Montesquieu And Social Theory

Montesquieu and Social Theory details Montesquieu’s contribution to sociology. The title chronicles Montesquieu’s work that led to establishing the fundamentals and principles of sociology. The text first details Montesquieu’s biographical account, and then proceeds to discussing the Montesquieu’s motivation in his works. The next chapters encompass Montesquieu’s works, which include Persian Letter; Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and their Decline; and (On) The Spirit of the Laws. The last chapter details Montesquieu's influence in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The book will be of great interest to anyone who has a keen interest in the development of social science.

First published in 1998. This is Volume X of twenty-two in the Sociology of Social Theory and Methodology series. Written in 1960, this focuses on Baron de Montesquieu the pioneer of the Sociology of Knowledge and the author’s wish to correct the widespread conviction that the sociology of knowledge as a whole, and not only the doctrine of ideology, is the child of revolutionary sentiment.

Montesquieu is often considered the first social thinker. Today, when 'the end of the social' has been proclaimed, it is time to reconsider its beginnings. In a wide-ranging, original interpretation of The Spirit of the Laws, this book explores what did it mean to 'discover the social', and what can it mean to recover the social today?

This volume makes available in an English translation the most significant part of Montesquieu's political, social and legal theory. About two-thirds of the volume has been translated from the Spirit of the Laws, not redone in English since the eighteenth century. That version was notoriously inadequate: Montesquieu's key terms were not rendered consistently; often his meaning was distorted by giving the nearest English eighteenth-century legal or institutional equivalent. Finally, English usage has changed so much that the eighteenth-century translation makes Montesquieu seem both quaint and obscure. This volume also includes substantial selections from the Persian Letters and the Considerations on the Causes of the Romans; Greatness and Decline. Although adequate translations of these works exist, it seemed advisable to maintain intellectual and stylistic consistency by providing English versions on the same principles as the Spirit of the Laws.

Political Theory and Social Customs: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Volney, and Constant provides novel insights on how these authors’ reflections on social customs influenced their contributions to political theory. Through his journey to Italy, Montesquieu developed a theoretical model on social customs and their relation to political systems. In the Constitutional Project for Corsica, Rousseau inserted his discussion of Corsican mores within an analysis of the power dynamics between centre and periphery. Volney’s evaluations of customs in the Middle East and the United States show how the French revolution impacted his conceptualization of politics and cultural difference. Constant based his political theory on the different societal mores of the ancients and the moderns.

This book is a detailed and wide-ranging account of the birth of social theory as a distinctive and modern intellectual genre, providing a brilliant account of the "pre-history" of sociology and a vivid portrayal of intellectual culture between the Enlightenment and the age of Romanticism.

V.1 From the Middle Ages to locke -- V.2 From Montesquieu to the early socialists -- V.3 Hegel, Marx and Engels, and the idea of progress.