Politics & Power Quote by Nassau William Senior

Senior is drawing a bright line between economics as a discipline and politics as a craft, and he does it with a kind of Victorian deadpan that still feels familiar in today’s “evidence-based policy” wars. The political economist, he insists, is not a priest dispensing moral commandments or a party operative spinning plans. He is a cartographer: mapping “general principles” that are dangerous to ignore, but also dangerous to worship.

The sentence is built on a tightrope of negations: neither recommend nor dissuade; fatal to neglect, yet not advisable to use as the principal guides. That rhythm is the point. Senior is staking out a professional identity for economics at a time when the field was trying to become something like a science, insulated from the heat of parliamentary reform, industrial unrest, and the contentious Poor Law debates Senior himself was entangled in. Claiming neutrality is also a way of claiming authority.

The subtext is a warning against two temptations that never go out of style. One is political cherry-picking: treating economic “laws” as optional when they’re inconvenient, then paying for it later. The other is technocratic overreach: letting abstract models bully messy reality into submission, as if societies were equations with no history, ethics, or power.

Senior’s most incisive move is admitting “perhaps” impracticable. It’s a small word that punctures the fantasy of clean application. Principles matter; governance is improvisation under constraint. The quote works because it refuses the comforting lie that expertise can replace judgment, while still insisting that judgment without principles courts disaster.