Montesquieu and China

Abstract

Charles Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu (born January 18, 1689; died February 10, 1755) was an outstanding thinker of the French Enlightenment in the first half of the eighteenth century, a sociologist and philosopher that laid the foundation for the theory of the bourgeois state and of the science of law. He was, with Voltaire and Rousseau, an intellectual pioneer of the French bourgeois revolution. This glorious name, Montesquieu, has to the ears of our people of China both a familiar ring and a sense of intimacy.