On Rebellion and Revolution
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize "the astonishing history of European pride" that laid the groundwork for both nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of...
...He describes modernity, in language foreshadowing Foucault, as a drama that began with the end of the ancient world and of which the final words have not been spoken...
...For if thinkers in this idiom tend to abandon humanism altogether, to deconstruct its premises, and to celebrate the decay of universalism into a heterogeneity of local impulses, Camus will clearly have none of this...
...Let us explore this unusual contradiction, in which the terms neither negate each other nor are dialectically transcended but rather coexist...
...Of course his work is not without its problems, both philosophical and political...
...Rather, given the relativity and indeterminacy of human existence, it is a necessary means of any freedom or justice worth speaking of...
...The former chooses only the ineffectiveness of abstention and the second the ineffectiveness of destruction...
...The task of historical materialism can only be to establish a method of criticism of contemporary society...
...The book reverberates with echoes of Nietzsche's The Will to Power...
...How then does Camus understand moral constraint...
...In fact, his remarks about liberalism in The Rebel are uniformly critical...
...The posture of absolute moral righteousness is not pure, but it is inexpedient...
...Or again, in discussing the excesses of socialism, he concedes that "undoubtedly, it has nothing but scorn for the formal and mystifying morality to be found in bourgeois society...
...The important thing," he insists, "is not, as yet, to get to the root of things, but, the world being what it is, to know how to live in it...
...The representatives of these two absolute poles are Koestler's yogi and commisar...
...Although Camus's writing clearly had its own intellectual sources, it was in style and substance more iconoclastic...
...It is quite true that there is no possibility of freedom for the man tied to his lathe all day long who, when evening comes, crowds into a single room with his family...
...What image better suits Camus's call for a "solidarity of chains" than the pluralistic movement of Polish workers, peasants, and intellectuals demanding at one and the same time their bread and their freedom, a demand reverberating on both sides of the cold war...
...In order to act we must develop and sustain practices of resistance and reconstruction, organizations, strategies...
...But these contradictions only exist in the absolute...
...Its culpability in this regard is infinite" [emphasis added...
...The moral outrage of Marx is a point to which Camus later returns...
...q Notes See Herbert Lottman, Albert Camus: A Biography (New York: Doubleday, 1979), on the acrimonious dispute that attended the publication of The Rebel...
...As he insists: "In assigning oppression a limit within which begins the dignity common to all men, rebellion . . . put in the first rank of its frame of reference an obvious complicity among men, a common texture, the solidarity of chains, a communication between human being and human being which makes men both similar and united...
...In response to the dizzying madness of the twentieth century, he proposes: [T]he first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed with the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared by all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe...
...But for him this clearly means that the left must learn from history and cease to furnish its enemies with arguments by justifying communist oppression...
...Camus draws two major consequences from SUMMER • 1989 • 381 Rebellion B Revolution this argument...
...Further, Camus observes, it was Marx's aversion to bourgeois cynicism that "compelled" him to magnify his prophesy...
...Most of the recent left-wing intellectual histories of the period are equally dismissive...
...5 See Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984...
...His arguments are uncompromising but pragmatic...
...6 Michnik also expresses a Camusian desire to articulate a political "third way," navigating through the jagged thaws in the frozen geopolitics of the cold war...
...Human dignity is his watchword, and he insists that this requires a commitment, critical to be sure, to political practices that seek to enhance human freedom, which "is good for all men...
...7 The spirit of Camus is thus very much alive...
...This is so important.that Camus, having just written of the need to "aspire to the relative," insists that an authentic revolution "would allow absolute freedom of speech...
...We are, Camus insists, bound in "mutual complicity...
...The power of his prose often outpaces the lucidity and rigor of his arguments...
...We must employ political means...
...We must thus act soberly, with commitment and circumspection: "Any historical enterprise can only therefore be a more or less reasonable or justifiable adventure...
...But in considering such problems, it is important to set Camus's enterprise in its proper context...
...There is no end of human history...
...He writes: It is undoubtedly correct to emphasize the ethical demands that form the basis of the Marxist dream . . . [and that constitute] the real greatness of Marx...
