Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope

Hayden establishes the relationship between the life of Albert Camus and the social-political contexts of his thought and work. The chapter explores Camus’s diagnosis of the human crisis of modernity, which also introduces several of the themes crucial to his ethical and political thinking — the absurd, nihilism, truth, dignity and revolt. Setting out the principal elements of Camus’s life in order to better understand the nature of his work, this chapter offers an important overview of the central historical events that informed his development as a writer, artist and politically-engaged public figure.

This chapter analyses of one of Camus’s most widely read works, The Myth of Sisyphus. It outlines in detail two aspects of his general argument that open up the central pathways into his moral and political thought; first, his meditations on the absurd, and second, his critique of nihilism and dogmatic foundationalism. It also provides a first point of contact with Camus’s use of literary and dramatic texts, including The Stranger and Caligula, alongside philosophical essays to elucidate his ideas about modern society, morality and politics. In doing so, Hayden posits the dominant theme of Camus’s account of the absurd as a critical post-foundationalist account of the human condition. The chapter thereby demonstrates that the disorienting limits or boundary-situations of human existence challenge the lingering tendency towards foundationalism in modern philosophy, ethics and politics.

This chapter examines the possibility for meaningful ethical and political action in light of the strange indifference of the world. It argues that what makes ethics and politics meaningful for Camus is tied to the question of revolt or rebellion, which challenges the perception of the futility of both existence and political life. Hayden interrogates how Camus’s notion of rebellion developed, how it influenced his critical views on revolutionary ideology, and how those views challenged received wisdom. In doing so, the chapter also illuminates the important parallel Camus draws between rebellion and measure (or balance and equilibrium). As the condition sine qua non for rebellion, an ethics of measure aims to maintain a creative tension between rebellion and the limitations of human understanding and political possibility.

This chapter examines Camus’s position on the relationship between politics and violence in general, and on political violence in the form of revolutionary insurgency, wars of liberation, torture and terrorism in particular. Hayden first outlines the controversial Camus-Sartre polemic in order to take up the question of political action and its relationship to violence and history. He then considers how Camus’s insistence that the means-ends relation remains inseparable from the responsibility of judgement and choice sustains his disavowal of terrorism and torture, with a particular focus on the Algerian war of independence. In this way, the chapter also shows how violence serves as a limit-situation for the political. The chapter concludes by considering Camus’s opposition to capital punishment and nuclear weapons as instances where the inscription of disproportionate violence within the authoritative institutions of the state engenders political conditions that degrade human freedom.

This chapter brings together two areas of Camus’s thought regarding the renewal of human freedom and dignity from the perspective of a politics of rebellion and measure. It first outlines the broader principles of reciprocal human rights and egalitarian socio-economic participation endorsed by Camus as the basis for a politics that strives for balance between the values of liberty, justice and equality. It then explores how Camus’s argument that political freedom and social equality complement each other is linked to his ideas that ethical and political attachments entail more than formal structures of government. Focusing on the powerful relations of love, friendship and solidarity, Hayden examines how these affective dispositions and felt social commitments embody an ethical-political opposition to injustice that implies a love of existence and the world itself.

This chapter argues that Camus’s thought is pertinent to engaging critically with current global political existence framed within the historical condition of globalization, as well as with the moral and political doctrine of cosmopolitanism. In doing so, it reconstructs Camus’s notion of the absurd in order to elucidate his critique of historical teleology. In his work, Camus endeavoured to develop a fallibilist historical sensibility suitable to a cosmos shorn of meaning, which led him to reject ideas of progress and their traces of messianism when elaborating his treatment of rebellion. By making use of Camus’s ideas about the absurd and rebellion, Hayden suggests that these two themes productively unsettle contemporary cosmopolitanism as a teleological orthodoxy of human progress and fruitfully if paradoxically lie at the heart of a post-teleological conception of cosmopolitanism ‘without hope’.

Camus’s short story, ‘Jonas or the Artist at Work’, depicts the predicament of Gilbert Jonas, a struggling painter who suddenly finds fame. As a result of his newfound success, Jonas is inundated with public demands and soon his apartment is besieged by numerous visitors. He is even thronged by ‘a school’ of disciples: ‘The disciples explained to Jonas at length what he had painted, and why. Jonas thus discovered in his work many intentions that rather surprised him, and a host of things he had not put there’ (2006b: 64). His time is consumed by conversing with admirers, answering fan mail, taking phone calls, giving interviews and meeting political figures. He begins to neglect his wife and children. Witnessing the public’s increasing encroachment in Jonas’s life, his oldest and faithful friend, Rateau, tells him, ‘You’re such a fool. They don’t really love you’ (2006b: 73). As time passes Jonas’s artistic output inevitably declines and his sterility precipitates a critical backlash; critics who had formerly praised him now begin to deride his talent as ‘overrated and outdated’, to celebrate that he seemingly is ‘on the way out’, and his reputation wanes (2006b: 74, 70). Jonas begins to avoid ‘the haunts and the neighbourhoods frequented by artists’ (2006b: 75), takes long walks alone, and patronises only cafes where he is unknown.