Montesquieu's Use of Republican Language in The Spirit of Laws 1

Raymonde MONNIER CNRS

De l'Esprit des Loisequally known in English as The Spirit of the Laws or The Spirit of Laws -Montesquieu's magnum opus was immediately hailed in Europe as a summa of social, political and legal science. It was rapidly translated in several languages and widely distributed throughout Europe, and as such, it fits in perfectly well with the general theme of this conference. One may actually judge its huge editorial success from the number of its editions throughout the century after the original edition appeared in Geneva, in 1748 : about twenty editions, for instance, appeared in France and abroad before the revised and corrected edition of 1757, whose text has been used by most editors since and presented along with D'Alembert's famous Éloge de Montesquieu and Analyse de l'Esprit des Lois. The publication of Montesquieu's Works in French continued at a sustained rhythm up to 1800, in parallel with that of l'Esprit des Lois and of its translations in Europe, notably in the United Kingdom where thirty-one editions are accounted for in English (Courtney, 2002). The reception of that "best-seller" and its influence on the political thought and revolutions at the end of the eighteenth century, as well as the number and variety of critical comments up to this day, all testify to the richness of its concepts over the long term and incite the reader to question the spatio-cultural dimension of conceptual change. Montesquieu's theories have played a role not only in the way we conceive politics in relation to national contexts, but also at various levels, depending on the location and time involved. In that sense, the reception of the work ties up with the methodological relativism of its conception, since the purpose was to account for the spirit of the laws and the complexity of relationships and establishment processes with regard to political institutions, which are always reduced to their relative nature under the sign of a nation's history and general spirit [START_REF] Céline | liberté, droit et histoire[END_REF].

However, I shall cast aside the reception of The Spirit of Laws and focus rather on the ideological context of its formulation in order to understand the rhetorical function of the typology, principles and republican language in Montesquieu's political argumentation. In the framework of a study on the concept of "republic", it is impossible not to encounter Montesquieu since he is, together with Rousseau, part of the authors that contribute the most to the widespread dissemination of the republican vocabulary, notably through the Encyclopédie. Jaucourt's articles on the various forms of government are based on the first books of l'Esprit des Lois and re-use both its aphorisms and its definitions. However, Jaucourt's commentary conceals a discrepancy with Montesquieu's major invention, which is the theory of relations ("la théorie des rapports"). Georges Benrekassa has noted that most Encyclopedists actually paid little attention to what bears an essential significance for us, that is, Montesquieu's contribution to the epistemology of social science. Its importance in the definition of a new social ethics was reassessed by John Pocock according to a rather original process. « We are now in the era of a revived and modernized natural jurisprudence, based on the notion that an intensive study of the variations of social behavior throughout space and time would reveal the underlying principles of human nature on which the diversities of conduct were based and from which the 'lois' took their 'esprit'. Jurisprudence, whatever it was like as the formal study of law, was the social science of the eighteenth century, the matrix of both the study and the ideology of manners » (Pocock,1985). In l'Encyclopédie, what distances articles of political philosophy from Montesquieu revolve around the ideology of natural rights and of the contract, the most symbolical example being the article on slavery [START_REF] Jean | Deux lectures de l'esclavage[END_REF]. While referring to « cet illustre auteur » (that famous author), Jaucourt goes beyond his reasoning and radically condemns slavery because : « il blesse la liberté de l'homme, qu'il est contraire au droit naturel & civil, qu'il choque les formes des meilleurs gouvernemens, & qu'enfin il est inutile par lui-même. […] en un mot, rien au monde ne peut rendre l'esclavage légitime ».

The conceptual specificity with regard to typology, principles and relations that justify the complexity of the political phenomena may be appreciated through their contrast with the major currents of thought of his times, either historical, jusnaturalistic or republican. The last two books on the theory and the revolutions of mediaeval laws, for instance, reassess historical theses on French monarchy compared to his notion of the link between the authority of the king and fundamental laws. Regarding the theories of natural law and of the contract, Jean Goldzink has shown how Montesquieu parts from the theories of Hobbes and Locke. His tight analysis, as close as possible to the text itself, questions other interpretations, which have been formulated since the end of the nineteenth century and consider The Spirit of Laws as a theory of political liberalism [START_REF] Jean | La solitude de Montesquieu. Le chef-d'oeuvre introuvable du libéralisme[END_REF].

By placing mankind in a cosmological chain and by opposing Hobbes on the very ground of the Englishman's genealogical method concerning the state of nature, from Book I, Montesquieu escapes the framework of a strict jusnaturalism in order to create a form of political science without natural rights for the human being. He neutralises the two large legitimation paradigms of government by one or several persons, which are paternal authority and consent by contract. He maintains the law of nations « relative to their mutual intercourse » (droit des gens), politic law (droit politique) « relative to the governors and the governed », and civil law (droit civil) dealing with issues between individuals (I, 3). Those relations, which are universal, may be specified differently depending on location and time. The typology, as well as the description of the nature and of the principles of governments are deployed under a form of plural history and various factors that determine the general spirit of a nation, its inherent esprit des lois. What matters primarily is to discover the insertion of laws in the nature of things : « the government most conformable to nature, is that which best agrees with the humour and disposition of the people, in whose favour it is established ». Laws « should be relative to the nature and principle of each government » (I, 3). The famous chapter on the English Constitution analyses a very enlightening case, not as an actual model to be exported, but as a constitutional system aiming at political liberty that achieves a balance of powers by distributing functions in reference to social forces that even out themselves.

Hence, Republicanism, according to its English variation, was therefore part of ideological debates during the Enlightenment. In the political discourse of the 1730s and 1740s, the Dutch Republic (the United Provinces) was often quoted as the model of a prosperous nation where citizens were enjoying a great deal of freedom, while the British parliamentary regime was widely successful in withstanding comparison in Europe with the French monarchy with regards to political liberty. Thus preparing the posthumous success of the English exception as proof of Montesquieu's liberalism, as he tried to bypass Locke, universal rights and republican freedom altogether, as Rousseau was well aware. « The science of politics is still unknown » ; Montesquieu « was not concerned with the principles of political law ; he was content to deal with the positive laws of settled governments ; and nothing could be more different than these two branches of study » (Émile, livre V).

I -Free State and Republic : the argumentation mode of The Spirit of Laws

Since typology and principles are involved, a linguistic analysis as close as possible to the text of l'Esprit des Lois makes it possible to appreciate Montesquieu's argumentative skill in dealing with the republican notion of freedom. In Europe, the two English revolutions had marked the minds of the time following the execution of Charles I, the abolition of royalty, the suppression of the House of Lords and the political experimentations conducted during the Commonwealth. After the "glorious revolution", the aspiration for change finally generated a parliamentary monarchy without any possible return to a tyrannical monarchy (Pincus, Worden, 2009). Together with the wave of translations from English, French works on the English revolutions at the turn of the century, publications from the 1720s and 1730s show the genuine interest exerted in France by the political life of Britain [START_REF] Joseph | Montesquieu et la tradition politique anglaise en France : les sources anglaises de l'Esprit des Lois[END_REF]. The publication or the re-edition by Whig publicists of the works of Harrington, Milton, Sydney and Henri Neville, as early as 1698-1700, had introduced the readership to the republican language of the English Revolution. The middle of the century appears in France as a major focal point in the Frantext database for the discourse on republic. The frequency distribution of the word république between 1748 and 1788 shows a relative frequency peak in 1748-9, due to the top frequency recorded in the works of Mably and Montesquieu. Through Lord Bolingbroke he knew well, the latter was familiar with English constitutional debates and ideological controversies on political economy. On the other hand, Roman history and Machiavellli's political thought, which English republicans call their gospel, have impassioned the French during the eighteenth century, ever since Amelot de la Houssaye translated Il Principe, in 1683.

