Montesquieu · Politics
Montesquieu’s great idea: that a nation’s laws are not arbitrary commands but grow out of a whole web of conditions - climate, terrain, religion, customs, commerce, history - that together form the <em>spirit</em> animating them.
You learned that Montesquieu sought the spirit of the laws. Explain in your own words what he meant by that phrase, and why it made him one of the first thinkers to study politics like a social scientist.
Leads to Émile Durkheim.
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