Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

A neat Enlightenment scalpel: society isn’t a pile of individuals, it’s the binding tissue between them. Montesquieu’s phrasing quietly demotes the heroic “great man” story and elevates something less flattering and more accurate - systems. Laws, customs, institutions, class structures, even climate (a factor he famously entertained) don’t just reflect people; they manufacture incentives and limits that make certain kinds of people more likely to appear and succeed.

The intent is diagnostic. If “society” were just “men themselves,” political reform would be a morality play: replace bad actors with virtuous ones and the plot improves. By defining society as union, Montesquieu shifts the reader toward design questions: What arrangements turn private interests into public order? What kinds of unions produce tyranny, and which produce liberty? That’s the subtext behind his comparative method in The Spirit of the Laws, where he treats governance less as theology and more as engineering.

There’s also a warning embedded in the grammar. Union can be consensual or coerced; it can be adhesive or suffocating. Society is not guaranteed to be humane simply because humans compose it. The union has a life of its own, with feedback loops that outlast any one generation and can drag decent people into indecent roles. In an era of monarchies, salons, and rising commercial modernity, this was a politically useful thought: critique the arrangement, not merely the ruler. Montesquieu gives reformers a vocabulary for structural blame - and structural hope.