Politics & Power Quote by Mercy Otis Warren

Domination, Warren implies, is not a barbarian glitch that progress will patch over; it is the recurring feature that civilization learns to dress better. The line has the chill of a playwright who knows how to make an audience laugh and flinch at once: the most “civilized” societies may not be less power-hungry, only more capable of rationalizing appetite as policy.

Her key move is the acidic “perhaps in proportion.” It’s a dagger slipped into the Enlightenment story Americans were busy telling about themselves in the late 18th century: that liberty naturally flowers as people become educated, commercial, refined. Warren flips that narrative. Higher “degrees of civilization” can scale up the machinery of control - bureaucracies, armies, courts, propaganda - while offering moral cover. Arbitrary power doesn’t vanish; it professionalizes.

The intent is pointedly political. Writing in the wake of revolution, Warren had watched a rebellion against imperial overreach pivot into domestic factionalism, partisan press wars, and anxieties about centralized authority under the new Constitution. Her warning reads like an early diagnosis of republics’ favorite self-deception: believing tyranny is something foreigners do, or something crude regimes do, while “we” merely govern.

Subtext: people don’t need monsters to lose their freedom; they need incentives, status, and the comforting idea that power is being used for order. As a dramatist, Warren understands that domination is rarely staged as villainy. It arrives wearing virtue’s costume, speaking the language of improvement, and expecting applause.