Montesquieu: the Institutions of Plurality

The article analyses the valuable consistency among Montesquieu's political and constitutional views. The great complexity of his constitutional thought reveals that between the political body's different parts there is an aller de concert, a real `concert' where social elements, heterogeneous forces, constitutional maxims and concrete rules of the nation combine themselves in order to generate its constitution. Though being legal motions, the organs of the constitutional order reflect the forces in the society, expressing as institutions social elements whose presence and action they warrant within the constitutional system and political space through their own political function. Here Montesquieu brilliantly updates the old principle of correspondence between the nation specific social structure and its political government form.