Politics & Power Quote by James F. Cooper

Government, Cooper suggests, is not the antidote to hierarchy but its engine. The line works because it refuses the comforting civics-class fantasy that institutions float above human pecking orders. Office isn’t just a job in this formulation; it’s a socially sanctioned elevation. The “repository of power” phrase is doing quiet, acidic work: power isn’t merely exercised, it’s stored, possessed, carried around in a person. That framing makes inequality feel structural, not incidental - baked into the container, not the contents.

Cooper’s second move is sharper: he yokes political preference (the citizen “preferred to office”) to inherited wealth as parallel “controlling law[s] of society.” That’s a novelist’s instinct for the real plot, the hidden continuity between the ballot box and the family ledger. Even in a nominally meritocratic republic, selection for office produces temporary aristocrats, and wealth produces permanent ones. The subtext is a warning against mistaking democratic procedure for democratic outcomes.

Context matters. Writing in the early American republic, Cooper watched a nation loudly allergic to European titles while quietly assembling its own status system through patronage, land, commerce, and family. His skepticism anticipates later American anxieties about elites without needing Marxist vocabulary: a society can abolish kings and still enthrone “preferred” citizens, then let their children keep the throne’s benefits through inheritance. The intent isn’t to argue for no government; it’s to puncture the myth that government can be neutral. It always picks somebody.