The Persian Letters

This meant there was a discredit of holiness and traditional authority, and unrivaled result was the gradual egression of the ideals of liberal, secular, democratic societies. The Enlightenment is associated with a materialist view of human beings, an optimism approximately human progress through education, and a general utilitarian approach to society and ethics. The movement can be discerned in England in the seventeenth century with the writings of Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes; it is seen in France with the new emphasis on unaided reason as expressed in the works of RenT Descartes. Another author of the period, Condorcet, shows faith in progress and in the fact that such(prenominal) progress has already taken place, and he contrasts the past with his present:

After long periods of error, after being led astray by vague of incomplete theories, publicists have at shoemaker's last discovered the true rights of man and how they can each(prenominal) be deduced from the single truth, that man is a sentient being, capable of reason and of acquiring moral ideas. . . .

Montesquieu is a representative of this same method of thought, and as such he exemplifies a dedication to noetic thought:

Cosmopolitan in outlook, and fascinated by the mixed bag of human societies, he believed that behind this diversity there couch intelligible principles discoverable by reason.

His cosmopolitan attitude is discernible as he develops his Persian characters and pre

Condorcet, Marquis de. "On the Progress of Humanity." In Sources of the Western Tradition, Marvin Perry, Joseph R. Peden, and Theodore H. Von Laue (eds.), 78-80. capital of Massachusetts: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

But if a ruler, so far from keeping his subjects happy, wants to domineer or destroy them, the basis of obedience is lost; zero unites them, nothing attaches them to him; and they go back to their natural liberty. They maintain that outright authority can ne'er be legitimate, because it can never have had a legitimate origin.

All these discussions are light by a purely secular spirit. He views religion from an outside standpoint; he regards it rather as one of the functions of administration than as an inner spiritual force. as for all the varieties of fanaticism and intolerance, he abhors them utterly.

But the uses to which Montesquieu puts this borrowed plot were all his own. He made it the base for a searching attack on the whole system of the government of Louis XIV. The corruption of the Court, the privileges of the nobles, the maladministration of the finances, the stupidities and barbarisms of the old controlling rTgime--these are the topics to which he is perpetually drawing his reader's attention.

Order your essay at Orderessay and get a 100% original and high-quality custom paper within the required time frame.