Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 9.djvu/267

 INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY 253

localities, and the human regulations to the natural laws," and furthermore "to the nature of the subjects." Bodin also took account of the alimentary necessities, and he pointed out the important influences of mountains upon civilizations. What he connected directly with positive political science is that he recog- nized the possibility for societies to interfere with their par- ticular organization and to modify it to their advantage. He is not a fatalist, and he is not a simple partisan rationalist of free will, but he is a determinist. He shows, indeed, with an impos- ing certainty and a wealth of erudition equal to that of Montes- quieu, "how much the food, the laws, and the customs, are able to change life." He compares, for example, from this point of view, Germany in the time of Tacitus and in his own epoch. With all of the historians and political theorists of antiquity he also proclaims that "the inequality of fortunes poverty and wealth are the two calamities of the republic." But what he did not see is that the internal barriers which separate men in each society have their analogue in the political frontiers between the societies. Both manifest the existence of inequalities and the temporary necessity of substituting this equilibration, based upon force and constraint, for one altogether broader and higher, based upon justice.

More than a century after Bodin, Montesquieu (1689-1755) devoted five books of The Spirit of Laws to the same problems. He also defined natural laws, and distinguished them from posi- tive laws. With an erudition scientifically more methodic and better chosen than that of his predecessor, he shows the con- nection of laws with the nature of climate and with the relative sobriety of peoples. He sets forth how, among other things, laws of civil and domestic slavery are connected with climate, and he combats the error, still in vogue today, that polygamy exists only among the wealthy classes. According to him, poor and rich civilizations are equally favorable to this state of pro- miscuity, which we find, indeed, in vigor in very opposite stages of civilization, although without different forms. Political servi- tude itself, according to him, is connected with climate. In reality, Montesquieu attributed to climate an exaggerated influ-