Commitment to history
Neutrality is complicity. To condemn revolutionary violence while capitalism and colonialism do violence daily is to side with the oppressors.
Revolt with limits
Rebellion that murders in the name of a future paradise betrays the solidarity from which it was born. No end justifies the camps.
The Exchange
who answered whom
Albert CamusThe Rebel (1951) — from Sade to the Bolsheviks, revolt has become a doctrine of murder. Measure and limit are the law of true rebellion.
Jean-Paul Sartre(Paraphrase) First through Francis Jeanson’s harsh review in Les Temps modernes, then in his own open letter — your mix of dreary self-importance and vulnerability has always kept people from telling you the plain truth; you have stepped out of history.
- Albert Camus
(Paraphrase) I will not be lectured on freedom by critics who have never turned anything but their armchairs toward history.
- Jean-Paul Sartre
After Camus’s death in 1960, a moving eulogy — “his stubborn humanism, narrow and pure, austere and sensual.”
History mostly vindicated Camus on the Soviet Union; Sartre is often credited with seeing colonial violence more clearly — though Camus’s stance on Algeria (“I believe in justice, but I shall defend my mother before justice”) remains bitterly debated.
Explore Next
related by shared connectionsThe Rebel
Camus’s history of revolt — metaphysical and political — arguing that rebellion that kills for history betrays its own origin. It ended his friendship with Sartre.
Existentialism Is a Humanism
Sartre’s 1945 public lecture — the most popular statement of existentialism — existence precedes essence, man is condemned to be free.
Bad Faith
Self-deception about one’s own freedom — pretending to be a thing, determined by role or nature, to escape the anguish of choice.
Existence Precedes Essence
Sartre’s formula — humans have no pre-given nature; we exist first and make ourselves through our choices.
Absurdism
Camus’s position — the conflict between our longing for meaning and the world’s silence cannot be resolved, only lived with in lucid revolt.
The Grand Inquisitor
Ivan Karamazov’s prose-poem — Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville, and the aged Cardinal Inquisitor imprisons him, explaining that humanity cannot bear the freedom He offered.