Politics & Power Quote by Herbert Spencer

Spencer fires this line like a neat little trap: if communism asks people to stop wanting private property, it’s not just politically risky, it’s psychologically absurd. The move is classic 19th-century liberal confidence dressed as common sense. He doesn’t bother to argue about wages, exploitation, or distribution; he goes lower and harder, to “elements of our nature,” where debate starts to look like denial of reality.

The intent is polemical but also preemptive. By framing property-desire as innate, Spencer shifts communism from “a competing theory of justice” to “a theory that misunderstands human beings.” That’s an effective rhetorical downgrade. It invites the reader to treat communists less as opponents than as utopians inventing systems for a species that doesn’t exist.

The subtext is doing two jobs at once. First, it launders a contested social arrangement into something like biology: property isn’t defended as a legal construct with winners and losers, but as a natural appetite. Second, it quietly equates the desire for property with the legitimacy of property relations. Wanting something, Spencer implies, is evidence it should be organized and protected as a right.

Context matters: Spencer is writing in an era of industrial upheaval, widening class conflict, and rising socialist movements. His broader project in social evolution and “natural” social order makes this line feel less like a standalone observation and more like a cornerstone. If nature wants property, reform can tweak around the edges, but revolution becomes an assault on the human animal itself. That’s why it works: it turns a political dispute into an argument about human nature, where the burden of proof becomes nearly impossible to meet.