The Rebel (book)

• 1. Introduction

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  The Rebel, published in 1951 under the French title L'Homme révolté, is a book-length essay by Albert Camus. It traces how rebellion and revolution have unfolded in societies, with a particular focus on Western Europe. Camus does not write it as a history alone. He treats rebellion as an idea with a logic of its own, one that can be followed from a single person's refusal to an entire society's upheaval. Along the way he asks what a person really commits to when they say no. He asks why revolutions that begin in the name of justice so often end in terror. And he asks whether any form of revolt can stay honest about the value of human life. The answers draw on a long line of thinkers, artists and movements, and they set off a quarrel that still has not settled.

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• 2. The Absurd Contradicts Itself

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  Camus builds the book on a perception he calls absurd: the clash between the human mind's unceasing hunger for clarity and a world that appears to have no meaning. He insists this perception must be faced with what he calls lucidity. Then he turns it against itself. A person who claims to believe in nothing still believes in their own protest, and in the worth of the life doing the protesting. For that reason, Camus calls the absurd sensibility a point of departure that irresistibly exceeds itself. From the impulse to rebel, he argues, we can deduce values. Those values show murder and oppression to be illegitimate and point toward what he calls hope for a new creation. The book can be read as a sequel to The Myth of Sisyphus, where Camus ponders the meaning of life. It answers the same question but offers an alternative solution. Rebellion and revolt, in his account, are the same phenomenon seen in a personal frame and in a social one. Both grow from a basic human rejection of normative justice, and Camus turns next to what happens when a whole society acts on that rejection.

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• 3. Killing God and King

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  The execution of Louis XVI is Camus's central example of how revolutions try to kill God. By removing the king, the French Revolution also swept away the divine right of kings. Camus sees this as one stage in a longer decline in the social importance of god, king and virtue, and he links that decline to the development of nihilism. In his reading, revolutionaries of this kind deny both history and transcendental values. What rose in their place was a materialist idealism that sought what he describes as the end of history. He considers that end unattainable. Because it cannot be reached, he argues, the revolutionaries tried to coerce it into being, and terror followed. The result was the enslaving of people described as temporary, carried out in the name of their future liberation. Camus does not use this argument to defend religion. He treats the replacement of divinely justified morality with mere pragmatism as a loss that shows how much transcendental moral values matter. Standing between unjust human existence and a poor substitute in revolution, his rebel needs a different path.

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• 4. The Fastidious Assassins

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  Ivan Kalyayev led a group of Russian terrorists in the early twentieth century whom Camus calls the fastidious assassins. Of all the modern revolutionaries, they earn his closest attention. Their distinction, in his telling, was that they were prepared to give their own lives as payment for the lives they took. They did not license other people to kill on their behalf. For Camus, that willingness marks the difference between a rebel and a tyrant. His ideal rebel fights for justice without abandoning transcendental values, and that includes the principle that human life has intrinsic value. The assassins show how narrow this path is. A third theme in the book explains why: crime. Camus describes rebels who get carried away and lose touch with the original basis of their rebellion. He follows the various defenses of crime that have been offered through different historical epochs. The question that remains is where a rebel can find a politics that avoids this drift.

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• 5. Midday Thought

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  Near the end of the book, Camus points to syndicalism as a politics with possible moral superiority in its ethics and its plan. He grounds it in a wider outlook he calls midday thought. This outlook sets love of this life, and an unrelativisable commitment to fellow human beings, against three promises. These are the promise of another world, the promise of an end of history, and the promise of the triumph of an alleged master race. A reference summary of his views puts the matter plainly. The true rebel is not someone who conforms to a revolutionary orthodoxy but someone who can say no to injustice. Such a person would prefer reform, of the kind found in modern trade-union socialism, to the totalitarian politics of Marxism or similar movements. Camus called the systematic violence of ideology crimes de logique, and he found it wholly unjustifiable. He hated cruelty, and he held that good ends do not authorize evil means. A second reference work adds that revolt is both a path of resolved action and a state of mind. It describes revolt as an attitude of heroic defiance toward whatever oppresses human beings. Camus rejected the extreme forms of revolt, which include terrorism and reckless egoism. Rejecting them did not spare him from controversy.

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• 6. A Divided Reception

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  Jean-Paul Sartre wrote a critical response to the book in the review Les Temps modernes in 1952. Marxists and existentialists generally disliked The Rebel, and Sartre was among the existentialists who did. Many European Communists considered Camus's thinking reactionary. Their anger is easy to understand, since the book explicitly condemns Marxism-Leninism and denounces unrestrained violence as a means of human liberation. One commentator describes Camus after this book as an outspoken champion of individual freedom and an impassioned critic of tyranny and terrorism, whether practiced by the Left or by the Right. Not every critic was convinced. Henri Peyre, writing for a major reference work, judged the text to consist of grave, but inconsistent and often unconvincing, essays loosely linked together. Others hold a much higher view. John Foley writes that philosophically, The Rebel is Camus's most important book, although it is much maligned and frequently ignored. Aidan Curzon-Hobson also calls it Camus's most underexplored text, and he considers it an important educational resource. Behind this divided verdict lie several readers who found something lasting in its argument.

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• 7. Echoes and Influences

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  Meghan E. Von Hassel argues that Camus presented a new humanism in The Rebel. In her reading, he found hope in the beauty of solidarity, rooted in the dignity of man and in the value of human life. Writers such as Paul Berman, among other modern philosophers and authors, have also been influenced by the work, so interest in it has continued. Scholars have traced its debts as well. Fred Rosen has examined the influence of Simone Weil on Camus's thinking in the book. According to Rosen, Camus adopted her criticism of Marxism and her conception of the rebel as an artisan. George F Selfer has drawn a different comparison, setting Camus beside Friedrich Nietzsche on philosophical aesthetics. Selfer found significant similarities, and he also found profound differences.

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