Politics & Power Quote by James Kent

Kent’s line reads like a calm civics lesson, but it’s really a power play disguised as principle: a jurist’s attempt to turn geopolitics into a courtroom where even the small states get a seat at counsel’s table. Coming from an early American judge steeped in the emerging law of nations, the sentence is less about sentiment than architecture. It tries to lock in a rule before the strong can rewrite it.

The craft is in the leveling cadence: “whatever may be... or however greatly...” piles up the usual excuses empires use to rank others - size, strength, regime type, religion, “manners.” Kent anticipates the whole menu of civilizational pretexts and preemptively denies them legal relevance. “Equal consideration” is doing heavy work here: it doesn’t claim nations behave equally or deserve equal praise, only that their rights require the same procedural respect. That’s a judge’s move, smuggling due process into international relations.

The subtext is anxiety. In Kent’s era, the United States was still a relatively vulnerable republic, surrounded by imperial powers and entangled in questions of recognition, neutrality, and sovereignty. A doctrine of formal equality protected the young nation from being treated as a second-class actor - and just as importantly, it offered a rationale for dealing with non-European states on paper as peers, even when practice lagged behind.

It’s an aspirational constraint on power, written in the sober language of law precisely because morality alone doesn’t bind states; rules might.