Daily Inspiration Quote by Charles de Secondat

Slavery isn’t just an unfortunate policy mistake here; it’s a moral contradiction baked into the thing itself. When Montesquieu calls slavery “in its own nature bad,” he’s doing more than condemning cruelty. He’s rejecting the era’s favorite escape hatch: the idea that the institution might be acceptable if administered “humanely,” justified by climate, economics, conquest, or custom. The phrasing is surgical. “State” makes slavery sound like a legal condition, almost bureaucratic, which is exactly the point: the Enlightenment loved systems, and Montesquieu aims his critique at the system-level logic that turns people into property.

The subtext is political as much as ethical. Montesquieu wrote in a Europe that was intellectually flirting with liberty while financially entangled in colonial extraction. By grounding the critique in “nature,” he invokes a higher court than kings or parliaments: natural law, the philosophical backbone of emerging rights talk. That move matters because it relocates the argument from sentiment to legitimacy. If slavery is “in its own nature bad,” no statute can cleanse it; no profit can redeem it.

Contextually, this sits inside a project concerned with how laws shape societies and how power rationalizes itself. Montesquieu often used irony elsewhere to expose hypocrisy, and this line retains that cool, unblinking clarity: it denies the comfortable middle ground where elites can oppose “excesses” of slavery while keeping the institution intact. It’s an Enlightenment mic drop aimed at enlightened self-interest.