" In later times, its growth has continued at an accelerated pace, and its extension has brought a corresponding extension of war. And now we no longer understand the process. We no longer protest, we no longer react. The quiescence of ours is a new thing for which power has to thank the smokescreen in which it has wrapped itself. Formally, it could be seen manifest in the person of the king, who did not disclaim being the matter he was, and in whom human passions were discernible. Now masked in anonymity, it claims to have no existence of its own, and to be but the impersonal and passionless instrument of the general will. "

― Bertrand De Jouvenel , On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth