"If conquest does not bind posterity, so neither can compact bind it"
About this Quote
There is a cold, almost legalistic audacity in Smith's line: it refuses the comforting fiction that a nation can sign away the future with a flourish of parchment. By pairing "conquest" and "compact", she collapses the moral distance between rule by force and rule by agreement. If the sword cannot permanently oblige those who come after, why should a treaty or constitution be treated as sacred chainmail?
The intent is not to sneer at law but to expose its coercive aftertaste. "Bind posterity" is the operative phrase: Smith is arguing about intergenerational legitimacy, the way political authority tries to launder present power into permanent obligation. Conquest is the obvious villain; compact is the polite one. Her rhetorical move is to make them twins. It is a neat act of Enlightenment skepticism, and also a poet's compression: two abstract nouns, balanced syntax, a quietly devastating "so neither", and suddenly the reader has to ask who benefits when the future is told it has already consented.
Context matters. Writing in the late 18th century, Smith lived through the American and French Revolutions and their aftershocks in Britain: debates about rights, representation, and whether tradition is wisdom or inertia. The subtext is revolutionary without being barricade-talk: if posterity cannot be conquered into obedience, it also cannot be contractually pre-obligated into it. Consent is not inheritable property. And in that insistence, Smith presses on a problem still alive today: institutions love to call themselves enduring; people keep arriving, unconsulted, to dispute the terms.
The intent is not to sneer at law but to expose its coercive aftertaste. "Bind posterity" is the operative phrase: Smith is arguing about intergenerational legitimacy, the way political authority tries to launder present power into permanent obligation. Conquest is the obvious villain; compact is the polite one. Her rhetorical move is to make them twins. It is a neat act of Enlightenment skepticism, and also a poet's compression: two abstract nouns, balanced syntax, a quietly devastating "so neither", and suddenly the reader has to ask who benefits when the future is told it has already consented.
Context matters. Writing in the late 18th century, Smith lived through the American and French Revolutions and their aftershocks in Britain: debates about rights, representation, and whether tradition is wisdom or inertia. The subtext is revolutionary without being barricade-talk: if posterity cannot be conquered into obedience, it also cannot be contractually pre-obligated into it. Consent is not inheritable property. And in that insistence, Smith presses on a problem still alive today: institutions love to call themselves enduring; people keep arriving, unconsulted, to dispute the terms.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
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