It is useless to deny its historical reality-rather we must seek in it a principle of existence. It is 'an attempt to understand the times.'Ĭamus believes that revolt is one of the 'essential dimensions' of mankind.

Not that it is a theoretical work-on the contrary, it is an examination of the actual situation of Europe today, informed by a precise historical knowledge of the past two centuries of its social development. It is a kind of book that appears only in France, devoted, in a passionate intellectual sense, to the examination of such concepts as liberty and terror. The Rebel,that is to say, offers us a philosophy of politics. Social values are rules of conduct implicit in a tragic fate and they offer a hope of creation. They have to be deduced from the conditions of living, and are to be accepted along with the suffering entailed by the limits of the possible. But in each case the values are not 'given'-that is the illusionist trick played by religion or by philosophy. If we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value if we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value. Just as an earlier work of his (Le Mythe de Sisyphe)began with a meditation on living or not living-on the implications of the act of suicide-so this work begins with a meditation on enduring or not enduring-on the implications of the act of rebellion.

Camus has not delivered us by rhetoric, or by any of the arts of persuasion, but by the clarity of his intelligence. After an age of anxiety, despair, and nihilism, it seems possible once more to hope-to have confidence again in man and in the future. With the publication of this book a cloud that has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift.

The rebel camus