Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, historian, and political philosopher.
Alexis Charles Henri Clérel, comte de Tocqueville, usually known as just Tocqueville, was a French aristocrat, diplomat, sociologist, political scientist, political philosopher, and historian. He is best known for his works Democracy in America and The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856). In both, he analyzed the living standards and social conditions of individuals as well as their relationship to the market and state in Western societies. Democracy in America was published after Tocqueville's travels in the United States and is today considered an early work of sociology and political science.
Henri-Benjamin Constant de Rebecque, or simply Benjamin Constant, was a Swiss political thinker, activist and writer on political theory and religion.
Claude Adrien Helvétius was a French philosopher, freemason and littérateur.
Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de Tracy was a French Enlightenment aristocrat and philosopher who coined the term "ideology".
In ethics, political philosophy, social contract theory, religion, and international law, the term state of nature describes the hypothetical way of life that existed before humans organised themselves into societies or civilizations. Philosophers of the state of nature theory propose that there was a historical period before societies existed, and seek answers to the questions: "What was life like before civil society?", "How did government emerge from such a primitive start?", and "What are the hypothetical reasons for entering a state of society by establishing a nation-state?".
Public law is the part of law that governs relations and affairs between legal persons and a government, between different institutions within a state, between different branches of governments, as well as relationships between persons that are of direct concern to society. Public law comprises constitutional law, administrative law, tax law and criminal law, as well as all procedural law. Laws concerning relationships between individuals belong to private law.
Two Treatises of Government is a work of political philosophy published anonymously in 1689 by John Locke. The First Treatise attacks patriarchalism in the form of sentence-by-sentence refutation of Robert Filmer's Patriarcha, while the Second Treatise outlines Locke's ideas for a more civilized society based on natural rights and contract theory. The book is a key foundational text in the theory of liberalism.
Maurice Joly was a French political writer and lawyer known for The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a political satire of Napoleon III.
Étienne-Gabriel Morelly was a French utopian thinker, philosopher and novelist. An otherwise "obscure tax official", and teacher, Morelly wrote two books on education, a critique of Montesquieu and The Code of Nature, which was published anonymously in France in 1755. This book, initially attributed to philosophes including Rousseau and Diderot, criticised contemporary society, postulated a social order without avarice, and proposed a constitution intended to lead to an egalitarian society without property, marriage, church or police.
Federalist No. 10 is an essay written by James Madison as the tenth of The Federalist Papers, a series of essays initiated by Alexander Hamilton arguing for the ratification of the United States Constitution. It was first published in The Daily Advertiser on November 22, 1787, under the name "Publius". Federalist No. 10 is among the most highly regarded of all American political writings.
18th-century French literature is French literature written between 1715, the year of the death of King Louis XIV of France, and 1798, the year of the coup d'État of Bonaparte which brought the Consulate to power, concluded the French Revolution, and began the modern era of French history. This century of enormous economic, social, intellectual and political transformation produced two important literary and philosophical movements: during what became known as the Age of Enlightenment, the Philosophes questioned all existing institutions, including the church and state, and applied rationalism and scientific analysis to society; and a very different movement, which emerged in reaction to the first movement; the beginnings of Romanticism, which exalted the role of emotion in art and life.
Oriental despotism refers to the Western view of Asian societies as politically or morally more suspectible to despotic rule, and therefore different from the democratic West. This view is often pejorative. The term is often associated with Karl August Wittfogel's 1957 book Oriental Despotism.
The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu is a political satire written by French attorney Maurice Joly in protest against the regime of Napoleon III, who ruled France from 1848 to 1870. It was translated into English in 2002. Small portions were translated in 1967 as an appendix to Norman Cohn's Warrant for Genocide, which identifies it as the main source of the later Protocols of the Elders of Zion, though The Dialogue itself makes no mention of Jews.
The Lumières was a cultural, philosophical, literary and intellectual movement beginning in the second half of the 17th century, originating in western Europe and spreading throughout the rest of Europe. It included philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, John Locke, Edward Gibbon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Denis Diderot, Pierre Bayle and Isaac Newton. This movement is influenced by the scientific revolution in southern Europe arising directly from the Italian Renaissance with people like Galileo Galilei. Over time it came to mean the Siècle des Lumières, in English the Age of Enlightenment.
The Law is an 1850 book by Frédéric Bastiat. It was written at Mugron two years after the third French Revolution and a few months before his death of tuberculosis at age 49. The essay was influenced by John Locke's Second Treatise on Government and in turn influenced Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson. It is the work for which Bastiat is most famous, followed by the candlemaker's petition and the parable of the broken window.
Francis Maseres was an English lawyer. He is known as attorney general of the Province of Quebec, judge, mathematician, historian, member of the Royal Society, and cursitor baron of the exchequer.
Jacob Vernet was a prominent theologian in Geneva, Republic of Geneva, who believed in a rationalist approach to religion. He was called "the most important and influential Genevan pastor of his day".
In political science, despotism is a form of government in which a single entity rules with absolute power. Normally, that entity is an individual, the despot, but societies which limit respect and power to specific groups have also been called despotic.
