Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, (born Jan. 18, 1689, Château La Brède, near Bordeaux, France—died Feb. 10, 1755, Paris), French philosophe and satirist. Born into a noble family, he held public office in Bordeaux from 1714. His satirical Persian Letters (1721) was hugely successful. From 1726 he traveled widely to study social and political institutions. His magnum opus, the enormous The Spirit of the Laws (1750), contained an original classification of governments by their manner of conducting policy, an argument for the separation of the legislative, judicial, and executive powers, and a celebrated but less influential theory of the political influence of climate. The work profoundly influenced European and American political thought and was relied on by the framers of the U.S. Constitution. His other works include Causes of the Greatness and Decadence of the Romans (1734).
Montesquieu Article
Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu summary
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baron Summary
Baron, baron equivalentstitle of nobility, ranking below a viscount (or below a count in countries without viscounts). It is one of the five ranks of British nobility and peerage, which, in descending order, are duke, marquess, earl, viscount, and baron. In the feudal system of Europe, a baron was
political philosophy Summary
Political philosophy, branch of philosophy that is concerned, at the most abstract level, with the concepts and arguments involved in political opinion. The meaning of the term political is itself one of the major problems of political philosophy. Broadly, however, one may characterize as political