Without a doubt, if Montesquieu were forced to choose a favorite mathematical formula, he would choose the mean function. Because even among the great thinkers of the French Enlightenment, Baron de Montesquieu stands out as a particularly passionate defender of moderation. Montesquieu, of course, left his greatest mark on the philosophy of government through his great work The Spirit of Laws. Although his earlier work, The Persian Letters, certainly sowed the seeds of many of the ideas presented in his masterpiece. In particular, Montesquieu devotes time in both works to examining the universe of possible governments. But he does not, in fact, advocate republicanism or, perhaps less surprisingly, despotism. Montesquieu instead supports the “moderate” position: a government less despotic than despotism, and yet less democratic than democracy or republicanism. In other words, he advocates the rule of an enlightened monarch. Montesquieu himself divided the main forms of government into three main groups in his seminal work The Spirit of Laws. At one extreme he places the “republican” government, at the other the despotic government. He places the “monarchical” somewhere in the center (Esprit des Lois book II, ch. 1). The order alone belies Montesquieu's position; of course, other evidence is more explicit. To begin with, Montesquieu does little to disguise his distaste for despotic governments. Even Usbek, Rhedi and Rica, the Persian aristocrats invented by Montesquieu in Les Lettres persanes – whose nobility derives from a despotic Asian government – ​​find fault with the despotic system, as if to highlight its lack of merit. Usbek says of European states: "A week of imprisonment or a small fine impresses the mind of a...... middle of paper...... Moderate government is Montesquieu's recipe for political success. He finds obvious and glaring flaws in the despotic system, from the cruelty that despots show toward 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 doomed to succumb to human whims. The monarchy, however, finds a balance in Montesquieu's eyes. It neither relies on the determination of citizens, nor allows 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. 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.