De l’esprit des lois (French Edition)

In this case we can attest the author: Before the travels, on the level of political and historical analysis, the Considerations on Spanish wealth represented an early deepened reflection on the wealth and power of a nation, and its ruin. The Essay on the causes , and this is an essential point, is an attempt at focusing rigorously the relation between physical and moral causes, far beyond a reworking, with respect to the influence of the climate, of Aristotle and Bodin. By testifying to the complex design of the work between and the post mortem edition, and all the passages rejected or removed from the work, revealed and studied from Henri Barckhausen to Catherine Volpilhac-Auger.

Georges Benrekassa, L’Esprit des lois | A Montesquieu Dictionary

It is indeed thus that we can, beginning with the reflections imposed by these materials, documents and texts, circumscribe even better what we should understand by principles , and what the spirit of law is. But that is to restrain or even shrink its general inspiration, which must always be related to the starting points which we have recalled, but is in addition rigorously defined, in the long run, by the preface, the balance sheet and true methodological conclusion of long labors.

The principles are located above all these particular cases: Lefort , in other words still exposed to partisan interpretations — or to more or less bad-faith misrecognition. And the spirit of law is defined by Montesquieu as what subsumes a series of relations first enumerated in function of the different domains in which laws can and must manifest and justify themselves: We must see that the object is to give the grand axes of an heuristic device, but that it cannot be a matter of a closed series: Montesquieu himself also gives at first a typology of the governments, the specific analysis of which dominates the first books, but their role remains fundamental, at least up to the books he elaborated XXVIII, XXX and XXXI last of all.

We need to underscore their decisive originality and just as well the paradox at which they arrive. We have already mentioned the nature-principle dialectic.

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But the changes it entails do not imply that there is a definite order of succession or a possible preferential hierarchy of types. In book V, we thus realize clearly that the opposition between despotism and moderate governments in fact exceeds all the others in importance: And this second axis is indeed conceived in line with the first: Nothing can be established without social and moral conditions, and the establishment of certain civil laws.

That was from the beginning the lesson of the analysis of the English constitution XI, 6 , which discerns an equilibrium of social forces at the same time as an institutional regulation.

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It is at the end of this trajectory that in book XIX, one of the most important, Montesquieu finally hones in on the notion of general spirit of a nation, where all the orders of determination are regrouped and conjugated, each time in an original way, into a form of global and reciprocal causality. It is not possible to enter into the details of a political thought of which we can only indicate here the essential vectors.

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Wealth, exchanges, currency, development of the population: In fact, the political aspect remains determinant. Montesquieu himself also gives at first a typology of the governments, the specific analysis of which dominates the first books, but their role remains fundamental, at least up to the books he elaborated XXVIII, XXX and XXXI last of all. We need to underscore their decisive originality and just as well the paradox at which they arrive. We have already mentioned the nature-principle dialectic.

But the changes it entails do not imply that there is a definite order of succession or a possible preferential hierarchy of types. In book V, we thus realize clearly that the opposition between despotism and moderate governments in fact exceeds all the others in importance: And this second axis is indeed conceived in line with the first: Nothing can be established without social and moral conditions, and the establishment of certain civil laws.

Georges Benrekassa

That was from the beginning the lesson of the analysis of the English constitution XI, 6 , which discerns an equilibrium of social forces at the same time as an institutional regulation. It is at the end of this trajectory that in book XIX, one of the most important, Montesquieu finally hones in on the notion of general spirit of a nation, where all the orders of determination are regrouped and conjugated, each time in an original way, into a form of global and reciprocal causality.

It is not possible to enter into the details of a political thought of which we can only indicate here the essential vectors. Wealth, exchanges, currency, development of the population: In fact, the political aspect remains determinant. It is attached to the stability of a social state that is highly dependent on the respect of orders and ranks, as well as of kingly functions of assistance or even tutelage: Politics is in no way a science that is deployed in the absolute, it is perhaps first conscience of its limits.

The working manuscripts prove that this opposition was considered at one point as the culmination of the work. But the transformation of the political which the work induces throughout its length considerably shapes and modifies it.

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Thus his attitude toward the religious phenomenon. He was made to feel that.

Its modern destiny reveals its capacity for escaping from this double ideological trap. The revolution in method has been decisively illuminated L. Novelty in the order of knowledge has progressively appeared, outside its positivistic annexation, in a more and more favorable light Raymond Aron ; its importance in the definition of modern political conditions has been re-evaluated in very original manner John Pocock: Firmin-Didot, , tome I.