Montesquieu: A Critical and Biographical Introduction to "the Spirit of the Laws"

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D. Appleton and Company, 1900 - 15 páginas

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Página iv - just because and in so far as his book was a work of science and epoch-making, it is as dead as the classics. The later investigations which it did so much to start have taken up what was true in it and have
Página xiii - been thought a mistake of Montesquieu to add them. The modern student naturally would turn to Roth or whatever still later man may displace Roth. With regard to the main body of the work, one might say that it expressed a theory of the continuity of the phenomenal universe at a time when, through no fault of the author,
Página viii - condition of the law. In another he is equally outspoken with regard to divorce, and says, not without some truth, that wishing to tighten the knot the law has untied it, and instead of uniting hearts, as it proposed, has separated them forever. Before Adam Smith he remarks the activity of dissenting sects, and he points out with unorthodox
Página xii - was a general cause at work which made that state ready to perish by a single battle. In a word, the main current carries with it all the special accidents." Montesquieu the ladies
Página v - a studious life. But I will postpone what more I have «to say of this book until we come to it in following the course of the author's career. Charles de Secondât, Baron de la
Página xiii - misled Blackstone and Delolme. Hear Bagehot in his work upon the subject : " The efficient secret of the English Constitution may be described as the close union, the nearly complete fusion, of the executive and legislative powers." And again: "The American Constitution was made upon a most careful argument, and most of that argument assumes the king to be the administrator of the English Constitution, and an unhereditary substitute for him—viz., a President—to be
Página xiv - Italiam! Italiam!" when the long day's work was done and the author saw his goal before darkness closed upon him; the suppressed invocation at the beginning of Book XX; the proud epigraph,
Página xiii - its facts were largely miraculous. He was not able to see history as an evolution, he looked at all events as if they were contemporaneous. Montesquieu's Rome was the Rome of fable uncritically accepted. His anthropology was anecdotic. His notion of a democracy suggests a Latin town meeting rather than the later developments in the United States and France. He made the world realize the influence of
Página v - and was retained that he might be godfather to the young noble, and so remind him all his life that the poor were his brothers. He was nursed by
Página xiii - climate and physical environment—which in our day furnished the already forgotten Buckle a suggestive chapter—but had not the data to be more than a precursor. His England—the England of the threefold division of power into legislative, executive, and judicial—was a fiction invented by him, a fiction which misled the makers of our Constitution as it misled Blackstone

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