1. Origins of 'Checks & Balances' in System and Mechanism
David Wootton's essay, Part 1 'Mechanical Systems'
David Wootton wrote:
So famous is the political theory of checks and balances, so well known to Americans, that he is a bold man who tries to say new things about it.
The epigraph is from Stanley Pargellis, “The Theory of Balanced Government” in Conyers Read, ed., The Constitution Reconsidered (Columbia University Press, 1938), 37.
My purpose in this essay is to present a new way of thinking about the origins of modern constitutionalism, and in particular about the intellectual origins of the American Constitution. The existing literature on this subject tends to assume that there were two major languages for discussing politics in the second half of the eighteenth century—a rights language, derived from Locke, and a republican language derived from Machiavelli. In recent years the fashion has been to emphasize the importance of the republican language, attacking an older literature which emphasized the importance of rights. My argument here is that this debate fails to recognize that the Founders had a new way of thinking of a constitution as a system, one which could be analyzed in the terms provided by a new “science of politics” (in the words of The Federalist No. 9). It has long been recognized that David Hume provided the Founders with an important example of how to engage in political analysis. I argue here that Madison, Hamilton, and Hume were all the beneficiaries of a conceptual shift which had taken place around 1700, one which expressed itself through the adoption of a new mechanistic language. It is, I maintain, the mechanical metaphor which lies at the origins of modern constitutionalism. This metaphor was used to argue that constitutions are interacting systems in which, as Hume put it, “Effects will always correspond to causes,” and that consequently what matters is not the moral quality of the rulers but the structure of the institutions within which the rulers operate. Given this understanding the new mechanists believed it was possible to design a political system in which good government would be established by, as The Federalist puts it, “reflection and choice.” This new way of thinking did not render the old rights and republican languages irrelevant; rather it assigned them specific roles within the new science of politics. Where we see the languages of rights and republics as being in competition with each other, and even directly at odds with each other, contemporaries saw them as complementary. In order to understand how this could be we need to explore a series of topics that have seemed of little importance to scholars working within the existing paradigm but which were in fact central to the new science of politics.
1: MECHANICAL SYSTEMS
My first subject is a topic which has been almost invisible to historians of political theory, the history of the concept of “checks and balances.” The phrase is widely used in contemporary discussions of power and its regulation, and it is precisely because it has become so commonplace that historians and theorists have found it entirely unproblematic, treating it as if it were not a technical language (with all that that implies in the way of intellectual preconditions and hidden presuppositions) but a mere manner of expression. For Garry Wills, for example, it is, when used by the Founding Fathers, simply “an old concept borrowed from mixed government theory.” There is a marked contrast here with the idea of the separation of powers, whose history has been carefully and intelligently studied.
To study the phrase, one must make some straightforward distinctions. First, there is the history of the phrase itself, first used by Hugh Blair in a sermon published in 1777 (and frequently reprinted thereafter): “It is wisely ordered in our present state, that joy and fear, hope and grief, should act alternately, as checks and balances upon each other, in order to prevent an excess in any of them, which our nature could not bear”; and then by Joseph Galloway in Historical and Political Reflections on the Rise and Progress of the American Revolution (1780). It was popularized by John Adams (1735–1826, the second president of the United States) in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States in 1787 (the first usage known to the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary). Then there are the histories of the words out of which it is composed for, I will argue, “check” and “balance” have separate histories in political theory. But the history of words and phrases is an empty thing if it is not a way of studying the history of concepts, and any study of the concept of checks and balances needs to include a wider family of words (such as “control,” “clog,” “counterpoise,” and “equilibrium”) which were often used to discuss the same or similar ideas. What all these words take for granted, I will maintain, is the idea that a political system can be usefully compared to a machine. Indeed the language I am concerned with here is entirely metaphorical. Nietzsche said that truth is “a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms,” and the scientific revolution serves as a useful illustration of his claim: it is impossible to imagine what has been called the mechanization of the world picture without the metaphors of clock, machine, and automaton, without the metonymic (or perhaps rather synecdochic) distinction between primary and secondary qualities which lies at the heart of the mechanists’ enterprise, and without the anthropomorphic conception of God as a clockmaker. And this new mechanical world picture provided in its turn a series of metaphors for talking about political constitutions.
