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Separation of powers is a political doctrine originating in the writings of Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws, in which he argued for a constitutional government with three separate branches, each of which would have defined authority to check the powers of the others.
Montesquieu's approach was to present and defend a form of government whose powers were not excessively centralized in a single monarch or similar ruler (a form known then as "aristocracy"). He based this model on the Constitution of the Roman Republic and the British constitutional system. Montesquieu took the view that the Roman Republic had ...
Montesquieu's philosophy that "government should be set up so that no man need be afraid of another" [17] reminded Madison and others that a free and stable foundation for their new national government required a clearly defined and balanced separation of powers. Montesquieu was troubled by a cataract and feared going blind.
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.
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]
The Madisonian model is a structure of government in which the powers of the government are separated into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. This came about because the delegates saw the need to structure the government in such a way to prevent the imposition of tyranny by either majority or minority.
The first topic that Madison addresses is the differentiation between a republic and a democracy.. George Clinton, the Governor of New York and one of the foremost authors of the Anti-Federalist papers at the time of the ratification of the Constitution, cited Montesquieu, a political philosopher who authored "The Spirit of the Laws", [5] to support his argument.