...The mutual understanding and communication discovered by rebellion can survive only in the free exchange of conversation...
...Here he acknowledges the genuine tensions within Marx's thought, and the possibility of these tensions being developed in a number of directions, critical as well as mystifying...
...This has a number of dimensions...
...Once again, Camus identifies the value of the tradition of Marxian socialism...
...While the latter views human beings as infinitely malleable and rejects any limits or standards in its crusading zeal, the former "is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power...
...But in The Rebel Camus clearly appreciates the open-endedness of the Marxist tradition and he exhibits a degree of openness toward its impulses and understandings...
...But Camus also 378 • DISSENT Rebellion il Revolution acknowledges the complexity of the Marxian tradition and the complexity of modern history, in which Marxists are not the only agents...
...And thus Camus's advocacy of freedom is inextricably linked to his advocacy of socialism...
...And yet it would be a serious historical error to interpret them in this way...
...But his problem is set by Stalin...
...In defending rebellion, he seeks to reconstruct a vital and sober humanism...
...Although Camus proceeds to distinguish between rebellion and revolution, and to criticize the latter in what approaches categorical terms, it is clear in Camus's book that Russian Communism is a problem not because it threatens "Western Freedom" (it is notable that the guiding geographical division in the book is not East vs...
...But we live and will live among people who think otherwise...
...Injustice denies this complicity by privileging ruling elites and classes and, in its extreme form, totalitarianism, utterly destroys it by establishing a "silent world . . . enslaved and mute," in which "dialogue and personal relations have been replaced by propaganda or polemic, which are two kinds of monologue...
...Until then there is no suitable criterion on which to base a judgment of value...
...Secondly, Camus rejects the doctrine of absolute nonviolence, which "is the negative basis of slavery and its acts of violence...
...Less worthy than Saint-Just, it simply made use of this frame of reference as an alibi, while employing, on all occasions, the opposite values...
...It is not surprising that, in the hysterical atmosphere of the cold war, his sober analysis would be misunderstood and his critical appreciation ignored...
...This, after all, is the spirit of rebellion as he understands it...
...On this view the rebel is someone who quietly, and always circumspectly, affirms human dignity while avoiding the fateful entanglements of political commitment and organizational membership...
...And the policy of pure expedience is likewise neither pure nor expedient, consuming first its children and then itself in an orgy of destructiveness...
...He refuses to absolve certain Marxists of responsibility for the crimes they have committed and for those they have justified...
...Albert Camus, "Bread and Freedom," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage, 1960), pp...
...Mediterranean courage and love of life) but because it has appropriated and devalued the rebellious impulse of humanism and the revolutionary means sometimes necessary to empower this impulse...
...Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York, N.Y.: Pantheon, 1984...
...In the chapter entitled "Rebellion and Revolution," which punctuates his critique of Marxism, Camus criticizes the view, associated with Sartre, that the authentic rebel must become a revolutionary...
...As Camus once put it, "It is essential for us to know whether man, without the help of either the eternal or rationalistic thought, can unaided create his own values...
...Camus proposes, in contrast, a mediated view of things: "A revolutionary action which wishes to be coherent in terms of its origins should be embodied in an active consent to the relative...
...Marx not only provides a compelling "criticism of contemporary society," he also provides a theoretical framework capable not of prophesies, but of prognoses about the future...
...It falls, I argue, within the range of democratic socialism...
...It is primarily a risk...
...Bourgeois] morality prospered on the prostitution of the working classes...
...According to Camus, the universe is silent...
...Marxism The major problem The Rebel seeks to address is that "curious transposition peculiar to our times" that has led to "slave camps under the flag of freedom" and "massacres justified by philanthropy"— Stalinism...
...Ronald Aronson, Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (London: Verso, 1980...
...As he writes, in a Camusian vein, "I do believe in the creative powers of our actions...
...But there are some hints here, and they relate to Camus's unabashed naturalism...
...He observes that the left fatefully confused the depredations of bourgeois freedom with freedom itself: For it should have been said merely that bourgeois freedom was a hoax—and not all freedom...
