Montesquieu, the Encyclopédie, and Materialist Fiction

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), produced in The Spirit of the Laws (1748) one of the Enlightenment's most influential works of political theory. Drawing partly on his admiration for the British constitutional settlement he observed during a stay in England, Montesquieu argued that political liberty is best preserved when the legislative, executive, and judicial functions of government are separated and lodged in distinct bodies capable of checking one another, preventing any single actor from accumulating unchecked power. This theory of the separation of powers, while it built on earlier reflections by Locke and on classical mixed-constitution theory, gave the doctrine its most systematic and influential formulation and would directly shape the institutional design of the United States Constitution and subsequent liberal constitutionalism.