Interpretation problems of the republican discourse are both historical and semantic in nature, starting with the various uses of the word "republic" in the eighteenth century [START_REF] Raymonde | Républicanisme, patriotisme et Révolution française[END_REF](Monnier, , 2017)). The definition, as transmitted edition after edition since 1694 by the French Academy in its Dictionnaire is : « Estat gouverné par plusieurs. Il se prend quelquefois pour toute sorte d'Estat, de Gouvernement » (Any State governed by several [persons]. It is sometimes used to mean any type of State or government). In his Dictionnaire critique (1787-8), Féraud found that meaning rather outdated at the eve of the French Revolution and noted that Neologists say : la chose publique. The English term commonwealth is generally translated into French by république, and maintains in both languages a sense that is associated with its etymology, res publica, meaning the common good, the public thing. In English texts dating from the years of Cromwell's government (1649-1659), other synonymous expressions were used, such as "free State", "popular government" or "popular State", which were also found in French.

Montesquieu's typology of governments

In classical vocabulary, since the term république was only referred to pure forms of government and to free States, it was perceived as a normative term. We know how Rousseau in his Social Contract gives its full meaning to the notion as a legal organisational process of the State for the common good : « I therefore give the name "Republic" to every State that is governed by laws, no matter what the form of its administration may be : for only in such a case does the public interest govern, and the res publica rank as a reality. Every legitimate government is republican ». A note refers explicitly to the typology of the Spirit of Laws : « I understand by this word, not merely an aristocracy or a democracy, but generally any government directed by the general will, which is the law. To be legitimate, the government must be, not one with the Sovereign, but its minister. In such a case even a monarchy is a Republic » (II, VI). Here, Rousseau stands in the field of democratic lawfulness, and does not rely, like Montesquieu, on the theory of the forms of government.

Several interpretations have been put forward concerning Montesquieu's novel typology, as he establishes in the initial books of his work a threefold distinction between governments, according to their nature and their principle : republican government, monarchical government, and finally despotism, which is a common sliding slope to all governments, and therefore all the more essential to avoid (Larrère, 2001). If Montesquieu did not coin the word, which is used by authors who opposed absolute monarchy for various reasons (Bayle, Fénelon, Boulainvilliers), he forged and systemised an essential concept for his general theory of governments [START_REF] Bertrand | Introduction à De l'esprit des lois de Montesquieu[END_REF][START_REF] Krause | Despotism in The Spirit of Laws[END_REF]. The entire body of history is an endless laboratory of arguments where typology is far from neutral : the universal harm of an authority with no limits, which is not only a government by one alone, but a State without laws and rules, where all subjects are slaves, provides Montesquieu with some sort of counterjustification for moderate monarchy. The typology of the Spirit of Lawsgovernment by one or by several versus despotic Stateneutralises the normative dimension of the notion of republic, especially since that initial typology is covered later by a binary typologymoderate government and despotism.

The passions-principles

We all know the outstanding value Montesquieu attributes to the principles he creates on the basis of moral concepts : « when I had once discovered my first principles, he writes in the preface, everything I sought for appeared ; and in the course of twenty years, I have seen my work begun, growing up, advancing to maturity, and finished ». John Pocock has shown that in Britain the notion of virtue had been put forward in an almost republican way since the Restoration in order to preserve the balance of the Constitution and defend the independence of representatives against nepotism and patronage. The rhetoric of virtue and corruption, which is typical of the Country's ideology, was borrowed later by Bolingbroke in his speeches on parties and it is possible that the ambiguities of that notion of civic ethics in a world of passions and interests were inspirational to Montesquieu [START_REF] Céline | Montesquieu : Critique of republicanism[END_REF]. Passions-principles of governmentssuch as virtue, honour and fearare raised to the level of genuine political concepts. The principle of the Republic is virtue : it is moral and political virtue « in the sense it points toward the general good » (III, 5 a ), « the love of the laws and of our country » (IV, 5). It is neither the machiavellian virtù of the Prince, nor the virtue of a hero. Virtue « in a republic, is the love of one's country, that is, the love of equality » (Advertisement). Hence, we understand better why revolutionaries, starting with Robespierre, later adopted some of those definitions. Yet, Montesquieu, by letting political virtue, and « all those heroic virtues which we admire in the ancients, and to us are known only by story » (III 5), remain almost the only recourse of democracy or of a popular State, refers to the republic in Antiquity. Democratic institutions are those of the citiesthe senate, the magistrates, etc. The polysemous use of all those terms until the French Revolution helps in providing an intellectual security for the opponents of democracy, notably on the basis of arguments on the size of the States or the representative system, that reinforces that idea that "the time for republics is over" [START_REF] Louis | la politique et l'histoire[END_REF].

However, when considering the distance from the Golden Age of the Republic at the time of the Romans and of the Cities of Sparta and Athens, the Britain of the Commonwealth was only yesterday. Under Cromwell's Protectorate, republicans defended the parliamentary representation and the people's right to select their government. The absence of the word is noteworthy in the chapter referring to that significant era of English republicanism (III, 3). Montesquieu systematically avoids any of the terms used at the time to designate that episode in British history, such as "civil wars", "revolution" or "rebellion", but historians who have studied the texts more closely have shown that the 1650s, in the aftermath of the civil wars, were years of passionate research for a parliamentary solution aiming at the creation of a genuine republic, a free State, governed by laws. Between the republic of the Antiquity and the revolutions towards the end of the century, the theorists of the free State reused classical language in order to develop the principles of republican freedom on the basis of natural law and contract [START_REF] Skinner | Liberty before Liberalism[END_REF], Worden, 1991). Montesquieu knew very well the texts on English republicanism from which he borrowed his vocabulary ; and his analysis of the English Constitution shows that he furthered his reading of Harrington's Oceana. His main interest was the stability of the State and the balance of powers, rather than theories that rely on natural law in order to secure the freedom and the right of resistance.

Classical rhetoric and destabilization of republican language

After so many scholarly comments on Book XI, let us linger awhile on the following fragment of Book III, which is nothing else but a parody of the first English Revolution by the mere inversion of the sensitive figures of the republican language : the cynical style remains timeless. The excerpt is rather long to quote, for Rousseau, that "subtle Diogenes" according to Kant, later responded to it in a note of The Social Contract : « A very droll spectacle it was in the last century to behold the impotent efforts of the English towards the establishment of democracy. As they who had a share in the direction of public affairs were void of virtue ; as their ambition was inflamed by the success of the most daring of their members (Cromwell) ; as the prevailing parties were successively animated by the spirit of faction, the government was continually changing : the people, amazed at so many revolutions, in vain attempted to erect a commonwealth. At length, when the country had undergone the most violent shocks, they were obliged to have recourse to the very government which they had so wantonly proscribed. » « When Sylla thought of restoring Rome to her liberty, this unhappy city was incapable of that blessing. She had only the feeble remains of virtue, which were continually diminishing : instead of being roused out of her lethargy, by Caesar, Tiberius, Caius Claudius, Nero, Domitian, she riveted every day her chains ; if she struck some blows, her aim was at the tyrant, not at the tyranny ». The specific reference to the ambivalent figure of a political general is worth noting : Sylla, who illustrated in the republican discourse the danger of ambition in leaders at the origin of civil upheaval and tyrannical dictatorship, becomes the powerless restorer of liberty. Hence the figures of the Prince and of the tyrant, as well as those of the people and the slave, and the inverted figures of the public and of the individual, are blurred in the general chaos (democracy without virtue) and in the corruption of the republic that resulted in political "revolutions". It is an extreme situation where every passion turns into its contrary, where the force of the principle draws everything to it (VIII, 11). « When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it, and avarice possesses the whole community. The objects of their desires are changed ; what they were fond of before, is become indifferent ; they were free, while under the restraint of laws, but they would fain now be free to act against law ; and as each citizen is like a slave who has run away from his master […] Formerly the wealth of individuals constituted the public treasure ; but now this is become the patrimony of private persons. The members of the commonwealth riot on the public spoils, and its strength is only the power of a few, and the licentiousness of many ». Athens, in its fascination and fragility, shines in the distance as the City that combines supreme freedom and servitude : « This famous city, which had withstood so many defeats, and after having been so often destroyed, had as often risen out of her ashes, was overthrown at Chaeronea, and at one blow deprived of all hopes of resource » (III, 3).

