Montesquieu's Thought Of Power Balance And Its Realistic Significance

The power corruption is a universal social phenomenon in our country now. France's Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century——Montesquieu once said: " All the people with power may abuse it easily, which is an eternal and unchangeable experience ." Acton ,an English famous Lord also pointed out , "The power causes corruption, the absolute power causes the absolute corruption". How to effectively restrict power and prevent the power corruption is an important political topic in political philosophy. Power corruption undermines social justice and affects the stability of the society. Therefore, studying Montesquieu's thought of power balance is of very important significance of theory and the practice.The Marxist discussed the power balance elaborately. He believed that the people should grasp the voting right and Replace right in order to prevent the power corruption; Lenin put forward the idea of restricting power with power; Mao Zedong proposed the thought of people's supervision. This article tries to probe the thought of Montesquieu's power balance with the viewpoint of Marxism historical materialism. This thesis takes power balance as a clue and the method of the history and the logic is used. It is divided into six parts. The first part elaborates how power balance came into being;The second part is about the thought of power balance in modern west countries, in which Hobbes'monarch power theory and Locker's thought of power balance are discussed with emphasis; The third part elaborated the thought of Montesquieu's power balance. He thought ,only by power balance can it make the people enjoy their politics liberty right; He also pointed out the necessity of the implementation of power balance, and analyzed the origin , the contents and the limitation of the thought; The fourth,the fifth part separately explained how Montesquieu's system of power balance theory were practiced in American and in China, Jefferson proposed the theory of layer― layer power divided, further perfected Montesquieu's power system; Montesquieu's thought of power balance is the origin of Sun Zhongshan's five-power constitution; The sixth part elaborated the practical significance of Montesquieu's power balance thought.The innovation of this thesis is to take Montesquieu's power theory as the thought of power balance whose key point is not to divide power, but power balance.