Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is making a sneakily radical claim in the language of calm expertise: the real flag of human freedom might be a shared way of speaking that belongs to no one state. Coming from a linguist-anthropologist writing in an era of hardening borders, mass propaganda, and “one nation, one language” politics, the line reads like a rebuttal to the 20th century’s favorite shortcut: turn culture into a passport and call it destiny.

The phrasing matters. “Common allegiance” borrows the vocabulary of citizenship and loyalty, then quietly reroutes it away from armies and ministries toward “form of expression” - not territory, not bloodline, not even a specific tongue. He’s arguing for a cosmopolitan commitment to communication itself: to art, scholarship, and cross-border discourse as a civic bond. That’s why “identified with no single national unit” is the load-bearing clause. Sapir knows how quickly language gets conscripted into nationalism; he’s proposing an alternative where expression becomes a commons rather than a boundary.

The subtext is both hopeful and wary. Calling it “one of the most potent symbols” admits symbolism’s double edge: symbols mobilize people, but they can also be weaponized. Sapir wants a symbol that resists capture - a portable, plural “allegiance” that makes the human spirit harder to regiment. In the interwar shadow, that’s not abstract idealism; it’s a defensive strategy for freedom, smuggled in as a theory of culture.