Politics & Power Quote by James Q. Wilson

“A government without the power of defense!” lands like a scoff because it’s engineered to. James Q. Wilson isn’t inviting debate so much as marking the boundaries of what counts as “government” in the first place. The punchline is the last word: “solecism,” a term for a grammatical error, repurposed as political indictment. He’s not saying such a government would be imprudent or risky; he’s saying it’s a category mistake, like a sentence that can’t be parsed.

That rhetorical move does quiet work. By treating “defense” as definitional rather than discretionary, Wilson pre-empts the moral arguments that often surround militaries, policing, and national security. If defense is the state’s basic syntax, then objections to coercive power start to sound like confusion, not dissent. It’s a classic maneuver in law-and-order liberalism: frame force as infrastructure, as necessary as roads or courts, and you shift the conversation from “Should we?” to “How much?”

The exclamation point matters, too. It signals impatience with utopianism - especially the kind that imagines governance as service delivery without coercion. In late-20th-century American politics, where debates over crime, Cold War posture, and the expanding security apparatus were constant background noise, Wilson’s formulation serves as a rebuke to anti-militarist or radically decentralist visions. The subtext is blunt: legitimacy begins where the monopoly on force begins. Everything else is commentary.