Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Dawson

Modernity’s dirtiest magic trick is to turn the human person into a tool and call it “progress.” Dawson’s line lands like a long, tightening screw: man is “a means,” pressed into service for “economic or political ends,” which themselves evaporate on inspection. The sentence keeps walking forward, refusing to stop where most public rhetoric demands we stop - at the reassuring claim that the system is headed somewhere final and good. Instead, it exposes an infinite regress of justifications: policy serves growth, growth serves stability, stability serves power, power serves... what, exactly? Dawson’s “and so ad infinitum” is the deadpan punchline. If the chain never terminates in a real end, then the machine isn’t oriented toward human flourishing; it’s oriented toward its own continuation.

The subtext is a moral anthropology in revolt against managerial thinking. Dawson, a Christian historian of culture, is attacking a society that has lost any shared metaphysical destination - salvation, virtue, the good life - and replaced it with procedural goals that can always be postponed. Economies must expand; states must secure; institutions must optimize. People become inputs: labor, voters, bodies, “human capital.” The quote’s power is how it mimics the bureaucratic logic it condemns: clause stacks on clause, means on means, until the reader feels the suffocation of living inside an endlessly instrumental system.

Contextually, Dawson is writing in the shadow of total war and mass society, when both capitalist industry and political ideologies demonstrated how efficiently they could mobilize - and expend - human beings. The warning isn’t quaintly anti-modern; it’s anti-idol. When nothing is an end, everything becomes expendable.