Camus: On and In Action :: Camus Essays

Camus: On and In Action ABSTRACT:In this paper I wish to examine the position of Camus regarding social change, namely his concepts of rebellion and revolution. I in no way question his well-deserved status as a major twentieth-century French writer, nor do I wish to suggest that he may have been someone caught in a Sartrean notion of 'bad faith.' I am concerned with what one might call his theory of social action. I do wish to assert that Camus was a good man who seriously wrestled with the events of his time. Yet his claims on behalf of suffering humanity, while honest, are not sufficient when faced with complex social issues. That his move toward the right that today might well be taken for a supposed liberalism was undoubtedly bound up with his continued misunderstanding of the dialectic of history. A Series of Critical Observations Camus continually stresses the break from Christianity (God is dead—the world is without order) whether in speaking of the French Revolution or what he calls the new absolutism of the communist revolution. In the first case there is a degree of confusion on the issue when speaking of Rousseau, St. Just, and the divine right monarchies. Camus obviously holds to one traditional view of the king as God's representative on earth and from this lays the groundwork for his future project. I would like to suggest that there are at least two alternate interpretations of divine right monarchy that vie for our attention. First, there is the view forwarded by Reinhart Koselleck in his 1959 book Kritik und Krise. There in he suggests that rather than a union of the sacred and the secular, divine right monarchy already announced the triumph of the secular over the sacred. Before this period there had been the two worlds of religion and politics. With the Reformation Christianity no longer w as unified under the pope but broke into various factions. The divine right of kings, whether it is in England or France, certainly allowed for an absolutism, but relegated the religious partner to the outer fringe of politics where it was left to argue matters of theology and direct the religious faithful while recognizing the supremacy of the King in all matters political, or even, as in England, recognizing the King as leader in both matters. When Camus points to Marx's observation that the beginning of a radical critique of society is a radical critique of religion, he believes his own critical project to be partly vindicated.