Politics & Power Quote by Charles de Secondat

Cosmopolitanism, here, isn’t a warm sentiment; it’s a hard constraint. Montesquieu draws a bright ethical line: political ingenuity is not automatically moral ingenuity, and the nation-state doesn’t get to launder harm into virtue just by calling it “interest.” The key move is his hierarchy of identity. “First a man” isn’t a platitude but a deliberate demotion of Frenchness from essence to accident. You don’t get to treat citizenship as destiny; it’s contingency, the random paperwork of birth. That turns patriotism from a sacred duty into a negotiable loyalty, answerable to a prior standard.

The “prince” matters. Montesquieu is writing under monarchy, when policy is framed as service to a ruler and raison d’etat is the reigning logic. Advising the sovereign was a prestigious intellectual job, and he’s quietly sabotaging it: the counselor’s obligation is not to maximize advantage at any cost but to refuse certain advantages altogether. The sentence is built like a legal argument, not a sermon: “necessarily” versus “accidentally” sounds like scholastic philosophy, but it’s doing political work. If Frenchness is accidental, then using “France” as a moral shield is incoherent.

Subtext: this is an indictment of zero-sum empire, mercantilism, and wars sold as national glory. He’s sketching an early human-rights premise without the later vocabulary: legitimacy depends on what your policy does to others, not just what it delivers at home. It’s Enlightenment liberalism with teeth, aimed straight at the state’s favorite excuse.