and developments of several centuries’ duration involving thepopulation of the entire globe? In search of an answer to this persist-ent question, a recapitulation follows of the worldviews ofMontesquieu and Marx, along with some updated discussion ofthe accompanying twin-track theme of the courses of Americanand Russian history. There is consideration of the continuingrelevance of these worldviews, and this theme, even into the 1990s.Next, I present some observations on historical revisions andalternatives triggered by the collapse of the USSR and its aftermath,but incorporating recent developments in the arts and sciences.How best can we consider constitutional and revolutionary orderin the light of the new circumstances? And which furthercomparative approaches might prove most fruitful? Finally, therecomes ‘world history, pure and applied’. Is it possible to studyhistory for its own sake, or must there be some ulterior purpose? Isuggest that it is possible to do both in any approach to worldhistory, and that they can both play a part in the difficult task ofdiscerning world order and the even more intractable problem ofcreating it. The same might be said of the two kinds of orderdiscussed in this book, constitutional and revolutionary. Like otheropposites, they are ultimately not contradictory, butcomplementary, a thesis and antithesis leading towards synthesis.To conclude this introduction, another question must be posed:why begin a study of history and world order with Montesquieu?After all, through language, human beings have sought to imposeorder on their environment since the dawn of time, even ifhistorians as professional dealers in time did not emerge beforethe later nineteenth century, a period which introduced thedemarcation of academic disciplines in general. Briefly, philosophyin a broad sense ‘finds in human reason the common source of ourknowledge of nature and our beliefs concerning the supernatural’from the period of Descartes—‘a worthy contemporary of theheroes of the Thirty Years War’ — that is, the first half of theseventeenth century. And about a hundred years after theconclusion of that war, ‘Montesquieu, in his Esprit des Lois (1748)undoubtedly makes use of the Cartesian method itself, applying itto political matters.’ Meanwhile in England, the empiricist tradition,based on observation rather than on reason alone, was firmlyestablished in the course of the seventeenth century from Bacon toNewton, both of whom continued to exert an enormous influencethroughout the eighteenth century. Between them, Descartes and

 Newton may be considered among the most important forerunnersof the Enlightenment.9Descartes himself wrote of the histories and fables of ‘theAncients’:

 For to converse with those of other centuries is almost thesame as to travel. It is a good thing to know something ofthe customs and manners of various peoples in order tojudge of our own more objectively and so not thinkeverything which is contrary to our ways is ridiculous andirrational, as those who have seen nothing are in the habitof doing. But when one spends too much time travelling,one becomes eventually a stranger in one’s own country;and when one is too interested in what went on in pastcenturies, one usually remains extremely ignorant of whatis happening in this century.10These words of the ‘modern’ Descartes could serve as anepigraph for this book. Its aim is to visit earlier centuries in orderto arrive at a better understanding of our own. It hopes toindicate through an analysis of the writings of Montesquieu,Marx and others how their ideas were influenced by the timesin which they lived, but also to indicate how the themes ofconstitutional and revolutionary order as enunciated byMontesquieu and Marx, and developed—either explicitly orimplicitly —by historians and others in the twentieth century,remain of great relevance today. Of course, there are other kindsof order besides the constitutional and the revolutionary, but atleast some of them, for example the economic, will normally besub-sumed under them. Definitions are in any case perhaps bestleft to social scientists,11 while this book concentrates on thehistorian’s stock in trade—movement through time—attemptingto illustrate how the study of past views of world order mayhelp us approach the present and the future.In 1748, the year of publication of The Spirit of the Laws, theworld was still imperfectly known. In spite of voyages of‘discovery and exploration’ from Columbus to the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries, the Southern Pacific and Australasia stillawaited Cook and others, while most of the Arctic and Antarcticwould remain uncharted for many years. Meanwhile, the interiorof the great continents had yet to be penetrated fully by thosewith the most extended worldview, Europeans at home andabroad. In particular, as far as the outliers of the northernhemisphere were concerned, what was to become the USA andCanada consisted primarily of maritime colonies, while Russiawas barely beginning to incorporate Siberia fully into the empire.Great changes would ensue through the dates to be picked uplater in this study, 1789, 1867, 1917 and so on up to 1994—as wewill remind ourselves, as we pursue the subject of theconsideration of world order through time