48
The Constitution’s Deep Roots
Ranking of Political Thinkers by Frequency of Citation and by Decade
1760s
1770s
1780s
1790s
1800–1805
Total
Montesquieu
Blackstone
Locke
Hume
Plutarch
Beccaria
Cato
Delolme
Pufendorf
Coke
Cicero
Hobbes
subtotal
Others
total
8
1
11
1
1
0
1
0
4
5
1
0
33
67
100
7
3
7
1
3
1
1
0
0
0
1
1
25
75
100
14
7
1
1
1
3
3
3
1
1
1
1
37
63
100
4
11
1
6
2
0
0
1
0
2
2
0
29
71
100
1
15
1
5
0
0
0
0
5
4
1
0
32
68
100
8.3
7.9
2.9
2.7
1.5
1.5
1.4
1.4
1.3
1.3
1.2
1.0
32.4
67.6
100.0
total citations
examined
216
544
1306
674
414
3154
All numbers except those in the last column are rounded to the nearest whole. Source:
Donald Lutz, A Preface to American Political Theory (Lawrence: Kansas University Press,
1992), 138.
Rousseau (the patron saint of French revolutionaries), or subscribed to
the views of Helvetius, Turgot, or Condorcet. Holbach’s System of Nature
(1773), an attack on religion and government anticipating in many respects the ideas of Karl Marx, seems to have had few if any followers in
the American colonies. Many of the French works, in fact, had not been
translated into English.
The single great exception was Charles Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws
(1748), one of the most widely read and frequently cited authorities relied
upon by the Americans in framing a new system of government. Montesquieu did not advocate utopian solutions to the problem of despotism
in his age. He favored constitutional reform. His practical aim was to analyze the constitutional conditions upon which freedom depends, in the