Without a doubt, if Montesquieu were forced to choose a favorite mathematical formula, he would choose the mean function. Even among the great thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Baron de Montesquieu stands out as a particularly passionate advocate of moderation. Montesquieu, of course, left his greatest mark on the philosophy of government through his great work The Spirit of Laws. Although certainly his previous work, The Persian Letters, sowed the seeds of many of the ideas present in his chef d'œuvre. In particular, in both works Montesquieu stops to examine the universe of possible governments. But he doesn't actually support republicanism or, perhaps less surprisingly, despotism. Rather, Montesquieu advocates the “moderate” position: a government less despotic than despotism, and yet less democratic than democracy or republicanism. In other words, he supports the rule of an enlightened monarch. Montesquieu himself divides the main forms of government into three large groups in his seminal work The Spirit of Laws. At one extreme he places the “republican” government, at the other the despotic one. The “monarchist” places it somewhere in the center (Spirit of the Laws book II, chapter 1). The order alone disproves Montesquieu's position; obviously other evidence is more explicit. For starters, Montesquieu does little to disguise his disgust with despotic governments. Even Usbek, Rhedi and Rica, the Persian aristocrats invented by Montesquieu in the Persian Letters - whose nobility derives from a despotic Asian government - find fault with the despotic system, as if to underline the system's lack of merit. Usbek says of European states: “A week's imprisonment, or a small fine, impresses the mind of a... means of paper... Moderate government is Montesquieu's recipe for political success. He finds clear and obvious flaws in the despotic system, from the cruelty that despots show towards their subjects to the instability of despotic government as an institution. The republican system, as Montesquieu sees it, is not without merit. But it seems certain that such a system is destined to succumb to human whim. The monarchy, however, finds a balance in Montesquieu's eyes. It does not rely on the determination of citizens, nor does it allow a prince the kind of unchecked control that subjects a population to the whims of a single man. Works Cited Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède. The Persian letters. Trans. CJ Betts. London: The Penguin Group, 1973.—. The spirit of the laws. Ed. JV Prichard. Trans. Thomas Nugent. London: Bell & Sons, Ltd., 1914.