Charles-Louis de Secondat (pronounce), Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu (pronounce)
in Wikipedia, Sanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Montesquieu on Natural Law and Natural Rights, Separation of Powers
Montesquieu's importance
Baron de Montesquieu's 1748 book De l’Esprit des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws) is one of the two most important works on political philosophy of the 18th century (the other being Jean-Jacques Rousseau's 1762 book The Social Contract). The book quickly rose to profoundly influence political thought in Europe and America. In France, the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. The Catholic Church banned The Spirit – along with many of Montesquieu's other works – in 1751 and included it on the Index of Prohibited Books. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe, especially Britain.
Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty (though not of American independence). According to one political scientist, he was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible.
Following the American Revolution, Montesquieu's work remained a powerful influence on many of the American founders, most notably James Madison of Virginia, the "Father of the Constitution." Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers.
Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors of anthropology, being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies. According to social anthropologist D. F. Pocock, Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions." This would also make him an early political scientist.
Montesquieu's political anthropology gave rise to his theories on government. When Catherine the Great wrote her Nakaz (Instruction) for the Legislative Assembly she had created to clarify the existing Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, although she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.
Montesquieu's Biography
Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 16 miles south of Bordeaux. His father, Jacques de Secondat, was a soldier with a long noble ancestry. His mother, Marie Françoise de Pesnel, who died when Charles was seven, was an heiress who brought the title of Barony of La Brède to the Secondat family. After the death of his mother he was sent to the Catholic College of Juilly, a prominent school for the children of French nobility, where he remained from 1700 to 1711. His father died in 1713 and he became a ward of his uncle, the Baron de Montesquieu. He became a counselor of the Bordeaux Parliament in 1714. The next year, he married the Protestant Jeanne de Lartigue, who eventually bore him three children. The Baron died in 1716, leaving him his fortune as well as his title, and the office of président à mortier in the Bordeaux Parliament.
Montesquieu's early life occurred at a time of significant governmental change. England had declared itself a constitutional monarchy in the wake of its Glorious Revolution (1688–89), and had joined with Scotland in the Union of 1707 to form the Kingdom of Great Britain. In France, the long-reigning Louis XIV died in 1715 and was succeeded by the five-year-old Louis XV. These national transformations had a great impact on Montesquieu; he would refer to them repeatedly in his work.
Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing. He achieved literary success with the publication of his 1721 Persian Letters, a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society.
He next published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline (1734), considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. The Spirit of the Laws was originally published anonymously in 1748.
Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary, spending a year in Italy and 18 months in England, where he became a Freemason. He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in 1755. He was buried in the Église Saint-Sulpice, Paris.
Major Works:
Lettres persanes (Persian Letters) (1721)
Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence
(Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline) (1734)
Considerations on the Causes... details the decline in the Roman empire which Montesquieu
attributes to falling morals.
Like the histories of Voltaire, Considerations is considered important to the development of
modern history writing. It was a significant influence for Edward Gibbon's more extensive and
more famous history The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776 - 1789).
De l’Esprit des Loix (The Spirit of the Laws) (1754)
Montesquieu and the American Founders
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