Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Montesquieu

Leave it to a philosopher of Montesquieu's stripe to shrink an empire to a shoe problem. The line reads like a throwaway gag, but its intent is pointed: it punctures the heroic origin stories nations tell about themselves. Rome, in the standard script, builds roads because it is disciplined, civilizing, destined. Montesquieu flips the telescope. What if the grandest infrastructure project in the ancient world traces back not to virtue or providence, but to blisters?

The subtext is classic Enlightenment mischief: de-sacralize power by tracing it to mundane incentives. People (and states) love to retroactively drape necessity in nobility. By blaming “inconvenient footwear,” he caricatures the way historians and politicians launder contingency into purpose. The joke isn’t that shoes literally caused highways; it’s that “great causes” often aren’t great at all, just repeated, amplified, and later dressed up as ideology.

Context matters. Montesquieu is writing in a period obsessed with systems: climate, commerce, law, and custom as forces that shape societies more reliably than the will of kings. The quip functions as a miniature manifesto for that worldview. It’s also a sly warning to his contemporaries: if Rome’s monuments can be reinterpreted as accidents of comfort, then modern empires’ self-flattering explanations deserve similar suspicion.

The wit lands because it’s an insult disguised as sociology: it lets you laugh at Rome while quietly learning how to distrust every empire’s press release, including your own.