Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 130 of economic historian Robert Higgs’s pioneering and persuasive 1977 book, Competition and Coercion: Blacks in the American Economy, 1865-1914 (original emphasis):

So often have scholars used summary expressions like “master class,” “the whites,” “the planters,” and so forth they tend to forget an obvious fact: individuals are actors. A man’s behavior is determined by the ends he pursues, the means he commands, the constraints he confronts. This is not to say that men are insensitive, or indifferent to, or unaffected by the desires and actions of others. But it does suggest the possibility that individual objectives may be mutually inconsistent.