"The law always limits every power it gives"
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Hume’s line has the cool bite of a skeptic watching politics pretend it’s metaphysics. “The law always limits every power it gives” is less a civics lesson than a warning about the way authority is laundered into legitimacy. Power, in the abstract, wants to sprawl; the law is the social technology that both authorizes it and cages it. The seeming paradox is the point: the same instrument that lets the state act is also the instrument that keeps the state from becoming a god.
Hume is writing from a worldview that distrusts grand origin stories. He’s not selling “natural rights” as self-evident truths or pretending rulers inherit legitimacy from heaven. For him, political order is a human contrivance held together by habit, interest, and fear of instability. In that context, law isn’t just a moral ideal; it’s a stabilizer. It creates predictable boundaries so that power can be used without constantly inviting retaliation, revolt, or collapse.
The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about governance: if you grant power without specifying limits, you haven’t created authority, you’ve created permission for arbitrary domination. Hume also smuggles in a hard-edged realism about why constitutions and procedures matter. Limits aren’t an optional ethical add-on; they’re part of the bargain that makes power tolerable enough to endure.
Read today, it lands as a rebuttal to the modern taste for “emergency” powers and executive shortcuts. Hume’s sentence insists that a power without legal constraint isn’t strength. It’s a breakdown in the very mechanism that makes collective power possible.
Hume is writing from a worldview that distrusts grand origin stories. He’s not selling “natural rights” as self-evident truths or pretending rulers inherit legitimacy from heaven. For him, political order is a human contrivance held together by habit, interest, and fear of instability. In that context, law isn’t just a moral ideal; it’s a stabilizer. It creates predictable boundaries so that power can be used without constantly inviting retaliation, revolt, or collapse.
The subtext is quietly anti-romantic about governance: if you grant power without specifying limits, you haven’t created authority, you’ve created permission for arbitrary domination. Hume also smuggles in a hard-edged realism about why constitutions and procedures matter. Limits aren’t an optional ethical add-on; they’re part of the bargain that makes power tolerable enough to endure.
Read today, it lands as a rebuttal to the modern taste for “emergency” powers and executive shortcuts. Hume’s sentence insists that a power without legal constraint isn’t strength. It’s a breakdown in the very mechanism that makes collective power possible.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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