That chapter on democracy prefigures what is to be developed in Book VIII with the upfront corruption of principles, including virtue and the spirit of equality. In democracy, an extreme spirit of equality is as irreparable as the loss of virtue ; it also generates corruption, which is the very inversion of the principle of the republic. « When once a republic is corrupted, there is no possibility of remedying any of the growing evils, but by removing the corruption and restoring its lost principles ». The people of Rome were all virtuous and free. « But when their morals were corrupted, the more power they were possessed of, the less prudent was their conduct ; till at length, upon becoming their own tyrants and slaves, they lost the strength of liberty to fall into the weakness and impotency of licentiousness » (VIII, 12). The first uses of the notion of corruption before Book VIII relate almost all to the laws and to the spring of democracy. The ultimate consequence is discussed as early as the terms of the principle of the popular state, with the reference to the Commonwealth : « when, in a popular government, there is a suspension of the laws, as this can proceed only from the corruption of the republic, the state is certainly undone » (III, 3).

Let us rest reassured however : the need for virtue decreases as a government draws closer together. Republican arguments are turned in favour of monarchy and of intermediary powers that are natural to it : « In monarchies, policy effects great things with as little virtue as possible… » (III, 5). « Ambition is pernicious in a republic. But in a monarchy it has some good effects ; it gives life to the government, […] Honor sets all the parts of the body politic in motion, and by its very action connects them ; thus each individual advances the public good, while he only thinks of promoting his own interest » (III, 7). In the very first books, monarchy is defined as the government of the laws. In Book V, after two chapters describing the advantages of monarchy compared to republic and despotism, Chapter 11 Of the Excellence of a Monarchical Government echoes Nedham's famous title (The Excellency of a free state) in order to deal with civil disorders. « Monarchy has a great advantage over a despotic government. As it naturally requires there should be several orders or ranks of subjects, the state is more permanent, the constitution more steady, and the person of him who governs more secure » (V, 11).

« Cicero is of opinion that the establishing of the tribunes preserved the republic. And indeed, says he, the violence of a headless people is more terrible. A chief or head is sensible that the affair depends upon himself, and therefore he thinks ; but the people in their impetuosity are ignorant of the danger into which they hurry themselves. This reflection may be applied to a despotic government, which is a people without tribunes ; and to a monarchy, where the people have some sort of tribunes » (V, 11).

II -Political liberty and the English Constitution

The argumentation mode becomes more precise when initiating the opposition between a despotic and a free State, which is more clearly formulated in Book XI. After the linguistic deconstruction of the Commonwealth, the rhetoric of inversion is perpetuated in the chapters on social upheaval and corruption of governments, with a view for the benefit of a moderate government to undoing not only the association between monarchy and despotism, but also the exclusive relationship between republic, free State and government of the laws. « Democratic and aristocratic states are not in their own nature free. Political liberty is to be found only in moderate governments » ; « it is necessary from the very nature of things, power should be a check to power », to prevent abuse of power (XI, 4).

The security liberty

As early as the initial chapters of Book XI, Montesquieu intertwines typologies in order to dismantle the classical association of freedom with the republic and provides his own definitions of liberty as different from independence : « Liberty is a right of doing whatever the laws permit » (XI, 3). « The political liberty of the subject is a tranquillity of mind arising from the opinion each person has of his safety » (XI, 6). « Political liberty consists in security, or, at least, in the opinion that we enjoy security » (XII, 2).

The following book, which is dedicated to the guarantees for a citizen to be free and which actually deals with criminal laws, has been far less commented than the previous one. Inversely, though, it constitutes the most topical account of l'Esprit des lois in the Encyclopédie, with Jaucourt's legal articles on crime (Crime) and criminal laws (Lois criminelles) forming the essential part of Books VI and XII concerning a citizen's security liberty protected by laws (Benrekassa). Beyond the distribution of powers and the separation of the judicial power, the advances of liberty, according to Montesquieu, are due to an extent knowledge of criminal laws : « The knowledge already acquired in some countries, or that may be hereafter attained in others, concerning the surest rules to be observed in criminal judgments, is more interesting to mankind than any other thing in the world. Liberty can be founded on the practice of this knowledge only… » (XII, 2). People are free « only as they are governed by civil laws » (XXVI, 20).

Montesquieu does not subscribe to the republican notion of freedom as defended by the radical authors of English republicanism : « There is no word that admits of more various significations […] than that of Liberty. Some have taken it as a facility of deposing a person on whom they had conferred a tyrannical authority ; others for the power of choosing a superior whom they are obliged to obey ; others for the right of bearing arms, and of being thereby enabled to use violence… » (XI, 2). The controversy pierces through the apparent control over the argumentation. Thanks to typology ruptures, passions are raised to the level of genuine political concepts, thus enabling them to respond to republicanism by reconfiguring the categories of republican language in a theory of political moderation. Honour maintains tranquillity in monarchy by calling upon self-pride : « the honor of monarchies is favoured by the passions, and favours them in its turn : but virtue is a self-renunciation, which is ever arduous and painful » and « requires a constant preference of public to private interest » (IV, 5). The paradigm of virtue keeps the republic and democracy at a distance, whereas the metaphor of general corruption, which threatens any abusive power, leaves the erratic image of a popular government as a crowd without leaders, since a lawless State leads to despotism and slavery for all.

Rousseau, who has read The Spirit of Laws very closely replies indirectly to Montesquieu's arguments in The Social Contract : « Outbreaks and civil wars give rulers rude shocks, but they are not the real ills of peoples […] Their true prosperity and calamities come from their permanent condition […] A little disturbance gives the soul elasticity ; what makes the race truly prosperous is not so much peace as liberty. Government undergoes contraction when it passes from the many to the few, that is, from democracy to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to royalty. To do so is its natural propensity » (III, IX*). A long note turns over Rome' example and classical vocabulary [the body of patricians, the senate, the body of tribunes…] against hereditary aristocracy, « the worst of all legitimate forms of administration » : « for names do not affect facts, and, when the people has rulers who govern for it, whatever name they bear, the government is an aristocracy. The abuse of aristocracy led to the civil wars and the triumvirate. Sulla, Julius Caesar and Augustus became in fact real monarchs ; and finally, under the despotism of Tiberius, the State was dissolved » (III, X*). A famous writer, he writes in the chapter on democracy (III, IV), « has made virtue the fundamental principle of Republics […] that great thinker was often inexact, and sometimes obscure, and did not see that, the sovereign authority being everywhere the same, the same principle should be found in every well-constituted State… ».

