About Complete Works

By Charles Louis de Secondat Montesquieu

Published in 1777

French lawyer, philosopher, and man of letters. He is noted for his Letters, a series of 160 fictional letters exchanged, for the most part, between two Parisians, satirizing Parisian institutions, individuals, gambling, religious intolerance, and royal power. He often discusses how a democracy, once having lost those public virtues that constitute the very essence of its existence, perishes through tyranny. His most famous work The Spirit of the Laws analyzes the relation between human and natural law.