Abstract
As a public intellectual—a writer who engaged publicly with matters of public importance—Albert Camus made significant contributions to a wide range of critical public debates in post-war France. In this chapter, Foley examines Camus’s attempt to introduce a moral vocabulary into the principal political debates of his time. Through an examination of Camus’s on-going debates with Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean Paul Sartre, and in particular Camus’s career as an essayist and journalist, Foley argues that Camus’s refusal to offer a philosophical justification for violence sets him apart from fellow writers on the Left at that time and also is indicative of his exemplary contribution as a public intellectual.
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Notes
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David Carroll (2007, p. 136) argues that Camus’s conception of assimilation was, for its time, liberal in the extreme.
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Merleau-Ponty (1969 [1947], p. 107). ‘Le Yogi et le prolétaire’ was published in instalments in Les Temps modernes in October 1946, November 1946, and January 1947. In July 1947, Les Temps modernes printed a related editorial, ‘Apprendre à lire’ [Learn to read]. A slightly revised version of the three parts of ‘Le yogi et le prolétaire’ and ‘Apprendre à lire’ was published in book form as Humanisme et terreur (1947).
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The original review was written by Francis Jeanson (1952a) under the provocative title ‘Albert Camus, or the Revolted Soul’. Camus (1952) responded to Jeanson’s review with a letter addressed to Sartre directly. This was published together with replies from both Jeanson (1952b) and Sartre (1952, which is quoted above) in the August issue of the same journal.
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He made this point in March 1956 to his friend Emmanuel Roblès, and again in the 1958 preface to Algerian Chronicles, where he also comments on the ‘peculiar commentary’ it provoked (see Camus (1965b, pp. 892, 1843; 2013 [1958], p. 25) and Roblès (1988, p. 48)). Camus wrote to the editor of Le Monde to clarify a number of points in the published report, but never disputed the accuracy of the comment regarding his mother and justice (Camus 1965b, pp. 1882–3). See also Camus’s letter to Jean Amrouche (Camus 1989, p. 238).
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For details of Sénac’s criticism of Camus, see also Le Sueur (2001, pp. 113–115).
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In 1973, Sartre told John Gerassi: ‘“There is a little falsehood in the obituary I wrote about Camus, when I say that even when he disagreed with us, we wanted to know what he thought. … He wasn’t a boy who was made for all that he tried to do, he should have been a little crook from Algiers, a very funny one, who might have managed to write a few books, but mostly remain a crook. Instead of which you had the impression that civilisation had been stuck on top of him and he did what he could with it, which is to say, he did nothing”’ (quoted in Todd 1996, p. 827; see also Todd 1998, pp. 415–6, revised translation).
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Foley, J. (2016). Neither Victims nor Executioners: Camus as Public Intellectual. In: Fives, A., Breen, K. (eds) Philosophy and Political Engagement. International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44587-2_12
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