at all, including the authority of the men and women they themselves elected.

Montesquieu goes further. He says the people, unable to bear the power they have delegated, want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to strip all judges. That is not self-government working as designed. It is constitutional order dissolving. When every difference, economic, social, educational, is treated as an injustice to be corrected by politics, no legislature can satisfy the demand. Every rule produces a disparity. Every standard produces an unequal outcome. So the demand for equal results ends by delegitimizing every institution that cannot produce them. That vacuum does not stay empty. It is filled by administrative bodies that issue mandates without accountability, and in the end, by a strongman who promises to restore order.

Montesquieu also knew how demagogues exploit this cycle. He warned that the people fall into this misfortune when those in whom they confide, to hide their own corruption, flatter the people and talk endlessly of their greatness and rights while building their own power. That description should make every American pause. A political class that promises equality of outcome while accumulating unaccountable power is not advancing liberty. It is following the old road to despotism with new road signs.

The American Founders Read the Warning

Montesquieu was not defending aristocratic privilege. He made the crucial distinction clearly. Men are born equal, but they cannot remain so in society. Society introduces inequalities, and they recover equality only by the protection of the laws. That is the American ideal: equality before the law, equal rights, equality of opportunity. It is not equality of income, health, social status, or condition.

The first kind of equality restrains government. The second kind requires government to be unlimited. You cannot make unequal people equal in outcome without controlling their choices, what they study, where they work, what they earn, how they raise their children, what they say. That is why Milton Friedman put the matter so precisely: a society that puts equality before freedom will get neither, while a society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both.

The Founders did not have to discover this truth on their own. They read Montesquieu. In Federalist 47, Madison called him the oracle who is always consulted and cited on the separation of powers. But Madison also drew the deeper lesson. In Federalist 10, he listed a rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property among the factions that a well-constructed republic must restrain. Notice what he groups together: inflation, debt abolition, and leveling property. Madison understood that these are all variations of the same disease, using government to override rights and ignore consequences.

That is why the Constitution built a constitutional republic, not a pure popular government. The Bill of Rights, federalism, the separation of powers, and the Senate were all designed to slow government down so that transient passions, including the passion for equalizing everything, could not sweep away liberty in an afternoon. The Founders wanted a government of laws, not a government of men, precisely because men are prone to mistake envy for justice and coercion for compassion.

The Modern Leveling Impulse

The economic record confirms Montesquieu's caution. Friedrich Hayek explained the knowledge problem: no central authority can possibly know enough to equalize outcomes without trampling on the dispersed decisions of millions of free people. Thomas Sowell spent a lifetime documenting the gap between intentions and results. Programs that promise to make society equal often leave the least advantaged dependent and the planners powerful. Henry Hazlitt's one lesson applies perfectly here. The seen transfer is visible. The unseen job not created, the business not opened, the community not built is invisible.

The modern version of the old leveling impulse calls itself equity. The word is chosen carefully because it sounds mild. But equity, as used by diversity bureaucracies and social-justice planners, does not mean equal treatment. It means equal results, enforced by authorities that decide which groups are privileged and which are owed. That is a categorical change. Equality under law says your rights do not depend on your group. Equity says your treatment will depend on your group, and the state will manage the scoreboard.

A government that promises equal outcomes cannot be a government of limited powers. It must be an administrative state, an army of rule-makers, enforcers, and judges deciding who gets what. That is not a republic. It is arbitrary power, the very definition of despotism Montesquieu feared. And the people who staff that administrative state do not answer to voters in any meaningful sense. They answer to each other, to their own professional norms, and to the political faction that appointed them. That is not self-government. It is rule by a credentialed class.

The Answer to the Familiar Objection

Some will object that all of this is merely a defense of inequality. But that objection misses the point. The defense is not for inequality as such. It is for the only equality that is compatible with freedom: equality under the law and the right to rise. The real choice is not between equality and inequality. The real choice is between inequality produced by merit, work, and voluntary exchange, and inequality produced by political influence. The second is worse for ordinary Americans because it locks them out of the market that could lift them and makes their prosperity dependent on whichever faction controls the state.

Montesquieu's warning is not an excuse for indifference. It is a call to restore constitutional discipline: equal laws, not equal outcomes; courts that interpret the law, not issue social mandates; a legislature that answers to voters, not agencies that answer to no one; and citizens who remember that liberty, once traded for a promise of equality, is rarely recovered.

The ordinary American does not need the state to equalize his neighbor. He needs the state to protect his rights, enforce contracts, and otherwise leave him free to build his own life. That is the spirit of the laws, and the only road to a free republic. Montesquieu saw it almost three centuries ago. We would do well to listen before the force of the leveling impulse completes its work.