Montesquieu is not often thought of as a significant natural law thinker. The article on natural law in theInternational Encyclopedia of the Social Sciencesdiscusses many theorists of the natural law, but Montesquieu is not among them. A valuable older survey of natural law theorizing by legal philosopher A. P. d'Entrèves cites the Frenchman but once, as a very minor character in a story with far more significant actors—Thomas Aquinas, Hugo Grotius, even Georg Hegel. A yet more comprehensive survey of the topic,Natural Law and Human Dignity, by French philosopher and social theorist Ernst Bloch, does not mention Montesquieu at all.
