Global Political Thinkers Series Editors: H. Behr, Professor of International Relations, School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University, UK F. Roesch, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Coventry University, UK This Palgrave Pivot series presents groundbreaking critical perspectives on political theory: titles published in this series will present influential political thinkers on a global scale from around the world, with interpretations based on their original languages, providing synoptic views on their works, and written by internationally leading scholars. Individual interpretations will emphasize language and cultural context of political thinkers and of political theory as primary media through which political thoughts and concepts originate and generate. Chih-yu Shih and Po-tsan Yu POST-WESTERN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS RECONSIDERED The Pre-Modern Politics of Gongsun Long Global Political Thinkers series Series Standing Order ISBN 978 1 137 38373 0 You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0001
Also by Patrick Hayden RECOGNITION AND GLOBAL POLITICS Critical Encounters between State and World (co-edited with Kate Schick) HANNAH ARENDT: Key Concepts (editor) POLITICAL EVIL IN A GLOBAL AGE: Hannah Arendt and International Theory THE ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO ETHICS AND INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS (editor) GLOBALIZATION AND UTOPIA: Critical Essays (co-edited with Chamsy el-ojeili) CRITICAL THEORIES OF GLOBALIZATION (co-authored with Chamsy el-ojeili) COSMOPOLITAN GLOBAL POLITICS CONFRONTING GLOBALIZATION: Humanity, Justice and the Renewal of Politics (co-edited with Chamsy el-ojeili) AMERICA S WAR ON TERROR (co-edited with Tom Lansford and Robert P. Watson) JOHN RAWLS: Towards a Just World Order THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMAN RIGHTS (editor) PHILOSOPHICAL PERSPECTIVES ON LAW AND POLITICS Readings from Plato to Derrida (editor) MULTIPLICITY AND BECOMING: The Pluralist Empiricism of Gilles Deleuze DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0001
Camus and the Challenge of Political Thought: Between Despair and Hope Patrick Hayden Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, University of St Andrews, UK DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0001
Patrick Hayden 2016 S o f t c o v e r r e p r i n t o f t h e h a r d c o v e r 1 s2016 t e d978 1 137 52582 6 i t i o n All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2016 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978 1 137 52583 3 PDF ISBN: 978 1 349 70731 7 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. www.palgrave.com/pivot doi: 10.1057/9781137525833
DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0001 To Zoë, the littlest rebel, and Katherine, my sheltering sea
Contents Prologue vii 1 Situating Camus 1 2 Human Existence and the Tragic Beauty of the Absurd 21 3 Rebellion and an Ethics of Measure 42 4 Politics and the Limits of Violence 66 5 From Justice to Solidarity 91 6 Cosmopolitanism without Hope 111 Epilogue 129 Bibliography 133 Index 139 vi DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0001
Prologue The Algerian-French writer Albert Camus is a crucial thinker for anyone who wants to reflect deeply yet cautiously about the enormous and often catastrophic political events of the twentieth century, the consequences and implications of which continue to reverberate throughout the world around us. Camus is acknowledged as a major figure in the intellectual scene of contemporary Europe, having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957, and his political interventions developed over time and in response to world events in which he played a key role as an artist, intellectual and political activist. Throughout his work, he reflected about the political present he lived in, from his youth in Algeria until his death in France in 1960. Although Camus is an important political thinker, his views were often controversial and not easily labelled. Moreover, Camus wrote primarily for the general public and not merely for academic audiences. An extremely prolific writer, Camus was an essayist as well as novelist, journalist, playwright and theatre director. Because Camus examined many topics through a variety of genre, his work does not form a rigid philosophical system and it can be difficult to arrive at a comprehensive overview of his thought. The central purpose of this book is to elucidate the many different facets of Camus s writings in order to show how his philosophical and political ideas fit together as a whole. Although Camus s ideas evolved over the course of his life, he retained his basic conceptual positions and each work that he added to his corpus was seen as exploring an aspect of human existence in the DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0002 vii
viii Prologue modern world that refracted across his other works, propagating multifaceted portraits of the human condition. Central to his understanding of existence were two firmly held beliefs: first, that the human condition is absurd insofar as consciousness confronts the felt absence of meaning in a world divested of absolute standards infusing modernity with a cultural and political crisis and, second, that life is nonetheless worth living when motivated by a rebellious ethos that affirms the possibility of creating shared values. These two ideas, absurdity and revolt, provide the framework for Camus s attempts to illuminate a world where the constant disintegration of the past and the uncertainty of the future seem to exhaust our capacity to make sense of historical and political events. Scholarly interest in Camus s work has generated a voluminous and wide-ranging secondary literature. While only limited references to this literature surface in the pages to come, it must be made immediately clear that this book has no pretensions to participate directly in this larger secondary industry in order to avoid getting mired in the disputes and presuppositions of that literature. In interpreting Camus for this series, my aim is to focus the reader s attention on, first, Camus s own work to more succinctly draw out its central themes and meanings and, second, how the great range of Camus s writings can indeed be seen as offering a compelling account of political coexistence that remains relevant today. The following six chapters therefore present a number of his key texts and ideas, locate Camus within his own social and historical setting, and demonstrate how his work directly addresses questions of ethics and politics. It also takes up the challenge of Camus as a political thinker from another angle, and argues that his closely related notions of the absurd and rebellion provide a provocative but unfamiliar perspective on cosmopolitanism in the contemporary context of global integration and fragmentation. In order to make the book as accessible as possible, my preference has been to use widely available English translations of Camus s work. When necessary, I slightly modify the existing translations or provide my own when citing from texts not yet published in English. While no book of this length can adequately address all of the ideas that Camus has become famous for, I hope that the present volume can in some small way stimulate the reader s encounter with the political thought of Albert Camus. DOI: 10.1057/9781137525833.0002