Leadership Quote by Algernon Sydney

Liberty, for Sydney, isn’t a polite inheritance; it’s a default setting that power has to work to override. The line is doing two things at once: admitting the ugly truth of governance (any “submission” is a restraint) while setting a trap for would-be tyrants who want obedience without legitimacy. If coercion is the only glue holding a political order together, it might compel compliance, but it can’t reliably produce the “good intended” because it never earns the internal assent that makes a society governable at scale.

His logic is almost mechanical: for submission to achieve its stated aim, it must be “general,” meaning broadly accepted rather than patchily enforced. But broad acceptance can’t be manufactured forever at swordpoint; it has to be “natural,” rooted in something people recognize as fitting to human freedom and shared interest. “Natural” here is a loaded 17th-century term: natural law, consent, the idea that political authority must harmonize with human nature rather than rewrite it.

Context sharpens the edge. Sydney was a republican-leaning English politician writing in the wake of civil war, regicide, restoration, and the recurring fear that monarchy would slide into absolutism. He’s arguing against the Hobbesian bargain that trades liberty for order by treating obedience as an artifact of fear. The subtext is a warning: regimes that treat liberty as a privilege to be suspended will always need more suspension. Only a political settlement that feels native to free people can become general enough to endure.