Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu
Montesquieu spent twenty years writing a book about why laws are what they are, and the Americans built a constitution out of one chapter of it. Born Charles-Louis de Secondat in 1689 near Bordeaux to a family of the robe nobility, he inherited a barony, a vineyard and a hereditary office in the parlement of Bordeaux, which he sold in 1726 having found the judicial work tedious. His first success was the Persian Letters of 1721, published anonymously in Amsterdam: two Persian travellers writing home about France, which allowed him to describe European religion, politics and manners as a visiting anthropologist would and to be extremely rude about all of them. He then travelled for four years — Austria, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and eighteen months in England, which he studied closely and admired. The Spirit of the Laws appeared in 1748. Its method is the innovation: it treats laws as products of climate, terrain, religion, commerce, population and custom, and asks what kind of law suits what kind of society, rather than deriving the right law from first principles. Its most quoted section describes the English constitution as separating legislative, executive and judicial power so that each checks the others — a description that was already inaccurate about England and became a blueprint elsewhere. Madison and the framers cite him more than anyone else. He also argued against slavery by satire, and the church put the book on the Index in 1751. He died in 1755 nearly blind. His comparative method is the part that has worn best. The claim that climate shapes national character has not survived, and the idea that a constitution must be judged against the society it governs rather than against an ideal has become the ordinary way of thinking about institutions.
- Lived: 1689 CE – 1755 CE
- Nationality: French
- Roles: philosopher, jurist, political_theorist, writer
