Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

A chilling thing about this definition is how clinically it’s written, as if slavery were a legal device you might diagram on a chalkboard. That coolness is the point. Montesquieu doesn’t begin with whips or ships; he begins with “the establishment of a right,” yanking the conversation out of moral hand-wringing and into jurisprudence. Slavery isn’t framed as a regrettable practice or a cultural habit. It’s a deliberate act of lawmaking: society laundering violence into legitimacy.

The phrase “properly so called” is doing quiet work, too. It signals that euphemisms and softer servitudes don’t interest him here; he’s pinning down the core mechanism. Slavery, in its pure form, is the conversion of a person into a jurisdiction. Once “right” is granted, power becomes total: “absolute master of his life and fortune.” Not just labor, not just movement, but existence and property in the broadest sense. “Fortune” lands especially hard in a world where wealth, inheritance, and civic standing were bound up with who counted as a legal subject. To own someone’s fortune is to own their future.

Context sharpens the blade. Writing in the early Enlightenment, Montesquieu is obsessed with how laws manufacture social reality. This definition reads like an indictment of states that congratulate themselves on order while authorizing domination. The subtext: slavery isn’t an aberration inside a legal system; it’s a legal system revealing its ugliest capability - to make “absolute master” sound like a normal category of rights.