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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.
Montesquieu makes use of the concept of the state of nature in his The Spirit of the Laws, first printed in 1748. Montesquieu states the thought process behind early human beings before the formation of society. He says that human beings would have the faculty of knowing and would first think to preserve their life in the state.
Château de la Brède, Montesquieu's birthplace. Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south of Bordeaux. [4] His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654–1713), was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, including descent from Richard de la Pole, Yorkist claimant to the English crown.
Montesquieu. Charles de Montesquieu (France, 1689–1755) In The Spirit of Law, Montesquieu expounded the separation of powers in government and society. In government, Montesquieu encouraged division into the now standard legislative, judicial and executive branches; in society, he perceived a natural organization into king, the people and the ...
Proponents of the doux commerce theory argued that the spread of trade and commerce will decrease violence, including open warfare. [6] [7] Montesquieu wrote, for example, that "wherever the ways of man are gentle, there is commerce; and wherever there is commerce, there the ways of men are gentle" [8] and "The natural effect of commerce is to lead to peace". [1]
Most of the philosophers of the French Enlightenment were progressive in the liberal sense and advocated the reform of the French system of government along more constitutional and liberal lines. Montesquieu wrote a series of highly influential works in the early 18th century, including Persian letters (1717) and The Spirit of the Laws (1748 ...
Others cite the publication of Isaac Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687) as the culmination of the Scientific Revolution and the beginning of the Enlightenment. [6] [7] [8] European historians traditionally dated its beginning with the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715 and its end with the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the emphasis shifted to Enlightenment philosophy and the adoption of a scientific outlook, particularly through positivism. An influential current in the later part of the 20th century was the philosophy of liberation , which was inspired by Marxism and focused on themes such as political liberation, intellectual ...