Politics & Power Quote by Benjamin Tucker

Tucker’s line is a scalpel: it strips “government” of its comforting civic perfume and leaves the cold mechanism underneath. By defining the state not as a referee or a shared project but as control, he’s refusing the usual legitimacy story. The phrase “essence” is doing heavy work here; it’s an ontological claim, not a policy argument. You can swap parties, constitutions, or slogans, but the core function remains the same.

The real bite is in the add-on: “or the attempt to control.” Tucker knows power is often less competent than it is ambitious. Governments posture, surveil, regulate, punish, and moralize, yet routinely fail to produce the order they promise. That parenthetical humility isn’t charitable; it’s an indictment. Even when the state can’t fully control, it still builds the apparatus to try, and those tools rarely stay unused.

Context matters. Tucker, an American individualist anarchist writing in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, watched industrial capitalism consolidate and the state expand alongside it: police forces professionalized, labor conflicts were suppressed, and reform movements increasingly routed change through law. He’s warning that “reform” can be a velvet glove on the same controlling hand, especially when state power pairs with corporate power.

The subtext is a dare to moral language: stop calling control “protection” or “public interest” and ask who gets controlled, by whom, and for whose benefit. Tucker’s intent isn’t nihilism; it’s clarity. If control is the job description, then every new mandate deserves suspicion not because it’s always wrong, but because it’s never neutral.