Politics & Power Quote by Alexander Hamilton

Hamilton doesn’t flatter the public with Enlightenment daydreams about innate virtue; he drafts a job description for the state and makes it sound like plumbing. Government exists, he argues, because human desire is not self-regulating. The line’s bite is in its bleak realism: reason and justice aren’t powerful enough to govern on their own, so the system needs “constraint” the way a river needs banks.

The intent is political and tactical. Hamilton is selling the architecture of federal power at a moment when the young republic was wobbling under the Articles of Confederation, unable to tax, enforce, or reliably defend itself. “Why has government been instituted at all?” is a rhetorical trap: if you accept the premise that people, left alone, don’t reliably choose the common good, then a merely advisory government becomes a contradiction. The subtext is a warning against romantic anti-statism: distrust of power can’t be an excuse for impotence.

His choice of “passions” does heavy lifting. It’s not only about criminality; it’s about factions, demagogues, private interests, and the everyday temptations that corrode civic duty. Hamilton’s cynicism is strategic, not nihilistic: constraint is presented as the condition for liberty, not its enemy. He’s arguing that freedom without enforcement collapses into the rule of whoever has the loudest crowd or the biggest wallet.

Read now, the line feels like a preemptive rebuttal to both utopian politics and performative outrage: emotions are inevitable; institutions are what keep them from becoming policy.