Montesquieu

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

The French nobleman Charles-Louis de Secondat Montesquieu (1689–1755) is often seen, along with Machiavelli, as one of the founding fathers of modern political science. His major work, The Spirit of the Laws (1748), is an attempt to provide what would now be seen as a cultural and environmental explanation for the legitimacy of different forms of government in different contexts. He held, for example, that climate, geographical location and history had great influence over the nature of social relations, and therefore of political bonds.

He tried to identify, at the same time, a particular ideological prop to different forms of government, such as a high value attached to the idea of ‘honour’ in a monarchial society.

Although his work was influential in helping to develop a more empirical aspect to political studies, influencing future writers as diverse as Burke and Engels, it is his constitutional theory that has been most important in retrospect. Montesquieu, along with Locke, developed the concept of the separation of powers, whereby the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government are independent of each other, and have the power to act as checks and balances over each other’s actions. This, which he held to be a basic constitutional need if liberty was to be preserved from tyrannical governments, has its most famous expression in the US Constitution, the writers of which were acutely conscious of Montesquieu’s ideas on the subject.