Montesquieu's work influenced the revolutions in the late 1700s, changing how people set up their republican governments and influencing how we see government today.
Or they may try all these without having read Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws, Rousseau's The Social Contract, and Locke's second treatise Of Civil Government.
Jefferson not only collected books, he read them with an unquenchable appetite - Cicero in Latin, Plato in Greek, Montesquieu in French, Cervantes in Spanish.
The Spirit of the Laws was so controversial that the Catholic Church banned the book only three years after it was published, but even they could not stop Montesquieu's ideas.
And if you look at the Federalist Papers, the intellectual most cited in the Federalist Papers, I think, in terms of just the number of times it's cited, is Montesquieu.
This and the consent of the governed would become the central planks of democracy, while both Locke's and Montesquieu's thoughts on the separation of powers were key to shaping the U.S. Congress.
The high rate of interest among all Mahometan nations is accounted for by M. Montesquieu, not from their poverty, but partly from this, and partly from the difficulty of recovering the money.
Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Locke, Hobbes, and Rousseau believed that the world was an object of study and that people could understand and control the world by means of reason and empirical research.