The Arrogance of Legacy

Inspired by J. William Fulbright’s The Arrogance of Power (1966)

I have just finished reading The Arrogance of Power by J. William Fulbright, published in 1966 at a time when nations mistook moral fervour for destiny. Let me say at the outset that my intention is not political. I read it through the prism of family enterprise, drawn by its title and by the quiet question it hides: what happens when success forgets its source?

Fulbright warned that power, when unexamined, becomes self referential. It begins to see its own reflection as truth. The same malady haunts great families. Wealth, like empire, breeds conviction. The founding generation, once humble before uncertainty, begins to speak in imperatives. The story of sacrifice turns into scripture. Advice becomes command. They forget that the right to guide is not inherited, it is renewed through wisdom, restraint, and example.

In such moments, the family drifts into what Fulbright described as the “missionary instinct,” the urge to improve others by remaking them in one’s own image. Parents begin to instruct when they should invite, to protect when they should prepare. Love, untempered by humility, becomes control. Intentions remain noble, but the effect is sterile. Initiative dies, imagination shrinks, and heirs learn to obey rather than to believe. The family that once embodied enterprise becomes an institution of compliance, convinced it is preserving virtue while quietly extinguishing vitality.

Fulbright’s call for nations to “lead by example, not by imposition” reads, in this light, as a manual for dynastic survival. True stewardship is not the multiplication of control but the transmission of freedom. The great family, like the great nation, must know the distinction between continuity and conformity. Continuity preserves the soul; conformity embalms it. The most refined form of power is not domination but presence, the silent confidence that needs neither decree nor display to command respect.

The task, then, is spiritual before it is managerial. It requires the courage to unlearn, to listen, to make space for renewal. Authority, Fulbright reminds us, is legitimate only when it is self limiting. When families learn this, they rise above the arrogance of their own success. They cease to measure greatness by obedience and begin to measure it by the capacity to inspire. They rediscover that leadership is not the privilege of the past but the art of awakening the future.

The arrogance of power is not a political condition. It is a human temptation, to mistake inheritance for insight and affection for ownership. Families that transcend it will not merely endure; they will evolve. Their legacy will not be monuments of wealth, but the living grace of wisdom passed, humbly, from one generation to the next.

W.