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It is all as if Montesquieu had been able to envisage its almost infinite extension from a historical and speculative point of view, and had stopped only out of strength: In the imposing form of the traditional cultural objects, they radically change the space of the known and the style of philosophy: In this case we can attest the author: Before the travels, on the level of political and historical analysis, the Considerations on Spanish wealth represented an early deepened reflection on the wealth and power of a nation, and its ruin.

The Essay on the causes , and this is an essential point, is an attempt at focusing rigorously the relation between physical and moral causes, far beyond a reworking, with respect to the influence of the climate, of Aristotle and Bodin. By testifying to the complex design of the work between and the post mortem edition, and all the passages rejected or removed from the work, revealed and studied from Henri Barckhausen to Catherine Volpilhac-Auger.

De l'esprit des lois, livres 1 au 10 audio et texte français Montesquieu livre 1 au

It is indeed thus that we can, beginning with the reflections imposed by these materials, documents and texts, circumscribe even better what we should understand by principles , and what the spirit of law is. But that is to restrain or even shrink its general inspiration, which must always be related to the starting points which we have recalled, but is in addition rigorously defined, in the long run, by the preface, the balance sheet and true methodological conclusion of long labors.


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The principles are located above all these particular cases: Lefort , in other words still exposed to partisan interpretations — or to more or less bad-faith misrecognition. And the spirit of law is defined by Montesquieu as what subsumes a series of relations first enumerated in function of the different domains in which laws can and must manifest and justify themselves: We must see that the object is to give the grand axes of an heuristic device, but that it cannot be a matter of a closed series: Montesquieu himself also gives at first a typology of the governments, the specific analysis of which dominates the first books, but their role remains fundamental, at least up to the books he elaborated XXVIII, XXX and XXXI last of all.

De l’esprit des lois – XXX (French Edition) eBook: Montesquieu: theranchhands.com: Kindle Store

We need to underscore their decisive originality and just as well the paradox at which they arrive. Montesquieu withdrew from the practice of law to devote himself to study and writing.

Catherine Volpilhac-Auger

He achieved literary success with the publication of his Persian Letters , a satire representing society as seen through the eyes of two imaginary Persian visitors to Paris and Europe, cleverly criticizing the absurdities of contemporary French society. He next published Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline , considered by some scholars, among his three best known books, as a transition from The Persian Letters to his master work. The Spirit of the Laws was originally published anonymously in The book quickly rose to influence political thought profoundly in Europe and America.


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  6. In France, the book met with an unfriendly reception from both supporters and opponents of the regime. It received the highest praise from the rest of Europe, especially Britain. Montesquieu was also highly regarded in the British colonies in North America as a champion of liberty though not of American independence. According to one political scientist , he was the most frequently quoted authority on government and politics in colonial pre-revolutionary British America, cited more by the American founders than any source except for the Bible.


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    Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" [11] reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers. Besides composing additional works on society and politics, Montesquieu traveled for a number of years through Europe including Austria and Hungary , spending a year in Italy and 18 months in England, where he became a freemason, admitted to the Horn Tavern Lodge in Westminster, [12] before resettling in France.

    He was troubled by poor eyesight, and was completely blind by the time he died from a high fever in Montesquieu's philosophy of history minimized the role of individual persons and events. It is not chance that rules the world. Ask the Romans, who had a continuous sequence of successes when they were guided by a certain plan, and an uninterrupted sequence of reverses when they followed another.

    There are general causes, moral and physical, which act in every monarchy, elevating it, maintaining it, or hurling it to the ground. All accidents are controlled by these causes. And if the chance of one battle—that is, a particular cause—has brought a state to ruin, some general cause made it necessary for that state to perish from a single battle.

    In a word, the main trend draws with it all particular accidents. In discussing the transition from the Republic to the Empire, he suggested that if Caesar and Pompey had not worked to usurp the government of the Republic, other men would have risen in their place.

    The cause was not the ambition of Caesar or Pompey, but the ambition of man. Montesquieu is credited as being among the progenitors, which include Herodotus and Tacitus , of anthropology , as being among the first to extend comparative methods of classification to the political forms in human societies.

    Montesquieu

    Indeed, the French political anthropologist Georges Balandier considered Montesquieu to be "the initiator of a scientific enterprise that for a time performed the role of cultural and social anthropology". Pocock , Montesquieu's The Spirit of the Laws was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within society, to study the inter-functioning of institutions. When Catherine the Great wrote her Nakaz Instruction for the Legislative Assembly she had created to clarify the existing Russian law code, she avowed borrowing heavily from Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws , although she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.

    Montesquieu's most influential work divided French society into three classes or trias politica , a term he coined: Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: The administrative powers were the executive , the legislative , and the judicial. These should be separate from and dependent upon each other so that the influence of any one power would not be able to exceed that of the other two, either singly or in combination.

    This was a radical idea because it completely eliminated the three Estates structure of the French Monarchy: His famous articulation of the theory of the separation of powers is found in The Spirit of the Laws:. By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions.

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    By the third, he punishes criminals, or determines the disputes that arise between individuals. The latter we shall call the judiciary power, and the other, simply, the executive power of the state. Montesquieu argues that each Power should only exercise its own functions, it was quite explicit here:. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary controul; for the judge would be then the legislator.

    Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression. 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 with it the power to revoke. The dating of watermarks is disappointing and never tells us anything we did not already know.

    The origin of paper, on the other hand, is telling: Thus we discover that Montesquieu, who in the summer of proceeded to a general revision of The Spirit of Law , has the additions to books XI-XXVII transcribed on paper that attests his presence in the Bordelais; since he left Paris at the end of August, we can thus follow precisely the progress of this revision. While chapter 6 of book XI, already quoted, appears from the start as it was to be in print, which authorizes us to see in it work done after his return from England it was copied between and , which confirms what had long been thought , it is more interesting to look closely at book XV, devoted to slavery.

    We discover that, contrary to all the affirmations by the most qualified commentators, the final chapters 10 to 19 , which present the modalities by which slavery was practiced in Antiquity, are not the earliest — it is even the contrary that is true, since they date almost entirely from the period , whereas the first chapters were conceived in at the latest, and the central part was copied before But these chapters which, while examining slavery as it existed, ran the risk of justifying it, in the eyes of these commentators could only constitute a retreat from the more vigorous positions of the first chapters; they had to be the oldest in order to cleanse Montesquieu of any suspicion: This pseudo-genetic reading was founded in nothing more than the eminently laudable but essentially unscientific intention of differentiating a stage when he might have been more favorable to slavery from the supposedly final stage of his thought, necessarily anti-slavery.

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    Such is the sense of these chapters, literally obscured so long as we did not have at our disposal a serious analysis of their genesis. The most famous chapter of The Spirit of Law did not sprout in full bloom from his brain…. Though not a faultless witness for Montesquieu modified his text between January and June , the manuscript contributes elements of an answer to certain questions raised by so tormented an edition; agreement between the manuscript and a printed edition is thus particularly worthy of interest.