In an earlier post, I bemoaned the fact that very few well-educated Americans know who Montesquieu was – and I drew attention to the fact that the author of The Spirit of Laws was more often cited by the American Founding Fathers than any other figure, that his magnum opus was quickly translated into virtually every European language, and that he exercised an influence in England and on the European continent during and for a time after the second half of the eighteenth century no less profound than that which he exercised in our own country.

Needless to say, there were reasons for Montesquieu’s pre-eminence. That his thinking deserves attention today may be less obvious, but it is no less true. To begin with, Montesquieu was the first to grasp the conditions within which modern war is waged, and his insights bear on the history of our country and on its situation today.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu was born on the 18th of January 1689, at a time in which the Glorious Revolution was underway in England, and he came of age in the course of the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1713. He watched from afar with dismay as England’s duke of Marlborough repeatedly annihilated the legions of Louis XIV, the Sun King of France: first at the battle of Blenheim on 13 August 1704, when Montesquieu was fifteen; then – in the brief span of years stretching from 1706, when Montesquieu was seventeen, to 1709, when he was twenty – at Ramillies, Oudenarde, Lille, and Malplaquet.

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Every once in a while one gets an insight into the sad state of higher education in the United States.

Back in 2008, when my agent was attempting to market the manuscript of what recently appeared in two companion volumes under the titles Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic and Soft Despotism, Democracy’s Drift: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Tocqueville, and the Modern Prospect, he ran into an unexpected snag.

None of the editors at the trade presses he approached had ever even heard of Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu.

That came as a shock to me; and when I repeated the story to other students of the eighteenth century, they expressed amazement and dread.

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