It is difficult to know how to place Montesquieu - if you're the kind of person who likes to categorize. Historian, political philosopher, sociologist, jurist or, if you think the Persian Letters a novel, a novelist - he was all these things. Perhaps, as some have, he could be placed among that almost extinct species, the man of letters The books that make up. The Spirit of the Laws have had the most influence on later thinkers, and in them, as in his equally great Considerations on the Causes of the Grandeur and Decadence of the Romans, he makes his underlying purpose clear. It is to make the random, apparently meaningless variety of events understandable; he wanted to find out what the historical truth was. His starting point then was this almost endless variety of morals, customs, ideas, laws and institutions and to make some sense out of them. He believed it was not chance that ruled the world, and that, beyond the chaos of accidents, there must be underlying causes that account for the apparent madness of things.