When a winner of the Nobel Prize for literature writes about the history of political ideas, you get Albert Camus’s The Rebel. Published in 1954, Camus’s beautifully written book—which is not to say it is light reading—is one-stop shopping for those who want a history of modernity and the crisis of the West. 

Today, we hear a lot about the fascism ostensibly stalking America. Writing less than a decade after the end of World War II, Camus observed that Hitlerism grew amidst despair. He took note that “the epidemic of suicides that swept through the entire country between the two wars indicates a great deal about the state of mental confusion.” Figure 1 in a just-released CDC report shows a disturbing uptick in youth suicide and homicide since 2014. On campuses throughout America, it is routine to hear administrators remind parents that college psychological counseling must happen in tandem with continuing care from their students’ own mental health professionals.

Camus argues that German despair was brought on by a collapse in value consensus: “There was no longer any standard of values, both common to and superior to all these men, in the name of which it would have been possible for them to judge one another.” America is roiled by debates about fairness, care of the migrant and unborn, the proper spheres of government and corporations, and even nature’s great standard, the difference between a man and a woman. As we whittle value consensus down to the vanishing point, Camus would predict rising despair. He would also not be surprised. The ideological strains on Germany in the ’30s were not unique to that country, he thought, but a feature of Western civilization. The problem, according to Camus, was a bad philosophy of history, and the problem had been festering for a long time. At the Nuremberg Trials, Hans Frank, the Governor General of Nazi-occupied Poland, testified that Hitler had a “hatred of form.” That is where we are today, too. Even nature’s most basic forms are now discussed in terms of phobias.

Camus tags Hitler as a convulsionist, someone bent on self-creation because he is utterly intolerant of the limits placed upon us by the cosmos. Inherited, settled forms of thinking and behaving were all cast off, and all emphasis was placed on will, propulsion, and energy. “Neither by culture nor even by instinct or tactical intelligence was he equal to his destiny.” Camus’s point is that Hitler’s murderous dynamism was a phenomenon of our civilization. At Nuremberg, only at times did “the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism” come into view. The reason is clear: “A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization.” As we puzzle over our own convulsionists, we can usefully ask Camus’s question again: How did the West—heir to the Pantheon in Rome and the Cathedral in Chartres—end up believing in formless history? What changes in ideas unmoored us from the cosmos and tied our sense of well-being so thoroughly to novelty instead of the ancestral? 

Personal Sacrament

Camus grew up in Algeria and was immersed in Mediterranean civilization. He wrote his MA thesis on ancient Gnosticism, an apocalyptic strain in ancient Greek thought that sought a make-over of the cosmos. He never completed a PhD, but The Rebel can be thought of as his informal doctoral dissertation on modern Gnosticism. The book is a survey of the ideas that generated the great Western revolutions starting at the end of the eighteenth century. Camus proposes that these revolutions were a perversion of a good impulse, rebellion. Rebellions are complaints against suffering and demands for justice. They stem from the perception of our dignity, the idea that persons cannot be willfully intruded upon. For Camus, rebellion reveals a standard of values, what he calls, the “personal sacrament.” However, the modern age has consistently contradicted this sacrament: “The majority of revolutions are shaped by, and derive their originality from, murder. All, or almost all, have been homicidal. But some, in addition, have practiced regicide and deicide.” Why? 

Camus contends that the fraught relationship between dignity and rebellion is first and foremost a Western problem. Christianity proposed the unity of all with the principle of cosmic goodness, a personal loving God. The implications of Christian humanism matured slowly but rebellion was to be expected once equality was gravely obscured by factual inequalities. Site of the Industrial Enlightenment, Christian civilization was the first to experience this cognitive dissonance. Rebellion is a complaint against the shortfall in human dignity. Dostoyevsky’s Ivan Karamazov sets the tone. If God cannot even stop crimes against children, then crime, not love, must be the default setting of the cosmos. If the cosmos is rotten at its core, then all is permitted, including Ivan conspiring in the killing of his father. Natural phenomena, like family bonds, are themselves perversities. In Camus’s telling, the crisis of the West is its fixation on the frustration of a proposed unity that stubbornly remains incomplete.

