Success Quote by William Graham Sumner

Nothing scares Sumner like a roomful of responsibility with no owner. "If you ever live in a country run by a committee, be on the committee" reads like practical advice, but it carries an acid little theory of power: when decision-making gets diffused, accountability evaporates, and the only real safety is proximity. The line is less civic-minded than survivalist. It assumes committees are not engines of consensus so much as machines for laundering blame and distributing favors.

Sumner is pointing at a political technology that was already modern in his era: bureaucracy, boards, commissions, party caucuses - rule by process. Committees promise neutrality and deliberation; the subtext is that they also create an insiders' ecosystem where outcomes are shaped by who gets a seat, who controls the agenda, and who can stall. "Be on the committee" isn't a call to serve; it's a warning that people outside the room are the raw material committees act upon.

Context matters: Sumner, a Gilded Age public intellectual with a businessman’s suspicion of state machinery, watched industrial capitalism collide with reform politics, patronage, and the expanding administrative state. His quip distills that tension into a single cynical hinge: if governance becomes collective, then individual liberty depends less on laws than on access. The wit works because it flips the democratic ideal. Instead of "everyone should have a voice", the real lesson is "someone will; make sure it's you."