One of the most notorious features of the French ancien régime was the practice of venality of office -- that is, the buying and selling of state offices that often served as a ticket into the hereditary nobility. To later historians, venality epitomized the irrational state structures that led to the eventual collapse of the French monarchy, but already in the eighteenth century it was denounced by everyone from aristocratic reactionaries to enlightened reformers. The most notable defender of the practice, however, was also by consensus the greatest French political theorist of the century, Montesquieu. His treatment of venality is especially notable because it does not offer a "conservative" defense of the practice as an inheritance of the pre-commercial past. On the contrary, Montesquieu views venality as a mechanism especially well-adapted to modern commercial society, and the logic he lays out might not be entirely irrelevant to contemporary liberal capitalist societies.

Daniel Luban is an assistant professor of political science at Columbia. He is finishing a book on early modern social theory entitled Children of Pride, from which the present talk is drawn.