Politics & Power Quote by Amos Bronson Alcott

A government that exists to shield commerce and little else is, in Alcott's blunt image, already dead on its feet. “Carcass” isn’t just insult; it’s a diagnosis. He’s treating the state as a moral organism: without duties beyond profit-protection, it loses the animating spirit that makes authority legitimate. The line works because it refuses the polite fiction that a market-friendly regime is automatically a “healthy” one. Alcott flips the usual 19th-century boosterism on its back: if business is the only constituency that counts, the state becomes meat for scavengers.

The subtext is aimed at a familiar American temptation: equating freedom with the freedom to transact, and confusing public purpose with private gain. Alcott is warning that corruption isn’t an accident that befalls such a system; it’s the natural metabolism of it. When policy is designed primarily to serve those with capital, government becomes a kind of patronage machine, and officials learn the quickest route to power is to auction it. Decay follows not because people suddenly become worse, but because incentives do.

Context matters. Alcott is a Transcendentalist-era educator, steeped in reformist energies (abolition, women’s rights, utopian experiments) and suspicious of institutions that neglect conscience. This sentence carries that classroom moral seriousness into politics: a society can’t educate character while its government educates greed. The threat he names isn’t merely collapse; it’s hollowing out. A “carcass” can still look like a body, even mimic motion, but it no longer contains a living public.