THE HUMANE POLITICS OF ALBERT CAMUS
My Political Education
My political education began to rapidly advance through my reading of Albert Camus. Originally, I was attracted to Camus due to his bold notion that the fundamental question of philosophy was that of suicide. Then I moved on from his philosophical work The Myth of Sisyphus and his fiction to political writings and essays. In these works, he often explored the social dimension of life from the perspective of rebellion. It was his politically inflected essay, The Rebel that acquainted me with the leading political dilemmas of the postwar era.
While reading Camus, I was also reading Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and pondering the significance of the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution. I was searching for guidance on the question of nihilism: Could any values be upheld in a meaningless world. The nihilist position is that if there is no God, everything is permitted. Camus rejected nihilism on the basis of his commitment to rebellion. He affirmed the value of life and espoused the principle of justice. But he did not take up the cause of revolution because it seeks perfection, allowing the end to justify the means, legitimizing murder in order to bring about a future paradise on earth. Camus claimed that nihilism had led the most politically committed revolutionaries to engage in terrorist politics.
Since Camus and Sartre were both viewed as existentialists (despite Camus’s denial that he subscribed to existential philosophy), I imagined that their similar philosophical views would be accompanied by similar political beliefs. But then I learned about the quarrel between Camus and Sartre and realized that their positions on communism, political centralization, violence, and the Cold War were vastly different. I read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Mandarins with great excitement, since in this 1954 novel, she exhaustively described the political sparring between fictional characters closely resembling Camus and Sartre. I was thrilled by the seriousness with which the characters took their philosophical and political ideas and the confidence with which they asserted that such ideas would have a great impact on the future.
Reading these works was like taking a crash course not only in contemporary politics but also in the history of 19th and 20th century ideas. I didn’t know it at the time, but the themes that Camus raised in The Rebel would preoccupy me for many years. One obvious issue was the connection between the individual, the focus of existential philosophy, and the social dimension addressed by Marxism and liberalism. But Camus had also traced the development of revolutionary ideas from Robespierre and Saint-Just through the Russian intelligentsia, ending up in Lenin and Stalin. He asked why revolution ends in terror.
Studying the roots of revolution in 19th century Russia became particularly fruitful for me during my college years. I was confronted with the question of the political use of violence and the relation between means and ends. My interest in the philosophy of nonviolence goes back to Camus’s insistent claim that unjust means can never bring about just ends. Of course, the issues of violence and means and ends had great implications for the evaluation of communism and one’s position on the Cold War. Here, Camus took an anti-communist stance on the grounds that Soviet communism legitimized violence and the use of immoral means to achieve moral ends.
These political questions were of great significance for me during the Vietnam War and right up until the collapse of Soviet communism in 1989. And if we talk about communism, we are in the realm of ideology. Camus made the point that we were living in an age of ideology and the individual was in danger of being swallowed up in a welter of political abstractions. He was pointing out the danger of treating ideologies as true and certain despite insufficient evidence and conflicting views. Such unreasoning faith in ideologies led to the violation of human dignity and rights.
There were also political and cultural issues raised by Camus in his essays, particularly those dealing with the Algerian War, that were of great significance to me many years later when I studied postcolonial theory in graduate school. Camus wrote about the relations between colonizer and colonized, cultural hybridity, multiculturalism, and the use of terror in liberation movements. It was not Camus’s conclusions that greatly influenced me; rather it was his ability to view social and political issues intellectually and historically plus his clarifying of the relation between the individual and social levels. He made ideas appear dramatic and of the utmost importance. Despite his focus on the works of various thinkers, he did not get lost in abstractions and did not neglect the practical relevance of the ideas at hand.
The Rebel Revisited
From my present vantage point, Camus is an attractive figure. For him, ethical and political thinking had to be governed by the will to question, and especially to question oneself and one’s own views. Instead of placing his faith in rational systems of thought, he emphasized the limits within which all thinking takes place and the need for moderation. He never indulged in the intellectual pride of Ivan Karamazov, and he rejected the pursuit of utopia that legitimized murder.
Camus appealed to the human need for dignity and harmony. It is more important to be honest and have integrity than to be right. He did not invoke the divine will to give weight to his ethics, but he did highlight human fellow feeling and sharing. His reliance on experience rather than on abstract modes of thought brought his ideas close to real life.
Today, it is hard to imagine how progressive intellectuals like Sartre could have so easily scorned such ideals. Sartre took refuge in philosophical abstractions and scathingly criticized Camus for not unconditionally supporting the Algerian rebels. Simone de Beauvoir called him “a just man without justice.” For Camus, born in French Algeria of dirt poor parents who were victims of class oppression, any glee about the downfall of French colonialism had to be balanced against the likely damage that would be suffered by his family members and those like them.
This concern for poor French people born in Algeria who had no other home made it difficult for Camus to perceive and embrace the anti-colonial direction that history was taking. It was hard for him to accept that there would be no third way, whatever its moral desirability, between the rule of the colonizers and the rule of the colonized. In terms of political effectiveness, Camus was wrong to be against negotiating with the Algerian leadership that favored independence. But it is possible to sympathize with his plight and to understand the reasons for his failure of judgment.
