To be neither victims nor executioners: Albert Camus and the measure of justice

Abstract

The controversy between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, in the early 1950s, took the spotlight in French academic circles at the time. The core of the discussion, which is known to have been the reason for the break-up of the friendship between the two authors, concerned the limits and justifications of violence as a form of political action. While Sartre and other thinkers of his cycle opted to justify, or at least not denounce, some of the violent actions of a government or a group in the name of the interests they defended, Camus did not accept terror, even if he recognised its inevitability. The present study, which aims to go beyond the Camus-Sartre polemic, seeks to recover the bases of Camus' political thought in a broader interpretation of his work. To achieve this, it uses not only his essay The Rebel, the pivot of that controversy, but also his theatre plays, such as The Just, and his articles published in the collection Actuelles (‘’ Actuals‘’). It also seeks to suggest an interpretative key for Camusian political thought based on a sort of ‘solidarity principle’, which consists in centralising solidarity as the motor force of political action, overcoming the problem of the inevitability of terror. Finally, it explores, using the notion of an ‘economy of utopia’, Camusian reflections on utopias, which discuss their price and aim to re-signify them.