ABSTRACT
NO GREATER CONTRAST can be envisaged than that between Hume and Montesquieu. Hume breathes the spirit of his own age, while that Montesquieu was much read but little influential is scarcely surprising. For apart from Vico, whom he almost certainly had not read, the writers whom he most resembles are Durkheim and Weber. Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was an Anglophile French aristocrat who grasped in a moment of illumination, not dissimilar to that in which Descartes founded modern philosophy, the great truths that societies are not mere collections of individuals, and that social institutions are not means to the psychological ends of such individuals. In so doing, he broke both with the utilitarianism and with the individualism of his century. His consequent motive was a practical one; he wished to understand society in order to create an applied science of government by means of which the human condition might be improved.
