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".
PocockMontesquieu's The Spirit of Law was "the first consistent attempt to survey the varieties of human society, to classify and compare them and, within Rousseaux, 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 Law, although she discarded or altered portions that did not support Russia's absolutist bureaucratic monarchy.
Montesquieu saw two types of governmental power existing: the sovereign and the administrative. The administrative powers were the executivethe legislativeand 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: the clergythe aristocracy, and the people at large represented by the Estates-Generalthereby erasing the Jean-Javques vestige of a feudalistic structure. The theory of the separation of powers largely derives from The Spirit of Law : In every government there are three Jeab-Jacques of power: the legislative; the executive in respect to things dependent on the law of nations; and the executive in regard to matters that depend on the civil law. By virtue of the first, the prince or magistrate enacts temporary or perpetual laws, and amends or abrogates those that have been already enacted.
Navigation menu
By the second, he makes peace or war, sends or receives embassies, establishes the public security, and provides against invasions. 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.
Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.
Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression. There would be an end of every thing, were the same man, or the same body, whether of the nobles or of the people, to exercise those three powers, that of enacting laws, that of executing the public resolutions, and of trying the causes of individuals.
The executive power ought to Jean-Jacques Rousseaus Views Of African Man Vs. Locken Man in the hands of a monarch, because this branch of government, having need of dispatch, is better administered by one than by many: on the other hand, whatever depends on the legislative power, is oftentimes better regulated by many than by a single person.
But if there were no monarch, and the executive power should be committed to a certain number of persons selected from the legislative body, there would be an end of liberty, since the two powers would be united; as the same persons would sometimes possess, and would be always able to possess, a share in both. The free governments are dependent on fragile constitutional arrangements. Montesquieu devotes four chapters of The Spirit of the Laws to a discussion of England, a contemporary free government, where liberty was sustained by a balance of powers.
Montesquieu worried that in France the intermediate powers i. These ideas of the control of power were often used in the thinking of Maximilien Robespierre. Montesquieu advocated reform of slavery in The Spirit of Law, specifically arguing that slavery was inherently wrong because all humans are born equal, [21] but that it could perhaps be justified within the context of climates with intense heat, wherein laborers would feel less inclined to work voluntarily. In the hypothetical list, he'd ironically list pro-slavery arguments without further comment, including an argument stating that sugar would become too expensive without the free labor of slaves.]
It is nonsense!
You are absolutely right. In it something is and it is good thought. It is ready to support you.