This paper will thus demonstrate the need for a more careful attention to language in the history of political theory. Despite the fact that the Cambridge School has always stressed the importance of linguistic change, only a rather narrow range of terms such as “state” and “liberty” have been studied historically; part of my purpose here is to show that words that apparently have nothing to do with politics, words such as “system” and “machine,” can be central to the history of political theorizing. Indeed a study of the history of a phrase like “checks and balances” may give us a different understanding of its range of possible meanings. The Cambridge School has often claimed that the history of ideas can contribute something to normative moral and political philosophy. The conclusion of my argument is that contemporary references to “checks and balances” miss the most interesting of the ideas that have been embodied in the phrase.
I began with a complaint about the history of political theory, so my first obligation is to show that historians of political theory have failed to think about checks and balances. One example can stand for many. Few texts in the history of political thought have been more widely influential than John Pocock’s 1977 introduction to James Harrington’s Political Works. There he argues that classical republican theory (a term of art including ancient Romans such as Cicero, Renaissance theorists such as Machiavelli, and English Civil War republicans such as Harrington) had, since Polybius in the second century b.c.e., been preoccupied with the idea of how to achieve political stability through balancing monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy. This problem became central to English-language political theory a few weeks before the start of the Civil War, when Charles I issued His Majesty’s Answer to the Nineteen Propositions of Parliament, which stated that “There being three kinds of government among men, absolute monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, and all these having their particular conveniences and inconveniences, the experience and wisdom of your ancestors hath so molded this out of a mixture of these as to give to this kingdom (as far as human prudence can provide) the conveniences of all three, without the inconveniences of any one, as long as the balance hangs even between the three estates. . . .” With these words Charles abandoned any claim to absolute rule and provoked what Pocock calls “a true revision of paradigms,” a revision embodied in Philip Hunton’s A Treatise of Monarchy (1643): “Hunton assumed that England was a mixed government, a balance of the independently subsisting forces of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, just as described in the Answer to the Nineteen Propositions; and he further pointed out that in a true balance, each power checked, but none controlled, the other two, with the consequence that no human authority was above the balance or was competent to command once it had broken down.” Hunton, we are told, “had employed the republican vocabulary,” and it would seem natural to assume that that vocabulary was one of balances, checks, controls. It comes as something of a surprise to turn to Hunton and discover that Hunton uses none of these words, either in the Treatise or in its subsequent Vindication (1651). I think it is reasonable to complain that Pocock has read the concept of checks and balances back into the Treatise, where it is not (or is barely) to be found.
It is true that Hunton once addresses the idea of the balanced constitution, though in his own language:
In such a composed state [i.e., a monarchy mixed with aristocratic and democratic elements], if the monarch invade the power of the other two, or run in any course tending to the dissolving of the constituted frame, they ought to employ their power in this case to preserve the state from ruin; yea that is the very end and fundamental aim in constituting all mixed policies: not that they by crossing and jarring should hinder the public good; but that, if one exorbitate, the power of restraint and providing for the public safety should be in the rest: and the power is put into divers hands, that one should counterpoise and keep even the other: so that for such other estates, it is not only lawful to deny obedience and submission to illegal proceedings, as private men may, but it is their duty, and by the foundations of the government they are bound to prevent dissolution of the established frame.
