Abstract
Montesquieu’s great work De l’Esprit des lois was published in 1748, the first English translation, by Thomas Nugent, appearing in 1750. There was a Dublin reprint ‘with corrections and additions communicated by the author’ in 1751, another in 1767, and a further two in 1792 (Appendix 2, 144–7). Thomas Nugent was a brother of the Christopher Nugent whose daughter Jane married Edmund Burke in 1757, and Burke probably knew him. He certainly knew Lord Charlemont, who met Montesquieu in 1754 and 1755. It is in the first of these meetings that Montesquieu expressed his view of the Irish situation.
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Notes
Francis Hardy, Memoirs of the political and private life of James Caulfield, Earl of Charlemont (London: 1810) p. 36.
The Writings and speeches of Edmund Burke, general editor, Paul Langford, vol. ix, i: The Revolutionary War 1794-1797. ii: Ireland, ed. R.B. McDowell (Oxford: 1991) pp. 602–3.
The most interesting sustained treatment of Burke’s outsider status is Isaac Kramnick, The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (New York: 1977).
See S. Deane, The French Revolution and Enlightenment in England 1789–1832 (Cambridge, Mass.: 1988) pp. 27–31; Martin Thom, Republics, Nations and Tribes (London: 1995) pp. 45–56, 200–11.
On these issues, see D. Lieberman, The Province of Legislation Defined. Legal Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: 1989).
Cf. A. de Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime, ed. G.W. Headlam (Oxford: 1904) p. 90.
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Deane, S. (1999). Montesquieu and Burke. In: Gargett, G., Sheridan, G. (eds) Ireland and the French Enlightenment, 1700–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510159_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510159_3
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