Politics & Power Quote by Charles de Secondat

A government doesn not rot first at the edges; it rots at the center, where it keeps its reasons for existing. Montesquieu is warning that collapse is rarely a sudden coup or a single bad leader. It is the slow replacement of founding restraints with convenient exceptions, the quiet normalization of "temporary" powers, the way public office shifts from duty to entitlement. By the time institutions visibly malfunction, the real damage has already happened: the moral and constitutional vocabulary that once limited action has been hollowed out.

The line works because it treats "principles" not as decorative ideals but as operating software. Laws can remain on the books while their animating commitments evaporate. Courts can sit while independence turns into partisanship. Elections can occur while legitimacy is reduced to raw victory. Montesquieu, writing in an era of absolute monarchy and elite intrigue, understood that governments survive less on force than on agreed-upon limits: separation of powers, civic virtue, and the belief that authority is bounded.

The subtext is pointedly anti-cynical in one way and brutally cynical in another. It rejects the comforting story that institutions are self-correcting machines. It also implies that citizens and officials alike participate in decay each time they excuse a shortcut because it serves their side. Deterioration, here, is not a scandal; it is a habit. And habits are harder to indict, because they feel like realism right up until they become ruin.