Restraint and counterpoise, one might argue, are terms strictly analogous to checks and balances. But restraint is a virtue as well as being a metaphor about limitations on freedom of action. Hunton’s own summary of this passage, in the Vindication, is “My third argument for mixture was from its end, which was restraint from excess.” “Excess” is clearly a normative concept—indeed, in an Aristotelian world, where virtue is defined as a mean, “excess” is by definition a vice. Hunton has no interest in pursuing the concept of a balance beyond this passing remark because he is interested in authority and right, public good, and private duty. To think seriously about checks and balances one has to start thinking about political systems in value-free terms and to see them, indeed, as systems which can usefully be compared with mechanical systems.
It would be surprising indeed if Hunton were interested in doing this because the vocabulary he would have needed would have been as much mechanical as republican. In 1648 we find the first reference to the science of mechanics: it is followed in 1662 by mechanism; and in 1673 the word machine is first used to mean an apparatus for applying mechanical power—engine had been the English translation for the Latin machina until then. John Evelyn, the diarist, is credited with being the first to introduce into English another word with a related meaning, but with a Greek origin, automaton (1645). In all the early usages the standard example of a machine or automaton was a clock, and like clocks before them, machines and automata soon became powerful metaphors for thinking of God, thinking of God as a clockmaker and the universe as a giant clock: as early as 1587, in a translation of the leading French Protestant, Philippe de Mornay, we find the heart described as a divinely constructed clock.
The idea of a system of checks and balances implies an idea of a constitution as a mechanical system, and that implies an interest in mechanism. The idea (if not the language) of political machinery is certainly present in the opening pages of Leviathan, where both the human body and that “artificial man,” Leviathan, are compared to “Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheels as doth a watch),” but having formulated this mechanical model, Hobbes does not seem to know quite what to do with it. The earliest reference to a “political machine” that I have been able to find is in John Dryden’s edition of Plutarch’s Lives (1683), in the life of Lycurgus:
When he perceived that his laws had taken deep root in the minds of his countrymen, that custom had rendered them familiar and easy, that his commonwealth grew apace daily, and was able to go alone, he had such a calm joy and contentation of mind, as Plato somewhere tells us the Maker of the World had, when he had finished and set this great machine a moving, and found everything very good and exactly to answer his great Idea; so Lycurgus, taking an unspeakable pleasure in the contemplation of the greatness and beauty of his work, seeing every spring and particular of his new establishment in its due order and course, at last he conceived a vast thought to make it immortal too, and, as far as human forecast could reach, to deliver it down unchangeable to posterity.
Here machine translates the Greek word cosmos.
Within a few years such usages of the word were common. Here the key figures are John Trenchard, his friend Walter Moyle, and their associate John Toland, the three of whom played the central role in refashioning the republican intellectual tradition to justify opposition to William III’s efforts to build a strong state capable of withstanding attack by the France of Louis XIV. These radicals insisted that a professional army (particularly if kept up during peacetime) was (as republicans had often claimed) a dangerous threat to political liberty. In An Argument Shewing That a Standing Army Is Inconsistent with a Free Government (1697), Trenchard and Moyle say that their objective is “to put in motion this machine of our government, and to make the springs and wheels of it act naturally and perform their function.” Soon afterwards, Trenchard, in his “incomparable preface” to his Short History of Standing Armies (1698), argues that “A government is a mere piece of clockwork, and having such springs and wheels, must act after such a manner: and there the art is to constitute it so that it must move to the public advantage.” The secret is “to make the interest of the governors and the governed the same, . . . and then our government will act mechanically, and a rogue will as naturally be hanged as a clock strike twelve when the hour has come.” Moyle, writing An Essay on the Lacedaemonian Government in the same year, maintained that the best constitution provided “a proper distribution of power into several branches, in the whole composing as it were one great machine, and each grand branch was a check upon the other; so that not one of them could exceed its just bounds.” It is not a coincidence that Toland, who may even have collaborated with Trenchard and Moyle in writing the Argument, uses the phrase “check and balance” soon after. One of their critics was dismayed by the effectiveness of this new language: “Can you bear smiling at the simplicity of mankind, to find how many swallow your notions, because you talk so finely for liberty, a militia to defend it, and engineering in your studies?” (This, by the way, is more than twenty years earlier than the OED’s first recorded use of “engineering” as a noun.) It is presumably from sources such as these that the language of political machinery found its way into the political essays of the philosopher David Hume, who writes in 1752 of “the political machine” and “the machine of government.”
