Science Quote by Arthur Keith

An “ancient problem” is a polite way of admitting we still haven’t solved it, and Arthur Keith’s phrasing carries the cool, clinical resignation of a scientist looking at human politics the way he might look at anatomy: as a recurring structural tension, not a moral puzzle we can wish away. “Proper balance” is doing heavy lifting here. It implies there is an optimal ratio, measurable in outcomes if not in numbers, and it also smuggles in a warning: too much liberty and the body politic spasms into fragmentation; too much authority and it atrophies into obedience.

Keith wrote in a period when “central authority” was no abstraction. He lived through mass industrialization, the expansion of bureaucratic states, two world wars, and the rise of ideological regimes that claimed scientific legitimacy for social control. In that climate, invoking antiquity isn’t mere historical trivia; it’s a rhetorical deflation of modern self-importance. Every generation thinks its crisis is unprecedented, then rediscovers the same argument in different costumes: city-state versus empire, parliament versus crown, citizen versus security apparatus.

The subtext is less about choosing sides than about puncturing fantasies of final settlement. If the problem is ancient, it’s probably permanent - or at least baked into social scale. Keith’s line also flatters the reader’s pragmatism: “proper” suggests governance as calibration, not salvation. It’s an invitation to distrust absolutes, whether libertarian purity or authoritarian efficiency, because both ignore the messy fact that human beings want autonomy and order at the same time, and politics is the art of rationing each without pretending the rationing ends.