...So violence can never be ruled out in principle...
...Of course such an injunction, however incisively it serves to repudiate flawed aspirations for the answer to our problems, cannot insulate his thinking from criticism...
...The revolutionary, on the other hand, is one who seeks to transform society as a whole and who is willing to license any means in the pursuit of this end...
...He devotes but eleven pages to it, describing it as an "ethics of the gang" and an "insensate passion for nothingness...
...But he writes in a modulated fashion, observing of the Bolshevik seizure of power: "From this moment on, the history of the interior struggles of the party, from Lenin to Stalin, is summed up in the struggle between the workers' democracy and military and bureaucratic dictatorship...
...and Fred Hirsch, The French New Left (Boston: South End Press, 1981...
...Mandan socialism, he writes, deifies man, and consequently "has assumed some of the characteristics of traditional religions...
...Camus's view here has powerful affinities with the writing of more recent thinkers like Adam Michnik in Poland and George Konrad in Hungary...
...Camus does not absolve Marx of historical responsibility, but his comments suggest that this is an enormously difficult question, not amenable to the kind of simplifications that cold war liberals were wont to indulge in...
...Marx, he writes, blends "the most valid critical method with a Utopian Messianism of highly dubious value...
...It is a critique of "historical revolution," a revolutionary attitude embodied in a certain kind of twentieth-century Marxist theory and practice...
...To be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other...
...It also does not rest easily within any readily identifiable intellectual tradition...
...Man, at the culmination of his rebellion, incarcerated himself...
...it is one of the legitimate heirs of the modern rebellious impulse...
...Justice in a silent world, justice enslaved and mute, destroys mutual complicity and finally can no longer be justice...
...It is true that Camus sees the development of "totalitarianism" in both Russia and Germany as having "crippled" our judgment and forced "innocence to justify itself...
...It kills that small part of existence that can be realized on this earth through the mutual understanding of men...
...Camus does not fully answer these questions, but his analysis poses them, and in an honest, nondoctrinaire way skeptical of the grand claims of modernity but also wary of a wholesale abandonment of its humanist aspirations...
...And although The Rebel was sufficiently anomalous to ensure its absence from the mainstream of political theory, it was also sufficiently philosophical to foreclose its entry into a more popular political discourse in the manner of Orwell's 1984 or Koestler's Darkness at Noon...
...4 Individual freedom—of movement, of expression, of love—is certainly the value that Camus wishes to uphold...
...The very core of his theory was that work is profoundly dignified and unjustly despised...
...Revolutionary violence is justifiable when it is necessary to combat injustice and when it is employed soberly, in a limited fashion, with the intention, "announced as often as possible," of mitigating violence and restoring human solidarity...
...This leads us to Camus's analysis of Marxism, which both recapitulates certain Nietzschean criticisms of socialism and parallels the "Got That Failed" view of Koestler, Silone, Gide, and others with whom Camus was associated...
...This does not require that we subscribe to any eternal or absolute moral codes...
...In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize "the astonishing history of European pride" that laid the groundwork for both nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of moral confusion...
...The malady experienced by a single man becomes a mass plague...
...The problem is whether rebellion, "without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible . . . can discover the principle of reasonable culpability...
...Camus and Postmodern Politics Camus's criticisms of liberalism and Marxism are clearly in the vein of much recent "postmodernist" writing...
...On the basis of everything I have already 380 • DISSENT Rebellion II Revolution argued, this view hardly seems plausible...
...Further, freedom of expression is necessary to discover justice, which is not a Platonic form but a fragile human achievement: Even when justice is not realized, freedom preserves the power to protest and guarantees human communication...
...3 But Camus's discussion is clearly not in this genre...
...6 Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985...
...In one of the concluding sections of The Rebel, "Rebellion and Art," Camus favorably quotes Nietzsche's aphorism: "Instead of the judge and the oppressor, the creator...
...The Rebel was clearly a polemic against communism in general and the French Communist party (PCF) in particular...
...In Camus's view Lenin is Marx's disciple, and, as such, he helps turn Marx's theory into a doctrine and erects a church—the party-state—to incarnate its truth...
