Politics & Power Quote by Friedrich List

List is picking a fight with the moral glamour of the free market by drawing a blunt distinction: private interest and public interest are not just different, they can actively collide. The first clause punctures the comforting fable that self-seeking automatically harmonizes into social good. An individual can profit by dumping costs on everyone else (pollution, monopoly pricing, financial speculation), and the “may injure” is doing strategic work: it’s restrained, empirical, hard to dismiss as hysteria.

Then comes the sharper twist. List admits the reverse discomfort: when a nation pursues “general welfare,” it will sometimes “check” the interests of some members. That verb is a quiet rebuke to the idea that any constraint is tyranny. In his frame, tariffs, industrial policy, infrastructure spending, and education systems are not acts of bureaucratic vanity; they’re instruments of national capacity-building that inevitably create winners and losers in the short run. The subtext is political: stop pretending policy can be pure. Distributional conflict is not a bug, it’s the terrain.

Context matters. Writing in an era when Britain’s industrial dominance made laissez-faire sound like a universal principle rather than a historically convenient one, List helped pioneer the “infant industry” argument: countries trying to catch up may need protection and coordination until domestic production can compete. His nationalism isn’t chest-thumping; it’s developmental. He’s warning that if you universalize individual-market logic to the level of nations, you’ll mistake dependence for efficiency and call it freedom.

The line lands because it refuses easy innocence. It tells both libertarians and central planners: your preferred mechanism produces collateral damage; the honest debate is which damage you can justify, and for whom.