Politics & Power Quote by Denis Diderot

Diderot is poking a finger straight into the 18th century's favorite alibi: the idea that morality is stitched into a people like a costume, “naturally” African or European, and therefore beyond critique. His move is to strip morals of their exotic labels and drag them back to the mundane, controllable machinery of power. If morals are “the result of legislation and government,” then they aren’t evidence of some civilizational essence; they’re policy outcomes. That’s an Enlightenment provocation with teeth: it turns a supposedly timeless hierarchy into a man-made arrangement that can be redesigned.

The subtext is almost bureaucratically radical. Diderot isn’t merely defending cultural difference; he’s indicting how states manufacture virtue narratives to justify themselves. What gets called “moral” often tracks what a regime needs: stable families, obedient workers, loyal subjects, disciplined bodies. By naming government as the author of morals, he also names responsibility. If a society’s ethical life is degraded, you don’t blame the climate, the bloodline, or the “character” of a continent. You look at laws, institutions, and the incentives they enforce.

Context matters: Diderot is writing in an era when European empires were busy turning conquest into a moral story about “civilizing” the world. His line refuses that geography. “They are good or bad” is the punch: a universal standard, not of European superiority, but of evaluative scrutiny. The irony is sharp: the same governments claiming moral authority are, in his framing, the ones producing the moral mess.