Anglophilia is an endearing quality. At least Anglos find it so, and never more than when manifested by a Frenchman—especially a philosophic Frenchman who might, as a philosopher, be presumed to know something. Even normally Francophobic Englishmen and Americans make an exception for those Frenchmen who find us exceptional. When their Anglophilia is put in writing for all (including the French) to read, we can’t help but be pleased. The two French noblemen whom the English-speaking peoples have most taken to their collective hearts are Montesquieu and Tocqueville.

True, it is an Englishmen, John Locke, who has the sobriquet “America’s philosopher”; but Locke, of course, never knew us as anything more than a twinkle in his mild and far-seeing eye. By contrast, Montesquieu was contemporaneous with the English constitution and society he explicated and admired, just as Tocqueville was, a century later, with democracy in America. Both authors have the distinction of revealing us not only to others, but to ourselves. The English immediately recognized themselves in Montesquieu’s presentation of a system of separated powers, even though his perspective was novel at the time. It must have been like the moment when depth was introduced into painting—suddenly a flat medieval icon is transformed into a realistic portrait with dimensions and dynamism—or like the shift from reflecting pools to looking glasses. In Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748), the English saw themselves for the first time in a clear, silver-backed mirror—a mirror that had the added advantage of showing them to be the fairest of them all.