Leadership Quote by John Buchanan Robinson

Robinson’s “egoism” isn’t the petty chest-thumping we usually mean by ego. It’s a claim about sovereignty: the individual as the final court of appeal, with institutions demoted to optional instruments. The sentence builds like a legal brief. First, he expands the definition (“more than this”), then issues a sweeping hierarchy (“above all institutions and all formulas”), and finally tightens the screw with a conditional: institutions “exist only so far as” the person “accepts” them. That last move is the real provocation. He doesn’t merely argue that people should be free; he implies that legitimacy itself is leased from personal consent.

Coming from a late-19th/early-20th century politician, the subtext reads as both democratic and dangerous. Democratic, because it flatters the citizen as an agent rather than a subject, pushing back against bureaucracy, party orthodoxy, and inherited authority. Dangerous, because it smuggles in a radical voluntarism: if rules are real only when I internalize them, what happens to shared obligations that are designed precisely to bind us when we don’t “choose” them? Taxes, court rulings, minority rights, public health mandates: the modern state runs on the premise that some constraints are not personal lifestyle preferences.

The phrasing “formulas” is telling. He’s not only targeting governments; he’s taking aim at ideologies, creeds, even ready-made moral systems. The intent is to elevate conscience over compliance. The context is an era anxious about mass society and institutional growth; Robinson offers an old liberal answer: the individual remains the prime reality, and everything else is negotiable.