"The preponderant weight of economic power in the Constitutional Convention, while conceding the outward forms of political democracy, went on at once to curb the exercise of the very power it had just granted; it crippled the force of democratic power at the source by parceling up this power by a marvelously dexterous system of barriers to its expression. Thus political equality under the ballot was granted on the unstated but factually double-locked assumption that the people must refrain from seeking the extension of that equality to the economic sphere. In short, the attempted harmonious marriage of democracy to capitalism doomed genuinely popular control from the start."
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Foreword to Business as a System of Power (1943), p. vii
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Staughton_Lynd
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Robert Staughton Lynd
Robert Staughton Lynd (September 26, 1892 – November 1, 1970) was an American sociologist, and professor at Columbia University, New York City.
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