The Spirit of the Laws (French: De l'esprit des lois, also sometimes called The Spirit of Laws ) is a treatise on political theory first published anonymously by Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu in 1748 with the help of Claudine Guérin de Tencin. Originally published anonymously partly because Montesquieu's works were subject to censorship, its influence outside of France was aided by its rapid translation into other languages. In 1750 Thomas Nugent published the first English translation. In 1751 the Catholic Church added L'esprit des lois to its Index Librorum Prohibitorum ("List of Prohibited Books"). Yet Montesquieu's political treatise had an enormous influence on the work of many others, most notably: Catherine the Great, who produced Nakaz (Instruction); the Founding Fathers of the United States Constitution; and Alexis de Tocqueville, who applied Montesquieu's methods to a study of American society, in Democracy in America. Macaulay offers us a hint of Montesquieu's importance when he writes in his 1827 essay entitled "Machiavelli" that "Montesquieu enjoys, perhaps, a wider celebrity than any political writer of modern Europe."
Montesquieu spent around twenty one years researching and writing L'esprit des lois (The Spirit of the Laws), covering many things like the law, social life, and the study of anthropology and providing more than 3,000 commendations. In this political treatise Montesquieu pleaded in favor of a constitutional system of government and the separation of powers, the ending of slavery, the preservation of civil liberties and the law, and the idea that political institutions ought to reflect the social and geographical aspects of each community.
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Famous quotes containing the words spirit and/or laws:
“There is a very holy and a very terrible isolation for the conscience of every man who seeks to read the destiny in affairs for others as well as for himself, for a nation as well as for individuals. That privacy no man can intrude upon. That lonely search of the spirit for the right perhaps no man can assist.”
—Woodrow Wilson (18561924)
“The members of a body-politic call it the state when it is passive, the sovereign when it is active, and a power when they compare it with others of its kind. Collectively they use the title people, and they refer to one another individually as citizens when speaking of their participation in the authority of the sovereign, and as subjects when speaking of their subordination to the laws of the state.”
—Jean-Jacques Rousseau (17121778)