Politics & Power Quote by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

Schlegel’s line lands like a slap because it refuses the comfort of mixing noble motives with grubby systems. Coming from a Romantic poet, it isn’t a policy argument so much as a diagnosis: politics and economics are machines that convert values into outcomes, and the conversion process itself corrodes the purity of moral intention. The bite is in the absolutism. “Where there is” doesn’t mean “sometimes.” It means the presence of power or exchange is enough to evacuate morality, as if ethics can’t survive contact with negotiation, incentives, and compromise.

The subtext is deeply Romantic: a suspicion of the Enlightenment’s faith that rational systems can improve humanity. Schlegel watched Europe enter modernity under the shadow of revolution and Napoleonic realpolitik, where high-minded slogans (“liberty,” “the people”) traveled conveniently alongside coercion, war, and administrative control. In that climate, morality becomes branding: a costume worn by interests that would rather not admit they’re interests. Economics, too, reads here as the cold logic of calculation, the world where everything gets a price tag and the soul becomes an accounting problem.

What makes the sentence work is its strategic pessimism. It’s not naïve about moral failure; it’s allergic to moral alibis. By banning morality from politics and markets, Schlegel forces a blunt honesty: call power power, call profit profit, stop laundering them in ethical language. The provocation still fits because modern public life runs on moral rhetoric while operating through incentives. Schlegel’s warning is that the rhetoric isn’t just insufficient; it’s often the mechanism of the betrayal.