Montesquieu And The Discovery Of The Social

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?

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?

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.

Montesquieu is famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, Vickie B. Sullivan argues that a creaful reading of Montesquieu's enormously influential The Spirit of the Law reveals the surprising result that he recognizes that Europe itself is susceptible to despotic practices - and that the threat emanates not from the East but rather from certain despotic ideas that inform Western institutions and practices. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers have brough forth despotic ideas in the form, for example, of brutal Machiavellianism, of Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, of Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and of the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason. Such ideas, Montesquieu shows, inform such revered European institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it to be instead a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death, when despotism repeatedly emerged in Europe with virulent intensity. -- from dust jacket.

In the last hundred years, the philosophy of natural law has suffered a fate that could hardly have been envisaged by the seventeenth and eighteenth century exponents of its universality and eternity: it has become old-fashioned. The positivists and the Marxists were happy to throw eternal moral ity out of the window, confident that some magic temporal harmony would eventually follow Progress in by the front door. Their hopes may not have been fully realized, but they did succeed in discrediting natural law. What is often not appreciated is the extent to which we have adopted the tenets of the philosophy they despised, borh in the field of politics, and in the field of personal and social ethics, which Barbeyrac called "la science des mreurs" and which the positivists re christened "social science". Consequently, though we live in a world whose freedom, such as it is, is largely a result of the popularization of the philosophy of natural law, and whose conscious and unconscious standards, such as they are, are a result of that philosophy as it became combined with Christianity, the doctrine of natural law is itself for gotten. In view of the oblivion into which it has fallen, natural law is a concept which means little to the average reader. All too often, Montesquieu scholars have traded on this oblivion in order to give an exaggerated picture of his originality.