...And it is a warning about the dangers of invoking revolutionary "ends" of history to justify oppressive and murderous means...
...But "it must therefore preserve, for the rebel, its provisional character . . . and must always be bound, if it cannot be avoided, to a personal responsibility and an immediate risk...
...In discussing the French Revolution and its "virtuous" excesses, Camus observes: The bourgeoisie succeeded in reigning during the entire nineteenth century only by referring itself to abstract principles...
...It does not tell us how to be and what to do...
...it is only capable of making suppositions, unless it abandons its scientific attitude, about the society of the future...
...And it is here that Marx's theory prefigures the atrocities of Stalinism: "In the perspective of the Marxist prophecy, nothing matters . . . when the bourgeois class has disappeared, the proletariat will establish the rule of universal man at the summit of production, by the very logic of productive development...
...But this evidence lures the individual from his solitude...
...Camus here strikes a theme that he returns to throughout the book, and which interpreters have failed to hear at their own peril—that communism is important for our history because it first articulates, and then betrays, a value worth defending, the value of human freedom...
...His theory of mystification is still valid, because it is in fact universally true, and is equally applicable to revolutionary mystifications...
...The central feature of this condition is the limited nature of all humans, as natural creatures who share a common earth and a common tendency to infuse their recalcitrant world with meaning...
...His treatment of philosophical themes, particularly regarding Hegel and Marx, is sometimes wanting...
...Two central terms of The Rebel are moderation and limits, and these certainly sound liberal...
...Revolution is a means of rebellion...
...And it prefigures such contemporary "postmodern" theorists as Foucault and Lyotard, who similarly seek to indict the "grand narratives" that animate the modern Western world...
...How do we conceptualize, let alone justify, humanist values and socialist practices once we decisively abandon the metaphysical guarantees of natural law or historical necessity...
...Suppression of free speech denies from the beginning "that small amount of existence we find in ourselves...
...I rebel—therefore we exist...
...It is a way to achieve greater human freedom and justice...
...In what, we may ask, lies the validity of Marx's criticism...
...Absolute freedom mocks at justice...
...Perfect freedom and perfect justice are impossible...
...And yet this does not mean that anything goes...
...It is, in short, a democratic socialism "without appeal," with no reliance upon any kind of transcendental imperative and with no guarantees of historical success...
...For Camus this historicism is joined with a prophetic vision of communism as "the riddle of history solved," the "reconciliation of the wolf and the lamb," the end of human alienation...
...The name revolution, to which Hitler's adventure had no claim, was once deserved by Russian Communism, and although it apparently deserves it no longer, it claims that one day it will deserve it forever...
...But the difference between these two types of men is not, as has been stated, the difference between ineffectual purity and expediency...
...But his point is not simply to insist upon the universality of human freedom...
...And this distinction has usually been interpreted so as to support the reading of Camus as a liberal...
...But probably the most important reason for its eclipse is the political context in which it was written, highly charged by the onset of the cold war and by the personal clash between Camus and Sartre that seemed to incarnate this polarization...
...The danger of nihilism is a major theme of The Rebel...
...We must learn the difficult art of political compromise, without which authentic pluralism will not be possible...
...we must stake everything on the renaissance...
...The crimes of the Bolsheviks, of Stalinism, and of the post-Stalin Soviet regimes convinced him of the dangers of communist ideology, dangers that can be traced to Lenin and, before him, to Marx's own messianic vision...
...Given such a world, can our beliefs and practices be grounded upon anything more than our own insistence, on our own will to power...
...Camus in fact distinguishes not between rebellion and revolution, but between rebellion and what he variously calls "absolute revolution," "historical revolution," and "Caesarean revolution...
...in other words, between justice and expediency...
...Industrial society will open the way to a new civilization only by restoring to the worker the dignity of a creator...
...Both the Frankfurt School theorists and Jean-Paul Sartre participated in, and reconstituted, the tradition of Western Marxism, a fact that gave their works an enduring significance...
...In doing so, and this can be said with conviction, he never wanted the additional degradation that has been imposed on man in his name...
