The ideal colonial official exerted supreme but wholly unfelt authority

Evidence

As the conception of freedom as non-interference was introduced by Hobbes to defend Leviathan against republicans, so it was used to defend British rule in the North American colonies against the republican criticism that Parliament had arbitrary power over the colonists. The argument was that since all law is a form of interference all law reduces people’s liberty and no legal system—not that of Leviathan, not that in the American colonies—can be dismissed as singularly inimical to freedom. — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1211 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Colonial authority worked as a real yet functionally indefinable part of state machinery; Colonial authority depends on the colonized hearing no other voice — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 329; Colonial officials took the political force of affect more seriously than later historians did — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 565 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• The non-interference ideal served to legitimate colonial subjugation #complicates (0.72) — Philip Pettit, Republicanism, 1211