Science Quote by Arthur Keith

Universalism, in Keith's hands, is less a moral ideal than a political solvent: a doctrine that dissolves borders, loyalties, and inherited difference, then blames the resulting panic on the crowd. The sentence is built like a courtroom brief. "Nowhere" and "everywhere" do the heavy lifting, leaving no room for counterexample and daring the reader to find one. That absolutism is the tell. It's not a sociological observation so much as a preemptive strike against anyone who might claim that cosmopolitan ideals arise organically from ordinary people.

The intent is to reframe universalist politics as inherently coercive. By separating "a people" from "governments", Keith taps a familiar populist suspicion of elites: the masses are imagined as naturally particularist, attached to tribe and nation, while the state (and, by implication, intellectuals, bureaucrats, and reformers) imposes abstract sameness from above. "Unwilling and resistant subjects" casts citizens as captives; the word "subjects" quietly slides from democratic participation to monarchic subordination. It's a rhetorical demotion.

Context matters: Keith was a prominent early-20th-century British anatomist and anthropologist associated with racial typologies and nationalist thinking in a period when empire, mass migration, and international institutions were reshaping political imagination after World War I. "Universalism" here likely points to egalitarian, internationalist, or anti-racial projects that threatened the hierarchy his worldview depended on. The subtext is defensive: if universal rights are "forced", then inequality can be presented not as injustice but as cultural self-defense. The line works because it weaponizes democratic language (the will of "a people") against democracy's most expansive promise.