osition" of the German people led them to find appropriate leadership in Hitler, or the same for the Russian people and Stalin?
One cannot blame Montesquieu for such leaders, of course, but one can question his basic premise--that the best government is found for a certain people based on the physical environment, history, and social customs. Are people so different, because of these environmental and sociohistorical factors, that each nation has and should have a unique set of political institutions, based on those factors? For that is precisely what Montesquieu states is the case:
Law in general is human reason, inasmuch as it governs all the inhabitants of the earth: the political and civil laws of each nation ought to be only the particular cases in which human reason is applied. They should be adapted in s
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