Politics & Power Quote by Francis Wright

The sentence is a quiet ambush on the prestige of economic language. Wright lines up the era's sacred terms - "wealth of nations", "powers of production", "demand and supply" - then punctures them by insisting they are only as real as the human lives underneath. It's a rhetorical move that still stings: she treats abstraction not as neutral description but as a kind of moral laundering, a way to make exploitation sound like natural law.

The intent is corrective, but not polite. Wright isn't arguing that markets don't exist; she's arguing that our obsession with their metrics is a form of forgetting. "We hear" and "we forget" casts the problem as cultural, almost auditory: society is trained to listen for the language of growth and efficiency while tuning out the noise of fatigue, hunger, and actual need. By collapsing national "wealth" into "the happiness, and the labor, and the necessities of men", she redefines the unit of analysis. The nation isn't a ledger; it's a population with bodies.

Context matters: Wright operated in an early industrializing Atlantic world where political economy was becoming a dominant public religion, and where "production" often meant long hours, unsafe workplaces, and rigid class discipline. As an activist, she reads the emerging capitalist vocabulary as a technology of power - a way to justify harsh conditions as inevitable outcomes of supply and demand. The line "if they mean any thing" is the tell: it's not just a plea for compassion; it's an indictment of empty prosperity, a warning that an economy that can't account for human necessities is less science than superstition.