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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.
Other publications of the Enlightenment included Berkeley's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Voltaire's Letters on the English (1733) and Philosophical Dictionary (1764); Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature (1740); Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws (1748); Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1754) and The Social ...
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.
French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu has been credited as one of the chief proponents of the doux commerce theory.. Doux commerce (lit.sweet commerce) is a concept originating from the Age of Enlightenment stating that commerce tends to civilize people, making them less likely to resort to violent or irrational behaviors.
The philosophes considered themselves part of a grand "republic of letters" that transcended national political boundaries. In 1784, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant summed up the program of the Enlightenment in two Latin words: sapere aude, "dare to know", meaning, have the courage to think for yourself. The philosophes used reason to ...
Liberalism, the belief in freedom, equality, democracy and human rights, is historically associated with thinkers such as John Locke and Montesquieu, and with constitutionally limiting the power of the monarch, affirming parliamentary supremacy, passing the Bill of Rights and establishing the principle of "consent of the governed".
Montesquieu already wrote in 1721 about religious tolerance and a degree of separation between religion and government. [27] Voltaire defended some level of separation but ultimately subordinated the Church to the needs of the State [ 28 ] while Denis Diderot , for instance, was a partisan of a strict separation of Church and State, saying ...
Particularly important were the extensively annotated edition by Paul Vernière for Classiques Garnier, long the standard edition, and the findings of Robert Shackleton regarding its use of Muslim chronology; also new perspectives by Roger Mercier, Roger Laufer, and Pauline Kra, which put new focus on the work's unity and integrated the ...