E. Мontagu on reason of Sparta rule system changes

In the last decades of the 20th century foreign and domestic historiography reassessed the theoreticalbases used in history works of the middle and second half of the 18th century. There are few works on assessment of one of the currentsof English history - ancient historiography in domestic and foreign history researches. The reason to this is incorrect determination ofthe main problems considered by English historians of Antiquity of the 18th century, as well as the theoretical bases. The latter largelydepended on the features of the political situation of the 18th century. The interpretation of the political situation of the 18th century asthe time or political compromise, or complete rule of the Whigs in domestic and foreign historiography resulted in the opinion that theliberal Whigs ideas ruled during the English Enlightenment. Originally, in the 19th century, this opinion was an effect of the consciousinterpretation of the 17th century political situation in the history, which was 'Whigs' by nature, and later, in the 20th century, was theresult of influences of liberal-bourgeois ideas that emphasized the positive, rather than the disastrous role of the economic, materialfactor in the political development of the society for the fate of the antique states. Domestic Soviet historiography often plagiarized theargumentation of the liberal historiography of the 19th - 20th cc., however, it criticized historians of Antiquity, as contrasted to liberalhistoriography in the class approach: for underestimation of the positive role of the economic factor, and for exaggeration of the role ofthe political and religious factors. It was reached by altering the interpretations, as in case with W. Mitford, but more the works ofhistorians that contradicted the given description of the epoch would not be mentioned, which happened with E. Montagu and J. Gillis.E. Montagu's Reflection on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republics published in 1759 was ignored in the 19th century and was notpopular in the 20th century, too. Thus, in her fundamental work The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought J. Roberts gives onlyshort and, in our opinion, sometimes unmotivated review of E. Montagu's writing. Complying with the opinion of J. Roberts thatMontagu set his main task as determination of reasons of the rise and fall of the antique republics, Roberts selects, to our mind, a set ofsecondary ideas from E. Montagu's works. J. Roberts ignored the role of the distribution of property and other material factors. In thearticle an attempt is made to prove that E. Montagu pays great attention to these factors when considering the reasons and circumstancesof Lycurgus' reforms realization, as well as the reasons of the decay of Sparta and the failures f attempts to prevent this decay.

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