French political philosopher Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu is generally considered the "first to build an explicit and systematic body of theory based on the principle of institutional reform with his book The Spirit of the Laws (1748)"
widely considered to have "effectively created modern politics"
"The Founding Fathers of the United States, all avid readers of Montesquieu, were consciously trying to put his theories into practice when they attempted to create a constitution that would preserve the spirit of individual liberty" (481)
Graeber and Wengrow note, speculatively, that in 1725 an Osage and Missouria delegation came to Paris and met with prominent European intellectuals
Montesquieu "was indeed in Paris at the time" and "the chapters in The Spirit of the Laws which speculate on the modes of savage government seem an almost exact reproduction of what Montesquieu would likely have heard from them"