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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.
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.
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.
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 makes use of the concept of the state of nature in his The Spirit of the Laws, first printed in 1748. Montesquieu states the thought process behind early human beings before the formation of society. He says that human beings would have the faculty of knowing and would first think to preserve their life in the state.
Frontispiece and title page of 1748 edition. Initially, Montesquieu only intended on writing a few pages on the topic. [1] However, the size of his topic overwhelmed him, so he chose to expand the scope of his writing from the beginnings of the Roman Republic to the decay of the late Roman Empire. [1]
In The Spirit of Law (1748), [17] Montesquieu described the various forms of distribution of political power among a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. 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 ...
In the Federalist Paper No. 51, Madison illustrated his beliefs on how a balance in the power was necessary for a government to exist. These ideas originated in the work of French philosopher Baron de Montesquieu who described these concepts in his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748). Here Montesquieu explained how these checks on powers were ...