Albert Camus' Politics of Rebellion

• Published date: 01 June 1961
• DOI: 10.1177/106591296101400202
• Date: 01 June 1961
• Author: Fred H. Willhoite
• Subject Matter: Articles

ALBERT CAMUS’ POLITICS OF REBELLION
FRED H. WILLHOITE, JR.
The College of Wooster
( ( ROBABLY EVERY GENERATION sees itself as charged with re-
making the world. Mine, however, knows that it will not remake the
world. But its task is perhaps even greater, for it consists in keeping the
world from destroying itself.&dquo; 1 What is the role of the literary artist in the defense
of human dignity against forces which threaten the existence of humanity itself?
This is the question which the second youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize for
Literature, until his tragic accidental death early in 1960, sought to answer through
his life and art. Despite his often-expressed desire to be a writer in the same sense
that Mozart was a composer, Albert Camus never attempted to place an &dquo;aes-
thetic distance&dquo; between himself and the major political issues of his time. With-
out becoming identified with any party or rigidly defined doctrinal position, he en-
deavored to become a witness on behalf of concrete, living, powerless human be-
ings in an age which he saw dominated by social and political depersonalization in
general and by totalitarianism in particular.
Although Camus was not a political philosopher by profession, his work has
considerable value for the student of political ideas, or more generally, of the
political culture of post-World War II France. Camus stands in that great line of
French savants and literary artists who have decisively echoed and influenced the
convictions of many of their compatriots: in this sense he is akin to Voltaire,
Rousseau, and Victor Hugo. Although it is difficult to estimate very precisely the
impact of Camus’ writings on French public opinion, Professor William May
seems justified in declaring that &dquo;Camus has had a decisive influence on the politi,
cal convictions of young Frenchmen.... (Apparently no book has been as effec-
tive as ’The Rebel’ in persuading young Frenchmen to reject Marxism.) 11
2
Camus was deeply involved -
in deeds as well as in words -
in some of the
major conflicts through which his generation has passed. The political ferment of
the Popular Front era, the Resistance movement, the reshaping of French demo-
cratic institutions after the second world war, the response to the challenge of
totalitarian communism - all these crises elicited his participation and comment.
He did not commit himself to any organized political party but stood out as an
individualistic champion of decency, modesty, honesty, and compassion in poli-
tics. Within the American context, his basically rather simple position might seem
unimportant, but in a Europe torn by decades of violent revolution and conflicting
ideologies, his attempt to get at and remain faithful to the concrete human foun,
dations of all social policy makes him a significant figure in contemporary political
thought.
In order to explicate Camus’ basic political ideas, it is necessary first to delin-
eate his vision of the human situation -
the meaning, purpose, and pattern of
man’s life. From his relatively uncomplicated view of the human condition, cen-
’ Albert Camus, "Camus at Stockholm: The Acceptance of the Nobel Prize," translated by Justin
O’Brien, Atlantic Monthly, CCI (May 1958), 34.
2
Letter to the author, March 3, 1959.
400

