Montesquieu and the Despotic Ideas of Europe
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A01=Vickie B. Sullivan
Aristotle
asia
Author_Vickie B. Sullivan
Category=JPA
catholicism
christian thinkers
christianity
despotism
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eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
france
french monarchy
governance
justification
law
legality
machiavellian
manner of thinking
middle east
Montesquieu
niccolo di bernardo dei machiavelli
philosopher
philosophical
philosophy
Plato
political science
politics
reasoning
religion
religious
republics
roman catholic church
slavery
slaves
thomas hobbes
treason
west
western world
Product details
- ISBN 9780226482910
- Weight: 539g
- Dimensions: 15 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 05 Sep 2017
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Montesquieu is rightly famous as a tireless critic of despotism, which he associates in his writings overtly with Asia and the Middle East and not with the apparently more moderate Western models of governance found throughout Europe. However, a careful reading of Montesquieu reveals that he recognizes a susceptibility to despotic practices in the West and that the threat emanates not from the East, but from certain despotic ideas that inform such Western institutions as the French monarchy and the Roman Catholic Church. Nowhere is Montesquieu's critique of the despotic ideas of Europe more powerful than in his enormously influential The Spirit of the Laws, and Vickie B. Sullivan guides readers through Montesquieu's sometimes veiled, yet sharply critical accounts of Machiavelli, Hobbes, Aristotle, and Plato, as well as various Christian thinkers. He finds deleterious consequences, for example, in brutal Machiavellianism, in Hobbes's justifications for the rule of one, in Plato's reasoning that denied slaves the right of natural defense, and in the Christian teachings that equated heresy with treason and informed the Inquisition.
In this new reading of Montesquieu's masterwork, Sullivan corrects the misconception that it offers simple, objective observations, showing it instead to be a powerful critique of European politics that would become remarkably and regrettably prescient after Montesquieu's death when despotism wound its way through Europe.
Vickie B. Sullivan is the Cornelia M. Jackson Professor of Political Science at Tufts University and the author of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and the Formation of a Liberal Republicanism and Machiavelli's Three Romes.
