Politics & Power Quote by James Mackintosh

A maxim is what happens when a culture gets tired of arguing with itself and decides to publish the verdict. Mackintosh’s line flatters the tidy authority of the proverb while quietly relocating authorship away from lone geniuses and toward the slow churn of collective experience. “Condensed” matters: compression implies heat and pressure, the way repeated crises, compromises, and everyday bargains reduce messy reality into something pocket-sized and repeatable. Good sense, here, isn’t brilliance; it’s survivability.

The subtext is judicial. As a judge in an era when Britain was absorbing revolution’s aftershocks and building a modern legal-administrative state, Mackintosh is drawn to forms of wisdom that look like precedent: short, stable, widely recognized. Maxims function like common law for the street. They’re not statutes, but they carry authority because they’ve been stress-tested. The phrase “of nations” is also a subtle power move, suggesting that popular sayings aren’t merely folk decoration; they’re a civic archive, a kind of democratic epistemology that elites ignore at their peril.

It’s also a warning. Condensation preserves, but it also distorts. A maxim can be a nation’s “good sense,” or its alibi - a way to smuggle bias and hierarchy into a sentence that sounds inevitable. That’s why maxims travel so well: they offer the comfort of consensus without the inconvenience of evidence. Mackintosh’s genius is to capture both their legitimacy and their danger in a single, courtroom-clean formulation.