Politics & Power Quote by Albert Camus

Camus lands the blade with a bureaucrat’s favorite weapon: definition. “By definition” sounds neutral, almost pedantic, but it’s a trapdoor. He’s stripping the state of the very alibi it loves to borrow from citizens: moral intention. A government, he argues, is not a person and can’t be shamed like one; it doesn’t blush, repent, or lose sleep. What looks like “conscience” in official life is usually just the afterglow of public relations or the private ethics of individuals briefly passing through the machine.

The cynicism here isn’t fashionable; it’s surgical. Camus isn’t claiming governments are uniquely evil so much as uniquely incapable of moral feeling. That’s why the second sentence hits harder. “Sometimes it has a policy” is damningly faint praise: policy is the thinnest possible substitute for ethics, an instrument for continuity and control rather than a commitment to the human cost. “But nothing more” compresses a whole political tragedy into four words: when harm happens, the institution can hide behind procedure, necessity, national interest, the weather.

Context matters: Camus wrote under the shadow of mass violence and ideological certainty, watching modern states justify cruelty with tidy abstractions. His larger project - absurdism yoked to moral responsibility - insists that meaning, and restraint, are human tasks. The subtext is a warning to citizens who want their politics to feel clean: if you outsource your conscience to the state, you won’t get conscience back. You’ll get policy.