Politics & Power Quote by Joyce Cary

Cary’s line works because it sounds like a tidy analogy, then quietly turns into a provocation. By pairing religion with “the soul” and politics with “the body,” he flatters both domains with a sense of necessity while also demystifying them as parallel bureaucracies: each is “organized” to manage human need. The key word is organized. It drags religion down from revelation to administration, and it drags politics up from horse-trading to pastoral care. Both become systems of discipline and consolation, not just belief or policy.

The subtext is a warning about category mistakes we keep making. When people demand that politics redeem them, purify them, give their lives meaning, politics starts behaving like a church: heresies, saints, excommunication, crusades. When religion is tasked with running the material world, it starts behaving like a state: taxation in moral currency, coercion dressed as salvation. Cary isn’t saying the soul/body split is clean; he’s saying we treat it as if it is, then act shocked when the overlap produces zealotry, censorship, or cynicism.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of two world wars and the mass ideologies that tried to substitute for faith, Cary had watched politics claim total jurisdiction over the “body” of society. His phrasing implies that governance is never merely technical; it is always a moral project with rituals, obligations, and promised futures. The line lands as both diagnosis and restraint: keep politics humane without asking it to be holy, keep religion meaningful without letting it become a police power.