Killing God’s Anointed

Camus declares “1789 is the starting-point of modern times” because it is the French Revolution that put into practical shape a torrent of ideas that, finding fault with God’s management of the cosmos, demanded “a limitless metaphysical crusade.” God had to be replaced and the hunt was on for unity. Practically, this crusade hits high gear in the schemes and crimes of twentieth-century totalitarianism but theoretically all the main goals and failings of rebellion were already sketched in the fantasies of de Sade: “These consequences [of rebellion] are a complete totalitarianism, universal crime, an aristocracy of cynicism, and the desire for an apocalypse.” 

To tell his story of modernity, Camus sets the scene with the 6,000 crucifixions of slaves that crushed the rebellion of Spartacus against Rome. A few years after this suppression, he speculates that God chose crucifixion for the execution of Jesus as an act of solidarity, to show that the world was not ultimately divided into slaves and masters, the humiliated and the powerful. God’s humiliation on the Cross affirmed the unity of all, the unity of heaven and earth. Little wonder then, Camus contends, that when revolutionaries set out on their angry crusade to separate man from a hapless heaven, they chopped off the head of a divinely installed king. Mordantly, Camus observes that crucifixion demonstrated power in ancient times, in our revolutionary age it will be the scaffold.

Seventeenth-century political theorist and court preacher, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet had told the French kings: “You are Gods.” Grace is discretionary—some receive the grace to be saints, others don’t—but Enlightenment thinkers hearkened to the original Christian proposal of equal justice for all. Premised on grace, the French monarchy could only be arbitrary, no matter that it often stepped in to restrain the abuse of the poor by the aristocracy and urban bourgeoisie. The dispute was philosophical, Saint-Just, the “youthful prosecutor” at Louis XVI’s trial, declared: “To determine the principle in virtue of which the accused is perhaps to die, is to determine the principle by which the society that judges him lives.” 

Rousseau had supplied the principle. “The will of the people is primarily the expression of universal reason, which is categorical. The new God is born. This is why the words that are to be found most often in The Social Contract are the words absolute, sacred, inviolable.” However, and for this reason, Rousseau “is also the first to justify the death penalty in a civil society [of purely human making] and the absolute submission of the subject to the authority of the sovereign.” God’s appointed king had to make way for “holy humanity” (Vergniaud) and the new “Our Lord the human race” (Anarchasis Cloots). As Camus puts it, at the trial of Louis XVI “two different conceptions of transcendence meet in mortal combat.” Saint-Just’s case for the prosecution was a theological treatise: because “the people are themselves the embodiment of eternal truth it is necessary to demonstrate that royalty is the embodiment of eternal crime.” 

Rebellion’s first steps were uncertain. God’s anointed dispatched, why did the Terror happen? Saint-Just could hold fast to a philosophical proposition, but others would need sterner tutoring: “To ensure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough; a police force is needed as well.” Stern measures were warranted because now that the people are the law—“the principle of absolute purity”—deviation from the laws of the Republic can only be rank perversity. For Saint-Just, the alternatives were obvious: “Either the virtues or the Terror.” The premise of the prosecution’s case against the king demanded no less.

History Is King

Modernity is a metaphysical crusade and those dissenting from Rousseau must have taken shelter in some as yet undisturbed alcove of the cosmos. The next phase of the crusade would fall to Hegel who saw that the French hadn’t really rid themselves of God. The Terror happened, he reasoned, because God had simply morphed into a transcendent reason commanding from on high: “Justice, reason, truth still shone in the Jacobin heaven, performing the function of fixed stars, which could, at least, serve as guides.”