...2 See the Introduction to The Rebel (New York: Vintage, 1956...
...The rebellious pole of the contradiction is thus a bit more complicated than it seemed at first appearance...
...and my "Arendt, Camus, and the Politics of Postmodernism," Praxis International (forthcoming...
...By demanding for the worker real riches, which are not the riches of money but of leisure and creation, he has reclaimed, despite all the appearance to the contrary, the dignity of man...
...Unlike fascism, he writes, Russian Communism openly aspires toward universal freedom: "That is its strength, its deliberate significance, and its importance in our history...
...And yet there is some support for it in The Rebel...
...Camus positions himself between East and West, a "free-lance" intellectual refusing aid and comfort to either camp...
...8 Albert Camus, "Pessimism and Courage," in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, p. 58...
...And the left, both within the PCF and Sartre's Les Temps Modernes, responded to Camus's criticism by dismissing The Rebel as a retreat from history and an abandonment of a socialist vision.' A cold war consensus thus emerged about Camus's "liberalism...
...This sounds like a categorical damnation of revolution...
...This diagnosis of Marxism is certainly familiar...
...It supposes that we cannot trust ourselves and, fatefully, that our present integrity and freedom can be sacrificed to the future, to be retrieved at the proper moment...
...8 As he knew, this is not merely a deeply intellectual problem, but an urgently practical one as well...
...Konrad's Anti-Politics too, and the democratic civil society of a demilitarized Europe that it underwrites, echoes Camus's observation that the political world "makes us sick," as well as his passionate commitment to a rejuvenated "art of living...
...Michnik's work, like Camus's, is marked by a sense of the need to equilibrate means and ends and of the ambiguities of political commitment...
...This essay makes explicit what is implicit, but not undiscernible, in The Rebel —Camus's socialism...
...Authentic arts of rebellion will only consent to take up arms for institutions that limit violence, not for those which codify it...
...It is a particular kind of historical revolution—communism—that nihilistically negates the present in the interest of the future...
...Camus's point is that our political practices and institutions must always remain true to our ends...
...For an alternative, see David Sprintzen, Albert Camus: A Critical Portrait (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988...
...And yet, if my argument is correct, we should not overemphasize Camus's affinities with contemporary postmodernism...
...Socialism vs...
...But that there were liberties to be won and never to be relinquished again...
...They suppose a world and a method of thought without mediation...
...In our daily trials rebellion plays the same role as does the "cogito" in the realm of thought: it is the first piece of evidence...
...It founds its first value on the whole human race...
...In this New Jerusalem, echoing with the roar of miraculous machinery, who will still remember the cry of the victim...
...Inheriting a . . . doctrine that pictured freedom as suspect, the revolution little by little became stronger, and the world's greatest hope hardened into the world's most efficient dictatorship...
...This is a difficult question, one that would take us beyond The Rebel...
...It should have been said simply that bourgeois freedom was not freedom or, in the best of cases, not yet freedom...
...In the paragraph that directly precedes the one from which I have been quoting, Camus notes that "the longing for rest and peace must itself be thrust aside...
...One would not want to overemphasize Camus's sympathy for bolshevism...
...It is based upon a much more serious questioning of the optimism and humanism of the Enlightenment...
...As he writes, the characteristic of the world we live in is just that cynical dialectic which sets up injustice against enslavement while strengthening one by the other...
...West but "European pride" vs...
...Russian Communism, Camus insists, is "forgetful of its real principles...
...His essay "Maggots and SUMMER • 1989 . 383 Rebellion II Revolution Angels" is a brilliant critique of political self-righteousness...
...Violence, he writes, is "a relative risk, which causes a rupture in communication...
...And in the concluding sections of the book, where he criticizes the various forms of the nihilism that he sees at the heart of our current ills, he notes: "Such a plant could, in fact, thrive only in the fertile soil of accumulated inequalities...
...From this moment, man decides to live by his own means...
...In it Camus, the anticommunist, endorses Marx's critique of bourgeois mystification and provides a sympathetic justification of his emphasis upon economic determinants...
...it coincides with the acceptance of iniquity...
