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Category Archives: Montesquieu

Montesquieu’s “Discoure on the Motives that Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences”

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Diana Schaub, author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters and one of those forgotten Straussians in Bush’s administration (member of the President’s Council on Bioethics), has translated Montesquieu’s “Discourse on the Motives that Ought to Encourage Us to the Sciences” [PDF] and a brief a commentary on the “Discourse” [PDF].

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Barbarians, Old and New

Saturday, April 28, 2007

On May 19th at 9:00 AM in a room yet to be announced, I’ll be giving the first public presentation on my work on barbarians and savages, drawing upon Hobbes and Montesquieu as examples. Apparently my session is entitled “Fundamentalisms” (I’m not sure why!) as one other person is doing a paper on Israeli fundamentalism [...]

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Cataloguing

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Among the contributions to political theory and practice that one can inscribe to the French aristocracy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries are the discoveries of the social, the political, and the political function of history. That is, they discovered that history was not simply the retelling of the great deeds of kings; [...]

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Naming

Wednesday, September 13, 2006

I’ve adopted the term “aristocratic political theory” to describe eighteenth century French thought that opposed itself to both the king and the bourgeoisie. Montesquieu, of course, is the most famous example, but there are a number of other people we’d want to include in this list: Fenelon, Saint-Simon, Boulainvilliers, and Mably, at the very least, [...]

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Montesquieu: Introduction

Thursday, August 3, 2006

In the non-Straussian secondary literature on Montesquieu (the Straussians are a story for another day), it is well agreed that Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws presented an ‘immense theoretical revolution’ (to borrow a phrase of Althusser’s in reference to Marx) – his discovery of ‘laws’ pertaining the human world, similar to, but different from [...]

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Montesquieu: Online

Wednesday, August 2, 2006

Known dates:
~1717 – “A Discourse on Cicero” [pdf]
1721 – The Persian Letters [html] [pdf]
1724 – “A Dialogue Between Sylla and Eucrates” [html] [pdf]
1724 – Reflexions sur la monarchie universelle [Manuscript missing?]
1725 – “The Temple of Gnidus” [html]
1728 – “An Oration by President Montesquieu, When He Was Received into the French Academy, in the Room [...]

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