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Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" [17] 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 was troubled by a cataract and feared going blind.
Separation of powers requires a different source of legitimization, or a different act of legitimization from the same source, for each of the separate powers. If the legislative branch appoints the executive and judicial powers, as Montesquieu indicated, there will be no separation or division of its powers, since the power to appoint carries ...
Separation of powers was the equivalent of prosperity to him. Madison states Montesquieu used the British government as an example of separation of powers to analyze connections between the two. Madison quotes Montesquieu in The Spirit of Law as saying the British are the "mirror of political liberty." Thus, Montesquieu believed that the ...
Separation of powers is a political doctrine originating in the writings of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, in which he argued for a constitutional government with three separate branches, each of which would have defined authority to check the powers of the others.
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 ...
Montesquieu's treatise, already widely disseminated, had an enormous influence on the work of many others, most notably: Catherine the Great, who produced Nakaz (Instruction); the Founding Fathers of the United States Constitution; and Alexis de Tocqueville, who applied Montesquieu's methods to a study of American society, in Democracy in America.
The Madisonian model is a structure of government in which the powers of the government are separated into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. This came about because the delegates saw the need to structure the government in such a way to prevent the imposition of tyranny by either majority or minority.
The model can be contrasted with the fusion of powers in a parliamentary system where the executive and legislature (and sometimes parts of the judiciary) are unified. Those in favor of divided government believe that such separations encourage more policing of those in power by the opposition, as well as limiting spending and the expansion of ...