...Violence can only be an extreme limit which combats another form of violence, as, for example, in the case of an insurrection...
...But if he is a rebel, he ends up taking sides against the revolution...
...The very project of human emancipation is somehow flawed...
...Camus is a libertarian socialist, but he is not a liberal...
...The Rebel is at once a lyrical reflection and a political treatise, and it is neither of them...
...On the contrary, he insists that "The revolutionary is simultaneously a rebel or he is not a revolutionary, but a policeman or a bureaucrat who turns against rebellion...
...One is that as a writer Camus occupies a rather peculiar no-man's-land, his work standing somewhere between the lyricism appropriate to "pure literature" and the rigor expected of the analytical philosopher...
...As such, it must always be judged pragmatically, in the light of our own inherent limitations as makers of history and also in the light of the barbarous history of twentieth century revolution...
...It is to underscore the necessarily communal character of freedom, both as an achievement and as an experienced reality...
...Camus's ethic is an ethic of solidarity...
...Its two most visible manifestations in the twentieth century are "revolutionary trade unionism" and "the syndicalist and libertarian spirit" unleashed, and then suppressed, by the Russian Revolution...
...Progress, from the time of Sade up to the present day, has consisted in gradually enlarging the stronghold where, according to his own rules, man without God brutally wields power...
...As Camus writes: "If injustice is bad for the rebel, it is not because it contradicts an eternal idea of justice, but because it perpetuates the silent hostility that separates the oppressor from the oppressed...
...Camus was an anticommunist...
...89-91, 92, 93...
...What was killed in the Moscow trials and elsewhere, and in the revolutionary camps . . . is not bourgeois freedom but the freeSUMMER • 1989 • 379 Rebellion a Revolution dom of 1917...
...Camus points to "the drama of our times in which work, entirely subordinated to production, has ceased to be creative...
...Insofar as it is a risk it cannot be used to justify any excess or any ruthless and absolutist position...
...The interior struggles of the party: Camus does not provide a historical analysis, but his comments acknowledge the authentic aspirations to which the Bolsheviks gave voice, and view Russian revolutionary history as possibility rather than preordained outcome...
...Camus also shares with postmodernists the view that the "prideful" grand narratives of modern humanism are themselves partly responsible for the horrors of the twentieth century...
...This solidarity is, appropriately enough, inspired by socialism...
...But the book was read on the basis of the kind of "cowardly logic" that Camus had always resisted, and it was almost universally misinterpreted...
...The revolution of the twentieth century has arbitrarily separated, for overambitious ends of conquest, two inseparable ideas...
...But it is also a paradigm of the kind of free creativity that must characterize a genuinely emancipated society...
...Because both reject the conciliatory value that rebellion, on the contrary, reveals, they offer us only two kinds of impotence...
...Nor indeed, did Lenin, though he took a decisive step toward establishing a military Empire" [emphasis added...
...See Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975...
...In it 376 • DISSENT Rebellion A Revolution Camus offers us a political vision that is neither Marxist nor liberal...
...By its essential corruption and disheartening hypocrisy, it helped to discredit, for good and all, the principles it proclaimed...
...All morality becomes provisional...
...Now is a good time to reread The Rebel...
...Bourgeois freedom can meanwhile have recourse to all possible hoaxes...
...384 • DISSENT...
...Camus is clear: His most profitable undertaking has been to reveal the reality that is hidden behind the formal values of which the bourgeois of his time made a great show...
...When anyone brings up the slave in the colonies and calls for justice, he is reminded of prisoners of Russian concentration camps, and vice versa...
...This is why the kindest words in The Rebel are reserved for "the fastidious assassins," Kaliayev and the Russian terrorists of 1905, who treated violence with the gravest of attitudes and incarnated its risks in their own lives...
...Like Hannah Arendt, Camus, while unable to subscribe to implausible doctrines of natural law, insists that there is such a thing as the human condition...
...3 See J. L. Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (New York: Norton, 1970...
...Marxism thus has value...
...And yet he is all the more interesting precisely because his political vision is joined with an abandonment of metaphysical codes and moral absolutes...
