Politics & Power Quote by Christopher Dawson

Dawson’s sentence is doing double duty: it names violence as a historical constant, then quietly shifts the blame from events to the cultural machinery that makes events feel inevitable. The opening concession - “No doubt” - isn’t humility so much as a rhetorical shoulder-check. He grants the obvious (wars and revolutions), then reinterprets them as symptoms of something deeper: “national elements” embedded in Western culture like a dormant gene.

The most pointed move is his insistence that these elements work even “when they were ignored.” That’s an argument against the liberal fantasy that you can de-emphasize nationalism and watch it wither. Dawson’s subtext is that nations are not merely political arrangements; they are emotional infrastructures. You can suppress the language of national destiny, but the energy doesn’t disappear. It reroutes into “unconscious” passions: pride, grievance, the hunger to be recognized, the readiness to translate identity into force.

The phrasing “driving force” makes nationalism sound less like an ideology than a motor, something that propels culture forward whether the driver admits it or not. And the pairing of “passion” with “aggressive self-assertion” is telling: he frames national feeling as both romantic and coercive, capable of making people feel meaning while priming them for conflict.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and amid the ideological churn of the mid-20th century, Dawson is warning that modernity’s supposed cosmopolitan escape hatches are flimsy. Western civilization, in his view, carries a latent politics of identity that keeps reactivating - not by accident, but by design.