Leadership Quote by Frederica Montseny

Montseny’s line is a dare disguised as a warning: govern yourselves, or someone else will do it for you with a boot on your neck. The rhetorical trick is the reversal. Dictatorships brag about “order” and “responsibility”; Montseny steals those words back and reframes them as democratic obligations, not authoritarian virtues. She’s not romanticizing freedom as a vibe. She’s describing it as labor.

The intent is brutally pragmatic. Spain, in her view, doesn’t lack laws or strongmen; it lacks the civic muscle that makes coercion unnecessary. “Enough intelligence” is doing double duty: it flatters the public just enough to recruit them, then immediately indicts them for failing to act like adults. The phrase “individual and collective responsibility” bridges two usually warring impulses in Spanish politics of the era: personal autonomy and mass solidarity. Coming from an anarchist-affiliated politician who became a prominent figure during the Second Republic and the Civil War, it reads as a manifesto for self-management under pressure, a bid to prove that anti-authoritarian politics can still produce discipline.

The subtext is fear: if ordinary people won’t impose limits on themselves - corruption, factionalism, vengeance, complacency - the “limits” will arrive anyway, imposed by a dictatorship that calls its violence “necessity.” Montseny is essentially arguing that democracy must outcompete tyranny on competence. Freedom isn’t the absence of constraint; it’s choosing the constraint before the tyrant chooses it for you.