...The first is the necessity of freedom of speech and of civil freedom...
...His writing is infused with moral purpose and moral outrage...
...The rebel is thus not a saint and cannot insulate himself from the political fray...
...One must act and live in terms of the future...
...There are clear affinities between Camus's thought and certain versions of modern, particularly French, liberalism...
...But Camus does not argue that freedom of speech is a natural right, given by God or Nature...
...The Rebel is thus not a statement of political withdrawal and liberal acquiescence, nor is it a categorical critique of political revolution...
...In such a disgusting attempt at outbidding, one thing only does not change—the victim, who is always the same...
...pit has appropriated the metaphysical ambition that this book describes, the erection, after the death of God, of a city of man finally deified...
...If one manifestation of this danger is the cruelty practiced in the name of political absolutes, another, equally dangerous, is the refusal to believe that we are morally constrained at all...
...Cold war liberals welcomed Camus's anticommunism with open arms, and interpreted his calls for limits, moderation, and freedom of expression as an endorsement of their own worldview...
...It simply requires that we acknowledge our common fate, the possibilities offered by our mutual recognition, and the dangers posed, more than ever in the twentieth century, by our refusal to do so...
...If the central concept of The Rebel is, unsurprisingly, rebellion, then the distinction that drives the essay is that between rebellion and revolution...
...But perhaps the clearest statement of this view is Camus's essay "Bread and Freedom," written in 1953, two years after The Rebel was published and at the height of the cold war...
...The task of reconstructing a theory and practice of democratic socialism in a disenchanted world stands before us...
...It accomplishes nothing and consecrates injustice with its refusal to act...
...Dialogue is thus at the heart of Camus's ethical theory, as it is for so many contemporary theorists...
...But Camus's subtlety does not end with Marx...
...This is the point of Camus's ethics of the absurd, premised upon "the encounter between human inquiry and the silence of the universe...
...Liberalism If the above analysis is correct, then clearly we must also reevaluate the purported "liberalism" of The Rebel...
...But the human condition also makes the future indeterminate and the ultimate consequences of our acts unknowable...
...And, it could be argued, his recourse to language about an "irrepressible demand of human nature, of which the Mediterranean . . . guards the secret" relies upon an implicit essentialism...
...Stalinism, he asserts, was something "Marx never dreamed of...
...It tears the basic fabric of humanity...
...The future cannot be foreseen and it may be that the historical renaissance is impossible...
...The Russian Revolution of 1917, he goes on, marked the dawn of real freedom and the greatest hope the world has known...
...It is generally associated with "end of ideology" views about the dangers of social SUMMER • 1989 377 Rebellion ll Revolution transformation and the value of liberalism...
...This is a remarkable paragraph...
...But "systematic violence is part of the order of things," and categorical nonviolence is itself culpable, because to renounce the exercise of power is simply to submit to existing power...
...But this fact condemns a class, a society and the slavery it assumes, not freedom itself...
...And it was received as such...
...We seem to confront, Camus observes, an "apparent dilemma" of either "silence or murder—in either case, a surrender," in the first case a withdrawal from politics, or at least from radical politics, that "consecrates injustice," in the second an embracing of historical necessity that consecrates revolutionary destruction...
...And yet, the sentence that follows reads: "So much so that there is absolutely no progress from one attitude to the other, but coexistence and endlessly increasing contradiction...
...It was unanchored in the academic institutions within which most "serious" theoretical discussion of politics has tended to take place...
...Art for Camus is one way of insisting upon the value of the world and man's place in it...
...The trials and perversions of revolutionary society furnish it at one and the same time with a good conscience and with arguments against its enemies...
...Both are forms of absolutism that, while in ineradicable conflict, paradoxically achieve the same result—human debasement and injustice...
...Camus's discussion of this is sharply critical, but even here he acknowledges the unintended and contingent nature of the revolution's ultimate outcome...
...The prophesy is still dangerous, but here Camus views it almost as rhetorical strategy, motivated by a desire to fight injustice and grounded in a compelling analysis of the structure of capitalist society...
...In any case, Camus would be the first to insist that we should do our own thinking...