Under highly unfavorable circumstances, Camus could only take the humanitarian position of preventing all terrorist attacks on civilians by both sides. The unwillingness of either French or Algerian partisans to abide by such an agreement demonstrates their immoral stances. Here, Camus’s point is that recognition of the humanity of people on both sides must supersede desires for revenge, total victory, and power over others. This attitude requires a great generosity of spirit. For me, it was clear that the use of terror even on behalf of a just cause can degrade those who use it. In the long run, nothing good can come from such violence, since it accelerates the negative spiral of hatred and revenge. Even if it contributes to eventual victory for those who have suffered oppression, it comes at the cost of their humanity. This is what Camus got right about the Algerian situation.
In the postwar era, many European intellectuals embraced the teachings of those Marxists who rejected humanism in favor of an uncritical acceptance of violence. Camus saw that after the death of God, many people believed that everything is permitted and turned this belief into a secular religion based on the alleged laws of history. Faith in the coming Marxist paradise on earth replaced the Christian faith in heaven. Writers like Raymond Aron had called Marxism “the opium of the intellectual.”
For Camus, trade union activity and political movements like the Paris Commune were exemplary products of libertarian thought. Such thought embraces the individual, freedom, the concrete situation, and the autonomy of the community. It warns against the ascendance of bureaucracy, state centralism, abstract thought, and authoritarian rule, all characteristics of modern industrial society.
Libertarian Socialism
What Camus understood was that both socialism and capitalism raise doctrine and ideology over the genuine interest of workers. Marxist socialism often resembles capitalism in its optimistic view of science and technology, its dependence on the machine, and its abstract goal of economic growth. They both extol an extreme division of labor because it increases productivity. The major difference between them is the espousal of ethical concepts by the merchant class, whereas authoritarian socialists expose bourgeois ethics as a sham. In its place, they offer the cynical notion that the end justifies the means.
The libertarian socialism that Camus advocated was not a return to a natural state of innocence. It included a conservative insistence on taking human beings as they are as the starting point rather than spinning a revolutionary ideology based on reason that focuses only on what humans could be. The contrast is between a philosophy based on moderation and one of rational absolutes. For the moderate, human improvement is a somewhat drawn-out process. Compared with the swiftness of revolution, reform takes place gradually and incrementally, brought about by education and the cultivation of the individual. The need for these organizational activities is emphasized by syndicalism and the trade unions because they take people of flesh and blood as their point of departure.
Camus’s anarchist sensibility is revealed in his faith in human creativity and will. People should not be forced to follow a rational blueprint or theory imposed by elites. Freedom exists but making use of such freedom requires self-mastery. This mastery is attained by overcoming the common prejudices that masquerade as wisdom. It means confronting the dark forces within ourselves and others while refusing to give into their lure. The role of politics is not to create a perfect world that is handed to everyone as a gift. Politics provides the conditions that make it possible for people to search for what is valuable and what makes life worth living. That is its modest but essential role.
Nowhere is Camus’s departure from conventional wisdom more striking than in his understanding of work. Work is oppressive under both capitalism and socialism. The division of labor and the rationalization of production mean that the living and breathing worker is sacrificed to abstract and quantitative ideals. Nothing is more degrading than a work life which drains energy while stifling personal creativity and growth. The imperatives of a technological society rob workers of all dignity and joy.
E.F. Schumacher, a path breaker in the search for a new economic system beyond capitalism and socialism, recognized that Camus got it right in his basic conception of work. He quotes Camus: “Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, all life stifles and dies.” Camus understood that work is central to life and to the development of human potentialities. It is not something to be eliminated through automation nor is it just a necessary chore to which one devotes as little of oneself as possible. Work is a key source of meaning and purpose in life, an important aspect of human dignity. Once again, we see Camus’s emphasis on what is real and concrete, his appeal to lived experience, and his trust in people and their ability to develop.
Camus’s opposition to what dwarfs human beings allies him with Schumacher and the alternative movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In his notions of Buddhist economics and appropriate technology, Schumacher breaks the iron grip of the technological society that has so limited our imagination and feeling. He brings to fruition the same insights that inspired both the counterculture and Camus. And let us not forget that Camus lived in an earlier era when it was less obvious that the single-minded pursuit of economic growth and larger-scale technologies led to a dead end. The overwhelming threat of environmental destruction was not even visible.
Camus was not a systematic thinker, and he was not very effective in his activities as a public intellectual. But he had an instinct for the intellectual weaknesses of his time. In his work there are remedies for ideological blindness, excessive faith in reason’s capabilities, and the separation of intellect from experience. Camus placed humanitarian concerns before strictly political ones. For this reason, as he well knew, he was not able to accommodate himself to the political demands of his time.
Camus’s thinking was existential in the sense that he knew there were no ethical recipes that could be followed which would alleviate the burden of contemplation and choice. He thought it was important for human nature to develop harmoniously and that dealing with inner conflicts is crucial for building up a free and just social order. It is only when individuals are free and help each other to become free that politics has a secure and stable base for realizing its aspirations.
Along with Schumacher, Camus valued the individual as an ethical and altruistic being. Both saw people as universes of meaning rather than as merely units of production and consumption. Although the science of ecology had not yet emerged, Camus knew the importance of our relationship with nature and the ways in which nature renewed and refreshed the lives of humans. He opposed the violence of the human relationship to nature expressed in the aggressive mode of technical domination over nature. Camus’s experience of emptying the self and blending and merging with nature is an inspiring example.
