"No oppression is so heavy or lasting as that which is inflicted by the perversion and exorbitance of legal authority"
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Addison isn’t railing against tyranny in the abstract; he’s warning about the kind that wears a powdered wig and carries paperwork. “Perversion and exorbitance of legal authority” is a scalpel of a phrase: the law doesn’t have to disappear for oppression to thrive. It just has to be bent, stretched, or weaponized until it becomes unrecognizable to the people it claims to serve. That’s why this form of domination is “heavy or lasting.” When coercion is laundered through procedure, it gains the aura of inevitability. You can fight a king’s temper. It’s harder to fight a court order.
The subtext is a shrewd diagnosis of legitimacy as a political technology. Law is supposed to be the social contract’s clean language, a public promise of predictability and restraint. When authorities pervert it, they don’t simply break the rules; they recruit the rules as accomplices. Citizens are pushed into a moral bind: disobey and you’re lawless, comply and you’re complicit in your own diminishment. Oppression becomes self-reinforcing because it trains people to mistake compliance for virtue.
Context matters. Addison writes as a Whig-era moralist shaped by England’s recent turbulence: civil war memories, the Glorious Revolution’s settlement, anxieties about arbitrary power, and a rising culture of print and public opinion. His argument flatters constitutional government while issuing a threat to it: the greatest danger isn’t the open tyrant but the respectable administrator who discovers that legality can be made to mean whatever power needs it to mean. In that sense, Addison reads less like a preacher and more like an early analyst of how “rule of law” can curdle into rule by law.
The subtext is a shrewd diagnosis of legitimacy as a political technology. Law is supposed to be the social contract’s clean language, a public promise of predictability and restraint. When authorities pervert it, they don’t simply break the rules; they recruit the rules as accomplices. Citizens are pushed into a moral bind: disobey and you’re lawless, comply and you’re complicit in your own diminishment. Oppression becomes self-reinforcing because it trains people to mistake compliance for virtue.
Context matters. Addison writes as a Whig-era moralist shaped by England’s recent turbulence: civil war memories, the Glorious Revolution’s settlement, anxieties about arbitrary power, and a rising culture of print and public opinion. His argument flatters constitutional government while issuing a threat to it: the greatest danger isn’t the open tyrant but the respectable administrator who discovers that legality can be made to mean whatever power needs it to mean. In that sense, Addison reads less like a preacher and more like an early analyst of how “rule of law” can curdle into rule by law.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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