Politics & Power Quote by C. L. R. James

It lands like an offhand family detail, but C. L. R. James is really sketching the architecture of colonial discipline. A teacher-father and a circle of teacher-friends sounds benign until he adds the key clause: they were "working for the Government" and their behavior stayed "within strictly limited areas". That euphemistic narrowing is the point. In a colonial society, the schoolmaster is not just an educator; he is an intermediary, paid to reproduce the state’s values in the classroom and at the dinner table. James is describing a professional class that appears respectable precisely because respectability has been defined as compliance.

The intent isn’t to moralize about individual cowardice. It’s to show how power recruits good people through routine, wages, and status. "Friends" and "Government" sit uncomfortably close, suggesting a social world where the state is not an abstract institution but a daily presence, woven into friendship networks and community expectations. The phrase "strictly limited areas" reads like a bureaucratic border patrol for the soul: you can think, speak, and behave freely, as long as freedom stays in its assigned box.

As a journalist and anti-colonial thinker formed in Trinidad under British rule, James is tracing his own origin story in constraint. The subtext is a quiet indictment: when your livelihood depends on the state, dissent becomes not just risky but socially unintelligible. He’s explaining how a colony manufactures "good conduct" and why breaking from it requires more than courage; it requires leaving the entire mapped terrain of acceptability.