Life & Wisdom Quote by Herbert Read

A poet’s line that reads like a constitutional draft is doing something sneaky: it insists that conflict isn’t a glitch in society, it’s the raw material. Herbert Read’s “I can imagine no society which does not embody some method of arbitration” sounds blandly procedural until you notice the trapdoor under it. Arbitration isn’t optional decor for a mature civilization; it’s the proof that people with clashing interests have agreed to keep living together anyway.

Read wrote as an anarchist-leaning modernist who lived through two world wars and watched states claim moral authority while industrializing violence. In that light, “arbitration” becomes a rebuke to fantasies on both ends: the utopian dream that harmony can replace dispute, and the hard-nosed myth that order can be maintained by force alone. He chooses the soft word. Not “law,” not “punishment,” not even “justice” - terms that assume a sovereign and an ideology. “Arbitration” suggests negotiation, mediation, a mechanism that can exist in a village council as easily as in a court. It’s governance stripped of grandeur.

The subtext is political: if every society must arbitrate, then the real question isn’t whether we’ll have power, but how visibly and fairly it will operate. Read’s poetic sensibility shows in the phrasing “I can imagine no…” - a creative faculty used to declare limits. Imagination, he implies, can picture many futures, but none without conflict-management. The line makes peace feel less like a sentiment and more like an infrastructure project.