In the light of my earlier reading of Hunton, you will expect me now to argue that this new mechanical language was linked to a rejection of moral categories in political analysis. And this is indeed the case. Trenchard, Moyle, and Toland, former Whigs, found themselves in alliance with former Tories such as Harley in attacking the new party of big government, the court Whigs. They were well aware that those in power shared (at least in theory) many of their principles. And they repeatedly acknowledged that William, as King, was both a legitimate ruler and a man to be trusted—it was essential that their attacks on his policies should have no hint of Jacobitism. But their claim was that good men would eventually be replaced by bad men (it was only a short step, but one they hesitated to take, to claim that power tends to corrupt and turns good men into bad) and that in the long run what counts is not the quality of the men or the rectitude of their intentions but the nature of the political system within which they operate. As Trenchard and Moyle put it, “Let us flatter ourselves as much as we please, what happened yesterday will come to pass again, and the same causes will produce the like effects in all ages.” Moyle, writing to a friend, adopted a more learned language: “Thus you see, as a good author expresses it, eadem fabula semper in mundo agitur, mutatis duntaxat personis; which agrees with what Thucydides says in his third book, eadem accidere, donec eadem hominum natura.” The casuistical terms in which Hunton and his contemporaries had conducted their debates could thus be dismissed as irrelevant. Trenchard, writing years later as Cato, still dismissed the conventional preoccupation with virtue: “The experience of every age convinces us, that we must not judge of men by what they ought to do, but by what they will do.” The task of the political analyst was not to judge moral right and wrong, but to follow the chain of causes at work within a political system. Hume made the same point by taking from Machiavelli the example of Renaissance Genoa. There the very same people who were, when engaged in politics, seditious, tumultuous, and disorderly appeared to demonstrate integrity and wisdom when running the bank of St. George. Forms and institutions were thus seen to be crucial in regulating behavior.
I find it easiest, as you will have noticed, to describe the new political theory by employing the word “system.” Hobbes had written a chapter “Of Systems”: “By Systems; I understand any numbers of men joined in one Interest, or one Business.” Harrington had written of “the system of the government” and “a system of politics,” but he seems to have had no immediate successors. Samuel Butler in 1729 was giving the word (which had previously meant little more than an aggregation or grouping) a tightened definition when he wrote “The body is a system or constitution: so is a tree: so is every machine.” Once the word was readily available in this new sense it was quickly reemployed in political theory: it appears a year later in the first definition of the modern idea of a constitution in its political sense, Bolingbroke’s statement that “By constitution we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, that assemblage of laws, institutions, and customs, derived from certain fixed principles of reason . . . that compose the general system according to which the community hath agreed to be governed.” Indeed he uses it over and over again. The constitution is “a noble and wise system, the essential parts of which are so proportioned, and so intimately connected, that a change in one begets a change in the whole.” King and people are “parts of the same system, intimately joined and co-operating together, acting and acted upon, limiting and limited, controlling and controlled by one another.” But for the pioneers of the new way of thinking in the final years of the seventeenth century, “system” was a word that was too imprecise to serve their purposes. The preferred word to convey the idea of an interacting system was, as in the quotation from Butler, “machine.” “Machine” was not a metaphorical term which stood in place of a readily available alternative; at first it was the only available term to convey the idea of complex interaction.
