The Rebel by Albert Camus

Description

Sartre paid tribute to him in his obituary notice- ‘Camus could never cease to be one of the principal forces in our cultural domain, nor to represent, in his own way, the history of France and of this century.’ ‘One of the great humanist manifestos’ The Times Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature ‘The last French intellectual to take the side of humanity and talk its language … a figure of immense moral stature’ Sunday Times

The Rebel is Camus’s ‘attempt to understand the time I live in’ and a brilliant essay on the nature of human revolt. Published in 1951, it makes a daring critique of communism – how it had gone wrong behind the Iron Curtain and the resulting totalitarian regimes. It questions two events held sacred by the left wing – the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917 – that had resulted, he believed, in terrorism as a political instrument.

In this towering intellectual document, Camus argues that hope for the future lies in revolt, which unlike revolution is a spontaneous response to injustice and a chance to achieve change without giving up collective and intellectual freedom.