The Rebel
반항하는 인간
A book-length essay by Albert Camus, published by Gallimard in 1951. Starting from the question and answer "What is a rebel? A man who says no", it argues that "revolt" against an unjust order at the same time creates limits and a solidarity to be kept, and it criticises "revolution", which forgets those limits and justifies murder for the sake of completing history. It reads the history of modern revolt, from Sade and Nietzsche to Hegel, Marx and the Bolsheviks, as a history of nihilism. Aimed squarely at Communism, the book provoked a controversy with Sartre's journal Les Temps modernes in 1952 that ended in the break between Sartre and Camus. The Korean translation is titled 반항하는 인간.
In depth
Why did this book split the Cold War left?
The Rebel is the essay of Camus's second cycle, the cycle of the "positive", which followed the first cycle of "negation" (The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, Caligula). By Camus's own account the novel The Plague and the plays State of Siege and The Just Assassins belong to the same cycle. Where The Myth of Sisyphus asked why one should not commit suicide in an absurd world, this book asks why one should not commit murder. As the preface puts it, in the words the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy quotes, its aim was to face the present reality of "logical crime" and to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified: to understand an age that in fifty years uprooted, enslaved or killed seventy million human beings.
The question was politics from the start. In post-war France the Communist Party was among the largest parties and many intellectuals placed their hopes in the Soviet Union. Camus took direct aim at the reasoning that justified camps and purges in the name of history. As the English Wikipedia summarises, the book explicitly condemned Marxism-Leninism, was disliked by Marxists and by existentialists such as Sartre, and many European Communists considered Camus's ideas reactionary. The book matters in this genealogy because it accepts Nietzsche's diagnosis of nihilism while trying to block the road from that diagnosis to the justification of murder.
What does it argue? Revolt and revolution
The book opens: "What is a rebel? A man who says no. But if he refuses, he does not renounce: he is also a man who says yes, from his very first movement." The slave who tells his master "this far and no further" is saying that there is a line that must not be crossed, and that line concerns the dignity not only of one person but of all. So Camus rewrote Descartes's "I think, therefore I am": "I rebel, therefore we exist."
Qu'est-ce qu'un homme révolté ? Un homme qui dit non. Mais s'il refuse, il ne renonce pas : c'est aussi un homme qui dit oui, dès son premier mouvement.
Je me révolte, donc nous sommes.
The book has five parts: The Rebel, Metaphysical Rebellion, Historical Rebellion, Rebellion and Art, and Thought at the Meridian. "Metaphysical rebellion" is the history of revolt against God and the whole of creation: Sade, the romantics and dandies, Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, Stirner, Nietzsche, Lautréamont, Rimbaud and surrealism. "Historical rebellion" is the history of that revolt passing into politics: the execution of Louis XVI, Rousseau and Saint-Just, Hegel, the Russian terrorists, Marx and Lenin, and state terror. Camus concludes that revolt becomes "revolution" the moment it forgets the limits of its starting point and aims at absolute justice and the end of history, and that revolution justifies today's enslavement and murder for the sake of future liberation. He contrasted the "fastidious assassins" such as Ivan Kalyayev, who in 1905 held back his bomb because children were in the grand duke's carriage and later paid with his own life, with revolutionaries who license others to kill.
In the last part, "Thought at the Meridian", Camus calls revolt within limits, "measure" (mesure), a Mediterranean way of thinking, and praises the revolutionary syndicalism of France and Spain as an alternative to state socialism. As the English Wikipedia notes, Camus was writing for anarchist and syndicalist papers at the time and leaned towards anarcho-syndicalism.
How is Nietzsche treated?
One chapter of "Metaphysical Rebellion" is "Nietzsche and Nihilism". For Camus, Nietzsche was the most honest diagnostician of nihilism. Having accepted that God is dead, Nietzsche did not resign himself but tried to overcome nihilism by an "absolute affirmation", the love of fate. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy points out that Camus followed Nietzsche's reading of Pandora's box in Human, All Too Human, which treats hope as an evil. Camus himself traced the roots of his philosophy to ancient Greece, Nietzsche and the seventeenth-century moralists.
But Camus also saw the danger that Nietzsche's affirmation, the moment it affirms everything, can affirm murder too. He did not brand Nietzsche a forerunner of Nazism and made clear that the Nazis had distorted him. He asked rather what an affirmation without limits had produced in history. This ambivalence, admiring Nietzsche while trying to go beyond him, is the book's reading of Nietzsche.
How did the quarrel with Sartre unfold?
The book appeared in the autumn of 1951. In its May 1952 issue Sartre's journal Les Temps modernes published Francis Jeanson's review "Albert Camus, or the Rebel Soul", which attacked the book as a moralism that turned its back on history and in the end served the anti-communist right. In the August issue Camus replied with an open letter "To the Editor of Les Temps modernes", addressed to Sartre rather than Jeanson, and Sartre published his "Reply to Albert Camus" in the same issue, publicly declaring the end of their friendship. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls the quarrel the start of the major political and intellectual divide of the Cold War era, in which Camus and Sartre became the leading figures of the anti-communist and the pro-communist left.
In the same year the surrealists around André Breton also attacked Camus over his pages on Lautréamont and Rimbaud. According to the French Wikipedia, Benjamin Péret pointed to "astonishing convergences" between the book and Jules Monnerot's Sociology of Communism.
Marxist criticism continues. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that Camus singled out the violence of Communism while hardly dealing with the Nazi genocide, Hiroshima or French colonialism. It is worth remembering that Camus had himself been a member of the Algerian Communist Party in the mid-1930s and was expelled for refusing the Popular Front line on the colonial question. Conversely, the book became an important classic for the anti-authoritarian left that held Soviet-style socialism not to be socialism at all. When Camus died in a car accident in 1960, Sartre wrote a eulogy honouring his "stubborn humanism".