Even when the idea of a system was well-established (and one may note, for example, the use of the word “system” by opponents of the proposed new American Constitution in 1787), the reference to machines remained almost obligatory because the idea of a system remained entangled in the idea of a machine. Astronomy had played a key role in reshaping the word “system” because of its use in phrases such as “the Copernican system”: Galileo’s Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) had first been published in an English translation in 1661. Thus Adam Smith writes, in the History of Astronomy (c. 1749), “Systems in many respects resemble machines. A machine is a little system, created to perform, as well as to connect together, in reality, those different movements and effects which the artist has occasion for. A system is an imaginary machine invented to connect together in the fancy those different movements and effects which are already in reality performed.” It was still entirely natural for John Adams, writing in 1765, to compare political constitutions at length with the constitution of the body and with machines such as clocks (“a combination of weights, wheels, and levers, calculated for a certain use and end”) before concluding “Government is a frame, a scheme, a system, a combination of powers for a certain end, namely—the good of the whole community.” Indeed Sir James Steuart’s An Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy (1767) could, when discussing this topic at least, have been written at the end of the previous century:
It is of governments as of machines, the more they are simple, the more they are solid and lasting; the more they are artfully composed, the more they become useful; but the more apt they are to be out of order.
The Lacedaemonian form may be compared to the wedge, the most solid and compact of all the mechanical powers. Those of modern states to watches, which are continually going wrong; sometimes the spring is found too weak, at other times too strong for the machine: and when the wheels are not made according to a determinate proportion, by the able hands of a Graham, or a Julien Le Roy, they do not tally well with one another; then the machine stops, and if it be forced, some part gives way; and the workman’s hand becomes necessary to set it right.
There would seem to be an obvious objection to this line of argument. Is not the concept of a political system or something very like it already present in Polybius? In the words of a mid-twentieth-century translation, Polybius held that Lycurgus, in reforming the constitution of Sparta, understood the perils of a simple constitution, and therefore
Combined together all the excellencies and distinctive features of the best constitutions, that no part should become unduly predominate, and be perverted into its kindred vice; and that each power being checked by the others, no one part should turn the scale or decisively outbalance the others; but that by being accurately adjusted in exact equilibrium, the whole might remain long steady like a ship sailing close to the wind.
There are two things that are disconcerting about this translation. In the first place, it brings together into the same sentence the words check and [out]balance. Here, though, it simply reflects the magnetic attraction of the modern phrase “checks and balances”—the early translations of Polybius that I have been able to consult do not use the word “check,” but rather phrases such as “mutually acted upon by opposite powers” or “each separate power being still counteracted by the rest.” Even more alarming is the phrase “like a ship sailing close to the wind.” In the first place, Greek ships could not sail close to the wind, so this must be a mistranslation; in the second place, a ship sailing close to the wind implies a complex balance of a number of different forces—wind, sails, ballast, rudder—so if Polybius thought in such terms his notion of equilibrium would imply some sort of complex machine, not the simplest form of a balance, that of two weights in a scale—the sort of balance that has been familiar for millennia.
In fact, Polybius thought only in terms of the simple balance. The passage about a ship remaining in equilibrium while in movement, which might seem to suggest otherwise, has provoked much debate and continues to puzzle scholars because it contains a word found nowhere else. The best interpretation as far as the sense is concerned (I am not competent to comment on the technical problems presented by the Greek) is in a French translation of 1792, which assumes quite properly that Polybius is thinking of a galley: if only the rowers on the port side row, the ship turns clockwise; if only those on the starboard side row, it turns anticlockwise; if both row together, an equilibrium is established and it proceeds in a straight line. In other words Polybius is still thinking of a simple balance between two equal forces, not of some complex balance between multiple forces—not of what we would call a “system” which needs to have several interacting parts. The standard modern translation takes Polybius to be talking about loading the cargo in a ship so it remains in trim as it travels along—again a balance of two equal forces. Moreover Polybius assumed that the balancing of forces would be the result of deliberate action, not the unintended consequence of an interactive process. Theorists such as Trenchard and Moyle were interested in the idea that a political system might be constructed so that it would generate outcomes (such as the public good) that none of the participants had intended to achieve.
