Politics & Power Quote by William Graham Sumner

Jealousy, Sumner suggests, doesn’t disappear when people start talking about “the nation.” It just changes costume. His target is a familiar moral sleight of hand: the person who bristles at a neighbor owning land (or at least at the neighbor owning too much) while simultaneously embracing grand, swelling claims that “we” as a tribe or country possess the soil by some higher right. The remark is sharp because it frames nationalism not as an elevated civic feeling but as a convenient escalator for the same emotion people pretend to outgrow: envy, insecurity, status anxiety.

The subtext is classic turn-of-the-century liberal suspicion of collective rhetoric. Sumner, an influential defender of laissez-faire and a critic of reformist crusades, watched the U.S. wrestle with populism, land reform agitation, labor upheavals, and the new imperial swagger of the 1890s. In that atmosphere, arguments about property were rarely just about acreage; they were about who counts, who belongs, who gets to draw the circle. By calling national land doctrines “exaggerated,” he’s puncturing their sanctimony: collective ownership claims can be as absolutist and emotionally charged as the private-property jealousies they claim to correct.

What makes the line work is its reversal. It denies the comforting story that private resentment is petty while national attachment is noble. Sumner implies a psychological continuity: people who distrust individual ownership may be drawn to the rhetorical safety of the collective, where appetite can be recast as duty. “My neighbor shouldn’t have it” becomes “our people must have it,” and suddenly the same impulse sounds like principle.