To complete the revolution, the task was now to truly bring God back down to earth, to make history king. Hegel thus makes reason “an irresistible urge to movement” and in the person of Napoleon, he thought he saw reason become energy. God no longer bestowed sovereignty, natural law was supplanted by the Code Napoleon, and the complete self-made man had arrived. Hegel famously declared the real is rational and the rational is real, but the upshot, Camus points out, is “the conqueror is always right.” Reason identified with the propulsive, action “must be performed in darkness while awaiting the final illumination.” Till then, there are no rules. Living for the future means we are now rudderless, “precipitated into a world without innocence and without principles.” This comes with the consequence that every exercise of power is an experiment, and so Hegel “justifies every ideological encroachment upon reality.” The stage is set for the transformative technological totalitarianism of the twentieth century. 

Hegel, argues Camus, is the most ambiguous of all philosophers because his catchy phrase “the real is rational and the rational is real” offers two possible emphases. Politically, you can focus on brute reality (the irrationalism of the Nazis) or unrestrained reason (the Five Year Plans dear to the Soviets). Communism, Camus sardonically says, “aims at liberating all men by provisionally enslaving them all. It must be granted the grandeur of its intentions.” Lenin put no faith in populism. Revolution was a strategic, rational affair. “He denies the spontaneity of the masses. Socialist doctrine supposes a scientific basis that only the intellectuals can give it.” Here, Enlightenment reason bent on liberating all from God becomes the secret maneuverings of state officers corralling all. Revolution above all must be efficacious, and so Lenin recommends “to use if necessary every stratagem, ruse, illegal method, to be determined to conceal the truth.” Political cynicism is the twin of moral nihilism. Truth is a casualty of revolution, and so is freedom. Stalin will make ample use of political trials: “Marxism in one of its aspects is a doctrine of culpability on man’s part and innocence on history’s.” 

The merciless secrecy of the unrestricted rationality of the Soviet planners was only a consequence of political nihilism itself. The Russian Revolution was “the greatest revolution that history ever knew,” but the “universal city” it proposed to build entailed rejecting “the magnificent heritage of the centuries,” and “denying, to the advantage of history, both nature and beauty and by depriving man of the power of passion, doubt, happiness, and imaginative invention—in a word, of his greatness.” The rational Marxist state, utterly different in its aims from Hitler’s “biological foreign policy,” was as utterly destructive as the latter. Rationalism made sinister through secrecy has a homicidal character comparable to Nazi irrationalism. Both are offspring of radicalizations of Hegel’s philosophy of history. Camus believes that “Hitler was history in its purest form.” His minister of foreign affairs, Alfred Rosenberg, testifying at Nuremberg, explained that Nazi policy was: “Like a column on the march, and it is of little importance toward what destination and for what ends this column is marching.” 

Instead of the “cult of history,” Camus argues that rebellion can only remain true to the dignity that is its impulse if linked with temperance. Essential is an account of history that pays deference to a measure outside of man. Modestly, the urge for dignified liberty must accept incompleteness: “Persuasion demands leisure, and friendship a structure that will never be completed.” If revolution is to be genuinely creative and not murderous, it “cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.” This measure is the cosmos. To think under the sun, solar thought, is our creative thought synched with natural measure. This is the temperate thinking of “we Mediterraneans,” as he puts it. Camus was not a Christian; as he puts it, he chose Ithaca, and in a Greek register he recommends we “remake the soul” in the “frugal and audacious thought” that “the earth remains our first and our last love.” Historical revolution nourished itself on “absolute negation”—formless history—but dignified liberty rests on a “negative supported by an affirmative.” There is a “forbidden frontier” to which man’s pride must bend, a measure in the cosmos that puts forth a “law of moderation”: “One can reject all history and yet accept the world of the sea and the stars.”

Rebellion is, Camus contends, an act of generosity to both our peers and natural order. It is an ethic “at once unsubmissive and loyal.” Historical revolution has been one long act of contempt. Camus opposes solar thought—thinking under the sun—to Gnosticism’s attitude to cosmic order: “Our Convulsionists, dedicated to elaborate apocalypses, despise it.” When we “no longer believe in the things that exist in the world,” warns Camus, we lose not only patience, temperance, generosity, and tolerance, but liberty is overwhelmed by murder, too.