The Rebel

A long essay published in 1951 that continues the argument of The Myth of Sisyphus. Where that book asked whether suicide can be justified in an absurd world, this one asks whether murder can be. Camus begins with the slave who says no to his master: rebellion affirms a limit and a value shared by all, summed up in his phrase 'I rebel, therefore we exist'. He then traces metaphysical rebellion against God and creation through Sade, the Romantic dandies, Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov, Nietzsche and the Surrealists, and historical rebellion through the regicides of the French Revolution, the Russian terrorists of 1905, whom he respects for paying with their own lives, and the state terror of Nazism and Soviet communism. Revolutions that make history an absolute end, he argues, end by justifying mass murder. Against this he proposes 'thought at the meridian', an ethic of measure and limits. Sartre's circle attacked the book as politically naive, and the quarrel ended their friendship.

It is Camus's fullest answer to how one can resist injustice without becoming a killer, and its case against ideologies that excuse violence in the name of history still reads as current.