Politics & Power Quote by Charles de Secondat

Power is rarely loud at first; it’s a sensation, a swelling confidence a society feels in its bones. Montesquieu’s line catches that exact hinge moment: the instant collective self-awareness curdles into geopolitics. “Begins to feel its strength” is doing the real work here. Strength isn’t just armies or wealth; it’s the psychological recognition that you can impose costs, redraw borders, set terms. Once a nation internalizes that capability, the outside world stops being a landscape and becomes a scoreboard.

The subtext is bleakly mechanical. War isn’t framed as a moral failure or a tragic exception. It “arises,” almost like weather, from a predictable shift in self-perception. That passive phrasing is a tell: Montesquieu is describing an engine, not assigning villainy. He’s also smuggling in a warning about domestic consolidation. A society that coheres enough to “feel” strong has already solved certain internal tensions; external conflict becomes the next arena where unity can be tested, performed, and justified.

Context matters: writing in the long shadow of Louis XIV and the perpetual European contest for balance-of-power dominance, Montesquieu watches states professionalize, centralize, and rationalize violence. His broader project in The Spirit of the Laws is to map how institutions, commerce, and climate shape political behavior. This sentence fits that anatomy lesson: once societies become legible to themselves as “nations,” they become legible as rivals. The line is less prophecy than diagnosis, and that’s why it stings. It suggests peace is not the default state nations fall from, but a temporary arrangement that must be engineered against the intoxicating discovery of strength.