Patrick baseden montesquieu biography

Original Works. Paris, — Brethe de la Gressaye, ed. Secondary Literature. See L. Paris,II, —, —, and passim ; and R. Shackleton, Montesquieu. A Critical Biography Oxford, Learn more about citation styles Citation styles Encyclopedia. Paris, France, 10 February philosophy, political theory. Jacques Roger.

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Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography. More From encyclopedia. Updated Aug 24 About encyclopedia. Related Topics Enlightenment. Constitution of the United States. Charles Leonard Woolley. Charles Lee Court-Martial: Charles law. Charles L'Ecluse.

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Newer Post Older Post Home. Subscribe to: Post Comments Atom. About Me Denise Wong I am a wine enthusiast from way back. Lettres persanes. Julia V. Douthwaite, Exotic women; literary heroines and cultural strategies in ancient regime France, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia While he by no means discarded the natural law perspective, which stressed an ordered universe, subject to laws embodying transcendent standards of justice, Montesquieu nonetheless introduced sociological perspectives into the study of positive laws.

His stress on the influence on human development of laws, customs, religion, education, maxims of government, and modes of subsistence, combined with his interest in such physical influences as climate and topography, inaugurated a new epoch in the study of society from anthropological and climatological perspectives and influenced numerous later theorists.

The Spirit of the Laws also contributed to recurring disputes regarding France's ancient constitution. For centuries theorists had debated the historical lineage of the respective components of the French constitution, with the legitimacy of absolutism hanging in the balance. The key question was whether the early Frankish monarchy had been absolute — having peacefully inherited the Roman Empire — or whether, following an early Frankish conquest of Gaulthe Frankish kings beginning with Clovis had been elected by noblemen, who kept a close watch on the exercise of monarchical powers.

Numerous absolutist theorists of the same century, however, including Jean Ferrault, Charles Du Moulin, and Charles de Grassaille, contended that both the parlements and the Estates-General of France represented illegitimate constraints on an originally absolutist monarchy. Montesquieu supported the Germanic nobiliary thesis rather than the Roman royalist thesis concerning the origins of the French monarchy.

Unlike Hotman and other proponents of a revived Estates-General, however, he believed that the Parlement of Paris functioned as the key bridle on absolutism through its right to register the king's edicts before they became law.

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His arguments in The Spirit of the Laws provided support for the parlementaires during their numerous clashes with Louis XV ruled — and Louis XVI ruled — in the decades leading up to the French Revolution — until both the parlements and the crown were extinguished during a period of intense republican fervor. The Spirit of the Laws was the most authoritative political treatise of its day.

Montesquieu altered the language of politics by replacing the ancient political classification distinguishing between governments of the one, the few, and the many with a new typology contrasting moderate and despotic forms of government and identifying republics, monarchies, and despotisms as the main types. Moreover, his selection of political virtue defined as self-sacrificing, patriotic attachment to the needs of one's country as the principle of republican government reverberated through both American and French political developments of the late eighteenth century.

In America "virtue" was extolled by nearly all the patriots opposing a monarchy they considered corrupt, whereas in France Maximilien Robespierre adopted Montesquieu's language of virtue only to debase it by linking patriotic self-sacrifice with terror, claiming that both are necessary when forging a republic during revolutionary times. Montesquieu bestowed lavish attention on republics within his governmental typology, but he was no republican by conviction — and certainly no democrat.

He had a low opinion of the political abilities of the masses. Moreover, he considered democracy suited only to the extremely small city-states of classical antiquity.

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Like James Madison in America, he formed a negative opinion of the unstable democratic states of Greek antiquity, whose tendency to produce unmanageable factional strife had often led to the rise of dictators who could quell disturbances. Only monarchical constitutions, Montesquieu concluded, were well suited for governance of the large states of the modern world.

The Spirit of the Laws contributed significantly to the humanitarian legacy of the Enlightenment since Montesquieu employed devastating satire to ridicule such evils as slavery, disproportionate punishments, religious intolerance, and despotism. Above all, Montesquieu is remembered as a defender of political and civil liberty. Central to that goal, he concluded, is the division of governmental powers between executive, legislative, and judicial authorities to ensure that no one individual or group monopolizes power.

Also central to the achievement of liberty is the presence of an independent judiciary enforcing a criminal code that punishes only offenses that threaten actual harm to others. Montesquieu remained a hero to advocates of constitutional monarchy during the early phases of the French Revolutionbut he lost favor as radical elements turned to Jean-Jacques Rousseau for inspiration.

The depiction of the English government in Book XI, chapter 6 of The Spirit of the Laws as a mixed constitution combining monarchical, aristocratic, and democratic elements became the classic view taken over by William Blackstone in his influential Commentaries on the Laws of England — In America the framers of the constitution were so enamored of Montesquieu's depiction of the need to separate executive, legislative, and judicial powers that they made him the most quoted author during the Constitutional Convention of and divided the American government into three separate branches, each one empowered to check the others.

Following the collapse of Communism in the late twentieth century and the French reassessment of the terror phase of their Revolution during the bicentennial ofEuropeans have shown a renewed interest in the liberal constitutionalism of Montesquieu, whose work stands as a timeless contribution to our understanding of political and civil liberty.

Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de.