Politics & Power Quote by C. Northcote Parkinson

Parkinson’s line lands like a polite cocktail-party toast that turns, mid-sip, into an accusation. “Make the people sovereign” sounds like the sacred hymn of modern democracy; he immediately follows it with a cold little forecast that treats elections less as civic virtue than as a lever. The verb “use” is doing the cynical work here: citizens aren’t imagined as deliberating, only operating “machinery,” a word that strips politics of moral romance and recasts it as a device with gears, pressure points, and predictable outputs.

The subtext is twofold. First, it pokes at elite anxiety: democracy is celebrated until it threatens property. Second, it implies that redistribution isn’t a philosophical argument about justice; it’s an inevitable consequence of mass rule in a society with steep inequality. Parkinson compresses a whole class conflict narrative into one sentence: when the poor are numerous and the rich are rich, sovereignty becomes arithmetic. Policy becomes the ballot-box version of a raid.

Context matters: Parkinson wrote in a 20th-century Britain shadowed by welfare-state expansion, postwar austerity, and the broader European story of labor parties translating numerical strength into state power. As a historian (and a satirist by temperament, famous for “Parkinson’s Law”), he’s not offering a neutral prediction so much as a dry warning about institutional incentives. The punchline is that “sovereignty” isn’t inherently noble or dangerous; it’s simply control. In Parkinson’s formulation, the real question isn’t whether the people rule, but what they’ll demand once they do - and who gets to call that demand “dispossession” rather than “democracy.”