The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1951

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction-Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Key Figures

Themes

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Background

Socio-Historical Context

The Rebel was first published in 1951, just a few years after the end of World War II (1939-1945). World War II was a devastating conflict on a truly global scale, leading to the death, injury, or displacement of tens of millions of people, both soldiers and civilians. The conflict pitted the Allied forces (namely Great Britain, France, the United States, and—eventually—the Soviet Union) against the powers of the Axis (Nazi Germany and its allies, such as fascist Italy and imperial Japan). The conflict is also notable for one of the most notorious large-scale crimes in human history: the Holocaust, in which Hitler sought the total extermination of the Jewish people and other designated “undesirables” according to Nazi ideology. As a result of this systematic persecution, millions of victims died in concentration camps like Auschwitz and Buchenwald.

The sheer scale of the war’s violence and the brutalities of Nazi ideology shocked the world and left Europe in a crisis of conscience. The Nuremberg Trials (1945-1946) placed surviving Nazis on trial and sought redress for their crimes; the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was declared in 1948 as an attempt to safeguard human liberties and prevent the horrors of genocide from ever taking place again. Camus wrote and published The Rebel within this context of a traumatized Europe seeking to understand why and how a supposedly civilized nation like Germany could wreak such devastation due to ideology. The phenomenon Camus seeks to understand is why and how man’s rebellious impulses so often lead to destruction instead of the better society of his dreams.

Intellectual Context

The 20th century was irrevocably shaped by two totalitarian ideologies: fascism and communism. Fascism was the root cause of World War II, when Hitler rose to power in 1930s Germany and instigated a global conflict in an attempt to establish a Third Reich empire. Communist ideology inspired the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, leading to the establishment of the Soviet Union. Camus traces the lineage of these totalitarian ideologies back to Nietzsche and Marx respectively, and he explores what the fatal flaws of these ideologies actually are.

Camus’s argument rests on two main points. First, he claims that the 19th century witnessed the rapid erosion of traditional religious beliefs, and with this erosion came a general loss in the belief of transcendent moral principles. When Camus speaks of nihilism, he is referring to a generalized moral and aesthetic rejection of transcendence and a kind of extreme cynicism that led thinkers like Nietzsche and Marx to seek meaning elsewhere, outside a religious context. For Nietzsche, man could become a sort of “superman” by letting go of the moral inhibitions instilled by Christianity and embracing his strength to the full; for Marx, man could achieve an ideal, classless society through violent revolution, a process he described as a historical inevitability that would lead to the final goal of communism.

According to Camus, the biggest problem with such ideologies is that they prioritize the future over the present and act in the service of an ideal human prototype that does not yet exist and possibly never will. Camus argues that this misguided, utopian streak in 19th-century ideologies led to the horrors and violence witnessed in the 20th century.