Thus to describe Polybius as having the idea of a political system is to read systems analysis (itself an aspect of mechanistic thinking) back into a pretechnological culture. When he was first taken up in English, the balance was only one, and not necessarily the preferred, metaphor for the imposition of due limits. Here is His Majesty’s Answer again: “. . . as long as the balance hangs even between the three states, and they run jointly on in their proper channel (begetting verdure and fertility in the meadows on both sides), and the overflowing of either on either side raise no deluge or inundation.” The mixing of metaphors here is testimony to just how little work the idea of the balance was capable of doing before the rise of mechanistic philosophy.
I have chosen a plainly anachronistic translation of Polybius because I want to stress that Polybius is not a fixed quantity but was bound to be read differently at different times. What has become for modern commentators the key passage of Polybius’s Histories was not always read—it survives only in a fragment and was omitted from those editions which reproduced only the complete books. The middle of the eighteenth century saw what has been called the “rediscovery” of Polybius, and I want to suggest that this was a rediscovery of this particular passage and was linked to the intellectual revolution I am discussing. Even when the passage was translated, its meaning was sometimes far from apparent—a translation of 1634 renders the passage incomprehensible by changing one letter, for instead of saying “Royalty should be restrained from arrogancy by fear of the people,” it says, perhaps under the pressure of censorship, perhaps simply through carelessness, “Loyalty should be restrained.”
Our own preoccupation with Polybius as the source of the idea of the mixed constitution and of checks and balances is in any case somewhat misleading. Adams, in his Defence of the Constitutions of the United States, placed great emphasis on Polybius, and the author of His Majesty’s Answer also appears to have had Polybius in mind, but for generations of politicians the idea of the balanced constitution would have been familiar, not from an obscure passage in Polybius, but from a far more widely read passage in Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus. The significance of this passage has been overlooked, perhaps because modern translations do not use the word “balance.” Here is the sixteenth-century translation of North:
In this change of the state, many things were altered by Lycurgus, but this chiefest alteration was, his law of the erection of a senate, which he made to have a regal power and equal authority with the kings in matters of weight and importance, and was (as Plato saith) to be the healthful counterpoise of the whole body of the Commonweal. The other state before was ever wavering, sometime inclining to tyranny, when the kings were too mighty; and sometime to confusion, when the people would usurp authority. Lycurgus therefore placed between the Kings and the people, a Council of Senators, which was as a strong beam, that held both these extremes in an even balance, and gave sure footing and ground to either part to make strong the state of the Commonweal. For the 28 Senators (which made the whole body of the Senate) took sometime the King’s part, when it was needful to pull down the fury of the people: and contrariwise, they held sometimes with the people against the Kings, to bridle their tyrannical government.
There is still only one balance here, not a series of checks and balances, but it is worth noting that there are close analogues here to Hunton’s language of counterpoise, restraint, and foundation so we can reasonably suspect that it is Plutarch not Polybius that Hunton had in mind.
