The Disposition of Power II

During the pre-Revolutionary period, the theory of politics that emerged leaned on the principle what laid at the rear of each political act, the definitive reason of political debate was none other than the disposition of power. The keenness of the perceptions colonists had with the challenge was they had no doubt what it was and the active role it would have throughout the history of the new nation. That power would not, and must not, be muddled with the physical world. What was meant by the colonists as power, according to John Adams, was “. . . the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life; ultimately force, compulsion.” Thus for the colonists, and perhaps contemporary people, they were and remain richly connotative words, for they stayed on continuously, nearly ad infinitum.

The most common argument on power were, and continue to be, positioned on its quality of a need to be aggressive. The seemingly boundless motivation to expand outside appropriate limitations began soon after the nation’s founding, has accelerated with each passing generation. John Otis writing in 1765 put it: “Power, it is said over and over again, has an encroaching nature”; “. . . if at first it meets with no control [it] creeps by degrees and quick subdues the whole.” The hand of power tenaciously reaches out to clutch, to grasp, to seize, more control. What it indiscriminately takes hold of it, it will forever retain, and like a cancer, it will devour faster and faster with every generation to a point where its momentum, its appetite, and its desire, so restless, so ambitious, so unquenchable, that it is always ready to consume everything in its path, including individual liberty.

The greatest potential of danger power brings about is that it is everywhere in public life, and constantly pushing, threatening, and grasping, all too often destroying the individuality of the people, its primary champion. The supreme importance to the aggressiveness of power is that its natural prey, the essential fatality, being Individual Liberty, Natural Law, and Natural Rights. As Richard Bland wrote in 1766, “Right and power have very different meanings, and convey very different ideas. Power abstracted from right cannot give just a just title to dominion, nor is it possible legitimately, or even logically, to build right upon power.” When the two are intermingled, when brutal power becomes an irresistible argument of boundless right, as it has over the centuries, as a consequence, innocence and justice merely sighed and quietly submitted to the ruthless cruelty of authoritarians and dictators.