To the Editor:
Mr. H. Stuart Hughes, in reviewing Albert Camus’ The Rebel (March 1954), is led to conclude, regretfully, that the book is a failure. Since this is no ordinary book but, as Mr. Hughes himself acknowledges, one “that is noble in concept and praiseworthy from every ethical and political point of view,” the work of a writer who has given us “the supreme parable of our time,” I think it worthwhile to state my quarrel with the terms of Mr. Hughes’ analysis, as well as with the conclusion to which they lead him. Quite properly, the reviewer sets the book against the background of Parisian intellectual life from which it springs and to which it addresses itself in part. But throughout his review there runs a current of derogation toward the very intellectualism of such a setting. It is in fact strongly suggested that, to keep up with a rarefied climate of abstruse speculation, Camus, feeling “under compulsion to vindicate his own position as a practicing intellectual,” simply smuggled into a fairly routine account of the ideological antecedents of the Russian Revolution a “metaphysical” rebellion which constituted “his own abstract twist” to a well-worn story. This tour de force is then followed by an appeasement of “an intellectual community in which some brand of leftism is de rigueur” through “the extraordinary gymnastic feat of equating the age-old tradition of common sense with the new imperative of rebellion.” . . .
In the first place, I think Mr. Hughes is misled by his small regard for abstract ideas, of which French intellectuals, to be sure, have tended lately to make an excessive consumption. But it is one of the tragedies of cultures that they tend to look at one another through distorting glasses, in which their differences are exaggerated to the point of caricature, the virtues inherent in such differences thus getting largely overlooked. Abstract reasoning with regard to concrete political problems may often be out of place, and may always to “irreverent Anglo-Saxon” ears sound absurd: yet it may also point the way to considerations that are essential to the matter and which the pragmatic approach would leave untouched. Such is the case of the metaphysical rebellion Mr. Hughes deems irrelevant to a discussion of the largely political issues of Fascism and Communism. Yet who can deny that a consideration of the roots of modern nihilism, whether in its theoreticians or its poets, in Hegel and Nietzsche or in Sade and Rimbaud, has a bearing on a study of modern political life? The intellectual and emotional climate of a movement is every bit as much a part of the historical complex as are its immediate political consequences, and by establishing, as Camus does, the spiritual link between the private fantasies of Sade and the mass murders of today’s concentration camps, a definite step is taken toward comprehending the enigma of the modern world.
Moreover, the thesis that nihilism, which fathered the Communist revolution and the fascist state, is a perversion of the original revolt by which man had attempted to assert his dignity against oppressive rule, seems to me a welcome and much-needed righting of the issues, at a time when the contention, made by Whittaker Chambers in his book, that revolt itself was the evil, is so rapidly gaining ground (largely through the absence of a strong theoretical counter-claim). . . .
In measuring the swerve which revolutionary nihilism has described from its initial aims of asserting and defending human rights, Camus has given us more than a melancholy account of the corruptions of ideology. He has, in fact, on ideological grounds, isolated the specific component of the revolutionary ideal which transformed affirmation into negation, the generous love of freedom into the totalitarian enslavement to History—this component being the spirit of démesure, the hubris whereby man, blind to his limitations, attempted to ensure his freedom by total control over his destiny. . . .
This brings us to Mr. Hughes’ last and most damning charge, that the book fizzles out into an absurd reconciliation of the timeworn ideal of “moderation” with the idea of revolt imposed on Camus by his leftist-minded Parisian public. This reconciliation is made to seem absurd only by translating a dynamic concept, mesure, the sense of measure, by “moderation,” with its connotation of abstention, and of merely prudential wisdom. The sense of measure is man’s awareness that his relationship to the world is governed by the realities of his powers and limitations, that only by accepting his limitations can he transcend them. Thus by settling for the purely human ideal of a progressively liberalized society, less flamboyant to be sure than the yearning for a perfect society, man can remain faithful to the libertarian impulse of his original revolt, which claimed for all, regardless of class, a share in the dignity of man. I do not think a stronger case can be made for the authenticity of the liberal faith and its right to defend the values which Communism claims as its own, and which it has betrayed.
To affirm, as Camus does here, that freedom and measure are in a higher sense identical, is to confirm on metaphysical grounds the true claim of the Western world in its defense of freedom, against the theoretical counter-claim of Communism, that it labors for main’s eventual freedom. If this be a failure, give us many more of the same elevation of thought, distinction of style, and firmness of statement.
Marcel Gutwirth
Paris, France
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