Life & Wisdom Quote by Fredrik Bajer

There’s a quiet bomb tucked into Bajer’s polite phrasing: “common supreme authority” sounds like administrative tidiness, but he treats it as a threat discovered through “study,” not passion. That’s the rhetorical trick. He isn’t rejecting power because he’s rebellious; he’s rejecting it because he’s methodical. The sentence performs the very political sensibility it endorses: sober, evidence-driven skepticism toward any structure that claims to sit above everyone.

The subtext is a critique of empire-thinking and centralized sovereignty at the moment Europe was learning, over and over, how efficiently “supreme authority” can turn coordination into coercion. Bajer’s lifetime runs through the consolidation of nation-states, the prestige of bureaucracy, the rise of mass politics, and the escalating logic that big problems require one commanding center. Against that tide, he frames central authority as not merely risky but “undesirable” in principle. Not dangerous today, redeemable tomorrow; undesirable as a design.

“Common” is doing extra work here. It implies consensus, shared benefit, a universal referee. Bajer punctures that promise. A supreme authority can be “common” only by flattening difference, overruling minorities, and converting plural societies into manageable units. His conclusion hints at an alternative ethic: peace and cooperation built through federations, treaties, and voluntary alignment rather than a single top-down arbiter.

It’s an anti-utopian sentence: suspicious of neat solutions, wary of the comfort people take in being governed “for the greater good,” and determined to keep politics messy enough that no one institution gets to call itself final.