Leadership Quote by Christian Lous Lange

Eternity is doing political work here: it’s not an afterlife promise so much as a psychological engine that can be converted into civic purpose. Christian Lous Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace laureate, writes in the long shadow of industrial modernity and the mounting catastrophes of early 20th-century Europe, when old certainties were cracking and new mass movements were offering replacement religions. His wager is that people don’t only want safety or prosperity; they want scale. They want their “small personality” to matter inside something that outlasts them.

The phrase “we thirst” is the tell. Lange isn’t describing a philosophical preference; he’s diagnosing a craving that politics ignores at its peril. The subtext is both hopeful and wary: if democratic institutions don’t supply a “higher coherence,” others will. Nationalism, militarism, and totalizing ideologies thrive by offering exactly what he names, but in distorted form - the individual dissolved into a collective myth.

What makes the passage work is its balancing act of paradoxes. “Human and yet superhuman” suggests institutions that are made by people but meant to exceed personal ego: law, peace, international cooperation. “Absolute and yet steadily growing” is a deliberate rebuttal to two temptations at once: relativism that can’t justify moral claims, and dogmatism that freezes them. He’s arguing for ideals sturdy enough to command loyalty, flexible enough to evolve - a blueprint for liberal internationalism before it had that label, pitched not as policy but as an answer to the hunger for meaning.