Regarding the civil bond, Rousseau advocates patriotism and self-love, which is common to all sensitive beings. It constitutes the natural principle that binds freely the individual to the republic, the internalised link of natural affections and manners that ties the citizen to the homeland that he not only cherishes, but with whom he shares the same values, and whose laws guarantee both his dignity and his freedom. Rousseau's response refers to the famous statement in The Social Contract. « The problem is to find a form of association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is the fundamental problem of which the Social Contract provides the solution » (I, vi).

The distribution of powers in the English Constitution

In the chapter of The Spirit of Laws on the English Constitution, where liberty should « appear in its highest perfection », figures the well-known formula regarding the separation of powers, which made Montesquieu famous : « There would be an end of everything, were the same man or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals » (XI, 6). The idea to separate the executive power from the legislative was already defended by English republicans, such as Nedham and Locke, for instance, in order to guarantee everybody's submission to the law. That purely negative principle would serve later in the drafting of constitutions. It was adopted unanimously in the French Declaration of Rights of 1789, although it did not determine the distribution of competences. What is actually debated in the political philosophy of the eighteenth century is the principle concerning the specialisation and hierarchy of functions, and the adequate mechanism to balance powers, which is related to the theory on the forms of government [START_REF] Michel | Séparation des pouvoirs[END_REF].

The system of free constitution that Montesquieu describes is different through its capability to maintain and regulate itself on its own, in the sense that several non-specialised powers or authorities ensure the balance of legislative power (the general will of the state) through their mutual faculty of rejecting (vetoing). The reference to Harrington, at the end of the chapter, suggests that he was imagining the free Commonweath of Oceana, while he had a truly free Constitution right in front of his eyes. Lord Bolingbroke, who was opposed to Walpole, considered that the balance between the three powers, which was typical of a mixed government, was the very principle of a free constitution : « It is by this mixture of monarchical, aristocratical and democratical Power, blended together in one system, and by these three estates balancing one another, that our free constitution of government hath been preserved so long inviolate ; or hath been brought back, after having suffered violations, to its original principles, and been renew'd, and improve'd too, by frequent and salutary revolutions » (Bolingbroke, 1754, Letter XIII). The Constitution of a free State requires a subtle craftsmanship in order to moderate interests and to maintain social equilibrium.

In The Spirit of Laws the mosaic of vocabulariessocial, political and constitutionalallows us, depending on the cases involved, passing from the aristocracy to the nobility and the Senate, from distinctions to the magistrates and to the power of corporate bodies, and from the body of nobles to the famous intermediary powers. « The most natural, intermediate and subordinate power, is that of the nobility. This in some measure seems to be essential to a monarchy » (II, 4). « An aristocratical government has an inherent vigour, unknown to democracy. The nobles form a body… » (III, 4). Heredity is the extreme point in the corruption of aristocracy, when changed into an oligarchy (VIII, 5). The polysemy of the notion of republic and the very etymology of the word "aristocracy", when added to the declining use of the word "oligarchy", give us to the possibility to consider the "body of the nobles" as the lost appropriate "regulating power" (puissance réglante) to moderate legislative power. « The ancients had no notion of a government founded on a body of nobles, and much less on a legislative body composed of the representatives of the people » (XI, 8).

The argumentation plays on the conceptual evolution and the juxtaposition of vocabularies. The impact of The Spirit of Laws on the political discourse at the end of the century pertains perhaps less to the originality of the method than to the rhetorical invention and expressive strength of political wordings. Montesquieu draws from the neo-classical vocabulary the notions that underlie his theory of governments. The argumentation, the reference to History and the ambiguity of the vocabulary have all led to contrasted readings. With due account of Montesquieu's intellectual weight in the eighteenth century, those who interpreted his thought do not seem to have measured the potential significance of the rhetoric of corruption. Revolutionaries did not invent the politics of virtue. Marisa Linton has shown that the language of moral and political virtue, which is adapted from Classicism and natural philosophy, was at the core of social thought since the middle of the century [START_REF] Linton | The politics of virtue in Enlightenment France[END_REF]. Already, Montesquieu was assigning the institutions of the republic with the formidable task to fight the alteration of the principle : « We must not imagine that criminal actions only are destructive of virtue ; it is destroyed also by omissions, by neglects, by a certain coolness in the love of our country, by bad examples, and by the seeds of corruption : whatever does not openly violate, but elude the laws ; does not subvert, but weaken them ; ought to fall under the inquiry and correction of the censors » (V, 19).

*

In the final crisis of the monarchy, the concepts of The Spirit of Laws escaped their author. The unbridled uses of the notion of despotism in the pamphlet war that prevailed in the 1770s and 1780s actually proved devastating for the royal power : the revolutionary spirit stole the notionas the symbolic form of the State degenerationin order to bring to life the representation of the Old Régime [START_REF] Melvin | Le despotisme et l'abus des mots[END_REF]. In the spirit of the revolutionaries, only civic ethics could overcome corruption. The rhetoric of virtue and of corruption had an influence in the radicalisation of the political groups that wished to personify the republic. The experiences lived through the country's dangers were leading the dominating party to consider itself as the only one to be in a position to exert virtue in the republic against "factions", which were perceived as many corruptive powers assimilated with the Counter-Revolution.

Montesquieu's political theory, which relied on the social-historical continuity of the States, was finally counter current to History and the dynamics of human rights. Its reference the first English Revolution prefigures Burke's interpretation of the French Revolution of 1789. With regards to republican freedom, Montesquieu could not fight on equal terms with the principles of 1789, due to the influence of Locke and Rousseau. The civic ideal of virtue was the moral ideal of citizens who were equal in rights, and the preservation of political liberty could no longer be reduced to the balance of powers in a society of orders. Even before monarchy was abolished, the hostility towards the aristocracy of nobles eradicated their everlasting privileges and their presumption to rule [START_REF] William | Aristocracy and its enemies in the age of revolution[END_REF]. However, at the time the Constitution was written, the famous wording for dividing the three powers provided Montesquieu with his entrance ticket into Modernity.

Lecture given in English at the 15 th Annual Conference on the History of Concepts in Helsinki, Spaces, Languages, Time, organized by the History of Political and Social Concepts Group and the Center for Nordic Studies of the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki (23-25 August

2012). Translated inEnglish by Gilles Plante.


David Stern

The Bergen Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein's Nachlass

Introduction

Wittgenstein's Nachlass consists of over 20,000 pages of manuscripts and typescripts. Because Wittgenstein published barely 25,000 words of philosophical writing during his lifetime-the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) and a very short conference paper-the papers that he left unpublished have played an unusually large role in the reception of his work. The posthumous publications, almost all of them based on materials in his Nachlass, contain well over a million words. As the Nachlass as a whole contains approximately three million words, one might estimate that roughly a third of Wittgenstein's writing is in print. However, as much of the material that was not edited for publication consists of early versions, rearrangements, and other source material for the previously published material, one could argue that considerably more than a third of his Nachlass has already seen the light of day in one form or another. On the other hand, because Wittgenstein never copyedited any of these papers for publication, each of the posthumous books and papers called for substantial editorial decisions about the content, and how to present it. Consequently, almost all of the twentieth-century publications from the Nachlass were extensively edited, often with little or no indication of the relationship between the source texts and the published material, and so one could argue that very little of the Nachlass has been available in print. 1 A number of more recent publications, such as the criticalgenetical German language edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2001) and the German-English scholars' edition of the Big Typescript (Wittgenstein 2005) are sophisticated critical editions. They make use of the information provided in the Bergen edition to present not only the final state of the text, but also such matters as undecided variant wording, marginal marks, and the different stages of revision, by means of footnotes and the use of an elaborate apparatus. The 'Vienna edition' of the manuscripts and typescripts from the 1929 to 1932 period (Wittgenstein 1993a, 1994-) however, is the product of a separate editing project.

