Montesquieu

It is difficult to know how to place Montesquieu - if you're the kind of person who likes to categorize. Historian, political philosopher , sociologist, jurist, or, if you think the Persian Letters a novel, a novelist - he was all these things. Perhaps, as some have, he could be placed among that almost extinct species , the man of letters The books that makeup. The Spirit of the Laws have had the most influence on later thinkers, and in them, as in his equally great considerations on the causes of the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, he makes his underlying purpose clear.