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Updated: June 20, 2025
Fourteen years had passed from the time of the publication of the "Greatness and Decadence of the Romans," when in 1748 appeared the great work of Montesquieu, the "Spirit of the Laws." Nor is it a detraction from the genius of Montesquieu to say that the comparison will not be altogether in his favor. Montesquieu's scheme is announced in the title originally given to his book.
There is no need here to enter into any criticism of Montesquieu's great work, how far the merits of its execution equalled the merit of its design, how far his vicious confusion of the senses of the word 'law' impaired the worth of his book, as a contribution to inductive or comparative history.
They will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu's opinion that religion is a column necessary to sustain the social edifice; they will quote, too, that sound and true saying of De Tocqueville's: "If the first American who might be met, either in his own country, or abroad, were to be stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the stability of the laws and the good order of society, he would answer, without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none in a state of freedom, can exist without religion.
There were Plutarch's Lives in the old French of Amyot, over which I labored; a French translation of Homer; Corneille's tragedies; Rochefoucauld; Montaigne's essays, in ten volumes; Thomson's poems, and Chesterfield's letters, in English; the life of Petrarch; three volumes of Montesquieu's works; and a Bible; which I found greatly to my taste. It was a wide and catholic taste.
We have no space here to work out the relations between Montesquieu's principles and Burke's, but the student of the Esprit des Lois will recognise its influence in every one of Burke's masterpieces. So far as immediate events were concerned, Burke was quick to discern their true interpretation.
D'Alembert, vi. 252. The date of Montesquieu's election was Jan. 24, 1728. See a discussion of the whole story in Vian, 100. Montesquieu is there said to have threatened to leave France, and to have declined a pension at this time.
The question was brought up by Montesquieu's report on the 27th of August, 1790. This report favored, with evident reluctance, an additional issue of paper.
Montesquieu's well-known division, though logically faulty, still has the merit of pointing to conditions of difference among forms of government, outside of and apart from the one fact of the number of the sovereign.
Read Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV., Montesquieu's Greatness and Fall of the Romans, Buffon's Epochs of Nature, the beautiful pages of reverie and natural description of Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar, and say if the eighteenth century, in these memorable works, did not understand how to reconcile tradition with freedom of development and independence.
The correspondence of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, D'Alembert, is sufficient to show how immediately, as well as how powerfully, they were influenced by Montesquieu's memorable book. Again, it is surely going too far to say that Montesquieu's Persian Letters contained every important idea of the century.
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