Albert Camus: The First of the New Philosophers

Abstract

By JEANYVES GUERIN & DIANE S. WOOD French New Philosophers Jean-Marie Benoist, Andre Glucksmann, Bernard-Henri Levy, et alia burst into public attention with a proliferation of an tiMarxist tracts including Marx est mort (Marx is Dead; 1970), La cuisiniere et le mangeur d'hommes (The Cook and the Man-Eater; 1975), Les maitres penseurs (The Master Thinkers; 1977) and La barbarie a visage humain (translated by George Holoch as Barbarism with a Human Face; 1977). Termed Solzhenitsyn's Children by Michael Rubbo, producer of the PBS documentary of that name on them, the group had had their philosophical views radically altered as a result of reading Gulag Archipelago. While the moral indignation of these young thinkers heralds the attempt of contemporary leftist intellectuals to find an alternative to Marxism, the appellation new obscures the fact that their analyses of the inherent dangers of Marxism repeat arguments made thirty years before by Albert Camus in Lhomme revoke (translated by Anthony Bower as Rebel; 1951). current intellectual ferment as well as the recent biography by Herbert R. Lottman (Garden City, N.Y., Doubleday, 1979) prompts one to reexamine Camus's penetrating discussion of metaphysical and historical rebellion. Camus himself was not a philosopher but a writer with deep moral convictions who lucidly denounced political terrorism, whether it originated from the Right or the Left. horrors perpetrated by Fascists in Spain and Germany were as repugnant to him as the suffering in Soviet camps, for Camus believed that all executioners are of the same family.* No special excused status was given to any group: We will name concentrationary what is concentrationary, even socialism (Actuelles 7, 386). In The Cook and the ManEater (Paris, Seuil, 1975) Andre Glucksmann came to the same conclusion: Russian or Nazi, a is a camp (37). To the victim, the political leanings of his torturer are insignificant: Nothing resembles a charnel house more than another charnel house, and a tortured body doesn't show whether the torture was 'socialist' or 'capitalist' (75). Taking seriously the plight of Kravchenko, Czapski, Gliksman, etcetera, an earlier generation of those now called dissidents, Camus could not excuse the existence of institutionalized torture in the Soviet Union, and he warned that Marxism would lead to the same concentration universe as did Fascism. He lucidly perceived that the camps were an integral part of maintaining the state's authority and that their occurrence in wartime Germany and Stalinist Russia was a natural product of authoritarian leadership.