ABSTRACT

His contemporaries – the ‘philosophes’ of the French Enlightenment and many British Enlightenment thinkers – considered him to exemplify their ideal of civilised man, creative writer and philosophic sage. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, it was his work as a political theorist which inspired the greatest praise. His ideas held high currency among the French revolutionaries, and, perhaps most notably, his constitutional discussions, which overtly praise the British parliamentary constitution, had a direct and lasting influence on the construction of the new American Republics. It was this direct influence in the development of Anglo/American constitutional politics which set his subsequent reputation as a liberal-minded constitutional theorist in the English-speaking world. This century, his reputation has ultimately rested on the doctrine of the separation of powers: the famous argument that the three core functions of the state – making laws (the legislative function), executing the law (the executive function) and upholding the law (the judicial function) – should be given to separate bodies in order that each body may check the power of the other and in so doing build a power-checking device into the state. This doctrine is now presented to college students worldwide as the core idea in Montesquieu’s constitutional theory, and the backbone of the liberal state, and in this move, Montesquieu’s status as a ‘father of liberalism’ is enshrined.