Chapter 17 Camus, Justice and the Challenges of History

In: Brill's Companion to Camus
Author:
Mark Orme
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Mark Orme’s contribution examines Camus’s philosophical attempts to give form to that passion for justice which Malraux, Grenier and others noted was decisive in shaping Camus’s lifework. Camus as Orme reads him was a “humanitarian pragmatist”, a figure moved by a “politics of honour”—almost an anti-politics—rather than a figure driven by any overarching ideological commitments. Camus’s orientation towards justice hails back to his childhood, growing up poor but happy in Algeria, Orme shows: an upbringing which left him with a sense of the social injustice shared by those he loved which would become determinative as his circle of concerns became wider; firstly in his political and journalistic work in Algeria in the later 1930s; and secondly, after the outbreak of war in Europe in September 1939. Orme pays particular attention to the series of articles Camus wrote on the impoverished Kabyle peasants in Alger républicain between June 5 and 15, 1939 (OC I, 267–336; AC 37–84). Nevertheless, like other critics, Orme suggests that too often Camus’s political interventions were shaped excessively by a “moralizing” language: that of a “liberal moralist” in opposition to the political authoritarianisms then dominant in the world. In his postwar journalism and philosophy, nevertheless, Camus set about trying to reason through the institutional and political preconditions for balancing justice with freedom, a position which is fleshed out in its fullest details in the final part of L’Homme révolté of 1951. Nevertheless, argues Orme, “his ongoing attempt to reconcile justice and freedom in the interests of human progress would be overwhelmed by the personal and political conflicts exposed by the Algerian War.”

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