Margaret Mauldon

Charles de Secondat baron de Montesquieu

Andrew Kahn

Two Persian travellers arrive in Paris and report on the European society of the Enlightenment in their letters home. With biting satire they compare East and West, while unsettling news from the harem provides a suspenseful plot of jealousy and passion. This is the first English translation based on the original text.

Persian Letters

Charles de Secondat Montesquieu, baron de

Montesquieu

Based on the 1761 edition, this translation strives for fidelity and retains Montesquieu's paragraphing. George R. Healy's Introduction discusses The Persian Letters as a kind of overture to the Enlightenment, a work of remarkable diversity designed more to explore a problem of great urgency for eighteenth century thought than to resolve it: that of discovering universals, or at least the pragmatic constants, amid the diversity of human culture and society, and of confronting the proposition that there are no values in human relationships except those imposed by force or agreed upon in self-interested conventions.

Persian Letters

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