Politics & Power Quote by Van Wyck Brooks

Brooks is betting on an unruly force: modernity as a kind of historical solvent. The line is built like a two-step demolition. First, he frames liberation as inevitable, not aspirational: the world has a "tendency" to throw off restraints, as if authority is a temporary cast that civilization keeps cracking. Then he names the restraints with a critic's scalpel, separating religious power from political power but condemning both as systems of managed information.

The subtext is less anti-religious than anti-clerical: "religious authority" isn’t grounded in faith so much as in asymmetry, "based on the ignorance of the many". It’s a shot at institutions that convert mystery into obedience. His political target is cooler, and arguably harsher: rule "based on the knowledge of the few". That phrasing anticipates the modern technocrat, the expert class, the state that governs by withholding. Brooks isn’t praising enlightenment; he’s warning that "knowledge" can become its own priesthood, a secular version of the same old trick.

Context matters. Writing in the long wake of the Progressive Era, amid mass education, professionalized expertise, and the decline of traditional religious monopoly, Brooks is diagnosing a shift in American authority: from pulpit to policy, from dogma to administration. The sentence works because it refuses comforting binaries. The enemy isn’t belief or competence; it’s imposed restraint justified by informational inequality. His confidence that it can’t be stopped is less utopian than Darwinian: legitimacy erodes when the rationale for power looks like a rigged quiz.