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This philosophy heavily influenced the United States Constitution, according to which the Legislative, Executive, and Judicial branches of the United States government are kept distinct in order to prevent abuse of power. The American form of separation of powers is associated with a system of checks and balances.
By far the most important French sources to the American Enlightenment were Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws and Emer de Vattel's Law of Nations. Both informed early American ideas of government and were major influences on the U.S. Constitution. Voltaire's histories were widely read but seldom cited.
Like the anti-Federalists who opposed him, Madison was substantially influenced by the work of Montesquieu, though Madison and Montesquieu disagreed on the question addressed in this essay. He also relied heavily on the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment , especially David Hume , whose influence is most clear in Madison's discussion of ...
Château de la Brède, Montesquieu's birthplace. Montesquieu was born at the Château de la Brède in southwest France, 25 kilometres (16 mi) south of Bordeaux. [4] His father, Jacques de Secondat (1654–1713), was a soldier with a long noble ancestry, including descent from Richard de la Pole, Yorkist claimant to the English crown.
Montesquieu's treatise, already widely disseminated, 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.
While the ideas of unalienable rights, the separation of powers and the structure of the Constitution were largely influenced by the European Enlightenment thinkers, like Montesquieu, John Locke and others, [82] [100] [101] Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson still had reservations about the existing forms of government in Europe. [102]
Madison states Montesquieu used the British government as an example of separation of powers to analyze connections between the two. Madison quotes Montesquieu in The Spirit of Law as saying the British are the "mirror of political liberty." Thus, Montesquieu believed that the British form of separation of powers was of the utmost caliber.
A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America is a three-volume work by John Adams, written between 1787 and 1788.The text was Adams’ response to criticisms of the proposed American government, particularly those made by French economist and political theorist Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, who had argued against bicameralism and separation of powers.