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401
tering upon a few fundamental themes, emerges the key concept of rebellion, cen-
tral to his interpretation of and prescriptions for politics. The most significant and
searching of Camus’ political writing consists of a sustained and reasoned analysis
of and attack upon totalitarianism, and the discussion of his specifically political
ideas will deal primarily with this aspect of his thought. Some attention will be
given, however, to the more constructive aspects of Camus’ political thought, an
area in which, for the most part, he wrote only sketchily and in very general terms.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
Camus’ fundamental perspective was set forth almost in its entirety in the
four lyrical essays of Noces, written when he was only twenty-three to record
his own most intimate experiences and his impressions of the natural world. Ob-
viously, intense personal crises rather than philosophical reading and speculation
stimuated the formulation of his basic ideas, which may be summarized under
the headings of man’s joy in nature, the total this-worldliness of life, happiness
conjoined with absurdity, complete honesty to oneself, and - the concept cen-
tral to his political thought proper -
rebellion.
Camus’ viewpoint in Noces is radically earth-bound -
and so it always re-
mained. His youthful experience of physical nature resulted in a simple and im-
mediate joy so intense that speculation about or belief in otherworldly life
seemed irrelevant. He concluded that it is man’s role in nature to be a happy
creature, but this does not imply that it is possible to overlook the fact of mortality.
Life is so good that we desire its eternal continuance. Because the fulfillment of
this longing is impossible, we must surmount our trepidation at the prospect of
death and, fully cognizant of our fate, affirm the happiness that we can know. The
keenness and poignancy of this joy will sustain and enrich our lives if we do not
delude ourselves by seeking to transcend the limits of mortality.
Camus’ passionate affirmation of the happy life has the effect of intensifying
for him a feeling of the absurdity of human existence. If life is joyous, good, and
infinitely desirable, it is for man the ultimate absurdity that he should be fully
aware of its inevitable extinction. In Le Mythe de Sisyph.e, a more philosophical
work written a few years subsequent to Noces, Camus seeks to explicate more fully
the meaning of absurdity and discovers that it is essentially the product of the
incommensurability of man - who desires total comprehension and eternal life
-
and the universe -
which continually offers new mysteries to man’s reason and
brings about his inescapable death.
But Camus’ belief that life is absurd did not imply for him weary resignation
to the whims of an inscrutable fate. For a final significant motif plainly expressed
in Noces is man’s rebellion against whatever oppresses his mind and body -
in
particular the ultimate oppressor, death. The first clear expression of this theme
in Camus’ work resulted from an intensely personal experience undergone by the
young writer when, faced with the imminent possibility of his own death from
tuberculosis, he traveled through Italy attempting to recover from the dread
disease.
In Florence he strolled through the graveyard of the Santissima Annunziata,
observing that, from the tenor of the epitaphs, it appeared that all those buried

---

402
there had willingly accepted death. Suddenly he experienced a moment of fierce
rebellion against such placid resignation:
Everything within me protested against this kind of resignation. &dquo;One must,&dquo; said the inscrip-
tions. But I said no, and my revolt was true. That joy which goes about the earth, indifferent and
absorbed in itself like a pilgrim -
I had to follow it step by step. And as for the rest, I said no.
I said no with all my strength. These slabs taught me that this was futile.... But today I still
do not see what futility takes away from my rebellion, and I feel keenly what is thereby added
to it.’
3
In this moment of instinctive rebellion Camus discovered that his love for the
earth, for life in its mingled joy and hopelessness, was so powerful that he could
not resign himself to the death which his lucidity would not permit him to over-
look. The movement of rebellion surged up within him, and he discovered that
all the forces of the world which aim at the obliteration of human life must be
resisted. His experiential sequence: life is very good though mortal and therefore
absurd; yet when the joy of living overwhelms us, we rebel against death and all
death-bringers; because our revolt is in the name of life, it leads us to a keener
awareness of the poignant happiness that can be ours if we affirm our allegiance
to the earth.
This distinctively individual experience of rebellion, later conceptualized by
Camus in his attempt to delineate its nature and significance, became in his writ-
ings the existential standard by which political ideas and empirical polities are to
be evaluated. Whatever of value we may discover in Camus’ conception of politics
springs ultimately from his own intensely personal reaction to human mortality.
But Camus could not speak meaningfully to the life of man in society until
he had passed beyond his own immediate experience of and reaction to the world
to arrive at serious consideration of the corporate dimension of man’s life. Al-
though his early works contain intimations of such a concern,4 on the whole it
seems true that the chaotic circumstances of the war years provided the matrix
for and a stimulus to Camus’ development beyond the delineation of personal
experience toward the construction of a positive morality for the individual and
humane political principles for society.
Camus’ experiential approach to the formulation of personal ideas and con-
victions leads to the conclusion that his active participation in the Resistance (as
editor of the clandestine newspaper Combat) must certainly have affected his
point of view. A profound sense of human solidarity in the struggle against evil
and oppression, a visceral contempt for totalitarianism and its treatment of per-
sons, an upsurging faith in the potentialities of...