Montesquieu and the Making of the Modern World - Tapa blanda

The Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755) was one of the greatest thinkers of all time. He was a leading member of the French Enlightenment and laid the foundations for thought in many of the social sciences. His greatest book, 'The Spirit of the Laws', was the first detailed survey of the customs and cultures of the world and their deeper structures. It build on other important work in his 'Persian Letters', 'Considerations on the Decline of the Romans'. His wide learning and analytic brilliance does not always make his work easily accessible. But if we consider all the work together, and combine the life with the writing, it is possible to see deep insider the mind of one of the most profound thinkers of modern times and someone who shaped our modern world.

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.