John Locke vs. Baron De Montesquieu: Ideas

John Locke vs. Baron de Montesquieu: Ideas on Government.

Locke and de Montesquieu possessed remarkable differing views on government and what exact role government should take. For Locke, government needed to possess a clear and strong moral role, so that each citizen could give up his or her power in the name of bestowing that power to one single designated body. Essentially these community members give up some of their innate rights in the name of one government which is better versed at securing and protecting those rights than one single man alone. Government is a creation of the people which is developed for the greater good of the community: this means that because government is not this organic entity, it can be eradicated and replaced if it's not fulfilling its function. In that sense, many historians view Locke as making an important contribution to political thought by essentially defending the rights of all citizens to engage in a revolution (Tuckness, 2005). According to Locke, one could argue, the citizens have a responsibility to make sure that the government is acting in the moral, vested interest of its citizens.

Baron de Montesquieu often echoed these ideas: he created a naturalistic account of all the various forms of government and the forces which shaped them and their development (Bok, 2010). "He used this account to explain how governments might be preserved from corruption. He saw despotism, in particular, as a standing danger for any government not already despotic, and argued that it could best be prevented by a system in which different bodies exercised legislative, executive, and judicial power, and in which all those bodies were bound by the rule of law" (Bok, 2010). In this fashion Baron de Montesquieu and Locke did engage in similar ideas of government as they both had a great deal of faith in the importance of government as founded on the division of power.

The separation of powers was a major aspect of Locke's views on the government, though Locke designated the legislative branch as having the most supreme level of power, a distinction that Baron de Montesquieu does not make. Like today, Locke discusses the role of the executive power in enforcing the law, though he comes up with a third branch of power that de Montesquieu never touches on. "Interestingly, Locke's third power is called the "federative power" and it consists of the right to act internationally according to the law of nature. Since countries are still in the state of nature with respect to each other, they must follow the dictates of natural law and can punish one another for violations of that law in order to protect the rights of their citizens" (Tuckness, 2005). One of the more remarkable aspects in the ways that Locke and de Montesquieu differ is that Locke does not mention a judicial branch, whereas de Montesquieu does. Locke does not make this distinction because he saw power as connected strictly to function and he didn't see a clear function in simply interpreting the laws.