...Here he writes about "the great event of the twentieth century," the forsaking of freedom by what he alternately calls "the workers' movements" and "the revolutionary movement," which had assumed responsibility for realizing freedom and justice...
...There are several reasons for this...
...2 But nazism is not his major problem...
...from Sade's lurid castle to the concentration camps, man's greatest liberty consisted only in building the prison of his own crimes...
...Camus is only half facetious when he observes that "Marx is only anti-capitalist in so far as capitalism is out of date," suggesting that Marx's historicism undermines the possibility of a fully worked out ethical justification of both socialist ends and socialist means...
...The human condition requires, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, that we either hang together or hang separately...
...George Konrad, Anti-Politics (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1984...
...But] this kind of resignation is, quite simply, rejected here...
...And so the legend of Camus's virulent anti-Marxism was founded...
...Camus rejects any notion of a necessity, whether natural or 382 • DISSENT Rebellion II Revolution historical, which can a priori ground our morality...
...We must be, in this sense, revolutionaries...
...His conclusion underscores this: The false freedom of bourgeois society has not suffered meanwhile...
...This has often been interpreted as an expression of aesthetic withdrawal, but it is in fact a deeply and selfconsciously political statement...
...Once again, freedom is a necessary condition of the justice that revolution, properly, seeks to achieve...
...The rebel is a kind of Popperian liberal, the revolutionary a Mandan socialist, if not an out-and-out Stalinist...
...It clearly parallels the similar efforts of more philosophically esteemed contemporaries, such as Adorno and Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism...
...Another is the historicism that Marx draws from Hegel, which for Camus entails that "Values are . . . only to be found at the end of history...
...Absolute justice denies freedom...
...One immediately thinks of Constant's defense of individual liberty and of Tocqueville's criticism of the overcentralizing tendencies of the French state and his advocacy of voluntary associations...
...His tone, his language, and his commitments are thus, in critical respects, far from those of contemporary postmodernists...
...We must learn to live with them and teach them to live with us...
...5 They reflect a similar sense of the breakdown of the metaphysical foundations of modernity, in Camus's case determined by his own experience of the mid-twentieth century, "a period which, in a space of fifty years, uproots, enslaves, and kills seventy million human beings...
...All subsequent references to The Rebel appear in the text of this article...
...One is a "scientific Messianism" of bourgeois origin, characterized by a naiveté about industry and technology...
...A single value is constantly outraged or prostituted—freedom...
...Similarly Hannah Arendt's writing self-consciously operI would like to thank David Sprintzen, Terence Ball, William Connolly, Debra Kent, and the editors for their comments and suggestions...
...But Camus's democratic socialism is not simply a joining of democratic norms to a socialist vision...
...Camus stands against both bourgeois hypocrisy and a "socialism of the gallows," and for both democracy and socialism...
...There is, it would seem, an ineradicable opposition between the movement of rebellion and the attainments of revolution...
...In the light of these comments, it is remarkable that The Rebel could be read as an apologia for Western liberalism in the face of "the threat" of communism, for Camus is clearly intent on denying bourgeois freedom its "good conscience...
...But that revolution, surrounded from the outside, threatened within and without, provided itself with a police force...
...He clearly believes this passion to be symptomatic of the nihilism so prevalent in his day, the product of the bankruptcy and hypocrisy of twentieth-century bourgeois civilization...
...above all, we must recognize and state that the extreme decadence brought about by the economy of prosperity was to compel Marx to give first place to social and economic relationships and to magnify still more his prophecy of the reign of man...
...And the defensiveness of the French left, no doubt fueled by the offensiveness of the right, in a truly vicious circle of recrimination, only served to further alienate Camus, himself a proud and selfrighteous man...
...It is a meditative reflection that violates the conventional categories and so is easily dismissed by those of a conventional literary or philosophical bent...
...Our human condition compels us to act in order to humanize the world...
...ated within the tradition of German phenomenology and played an important role in shaping American academic political philosophy...
...And yet, strangely, The Rebel tends today to be ignored...
...What does it matter that this should be accompanied by dictatorship and violence...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
