A tripod is stable because its three legs are always on the same plane. In other words, it won’t wobble, even if its legs are uneven.
18 January 1689 is the day that Montesquieu was born. His influence on the authors of the US constitution cannot be understated. From him, the US constitution was embedded with the separation of administrative power into the legislative, the executive and the judicial. He did not invent the separation of powers, but he gave particular emphasis to the separation of the judiciary and to the rule of law. Of course publishing his ideas a generation before the War of Independence meant his timing was spot on.
As brands, the separation of powers and the rule of law have been hugely successful. They are regarded as thresholds of development into a modern democracy. Indeed, the peoples of many developed democracies think they have a separation of powers when they don’t. In countries of the British Commonwealth, for example, the usual constitutional model is that a person can only become prime minister, ie the head minister of the executive, if they sit in and can command the legislature.
It is important to remember that when Montesquieu was writing about the separation of power, he was writing about the separation of administrative power as a means of providing stability for the ultimate or sovereign power.
The stability afforded by the separation of administrative power was intended by Montesquieu to provide stability to the ultimate, or sovereign, power, but to be truly effective in a state where the people were sovereign, they had to be prepared to live with the consequences of appointing administrators.
It is the fashion of today’s world not only to hold our administrators in contempt but to say so publicly and immediately with all the reach our devices provide. This, the fashion holds, is the inherent right of our equality with each other. And this, no doubt, gives us a sense of participation and of being heard.
The fashion may be well-founded, but it is as well to recall what Montesquieu regarded as a first class road to despotism, what he called “the spirit of extreme democracy”, the eagerness of each of us to despise the very people we have chosen to represent us. He described us thus:
[They] want to manage everything themselves, to debate for the senate, to execute for the magistrate, and to decide for the judges…
The fact that those chosen to represent us so persistently hold their fellow administrators in public and immediate contempt may have some bearing on the matter, but that is for another day.
