» Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought)

Montesquieu: The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought) Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: The craft of creating legislation: a lost art
Comment: Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu exhibits an incredible breadth of knowledge here. Today, at least in modern America, creating law has been the province of special interest groups who high-jack all the commissions responsible for assisting the legislature. Instead of creating law with an eye to serving the nuclear family by mitigating economic burdens and encouraging religious practice, laws today impose taxes on those who can barely make it, endorse sexual perversion as a legitimate candidate for marriage, give minorities privileges over caucasians (e.g., white people, except jews, cannot file discrimination lawsuits), censor the voice of religious people in the name of separation of church and state (removing the ten commandments in Alabama, barring nativity scenes, barring school prayer), and hypocritically mandate the celebration of menorahs in public places. It is clear that the law has been transformed into an instrument to assault Christians and benefit jews. Having read Montesquieu, the concept of social engineering through legislation is an abomination that needs to be purged from our modern culture. The comparison of Montesquieu with modern law making is like night and day. The object of the law has been thwarted to undermine Christian civilization as we know it. You don't see Montesquieu proposing laws that benefit money changers. For example, it was not till the advent of Roosevelt when the Federal Housing Administration was created to insure money lenders that they would get their market value in the event of defaulting debtors or fluctuating markets. It was in the advent of Woodrow Wilson when the private bank, the Federal Reserve, was permitted to make loans to the U.S. government to finance wars and give to Israel, charge us usurious interest rates, and shift the debt burden of this national debt on the American people. Montesquieu was not a democrat but proposed democracy as one form amongst many to practically govern a nation. It is for this reason he did not advocate a "system." First and foremost was a spirit to learn from the mistakes of the past, which is why he makes constant reference to foreign examples, such as Greece and Japan. Montesquieu would view our current system as an abomination. By catering to minorities, giving them something they want, the jewish party has consolidated their vote onto one platform thus giving the voting block of that platform greater force in politics. Modern American law has transformed America into a colony of Israel.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Iran
Comment: This is a good book which gives you first hand impression about how laws are design by authority.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent review for our present members of congress and anyone with the interest to put in the time.
Comment: This is very interesting about Montesquieu. Every member of congress should read it and take it to heart. It appears that the majority of our founding fathers did read it and take it very seriously. It is something that all Americans who are interested in our government should consider reading. It is amazingly quite easy to read though, I would suggest having a good dictionary handy while reading it. Some of our members of congress I just do not believe would understand, even if someone was reading the dictionary for them. That is a sad commentary about the facts we all must face, however.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Not the great book people seem to think it is.
Comment: This is a book that could (should?) have faded into history without being a great loss to the world. Yes, there are a few interesting bits of political philosophy, but they're far and few between, and mainly either just thrown out as Montesquieu's personal opinions with little to no evidence or examination, or flimsily based on historical examples. As a reader, I didn't find most of his arguments (where he didn't seem to be contradicting himself, which happens frequently) very convincing. This was obviously written with the 18th century French salon crowd in mind, and reads as such. I'm sure it provided a lot of aristocrats with conversation fodder to make them appear intelligent and educated at the time, but these days it just seems like an antiquated bit of history.

He claims the book has to be read as a whole to see the structure and his overall goal; well, I did read the whole book and at the end couldn't see an overarching structure at all. The work just seemed like a long, rambling, unorganized mess. The only people I might really recommend this to are people interested in Greek, Roman, and French history (especially legal history), but not to people interested in political science or philosophy.

Bump this one to the bottom of your list of classics on historical thought, there are much more interesting reads out there.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Important book in the history of ideas
Comment: There are mainly two reasons why Montequieu's book is important. One is for his ideas, which still have relevance for current political issues, such as separation of church and state. The second is that it represents an important historical milestone in political thought. The real bonus is that, in the translation, his work reads in a way that is both intellectually engaging, by which I mean he gets you thinking about the issues, and also engaging (if entertaining is not quite the right word) as a series of philosophical perspectives delivered in a direct way generally free of jargon.
The most interesting part of his book for me was at the outset, in his comparison of despotism, republics and democracy.
The really important aspect of his book is that so many of the threshold policitical issues that he discusses are still live issues. How much should the state intervene? What constitutes good laws? What parts of life in a political society are the business of the state?

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