Camus: On and In Action :: Camus Essays

Camus On and In ActionABSTRACTIn this paper I lack to examine the position of Camus regarding social change, that is to say his concepts of rebellion and revolution. I in no way question his well-deserved view as a major twentieth-century French writer, nor do I wish to refer that he may have been someone caught in a Sartrean notion of bad faith. I am concerned with what one might grouse 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, part honest, are not sufficient when faced with complex social issues. That his snuff it toward the near that today might well be taken for a supposed liberalism was undoubtedly bound up with his continued misunderstanding of the dialectical of history.A Series of Critical ObservationsCamus continually stresses the break from Christianity (God is deadthe realism is without order) whether in speaking of the French Revol ution or what he calls the impudent 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 prognosticate right monarchies. Camus obviously holds to one traditional view of the king as Gods exemplar 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 discussion Kritik und Krise. There in he suggests that rather than a union of the set apart and the secular, divine right monarchy already announced the triumph of the secular oer the sacred. Before this period there had been the two worlds of religion and politics. With the Reformation Christianity no longer was unified under the pope but broke into mingled factions. The divine right of kings, whether it is in England or France, certainly allowed for an absolutism, but relegated the spiritual partner to the outer fringe of politics where it was left to argue matters of religion 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 attraction in both matters. When Camus points to Marxs observation that the beginning of a radical brushup of society is a radical critique of religion, he believes his own little project to be partly vindicated.