What Was Montesquieu's Aim in Writing the Spirit of the Laws?

What entity dictates life on the most fundamental level? Is it the government or the people who permit the government to exist? This is the main point of contention between Baron de Montesquieu 's Spirit of Laws and Jean-Jacques Rousseau 's On the Social Contract. Interestingly, their interpretation of different forms of government converge on the sovereignty of a democracy, but that is where most of their common ground lies. While Rousseau shares similarities on the sovereign authority of a democracy with Montesquieu, he departs by arguing how regardless of government, sovereignty always rests in the hands of the people. He also disagrees on how the populace should participate in the democracy and on their representation in government, making his principles more relevant today.

In order to understand this one must first look at the author’s life. According to Elain Hedges, who

During the 17 and 18th century the British legal system was incredibly harsh, distributing death penalties for often minor offences, the aim of this was to deter individuals from committing crime. There was very

extremely tyrannical in its approach. Through the 1760s and 1770s, England passed a litany of

England has a reasonable repute for cruelty. A mutual awareness of the Middle Ages is that society was abused by continuous violence and social indifference against fatalities by the insistent dignity of the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse continuously pushing back and forth across Europe.

French minister Richelieu symbolized absolutism in many ways. With his policy of total subordination of all groups and institutions to the French monarchy, Richelieu worked to break the power of nobility. This is because French nobility’s selfish and independent ways went against the the crown’s goal to centralize the state. To break it Richelieu leveled castles, which were a symbol of feudal independence. He also destroyed aristocratic conspires, with speedy executions. In addition to this Richelieu’s genius is best reflected in the administrative system he established. Extending the use of royal commissioners, known as intendants giving them responsibility for justice, police, and finances in each of Frances 32 generalities or districts.

Discuss, using examples from this essay, whether or not he successfully achieves his thesis through this piece.

Part one, consisting of eight chapters, starts from the understanding of the text. The response, the research, and the questions on the text is crucial

Percy’s noble task is to open our minds to the possibility that we are not the masters of what we know—that, in part, what we know and what we see, when approached passively, have a lot more to do with “preformed symbolic complex” than with ourselves (512). Percy’s exploration achieves one of the main goals of all philosophy—to change the way we think about things. He changes the meaning of many concepts human beings tend to take for granted. Sight is no longer the mere act of seeing, but “a struggle,” an act of understanding and appreciation (523). “Sovereignty,” in relation to things, is no longer some abstract concept of “power,” but an ability to interpret for oneself (517). Education—or perhaps more specifically, its dynamic—is reshaped, for it is no longer a passive act (i.e. “being taught to”) but an action that relies much more upon the student, who “may have the greatest difficulty in salvaging the creature itself from the educational package in which it is presented” (519). These concept-alterations are thus meant to alter our reality; they aim to help us rediscover in art what he calls in his opening paragraph an island, “Formosa.” This previously untouched island is beautiful to its discoverer

Not only were Hobbes and Locke influential during the Constitutional Period, but also Charles de Montesquieu and Jean Jacques Rousseau. In Montesquieu’s work, The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu described the state of nature as a place of fear where humans avoid violence and war. However, once the state of war enters society, a need for human laws and government is needed in order to maintain law and order. Therefore, Montesquiu helped advocate for governmental authority and raised awareness for the need for separation of powers in the three branches of government. In today’s government, Montesquieu's beliefs in the separation of powers and governmental control are clearly seen in the Constitution. Additionally, Rousseau was able to influence

the whole novel: “the linguistic pattern of choices realizes a primitive pattern of cognition, which in turn is the key to the tragic vision of the novel.”(Leech & Short, 2001: 32) Halliday being the widely acknowledged precursor of functional stylistics, the eminent German linguist-critic Leo Spitzer (1887-1960), is likewise father of literary stylistics. In his insistence that the smallest detail of language can unlock the “soul” of a literary work, he maintains the task of stylistics is to provide a hard-and-fast technology of analysis: I would maintain that to formulate observation by means of words is not to cause the artistic beauty to evaporate in vain intellectualities; rather, it makes for a widening and deepening of the aesthetic taste. It is only a frivolous love that cannot survive intellectual definition; great love prospers with understanding. (Leech & Short, 2001: 2) A question which is often asked in this connection is “At which end do we start, the aesthetic or the linguistic?” The image used by Spitzer of the “philological circle”, the circle of understanding, however, seems to suggest there is no logical staring point. Spitzer argues that the task of Linguistic-literary explanation proceeded by the movement to and fro from linguistic details to the

"It is almost unimportant whether a work finds an understanding audience. One has to do it because one believes that it is the right thing to do. We are not only here to please, we cannot help challenging the spectator.”

Any literary work is unique. It is created by the author in accordance with his vision and is permeated with his idea of the world. The reader’s interpretation is also highly individual and depends to a great extent on his knowledge and personal experience. That’s why one cannot lay down a fixed “model” for a piece of critical appreciation. Nevertheless, one can give information and suggestions that may prove helpful.

To understand the novel’s play with predictability, we must have recourse to the post modernist discourse about it. Aristotle primarily argued in “Poetics” that:

Another observations about the form of the text is that the author uses very long sentences. There is no period at the end of ideas and that can show a very alert rhythm, like the narrator has to many to say that we won’t stop writing ideas all over again and he won’t let you get a word in. There are ideas interconnected with