Today’s class is extraordinary, if not a particularly joyful one. The reason being skiving. That’s right, it is the separation of powers who’s absent without leave today. All three powers are Montesquieu’s children and I would like to dedicate our entire form period to them.
Mind you, Montesquieu really did his best to keep all the powers and their separation present here. Remember when he talked about several types or classes of government?
Look at the king here. Montesquieu says that in order for a monarchy to work, what it needs is honour/honor [somehow neither British nor American spelling of this term feel right here]. In monarchy you just don’t do certain things. You don’t run back and forth across the board, like the queen. The queen is a despot, her rule is fear. She shows up everywhere and beats everyone up.
The second type of government – the bishop and the knight – aristocracy, that is. The basis for this system is moderation. Two steps forward, one to the side. [tu ze skokiem w bok nie działa niestety]
And here’s the pawn, representing democracy. The defining rule of democracy is virtue. As virtue fades out, ambition creeps into some of the hearts. Greed creeps into all of them. Every pawn wants to be queen.
In order to prevent this, power needs to be divided. One sets the rules, a different one governs and the third one settles disputes. This is in order for every pawn to feel safe.
Imagine that only one team sets the rules of a football match. Its players play in it and its coaches referee it. The players of the opposite team don’t feel very safe now, do they? This is what Montesquieu is all about – he wants us to feel safe out there.
The right way of separating powers is best represented by the envy-free cake-cutting: – one person cuts it, the other one chooses one of the pieces. The third one makes sure everybody gets a piece. As Montesquieu puts it, L’éducation consiste à nous donner des idées, et la bonne éducation à les mettre en proportion – education provides information and ideas, but a good education teaches us how to maintain the right balance.
Therefore, according to Montesquieu, in order for public servants to obey the laws, people must have the power to make them come back to being regular citizens. Every queen has to turn into a pawn again in order for her head not to turn.
What we are talking about here is the separation and the balance of powers. We don’t want the pawn to suddenly start capturing while moving backwards or fly over the chess-board, changing the rules on the fly. He can’t become queen until he reaches the other end of the board and changes the constitution.
That balance of powers is there precisely in order to prevent the pawns from flying. Before any decision reaches a citizen, it must go through the institutions that keep one another in check. That way any action against others equals an action against oneself – once change of government happens. The relationship is healthy then.
A toxic relationship begins when the ruling class, whom the people put their trust in, attempts to corrupt the people in order to hide their own corruption. In order to hide their own ambitions, they emphasize how extraordinary the people are. In order to hide their greed, they feed the people’s greed. The people then lose their balance, they tumble down into the box and let themselves be locked inside a system in which one person sets the rules, governs and settles disputes. A toxic relationship.
That separation of powers is absent without leave today and I’m afraid that we are all going to stay down and repeat the year – with the same homecoming king at helm. Montesquieu wouldn’t have liked that.