Montesquieu belonged to the noblesse de robe. Part of his design in recommending the separation of powers in France was to elevate the French aristocracy to a position comparable to that of the English, for whereas Rousseau believed that political liberty could be achieved only in a democracy and Voltaire believed it could best be achieved by a philosopher-king, Montesquieu held that liberty was most secure where there was a potent aristocracy to limit the despotic tendency of both the monarch and the common people. He believed that the way to preserve freedom was to set "power against power."
No one wrote with greater eloquence against despotism than did Montesquieu, yet he was far from sharing the conventional liberal outlook of the eighteenth-century philosophes. He had all the conservatism characteristic of the landowner and the lawyer. In many respects he was positively reactionary; for instance, he wished to strengthen rather than diminish hereditary privileges. But like Edmund Burke, whom he influenced considerably, Montesquieu was able to reconcile his reforming and reactionary sentiments by insisting that he sought to restore old freedoms, not promote new ones.
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