"One of the worst of errors would be the general admission of the proposition that a Government has no right to interfere for any purpose except for that of affording protection"
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Leave government to “protection” alone, Nassau William Senior warns, and you don’t get liberty so much as a convenient alibi. The line is engineered to puncture a rising 19th-century orthodoxy: that the state’s only legitimate job is to guard property and keep the peace. Senior, an economist steeped in political economy but also a policy practitioner (notably around Britain’s Poor Law debates), is pushing back on a proto-libertarian slogan before it hardens into common sense.
The specific intent is defensive and strategic. He’s not celebrating interference for its own sake; he’s calling the “no right to interfere” proposition an error because it pretends to be principled while smuggling in a huge moral choice: whose harms count as violence requiring “protection,” and whose harms are rebranded as mere misfortune. Industrial capitalism created new, systematic vulnerabilities - workplace injury, child labor, urban disease, boom-bust cycles - that weren’t easily framed as one person aggressing against another. If “protection” is defined narrowly, government becomes blind by design.
The subtext is a critique of rhetorical minimalism. “Except… protection” sounds clean, but it’s a linguistic trapdoor: it turns policy arguments into boundary-policing, where anything ambitious is dismissed as illegitimate before it’s debated. Senior’s sentence widens the aperture, insisting that legitimacy can’t be reduced to a single function without starving a society of tools to manage collective risk.
Context matters: this is Britain in the long shadow of the Poor Laws and early industrial reform, when “interference” meant everything from regulating factories to funding relief. Senior is staking out a liberalism that fears dogma more than discretion.
The specific intent is defensive and strategic. He’s not celebrating interference for its own sake; he’s calling the “no right to interfere” proposition an error because it pretends to be principled while smuggling in a huge moral choice: whose harms count as violence requiring “protection,” and whose harms are rebranded as mere misfortune. Industrial capitalism created new, systematic vulnerabilities - workplace injury, child labor, urban disease, boom-bust cycles - that weren’t easily framed as one person aggressing against another. If “protection” is defined narrowly, government becomes blind by design.
The subtext is a critique of rhetorical minimalism. “Except… protection” sounds clean, but it’s a linguistic trapdoor: it turns policy arguments into boundary-policing, where anything ambitious is dismissed as illegitimate before it’s debated. Senior’s sentence widens the aperture, insisting that legitimacy can’t be reduced to a single function without starving a society of tools to manage collective risk.
Context matters: this is Britain in the long shadow of the Poor Laws and early industrial reform, when “interference” meant everything from regulating factories to funding relief. Senior is staking out a liberalism that fears dogma more than discretion.
Quote Details
| Topic | Freedom |
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