The Bergen electronic edition, freed from the constraints of print publication, provides much more detailed information about each page of the manuscripts and typescripts that make up the Wittgenstein papers. The organizing principle is Georg Henrik von Wright's catalogue of the papers, which lists 83 manuscripts (101-183), 46 typescripts, (201-246), and 11 dictations (301-11). There are approximately 5000 pages of typescripts, a few manuscripts on loose sheets, with the remainder written in bound volumes and notebooks. All references to a specific place in the Nachlass are provided in terms of a manuscript number and page number, and search results are always displayed in that order. 2 In the early 1990s, the first director of the Bergen Wittgenstein Archive, Claus Huitfeldt, a Norwegian philosopher and computer specialist, led the development of the multielement coding system (MECS) used to produce the digital transcriptions of the source texts. This 'machine-readable version', a set of marked-up and encoded transcriptions that aims to record as much of the relevant information about the text as the editors consider appropriate, is the basis of the Bergen electronic edition, but is substantially different from it. 3 The machine-readable version can be thought of as a database that systematically encodes the results of the transcribers' work; the Bergen electronic edition was generated from that database. Transcription, coding, and editing these materials took over ten years, forty man-years of work, and a budget of 14 million Norwegian kroner, or approximately £1,000,000 at the 2001 rate of exchange. 4 The Bergen Edition comprises over 21,000 colour facsimiles of almost every page of Wittgenstein's papers, two different editions of the 3 million or so words on those pages, and a custom-built search engine.

The distinction between the database containing the machine-readable transcriptions, the edited versions of that material presented by the Bergen Electronic Edition, and other realizations of that database may seem to be an arcane point of electronic editorial philology to scholars who simply want to read the Nachlass. However, those machine-level transcriptions have already served as the basis for other presentations of those texts, both in the server-based Intelex edition of the Bergen Electronic Edition and the open-access webbased Discovery project currently under development. Furthermore, that distinction between the transcription, usually recorded in computer code, and the resultant editions, prepared for the ordinary reader, is essential for an appreciation of two crucial differences between digital and print publishing. Digital publishing not only opens up the possibility of new ways of working with texts, but the software that provides access to a digital text can also prevent one from doing things that we take for granted with books, such as making copies. 5 At first sight, it may look as if a scholarly digital edition of an author's writing is no more than an up-to-date repackaging of familiar components, each of which can be found in the world of scholarly print publishing, such as facsimiles, the concordance, and the critical edition. However, a published book is a physical object, a bound codex, a text that has taken on a definite form. A digital edition is a virtual object, presented in a software package, in which a text can take on multiple forms. Printing a scholarly edition of an author's writing requires that the editor settle on a specific way of presenting the text. A digital edition, on the other hand, permits multiple ways of presenting and manipulating the transcription of the text. While both print and digital editing involve transcription, digital editing requires additional decision-making: When one is transcribing for a traditional edition, the choices are bounded by the characters available in the printer's fount; furthermore, the end of the transcription is its printing, and not its distribution in electronic form. But one can expect a computer-readable transcription to be searched, analyzed, and edited in ways not possible with a printed transcription. (Robinson 1997: 150) It is also important to distinguish between limitations due to choices made in producing the encoding protocols, limitations that could only be overcome by first altering those protocols and then revising the transcriptions, and those due to Folio Views, the software package used in the Bergen Electronic Edition. The version of Folio Views in the Bergen Electronic Edition was developed in the early 1990s, when Windows 3.1 was the standard operating system and only computer experts knew how to use a web browser. Because Folio Views is employed in the Past Masters series of electronic editions of the works of many of the most important figures in the history of philosophy, it is a familiar environment for many philosophers. Because the customer base is so small, it is sold at a price that only well-endowed institutions can afford. As of spring 2007, approximately 150 copies of the complete edition (text and facsimiles), 40 copies of the text-only version, plus an additional 70 copies of the first volume (text and facsimiles) had been sold. In other words, the market for such technology has, so far, guaranteed it a 'niche' role where it is only accessible to relatively few researchers. However, as the results of the work of the first generation of users of this software reaches a broader audience, and as the transcription work of the WAB is more widely disseminated via initiatives such as the Discovery project, which will make some 5000 pages of the Nachlass freely available on the Web, we can expect that the digital turn in Wittgenstein studies, like the web browser, will eventually reach a wider audience. In order for the Bergen transcription of the Wittgenstein Nachlass to be made available in this way, the original MECS code must be translated into XML, the emerging standard for web-based encoding. While the editor's work is done when a traditional scholarly text is published, an electronic text, like any other software, must constantly keep up with emerging standards or rapidly become obsolete. Alois Pichler, who took over the leadership of the Bergen Wittgenstein Archive just as the Bergen Electronic Edition was published, has done precisely what was needed to ensure that the work of the Archive remains not only relevant but also innovative. 6 Another promising development is the publication of the Innsbruck electronic edition of Wittgenstein's correspondence (Wittgenstein 2004), which includes hyperlinks to a substantial and informative commentary, biographical information about people, places and literature mentioned in the letters, and a timeline of Wittgenstein's activities.

Using the Bergen Electronic Edition

On starting up the software, the reader arrives at a Contents page containing links to six options. Three of them are comparable to the 'front matter' of a printed book: an introduction to the Nachlass and the editorial decisions, a user guide explaining how to use Folio Views, and the usual 'Read Me' file about installation. 7 The other three provide three different ways of looking at the papers: colour photographs of each page of the source text, a detailed 'diplomatic' edition of that text that shows as much information as possible, and a 'normalized' edition that leaves out such matters as variant wording and information about deleted text. 8 Roughly speaking, the 'diplomatic' edition shows a letter-by-letter representation of every semantically significant mark on the page, while the 'normalized' edition shows each word at the end of the writing process. The diplomatic edition is a detailed representation of the state of the original manuscript; the normalized edition is an edited text that can be read more smoothly. Thus, the diplomatic edition shows misspelled words, and words written in Wittgenstein's letter-replacement code as they stand on the page; it includes words that are crossed out, deleted, inserted or subsequently revised. The normalized edition corrects spelling, shows words written in code in their decoded form, and includes only the last version of wording that has been revised. Links between each page of the normalized and diplomatic editions, and the facsimiles, make it Wittgenstein's Nachlass easy to move between the different representations of the text, and to check on the editorial work. Close readers interested in rejected alternatives, marginalia, and the intricacies of Wittgenstein's rewriting process will ordinarily turn to the diplomatic edition; readers who prefer a clean final text will usually prefer the normalized edition. In some cases, such as an unedited typescript, the differences between the three are negligible, and it is often easiest to bring up the facsimile of the typescript. In others, where the text has been repeatedly revised, a careful reader will need to move between all three representations.

