The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt (Vintage International)

by Albert Camus

When the concept of innocence disappears from the mind of the innocent victim himself, the value of power establishes a definitive rule over a world in despair.

Precursor to whataboutism

the Hitlerian religion, thus only aroused an insensate passion for nothingness, which ended by turning against itself. Negation, this time at any rate, and despite Hegel, has not been creative. Hitler presents the example, perhaps unique in history, of a tyrant who left absolutely nothing to his credit. For himself, for his people, and for the world, he was nothing but the epitome of suicide and murder.

But their deaths were deaths for nothing; they were like a bad dream, a puff of smoke that vanishes.

In contrast to the ancient world, the unity of the Christian and Marxist world is astonishing.

“It is a Christian way of thinking to consider that the history of man is strictly unique.”

The Christians were the first to consider human life and the course of events as a history that is unfolding from a fixed beginning toward a definite end, in the course of which man achieves

The Greek idea of evolution has nothing in common with our idea of historical evolution. The difference between the two is the difference between a circle and a straight line. The Greeks imagined the history of the world as cyclical.

It is easier to understand this dissimilarity by underlining the hostility of historical methods of thought toward nature, which they considered as an object not for contemplation but for transformation. For the Christian, as for the Marxist, nature must be subdued. The Greeks are of the opinion that it is better to obey it.

The love of the ancients for the cosmos was completely unknown to the first Christians, who, moreover, awaited with impatience an imminent end of the world.

“the last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.” Humanity marches, by way of crimes, violence, and death, toward this final consummation, which will justify everything.

The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.

but the religion of humanity was effectively preached toward the end of the nineteenth century, and Marx, despite the fact that he had not read Comte, was one of its prophets.

everything is both itself and its opposite, and this contradiction compels it to become something else.

pure determinism is absurd in itself. If it were not, then one single affirmation would suffice to lead, from consequence to consequence, to the entire truth.

“Atheism is humanism mediated by the suppression of religion, communism is humanism mediated by the suppression of private property.”

Marx

Thiers dreamed was the freedom of privilege consolidated by the police; the family, extolled by the conservative newspapers, was supported by social conditions in which men and women were sent down into the mines, half-naked, attached to a communal rope; morality prospered on the prostitution of the working classes.

Man is born into a world of production and social relations. The unequal opportunities of different lands, the more or less rapid improvements in the means of production, and the struggle for life have rapidly created social inequalities that have been crystallized into antagonisms between production and distribution; and consequently into class struggles.

The industrial revolution, the invention of steam appliances, and competition for outlets inevitably led to the expropriation of the small proprietor and to the introduction of large-scale production. The means of production are then concentrated in the hands of those who are able to buy them; the real producers, the workers, now only dispose of the strength of their arms, which can be sold to the “man with the money.” Thus bourgeois capitalism is defined by the separation of the producer from the means of production.

When private property is concentrated in the hands of one single owner, it is only separated from collective ownership by the existence of one single man. The inevitable result of private capitalism is a kind of State capitalism which will then only have to be put to the service of the community to give birth to a society where capital and labor, henceforth indistinguishable, will produce, in one identical advance toward progress, both justice and abundance.

The proletariat “can and must accept the bourgeois revolution as a condition of the working-class revolution.”

What in fact does the sacrifice of individual men matter as long as it contributes to the salvation of all mankind! Progress resembles “that horrible pagan god who wished to drink nectar only from the skulls of his fallen enemies.”

Progress as slave morality, philosophical suicide

If it is certain that the kingdom will come, what does time matter?

Utopia replaces God by the future. Then it proceeds to identify the future with ethics; the only values are those which serve this particular future. For that reason Utopias have almost always been coercive and authoritarian.

He gave a bad conscience to those who had no right to a clear conscience, and denounced with unparelleled profundity a class whose crime is not so much having had power as having used it to advance the ends of a mediocre society deprived of any real nobility.

Economic crises, which should have occurred with increasing frequency, have, on the contrary, become more sporadic: capitalism has learned the secrets of planned production and has contributed on its own part to the growth of the Moloch State.

Reason does not preach, or if it does, it is no longer reason.

The will to power came to take the place of the will to justice, pretending at first to be identified with it and then relegating it to a place somewhere at the end of history, waiting until such time as nothing remains on earth to dominate.

It contrives the acceptance of injustice, crime, and falsehood by the promise of a miracle.

Common feature of religion

The German nation frees itself from its oppressors, but at the price of the freedom of every German. The individuals under a totalitarian regime are not free, even though man in the collective sense is free.

The dialectic miracle, the transformation of quantity into quality, is explained here: it is the decision to call total servitude freedom.

Then man takes refuge in the permanence of the party in the same way that he formerly prostrated himself before the altar.

It is simultaneously war, obscurantism, and tyranny, desperately affirming that one day it will be liberty, fraternity, and truth; the logic of its postulates obliges it to do so.

The acceleration of events that is part of our times also affects the fabrication of truth, which, accomplished at this speed, becomes pure fantasy.

But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.

One must die dishonored or no longer exist—

Every religion revolves around the concepts of innocence and guilt.

Every man is a criminal who is unaware of being so. The objective criminal is, precisely, he who believed himself innocent.

Real objectivity would consist in judging by those results which can be scientifically observed and by facts and their general tendencies.

This type of objectivity has no definable meaning, but power will give it a content by decreeing that everything of which it does not approve is guilty.

Culpability no longer has any factual basis; it simply consists of absence of faith,

Under a capitalist regime, the man who says he is neutral is considered objectively to be favorable to the regime.

Under the regime of the Empire, the man who is neutral is considered hostile ob...

In the twentieth century power wears the mask of tragedy.

Whatever paths nihilism may proceed to take, from the moment that it decides to be the creative force of its period and ignores every moral precept, it begins to build the temple of Cæsar.

Fascism wants to establish the advent of the Nietzschean superman. It immediately discovers that God, if He exists, may well be this or that, but He is primarily the master of death. If man wants to become God, he arrogates to himself the power of life or death over others. Manufacturer of corpses and of sub-men, he is a sub-man himself and not God, but the ignoble servant of death.

The rational revolution, on its part, wants to realize the total man described by Marx. The logic of history, from the moment that it is totally accepted, gradually leads it, against its most passionate convictions, to mutilate man more and more and to transform itself into objective crime.

It is not legitimate to identify the ends of Fascism with the ends of Russian Communism. The first represents the exaltation of the executioner by the executioner; the second, more dramatic in conc...

But, on the other hand, it is legitimate to identify the means employed by both with the political cynicism that they have drawn from the same source, moral nihilism.

Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.

There is no method of thought which is absolutely nihilist except, perhaps, the method that leads to suicide,