Politics & Power Quote by Dudley North

Wealth, in Dudley North's telling, isn’t a glittering personal achievement; it’s a machine for continuity. The definition of “the Rich” quietly dodges virtue or industry and lands on something colder and more durable: transmission. Rich people are those who can make their money survive them. That emphasis reads less like moral philosophy than political anatomy, the kind of sentence you write when you’re trying to explain why societies stratify even when individuals rise and fall.

North is working in a late-17th-century England where commerce is expanding, credit is becoming more sophisticated, and the modern state is learning to tax, borrow, and wage war at scale. In that world, inheritance is not an afterthought; it’s the infrastructure that turns private accumulation into public reality. “Posterity” is doing heavy lifting: it implies legitimacy, lineage, and a future secured in advance. The subtext is that inequality isn’t merely a bug of the system. It’s one of the system’s organizing principles.

The sentence also performs a neat ideological move. By saying families “become” rich, he treats wealth as a generational process, not an isolated windfall, which normalizes hierarchy as organic growth. Then he telescopes outward: families “compound” into cities and nations, making private property feel like the building block of collective life. It’s a proto-liberal argument that quietly equates social order with the stability of inherited capital. You can hear the implied warning, too: disrupt the chain of transmission, and you’re not just hitting elites; you’re shaking the scaffolding of the polity.