The transcriptions include an elaborate system of 'tags' that track many semantically significant features. One can limit a search to a specified period, volume or group of volumes, to words written in German, in Wittgenstein's letter replacement code, English, French, or Latin; to symbols in logical, mathematical, set-theoretical notation, musical, or miscellaneous notations; to people, a category that covers not only historical figures, famous people, family and friends, but also fictional characters; or for one of the many diagrams and drawings. In each case, clicking on that search option opens a drop-down list of relevant choices; clicking on any of those choices lets one know how many hits there are for that search term. Results can be displayed in a variety of customized formats. It is easy to combine a number of different terms, for instance to collect results for a family of words. Because one searches a previously generated database, results are displayed immediately, even for complex searches with hundreds of hits. Both editions also include 2,500 images of Wittgenstein's drawings, diagrams, musical scores, and similar material that cannot be encoded using the specialized mark-up language. The careful handling of the extensive range of graphical symbols, which are often essential to the accompanying discussion, is particularly impressive. 9 When the Bergen Electronic Edition was produced, it was expected that users would insert one of five data CDs as needed in order to view the facsimiles. Fortunately, there is plenty of room on today's hard drive for 4GB of images, and it is relatively simple to redirect the software to the new location. Similarly, while the image display program provided is incompatible with Windows XP, one can easily replace it with the viewer of one's choice.

The version of the online (server based) edition available at the time of writing did not include any images at all, though there were plans to do so eventually. An even bigger limitation is that it only displays one very short passage at once. In the Windows package, the diplomatic or normalized edition provides a window that can show the complete set of texts, from the beginning of MS 101 to the end of TS 310. It is easy to customize the display to show selected texts, or to flip to a 'contents' display in order to find a given page more easily, but it is crucial that one can move to any part of the text without any delay. At first, it can seem overwhelming, but it is enormously helpful to be able to have as many windows open as one needs, each showing the relevant passages in full. With the online edition, one can only view a few paragraphs at once, even the simplest searches take a long time if one is accessing the server via a remote connection, and the ability to 'cut and paste' is disabled. In the Windows version of the Bergen Electronic Edition, with a little training in the appropriate techniques, one can cut whatever parts one needs to examine further and paste them into a word processing document. The cut and paste option is admittedly fairly crude, as there is no control over the format of the output, which shows only part of the detailed onscreen display, yet still leaves a host of data and formatting that one needs to remove manually before one has a clean text to work with. 'Export to MS Word' or 'ASCII text only' options would have been welcome.

Before the publication of the Bergen edition, the only public access to the Nachlass was by means of microfilm, or transcripts of unpublished sources of the Philosophical ; see also Stern 1996a, 1996b). Despite the difficulties involved in working with this material, the promise it held for a deeper understanding of Wittgenstein's work meant that a remarkably large number of books were written during the 1980 and 1990s that made extensive use of it. Garth Hallett's Companion to Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' (1977) was the first book to give multiple references to the sources of each remark in the Philosophical Investigations and to include frequent quotations from the Nachlass. Hallett also provided a reading of the text that turned on an account of the development of Wittgenstein's thought between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker's multi-volume commentary (Baker and Hacker 1980, 1984; Hacker 1990, 1996) provided a great deal of information about the multiple manuscript and typescript sources of remarks in the Philosophical Investigations. Much of this information was based on the painstaking and detailed research by von Wright and Maury on the manuscript and typescript sources of each remark in Part I of that book, now also available in Maury's list of the 'Sources of the Remarks in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations' (1994) and appendixes to the critical-genetical edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2001). The Bergen Electronic Edition does facilitate the exploration of these-and other-processes of rewriting connecting the various stages of revision, compilation, reorganization, selection, and rearrangement that are characteristic of his writing. However, there are no hyperlinks connecting earlier and later drafts, and there are no tags marking these connections that would enable one to search for them systematically. In practice, it is rarely difficult to find earlier or later drafts of a given passage, as one just has to use the main search window to look for a few of the less common phrases in the remark in question. Readers wishing to explore the systematic links between the Philosophical Investigations and its sources, or the complex process of revision that leads from the manuscript notebooks from 1929-1932 to the various typescripts based on them, will find a great deal of invaluable guidance in the previous literature on the topic. 10 However, it is unfortunate that none of this information was built into the Bergen Electronic Edition, and given the proprietary nature of the software, there is no facility for an individual researcher to add it in.

The basic unit in Wittgenstein's process of revision is the remark, a passage that may be as short as a single sentence, or as long as a sequence of paragraphs stretching over several pages. Typically, remarks are separate from one another by a blank line, and are usually numbered sequentially in the more polished typescripts-each numbered section in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations is a remark. Unfortunately, there is no systematic way of tracking or searching for remarks in the Bergen Electronic Edition, and line breaks are not shown in either of the editions. When I discussed the prospect of an electronic edition in 1996, I certainly imagined that it would be as easy to trace Wittgenstein's process of revision as his use of key terms, and it is disappointing that the Bergen Electronic Edition does not support searches for remarks or blank lines between paragraphs. Coding for blank lines was included in MECS, the Bergen transcription protocol, but due to problems with the automated conversion process used to move the MECS data into the Folio Views format, that information was not included. Line breaks and the beginning of remarks will be shown in the improved diplomatic and normalized editions of the Wittgenstein Q1

Q2

Wittgenstein's Nachlass Nachlass in the next-generation Discovery website. 11 The display has also been made more intuitive; for instance, insertions above or below a line show up as superscripts or subscripts.

Wittgenstein often put marginal marks, or sigla, in the margin at the beginning of a remark to indicate plans for revision or reorganization, but never provided a key. There is some consensus about the overall interpretation of a few of the most common signs. Examples include 'S' for 'Schlecht', (bad) a '/' for manuscript remarks to be transcribed in a typescript of selections from that manuscript, and wavy lines in the margin as a way of indicating his dissatisfaction with the wording (the latter is also used under particular words for the same reason). However, such construals are at best reasonably well established hypotheses. While the sigla are included in the diplomatic transcription (but not the normalized one), they do not show up in a search, and the transcription can be inconsistent. Tuomas Manninen pointed out that two capital 'L's, sometimes written somewhat sloppily, are used frequently in MS 137, but are transcribed as 'l.h.' on pages 86a-b, 'h.l.' on pages 88a-b, and 'l.l.' on page 91b, even though there is very little variation in the way they are written on those pages. According to Schulte (1993, 6) 'L.L.' indicated that the relevant remark was 'to be included in MS 144, a loose-leaf (5 L.L.) folder on whose contents Part II of the Philosophical Investigations is based'.

There has been very little explicit discussion of Wittgenstein's use of sigla and other related editorial techniques in his manuscripts. [START_REF] Stern | [END_REF] The only extended discussion of this issue in print is by Josef Rothhaupt (1996: 327-39; 2008.) Indeed, Rothhaupt observes that even in the cases that seem most straightforward, the evidence for the usual reading is not unequivocal. For instance, there is an 'S' in front of the first manuscript record of the Nestroy passage that became the motto to the Philosophical Investigations. Clearly, this shows that we cannot take an 'S' as a sign that Wittgenstein had given up on using a remark, or had decided that it was plain 'bad'. Perhaps it meant only that he wasn't entirely happy with it, or that he was planning to have some of the remarks typed up and didn't want to include the remarks marked 'S'. We cannot rule out the possibility that Wittgenstein used the same marks for different purposes in different manuscripts, or at different stages of revision. Indeed, in the case of some of the more elaborate sigla, it is far from clear whether the differences between certain inscriptions are merely orthographic, or should be taken as distinguishing different sigla, let alone how the various sigla interact when several are written on top of one another. Given that we lack a good grasp of the semantics of Wittgenstein's sigla, the question of how to reidentify a siglum-which marks count as the same siglum-becomes pressing. Recently, Rothhaupt (2008) has proposed that a 'Kringel'-a circular siglum, or round squiggle-indicates Wittgenstein's selection of remarks for a book, complete with motto and preface, drawing from manuscripts written between October 1929 and September 1931. Rothhaupt calls this the 'Kringel Buch' text corpus. This is an intriguing and extremely promising proposal that brings together many of Wittgenstein's most interesting writings from this period in an unexpected way, and I regret that space limitations prevent me from discussing it further here.

