Politics & Power Quote by Michel de Montaigne

The barb in Montaigne's line is how quickly it collapses the grand theater of politics into the cramped, petty frictions of domestic life. A state, in Renaissance imagination, is pageantry: law, war, hierarchy, ceremony. A family is supposed to be natural, intimate, manageable. Montaigne flips that expectation and, with a shrug, suggests the ratio of hassle to authority barely changes. Power doesn’t simplify; it multiplies the occasions for irritation.

The intent is quietly anti-heroic. Montaigne isn’t denying that states matter; he’s puncturing the fantasy that rulers inhabit a cleaner realm of rational command than ordinary people. The subtext is a skepticism about control itself: governing is less about issuing orders than absorbing competing wills, misread motives, and daily mess. You can draft edicts or household rules; either way you’re negotiating pride, fear, appetite, and the stubborn autonomy of others. The “vexation” isn’t an accident of bad systems but a feature of human nature.

Context matters: Montaigne writes after civil wars and sectarian violence have shown what “statecraft” looks like when certainty turns cruel. His Essays repeatedly prefer the scale of lived experience to abstract political theory. By equating family management with state management, he also democratizes political insight: you don’t need a crown to understand governance; you’ve seen it at the dinner table. It’s a cool, deflationary humanism that still lands today, when we watch leaders flail at problems that look, unglamorously, like group chats with budgets.