Politics & Power Quote by Albert Bushnell Hart

Nations like to narrate themselves as fresh starts, sprung from raw land and sheer will. Hart refuses the romance. By calling inherited political traditions and “usages” one of the strongest, most persistent forces in national development, he’s arguing that what settlers pack in their heads matters more than what they build with their hands. The future is drafted in the language of the old country long before it’s argued in the legislature.

The intent is quietly polemical. Hart, writing as a late-19th/early-20th-century American historian, is pushing back against frontier-myth exceptionalism and the idea that American institutions emerged organically from new conditions. “Inheritance” is doing heavy lifting: it frames politics as something transmitted, almost like property, not invented at the scene. “Usages” sharpens that point by including informal habits and procedural reflexes - how authority is respected, how disputes are settled, who counts as a legitimate participant. Those are the invisible rails that make formal constitutions run.

The subtext is also about power. If political tradition travels with “new settlers,” then the nation’s democratic self-image is inseparable from the imported assumptions of those settlers - and from who wasn’t included in that inheritance. Hart isn’t foregrounding Indigenous dispossession or coerced labor, but his framework makes clear that “national development” is less a neutral evolution than a continuity machine: institutions reproduce the culture that founded them, often long after the founding generation is gone.

The line works because it demystifies history without making it cynical. It replaces destiny with continuity, and asks readers to look for the past not in monuments, but in routines.