"It has now become a very common sentiment, that there is some deep and radical wrong somewhere, and that legislators have proved themselves incapable of discovering, or, of remedying it"
About this Quote
A “very common sentiment” is Warren’s polite way of saying the room is already on fire; he’s just noting how many people smell smoke. The line captures a familiar civic mood: something feels structurally off, and the official class seems either too dull, too bought, or too trapped by its own machinery to fix it. Warren isn’t merely diagnosing dysfunction. He’s taking aim at the faith that dysfunction can be solved by swapping in better managers.
The syntax does a lot of quiet work. “Deep and radical wrong somewhere” is intentionally vague, because the feeling he’s describing is diffuse: wages, land, debt, privilege, corruption. That vagueness also functions as a bridge, letting almost any dissatisfied reader step into the sentence and supply their own grievance. Then comes the turn: legislators aren’t just failing to cure the disease; they can’t even “discover” it. That’s a sharper insult than it first appears. It suggests the problem isn’t a lack of effort but a mismatch between the tools of lawmaking and the reality of social harm.
Context matters. Warren, an inventor and early American individualist anarchist, lived through the churn of early industrial capitalism, boom-and-bust cycles, and political institutions that routinely protected property and power first. An inventor’s impatience runs through the line: if the mechanism keeps producing the same breakdowns, stop blaming the operator. Redesign the system. His subtext is a dare to move politics out of the legislature and into experiments in exchange, labor, and everyday organization - the realm where Warren believed real remedies could be engineered.
The syntax does a lot of quiet work. “Deep and radical wrong somewhere” is intentionally vague, because the feeling he’s describing is diffuse: wages, land, debt, privilege, corruption. That vagueness also functions as a bridge, letting almost any dissatisfied reader step into the sentence and supply their own grievance. Then comes the turn: legislators aren’t just failing to cure the disease; they can’t even “discover” it. That’s a sharper insult than it first appears. It suggests the problem isn’t a lack of effort but a mismatch between the tools of lawmaking and the reality of social harm.
Context matters. Warren, an inventor and early American individualist anarchist, lived through the churn of early industrial capitalism, boom-and-bust cycles, and political institutions that routinely protected property and power first. An inventor’s impatience runs through the line: if the mechanism keeps producing the same breakdowns, stop blaming the operator. Redesign the system. His subtext is a dare to move politics out of the legislature and into experiments in exchange, labor, and everyday organization - the realm where Warren believed real remedies could be engineered.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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