Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Building on and revising a discussion in John Locke's Second Treatise of Government, Montesquieu argues that the executive, legislative, and judicial functions of government should be assigned to different bodies, so that attempts by one branch of government to infringe on political liberty might be restrained by the other branches.
John Locke. An earlier forerunner to Montesquieu's tripartite system was articulated by John Locke in his work Two Treatises of Government (1690). [13] In the Two Treatises, Locke distinguished between legislative, executive, and federative power. Locke defined legislative power as having "... the right to direct how the force of the ...
Mixed government theories became extremely popular in the Enlightenment and were discussed in detail by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Apart from his contemporaries, only Montesquieu became widely acknowledged as the author of a concept of separation of powers (although he ...
Congress is one of the branches of government so it has a lot of powers of its own that it uses to pass laws and establish regulations. These include express, implied, and concurrent powers. It uses its express powers to regulate bankruptcies, business between states and other nations, the armed forces, and the National Guard or militia.
One variant of classical republicanism is known as "civic humanism", a term first employed by the German scholar of late medieval and early modern Italian history, Hans Baron. [12] Although in certain cases and with certain scholars there is a subtle distinction between the two, they are for all intents and purposes interchangeable.
Montesquieu identifies three main forms of government, each supported by a social "principle": monarchies (free governments headed by a hereditary figure, e.g. king, queen, emperor), which rely on the principle of honor; republics (free governments headed by popularly elected leaders), which rely on the principle of virtue; and despotisms ...
[12] [13] Locke also defined the concept of the separation of church and state. [14] Based on the social contract principle, Locke argued that there was a natural right to the liberty of conscience, which he argued must therefore remain protected from any government authority. [15]
The concept of despotism, and especially oriental despotism, entered European political thought with Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws in the 18th century. The idea was not new or unique to Montesquieu's work, but Montesquieu's work is widely regarded as having been the most influential on modern political thought. [4]