I have paused over Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus partly because Moyle, writing in his Essay on the Lacedaemonian Government about Harrington’s scheme of government, said, “How nearly this is drawn from Lycurgus’s institution you may read with pleasure in his Life writ by Plutarch.” This is true to a far greater extent than modern commentators on Harrington have acknowledged. The agrarian; the ballot; rotation of office; the separation between proposing and resolving; the mixture of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy; the idea of a government so constituted that it is capable of surviving forever: all were described by Plutarch and taken up by Harrington. It was ostensibly on the basis of Plutarch and Harrington (and perhaps also on the basis of a reading of Nedham) that Moyle developed an account of what we now call the separation of powers, an account which surely influenced both Bolingbroke, whose essays in The Craftsman (1730) followed soon after the first publication of Moyle’s work (though written in 1698, it did not appear in print until 1727), and Montesquieu (who, like Moyle, writes of the distribution not the distinction—Nedham’s term—or separation of power(s) and who, like Moyle, uses a selective account of an existing constitution to describe the maximum amount of liberty possible within civil society). For our purposes Moyle’s essay of 1698, not Hunton’s Treatise of 1643, represents the birth of a new language and a new paradigm: he writes of checks, of controls, of the balance of power (although perhaps not in its modern meaning), of machinery. That new paradigm owed a great deal to Harrington’s conceptions of political architecture and political anatomy, but its vocabulary was only in part Harrington’s. Harrington had written of checks (in the context of providing political supervision of military commanders) and of the law controlling the Lucchese (in the context of a refutation of Hobbes’s views on liberty), but he had made no mention of machines, and when Harrington had written of “the balance,” he meant the stable state created by an overbalance, not an equilibrium. The traditional idea of a balanced constitution he dismissed as a mere wrestling match between Kings, Lords, and Commons, and in order to avoid the hated term “balance” when talking of constitutional provisions, he adapted the term “libration” to a novel use.
Harrington, as his description of the constitution of Oceana draws to a close, quotes Plutarch’s account of how Lycurgus had admired his own work and aspired to make it permanent. For readers of Moyle’s generation, this passage evoked images of machines driven by springs; but Harrington still read it as North had read it, as an account of man imitating God in the construction of an order comparable to that of the heavens: “He conceived such a delight within him, as God is described by Plato to have done when he had finished the creation of the world, and saw his own orbs move below him: for in the art of man (being the imitation of nature, which is the art of God) there is nothing so like the first call of beautiful order out of chaos and confusion as the architecture of a well-ordered commonwealth.” It is this step from the classical art of political architecture to the modern science of political engineering—which Trenchard called “the art of political mechanism”—that is marked by the new language of checks and balances. It is true that both Nedham and Harrington saw the frequent election of representatives as a key process in politics which Nedham described as “revolution” and Harrington as “rotation,” but the whole point of this movement, like the movement of the heavens, was that it kept bringing the political system back to its original starting point, a conformity of interests between government and governed: which is why Harrington can mix astronomical and architectural metaphors in a single sentence. The new emphasis on mechanism, by contrast, made it possible for the first time to think about the political process in noncyclical terms. For later theorists of constitutional machinery, the importance of Polybius and Plutarch and of Nedham and Harrington was that they provided apparent precedents for what was in fact a new way of thinking.
Moyle, tracing the idea of the distribution of power back to Lycurgus, was effectively denying the modernity of the new political theory and the institutions it described. A much more subtle view is implicit in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748). There Montesquieu writes of moderate governments as requiring the balancing of powers one against another. But mere moderation provides no guarantee of constitutional liberty which exists only where there is a proper separation of powers. Only in England had the separation of legislature, executive, and judiciary (in the English case the “judge” in criminal cases being the jury) come properly into existence, and thus a constitution in which the separate powers provided adequate checks upon each other and political liberty was consequently guaranteed was evidently a modern invention. However Montesquieu’s account of the English constitution was theoretical rather than historical. Nowhere does he give any indication that he grasped that both the division of powers he so admired and the mechanical language he employed to describe their relationship to each other were scarcely older than he was. (He was born in 1689.)
The Source:
David Wootton, ‘Liberty, Metaphor and Mechanism: “Checks and Balances” and the Origins of Modern Constitutionalism’, in David Womersley, ed., Liberty and American Experience in the Eighteenth Century, Liberty Fund 2006
[MGH: Original version, no editing/highlighting. As usual, for the sake of ease of reading, all footnotes and references have been omitted. Coming up soon: Part 2: Checks and Balances. Recommended listening on this topic: The people at WSJ Potomac Watch Podcasts are unusually knowledgeable about all matters relating to separation of powers, an today they discussed the overturning of Roe v. Wade.]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.