Results of a Close Study of the Transcription

Working with Tuomas Manninen, my graduate student research assistant at the time, we compared passages from the diplomatic edition of four manuscripts (105, 114, 142, and 183) and four typescripts (226, 227a, 233b, 235) against the facsimiles, and a published version, in those cases where one was available. 13 for review, from different periods of Wittgenstein's career, and of different levels of editorial complexity. We looked not only for errors in transcription, but also for places where the transcription methods were insufficient to capture details in the source text. Like Joachim Schulte, the only other reviewer who has reported on extensive checking of the quality of the editing, we found that the quality of the transcribers' work varied: 'mostly it was good, sometimes it was excellent, and occasionally it was disappointing'. 14 In the best cases, we found a mistake every few pages; at worst, an average of several mistakes per page. The vast majority were minor errors of transcription, punctuation, or spelling, and some were certainly debatable; the most serious involved the complete omission of phrases or sentences. Looking at a variety of materials not only allowed us to look at the work of different transcribers, but also to consider some of the strengths and weaknesses of the transcription system itself.

TS 226 is an unpublished translation into English, by Rush Rhees, of the beginning of the prewar version of the Philosophical Investigations. 15 We were impressed that there were only a few small mistakes in the 12 pages of the diplomatic edition of TS 226 that we reviewed, a typescript with dozens of handwritten changes on most pages, often on every single line. However, we found the handling of typewritten phrases that had been marked for relocation, using square brackets to show the whole passage affected, less than perspicuous. There is a striking example in Wittgenstein's discussion of the difficulty of conceiving of a game as always bounded by rules. In the sentence beginning 'I can well imagine that someone is always in doubt before he opens the door of his house whether a chasm may not have opened on the other side of it . . .' (TS 226, 59; cf. Philosophical Investigations §84), Wittgenstein had circled 'is always in doubt' and drawn an arrow showing that it should go after 'house,' with the words 'as to' immediately afterward. This is shown in the diplomatic edition with square brackets around the whole passage affected, rather than the words that are relocated, as follows: I can well imagine that someone [is always in doubt before he opens the door of his house] # as to whether a chasm may not have opened on the other side . . . We would have preferred a system that placed the brackets around the phrase to be moved, and then indicated the insertion point, along the following lines: I can well imagine that someone [is always in doubt( n )] before he opens the door of his house ( n ) # as to whether a chasm may not have opened on the other side . . . Like most such difficulties with the diplomatic edition, any confusion or unclarity can easily be dispelled by looking at the facsimiles. Indeed even though the diplomatic edition is extremely thorough, it is usually much easier to follow the handwritten corrections in the facsimile. As the normalized edition does not distinguish between Rhees's words and Wittgenstein's revisions, it is not of much interest.

TS 227a is one of the two surviving typescripts of the final version of the Philosophical Investigations. 16 We checked 11 pages from TS 227a, and found approximately one small transcription error per page. We also noted the mistaken addition of two extra words in the diplomatic edition ('in' on page 90a, line 1; 'leicht' on page 92, line 6). Cross-checking, we noted that both of these mistakes are repeated in the diplomatic edition of TS 227b, another copy of 227a. This suggested that the transcriptions of the two typescripts are based on one transcription of the shared text.

MS 142 is the earliest draft of the Philosophical Investigations, dating from the end of 1936. 17 In ten pages of MS 142, a heavily revised manuscript volume, we identified sixteen minor errors, and two changes of wordings: 'das uns' in the middle of page 106 is replaced by 'welches' in the transcription; 'Leser' on page 110 is replaced by 'Andre' in the transcription. Noticing that both these changes of wording correspond to the wording of the typescript of the next version of this text, TS 220, we formed the hypothesis that the transcription of MS 142 may have been produced by revising a transcription of TS 220, rather than producing it from scratch. In the best of all possible worlds, such expedients would never be adopted. However, the sheer scale of the project must have required some compromises if it was to be brought in on time. Editors who make use of it will be grateful to have so much of their work done for them. The editing of MS 142 and TS 227 in the critical-genetic edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2001) was exemplary; the intricacies of the source text were unraveled with care in unobtrusive footnotes. Scholars who make use of the Bergen Electronic Edition should always check the editing of any passage they study closely, or plan to quote. It should already be clear that it would be a false economy to buy an edition of the Bergen Electronic Edition without the facsimiles. The diplomatic edition is an invaluable guide to the intricacies of the source texts, but no replacement for them.

We also noticed a couple of more general transcription issues in TS 227a. The placement of insertions written above the main line of text appeared to be inconsistently handled in the diplomatic edition: sometimes the insertion is transcribed directly after the word it is written above, but at other times, the insertion is placed at the end of the phrase or sentence in question. It may be that the decision about where to place the insertion turned on which location seemed more plausible, but it was hard to discern a clear pattern, and the issue is not addressed in the front matter. Another transcription problem concerned passages that had a circle drawn around them, such as the top two-thirds of page 113. The diplomatic edition shows this as underlining. This is not only contrary to the explanation of the use of underlining in the key, but also makes it impossible to represent the underlined words within the circled passage appropriately.

The most problematic material we reviewed was TS 233, the source for Zettel. This is a difficult text to transcribe, as it is not, strictly speaking, a conventional typescript, but rather a collection of heavily revised slips of paper, cut from typescripts, that were glued in their current order by Peter Geach. There can be several layers of revision to transcribe, in different inks and often squeezed into the small space available on the slip. We identified approximately 120 mistakes in the 42 pages of the diplomatic edition of TS 233b that we reviewed, including no less than ten on page 38. While the vast majority were very small, we did find seven passages that had been left out of the diplomatic edition altogether. Also, a couple of substantial passages, each several sentences long, that are shown as insertions in the diplomatic edition (TS 233b, 4a-4b), are not included in the normalized edition. We also noted that the transcription protocol does not distinguish between typed corrections (usually a misspelled word that is crossed out and the correction typed in), and those that are written in later.

TS 235 is a somewhat mysterious document, described by von Wright in his catalogue as a 'Typescript of a Table of Contents to an unidentified work. Date Unknown. 9 pp.'. We were unable to review the editing of this typescript, as the facsimile provided shows a clean typescript, with only a few typed corrections, presumably a carbon copy of the typescript with manuscript corrections noted in the diplomatic edition. This lacuna is not noted in the front matter.

MS 105 is the first of a series of 18 numbered manuscript volumes that Wittgenstein began in February 1929 and continued for over 10 years. scholarly edition as part of the first volume of the Vienna edition, (Wittgenstein 1994). MS 114 is the tenth volume in that series, begun in 1932. We identified an average of only one minor mistake every two pages, and no missing passages, in the 36 pages we reviewed from MS 114, an extensively revised manuscript. However, the facsimile for page 43 is missing, replaced by a second copy of page 44, and this omission is not on the list of missing pages provided in the front matter. While reviewing this material, we did notice some limitations to the transcription system's ability to handle the crossing out of signs and passages. In the case of a deleted dash, or an arrow, the usual method of adding 'strike-through' does not work. In some instances, these problematic deletions are indicated in the diplomatic edition by a ' n ', but this convention is not used consistently, and not mentioned in the front matter. In the case of a crossed-out paragraph, the transcription conventions do not distinguish between a single line through a paragraph, and a paragraph that has been crossed out, or has many lines through it. It is unfortunate that all 'deleted' passages are treated the same way.

