Politics & Power Quote by Will Durant

Durant’s line lands like a historian’s version of a moral law: the seed of failure is often the virtue a system can’t stop worshipping. He’s not arguing that governments collapse because they betray their ideals, but because they cling to them past the point of usefulness. The word “excess” does the heavy lifting. It suggests not a sudden coup or a villain, but a slow drift into overapplication: the principle that once made a regime coherent becomes a solvent that dissolves it.

The intent is diagnostic, almost clinical. Durant spent his career compressing centuries into patterns, and this is pattern-thinking at its sharpest: monarchy rots into absolutism, democracy into faction or mob pressure, aristocracy into oligarchic self-dealing, revolutions into purges. The subtext is a warning against political purity as a governing style. When a principle becomes sacred, compromise starts to look like corruption; reality, like heresy. That’s when systems stop correcting themselves.

Context matters: Durant wrote through two world wars, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism and communism, and America’s own swings between reform and reaction. In that century, “excess” wasn’t abstract. It was mass politics without brakes, state power without limits, markets without guardrails, ideology without humility. His sentence flatters no camp; it indicts the human tendency to turn a tool into a religion. A stable government, he implies, isn’t one with the purest principle, but the most disciplined relationship to it.