One of the first moderns explicitly to ask a core political question: what is the hidden recipe behind a visibly successful society? And as corollary: when this society goes in decline, what factors are then at play? Montesquieu answers, almost like a Cicero, Sallust or Tacitus, that the causes of Rome's greatness & decline were mainly moral. Roman citizens expressed & upheld a series of simple, common-sense habits & virtues - cultivating each soldier's physical endurance, adopting foreign inventions whenever advantageous, willingly embracing every necessary conflict, & many more. Exactly as long as these habits were in use, Rome prospered.

A luminous, terse & rather remarkable focus on each citizen's responsibility & morals, by this founding father of institutional politics, partial to aristocratic oligarchies of which republican Rome remains the classic example. ( )

loved this book. ( )