With one exception, we found the transcription of the first 20 pages of MS 105 was to a similarly high standard. One surprising small mistake was that an image of a computer cursor was somehow incorporated into the representation of a logical formula on page 21. 18 The only substantial omission we noted was the motto, 'Hier hilft dem Dummen die Dummheit allein'. (Here only stupidity helps the stupid), lightly written in pencil under the title of the volume. MS 105 is one of the few volumes for which only low quality black and white photos are provided, and the words are barely visible. However, this motto, taken from Nestroy's play 'Secret Love-Secret Money', and then placed at the very beginning of an eighteen volume series of manuscript notes, is a serious oversight, and means that anyone searching for references to Nestroy will only find a few other references to that author. 19 A search of the person index yields three hits. Two of these are to the motto of the Philosophical Investigations, on page 1 of TSS 227a and 227b, where it is written in, replacing a typed motto from Heinrich Hertz. The other is to a discussion of the connections between facial physiognomy and music (MS 154: 26v.) However, there is one more reference to Nestroy in the Bergen Electronic Edition, namely a manuscript note of the motto of the Philosophical Investigations, followed by his name in parentheses (MS 134: 152.) While this can be found using a regular search for the word 'Nestroy', it does not show up in a search of the person index, presumably because it was not tagged as a reference to the playwright.

MS 183 contains personal diary entries from the 1930s (published in Wittgenstein 1997, and translated in Wittgenstein 2003). There were about a dozen small mistakes in over forty pages of MS 183, and only one missing phrase; almost all of these errors were corrected in the two-volume Haymon edition of MS 183 (Wittgenstein 1997). The first is a 'normalized' edition, and the second a 'diplomatic' one. However, the 'diplomatic' edition is somewhat more detailed than the version in the Bergen Electronic Edition. It introduces new symbols for crossed out dashes, crossed out underlining, double underlining, single letters that are overwritten with another letter (such as replacing a small 'a' by a capital 'A'), and for letters that are written over other letters where the previous letter is no longer legible.

Conclusion

The Bergen Electronic Edition is an extraordinary editorial achievement. It provides researchers and editors with unprecedented access to Wittgenstein's unpublished writing use in revision,' (Wittgenstein 1993b: 100) but to the best of my knowledge does not provide further guidance in construing those remarks. 13 I would like to express my appreciation for his thorough and painstaking work on this project. I am responsible for any errors in the following discussion. Some of his corrections are noted in the WAB's online error list at http://wab.aksis.uib.no/beeerrors.htm That list is no longer being updated; future submissions will be used in the forthcoming Discovery edition. 14 Schulte 2002: 240. Other reviews of the Bergen Electronic Edition include [START_REF] Roser | Wittgensteins Nachlass auf CD-ROM[END_REF][START_REF] Binder | Wittgensteins Nachlass. The Bergen Electronic Edition[END_REF], McGuinness 2002b, Soulez 2003. 15 See Wittgenstein 2001: 205-446. 16 See Wittgenstein 2001: 739-989. 17 Wittgenstein 2001: 51-204. 18 Because Wittgenstein first wrote on the odd-numbered pages, only filling in the even pages afterwards, page 21 is part of the first 20 pages of this volume. Wisely, the diplomatic transcription follows this order, rather than showing the pages in their physical sequence. 19 The Nestroy passage is included in the Vienna edition (Wittgenstein 1994: volume 1, vii and 1), but is overlooked in Biesenbach's (2008) collection of references and citations in Wittgenstein's work. 20 Mauro Engelmann, Jim Klagge, Alois Pichler, Brian Rogers, Joachim Schulte and George Wrisley provided extremely helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper.

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Investigations

  produced and circulated by G. H. von Wright, assisted by Heikki Nyman and Andre ´Maury. Indeed, it was not until the end of the 1960s, with the production of the 'Cornell' microfilm of the Nachlass, and the publication of von Wright's catalogue and guide to 'The Wittgenstein Papers' (1969), that research on the Wittgenstein papers became possible. Anyone interested in working on the Nachlass should start by reading the most recent version of von Wright's catalogue, and his pioneering studies of the composition of the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations (von Wright 1982

  I chose a variety of different materials 6 David Stern r 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Wittgenstein's Nachlass 9 r

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Wittgenstein's Nachlass

as a whole. It is a landmark contribution to editing in the humanities, both as a state of the art scholarly edition of the papers of a major figure in the history of philosophy, and as one of the first generation of digital editions of the collected work of a canonical author. It will also be of considerable interest to anyone attending to the problems involved in producing a digital edition of a large and complex Nachlass. The Bergen edition is not a replacement for the published texts; its principal use will be as a resource enabling editors and researchers to work on the sources of those texts. However, by facilitating new editions and new interpretations of Wittgenstein's work, its impact on our understanding of his philosophy will extend beyond the narrow circle of experts who currently make use of it. 20

David Stern Department of Philosophy

The University of Iowa USA david-stern@uiowa.edu NOTES 1 For previous discussion, see Hintikka 1991; Kenny 1976, 2005; Stern 1996a, 1996b. The Bergen edition can also be used to review the editing of the published works. While this information is not provided within the digital edition, Biggs and Pichler 1993 provide detailed charts of the Nachlass sources of the published works.

2 See von Wright 1969. Revised and updated in Wittgenstein 1993a: 480-510 and in Wittgenstein 2003, with an addendum. 3 The terminology is due to Claus Huitfeldt. See [START_REF] Huitfeldt | MECS -A Multi-Element Code System[END_REF]Huitfeldt , 1994aHuitfeldt and 1994b. 4 . 4 These figures are taken from Huitfeldt 2001. 5 For further discussion, see Pichler 2002, II;Hrachovec 2000. 6 For further information, see http:/ /wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_discovery.page and http:// www.discovery-project.eu/. For examples of the various display formats, including interactive editions of Wittgenstein manuscripts see http:/ /www.wittgensteinsource.org/. See also the brief HyperWittgenstein project description at http://wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_hw.page/. For further discussion, see [START_REF] Hrachovec | Wittgenstein On Line/On the Line[END_REF]Hrachovec , 2005;;[START_REF] Mcewen | Wittgenstein in Digital Form: Perspectives for the Future[END_REF]Pichler 2002Pichler , 2006. 7 . 7 Hrachovec 2000 reviews some of the difficulties and limitations of using the software on a campus network.

8 A few pages could not be photographed; these exceptions are listed in the introduction. A few manuscripts could only be reproduced in black and white photographs, with a quality comparable to a microfilm; the color photographs are of considerably better quality, although they do not show some fine details, such as very light pencil marks. For more detailed discussion, see Schulte 2002: 241. 9 For further information, see [START_REF] Biggs | Wittgenstein: Two Source Catalogues and a Bibliography[END_REF][START_REF] Biggs | Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Visual Concordance to the Published Works[END_REF], 2001. 10 For lists of references connecting different stages of revision, see: [START_REF] Maury | Sources of the Remarks in Wittgenstein's Zettel[END_REF]Maury , 1994;;Nedo 1994-, index volumes;Wittgenstein 2001, appendix. 11 For further information, see above, n6.

12 Some rare exceptions to this rule are the brief but helpful remarks in Schulte 1993: 6-7, Pichler 1994: 2.2, and the preface to The Big Typescript (Wittgenstein 2005: x). See also Paul 2007. Nedo observes that 'Wittgenstein's marginal marks, which