Politics & Power Quote by Georg Henrik von Wright

A philosopher’s way of saying the quiet part out loud: the modern state is still performing sovereignty while capital has already gone off-script. Von Wright’s line lands because it inverts the civics-class assumption that markets live inside the rules of democratic politics. “Within” suggests constraint, accountability, and borders; “above” suggests altitude and impunity. The sentence is built like an indictment, not a description: “transnational” and “gigantic” are not neutral adjectives but moral weights, meant to make the reader feel scale as a form of power.

The specific intent is to name a structural mismatch. Political systems remain territorially bounded, procedurally slow, and legitimacy-driven. Industrial companies, especially in their late-20th-century multinational form, move faster than law, arbitrage jurisdictions, and treat borders as costs to be optimized. Von Wright is pointing at a new geometry of authority: not the old image of business lobbying government, but a condition where governments compete for investment, dilute regulations, and internalize corporate priorities as “economic necessity.”

The subtext is darker than “corporations are influential.” It’s a warning about democratic hollowing-out: elections rotate managers of a machine whose key levers sit elsewhere, in boardrooms and supply chains. Context matters here. Von Wright, writing in the shadow of postwar industrial expansion, Cold War technocracy, and the acceleration of globalization, consistently worried about instrumental rationality - the tendency to treat human ends as secondary to system efficiency. “Above them” is his shorthand for a world where the economy stops being a tool and starts acting like a sovereign.