Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago doesn’t plead for incremental reform; he indicts the machinery that claims to represent us. The first clause concedes a near-consensus premise - society must change - then swivels to the uncomfortable part: the tools we’re allowed to use are structurally incapable of delivering it. “Political powers” reads less like parties than like permitted levers: elections, parliaments, polite debate. He’s implying that what passes for democratic agency has been hollowed out into procedure, and procedure has become a substitute for power.

The line works because it refuses the comforting story that democracy is self-correcting. “At the moment” is doing sly work: it sounds temporary, but the surrounding sentence suggests permanence, a chronic insufficiency disguised as a passing phase. Then comes the escalation: not “reformed,” not “repaired,” but “rethought.” That verb is philosophical, almost impatient, as if the crisis isn’t just in policy but in the imagination of governance itself.

Context matters. Saramago was a Portuguese novelist shaped by dictatorship, revolution, and the post-Cold War triumphalism that sold liberal democracy as the end of history. As a committed leftist and chronicler of collective blindness (literal and moral), he saw how democratic forms can coexist with economic coercion, media consensus, and managed consent. The subtext is sharp: if democracy is reduced to choosing administrators for an unchangeable system, it becomes a ritual of legitimacy, not a vehicle of transformation. His provocation isn’t anti-democratic; it’s a dare to make “rule by the people” mean something operational again.