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Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe - An Interpretation of "The Spirit of the Laws" (Hardcover)
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Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe - An Interpretation of "The Spirit of the Laws" (Hardcover)
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Montesquieu is rightly famous as a tireless critic of despotism,
which he associates in his writings overtly with Asia and the
Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western
models of governance found throughout Europe. However, a careful
reading of Montesquieu reveals that he recognizes a susceptibility
to despotic practices in the West and that the threat emanates not
from the East, but from certain despotic ideas that inform such
Western institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic
Church. Nowhere is Montesquieu's critique of the despotic ideas of
Europe more powerful than in his enormously influential The Spirit
of the Laws, and Vickie B. Sullivan guides readers through
Montesquieu's sometimes veiled, yet sharply critical accounts of
Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various
Christian thinkers. He finds deleterious consequences, for example,
in brutal Machiavellianism, in Hobbes's justifications for the rule
of one, in Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of
natural defense, and in the Christian teachings that equated heresy
with treason and informed the Inquisition. In this new reading of
Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that
it offers simple, objective observations, showing it instead to be
a powerful critique of European politics that would become
remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death when
despotism wound its way through Europe.
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