Politics & Power Quote by George Woodcock

Freedom here isn’t the flag-waving kind; it’s the stubborn interior kind that survives even when the body fails. Woodcock, writing out of a 20th-century tradition of anarchist-inflected humanism, cuts straight through the usual liberty-versus-law debate and reroutes it into psychology. Yes, you can be “bound” by illness and still insist on freedom, because the only freedom that can’t be confiscated is the capacity to locate agency where it actually lives: in the self.

The line works because it refuses both self-pity and civic romance. He concedes constraint without granting it sovereignty. “Certain sicknesses” functions as credibility, not confession; it prevents the argument from sounding like abstract idealism. Then comes the provocation: initiatives “really come from yourself” if you don’t “depend upon structures of government or structures of any kind.” That last clause widens the target. Woodcock isn’t only swiping at the state; he’s warning against the softer addictions of modern life: institutions, bureaucracies, even the comforting scaffolds of routine and ideology that let us outsource responsibility.

Subtextually, this is a rebuke to the mid-century habit of treating politics as the primary engine of meaning. Woodcock’s anarchism isn’t chaos; it’s a demand for grown-up autonomy, a suspicion that “structures” can become alibis. His freedom is less about escaping limits than about refusing the narrative that limits are destiny. The sharpest implication: dependence is not just material. It’s a mindset, and it’s optional.