The intellectual foundations of modern constitutional democracy
were laid during the European Enlightenment, an 18th-century
philosophic movement marked by its rejection of traditional
social, religious, and political ideas and its emphasis on
rationalism. Two of its most influentual thinkers were English
political philosopher John Locke and French jurist and political
philosopher Montesquieu.
In 1690 Locke published his seminal Two Treatises of
Government. His assertion that all legitimate government
rests upon "the consent of the governed" profoundly altered
discussions of political theory and promoted the development of
democratic institutions.
With his assertion of natural law, Locke rebutted the claim that
government, specifically monarchy, was an aspect of a divinely
ordained chain of being. Natural law is identical with the law of
God, Locke argued, and guarantees to all men basic rights,
including the right to life, to certain liberties, and to own
property and keep the fruits of one's labor. To secure these
rights, Locke argued, men in civil society enter into a contract
with their government. The citizen is bound to obey the law,
while the government has the right to make laws and to defend the
commonwealth from foreign injury -- all for the public good.
Locke asserted that when any government becomes lawless and
arbitrary, the citizen has the right to overthrow the regime and
institute a new government.
Locke's theory of natural law inspired a generation of
Enlightenment philosophers in Europe and the New World -- from
Jean Jacques Rousseau in France to David Hume in Scotland,
Immanuel Kant in Germany, and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin in what became the United States. But his foremost
successor was probably Montesquieu who, like Locke, believed in
repubican government based on the consent of the governed, but
not in democracy founded on majority rule. In The Spirit of
Laws, published in 1748, Montesquieu advocated separating and
balancing powers between the executive, legislative, and judicial
branches of government as a means of guaranteeing the freedom of
the individual. This doctrine also helped to form the
philosophical basis for the U.S. Constitution, with its division
of power among the presidency, the Congress, and the judiciary.
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