Introduction
As discussed in The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus, 1955/1979) we learn humanity confronts the absurd, in which an individual does not have a clear line of sight nor has access to the meaning of existence, yet still strives to find life's meaning or at least formulate a way to order chaos. He witnesses events from his own life or the lives of others and seeks to understand why seemingly irrational events occur. For example, while he may express pious gratitude that his son's exceptionally poor vision prevents his country from drafting his son into a war, he may experience bewilderment when that same son leaves his college to drive home and mysteriously disappears - his car, his possessions all are found on the side of the road, but there is no sign of what happened to him. Confronted with these events, the man is subsequently left to his own devices to either default to the ontological programming of his parents or tribe (e.g. he was raised as a Christian, therefore God has a reason for his son's disappearance, but that reason is unknowable for him), or to outsource it to some other religion or philosophy (e.g. this same man who was raised Christian, abandons his faith and embraces Stoicism, which in turns tells him to love his fate, even it it is unexplainable and there is no reason as to why his son disappeared).
Besides using one's default programming or outsourcing it, Camus contends there are still other options for when a person confronts the absurd. He can choose to succumb to the absurd, and immediately reach the only known outcome for the individual: immediate death in the form of suicide. Or he can choose to revolt and rebel. If he chooses revolt, he no longer needs to seek a reason (e.g. as Camus wrote, "Knowing whether or not one can live without appeal is all that interests me" (1955)). He also consciously accepts his limits, knowing that the only space that belongs to him is his life span and consequently perpetually revolts while he lives.
From this point (living within limits), Camus springs into his book The Rebel (1956). Humans often wish to remove limits and therefore tend to embrace All-or-Nothing thinking (sometimes called binary thinking or black-or-white thinking). Of course, one prime example is the individual confronted with the absurd and concludes suicide is the only answer (Nothing, or negation). If one chooses to remain living in revolt against the absurd, he may fall on the other end of that spectrum of All, or total unity. However, this thinking tends to prove disastrous as well, even tilting back to negation.
For the true rebel, after rejecting the immediate answer of suicide, he is left with another crucial question: "Is it possible to find a rule of conduct outside the realm of religion and its absolute values? That is the question raised by rebellion" (1955, 21). However, he must also stand in solidarity with the rest of humanity. In the grand metaphysical sense, we are all victims of the absurd, so any solution proposed to this problem, must defend life; this is a primary motive of the rebel. The Rebel makes the case that those who either choose Nothing or All must always remember the primary motive of revolt, and not go down paths which in turn, enslave or murder for the sake of All (total unity) or strive for the destruction of the self and other (Nothing), both of which lead to nihilism.
It is important to note that Camus observed how the ancient Greeks affirmed existence and their rebellions were targeted and limited, thus preventing All or Nothing thinking. He says, "The Greeks are never vindictive. In their most audacious flights they always remain faithful to the idea of moderation, a concept they deified" (1956, 27). We are reminded of the wise counsel 'nothing to excess' and that hubris, of which excess plays a major role, will bring about deleterious consequences. Epicurus stands diametrically opposed to religions which bring about anxiety in people, as well as religions which would provoke humanity to change the status quo. He attempts to teach how one can avoid all excess and live in harmony with the cosmos. But later, with Lucretius, revolutionary ideology takes root. While Epicurus would have us believe the gods view humanity with indifference and therefore humanity should equally view the gods with indifference, Lucretius actively charges the gods with crime, claiming humans only murder because the gods murder (1956, 31). He would take up the fight to remove the gods from their thrones and sit himself in their place. This radical idea preceded a similar ideology in the form of Christianity, which taught of a personal, omnipotent, all-powerful God. As such, when the individual believes in such a god which encompasses All, and consequently is responsible for evil, all of existence will effectively be put on trial! In modern philosophical parlance, this is known as the theodicy problem.
Related to the problem of responsibility of evil, is the story and history of humanity. Unlike the Greeks who were committed to moderation in all things and lived in the present moment with no thought for the future, Christianity (and by extension, other monotheistic religions) introduced a story which supposedly resolves the evils of suffering and death of humanity. With Christ, death is overcome and all human suffering becomes justified in him, since he was innocent. Therefore, humanity has hope for the resurrection and enlists in a quest in overcoming All, in which heaven (an absolute) will be found in the beyond. Thus the real good for believers is to be found elsewhere, in the future, which ultimately sacrifices the present, which nihilates the here and now.
In the Western world, Christians wrestled with the problem of evil, putting their hope in Christ, but with every generation, the Christian God began to die in their hearts due the rise of science and the advances of the Enlightenment, until eventually Nietzsche openly declared that "God [was] dead in the souls of his contemporaries" (1956, 34). Rightfully so, he foresaw the moral collapse of Western culture, noting the rise of nihilism as a "terrible guest" (Valchev 2021). From here, Camus meticulously traces the historical and metaphysical reactions to this vacuum of transcendent belief, each one falling into the category of Nothing (Sade, the Dandies, Romantics, etc.) or All (Christianity, Hegel's World Spirit, and Marxism). The purpose of this review is to support his thesis that all of these ideologies tilted hard to nihilism and therefore either sacrificed life in the name of Nothing or negation, or in the name of All to achieve some far distant utopia or classless society. Both paths fundamentally forgot the real motives for rebelling against our state of existence. The original motivation was to stand in solidarity with all humans to fight the chaos and injustice, but both options of All or Nothing ultimately embodied the very thing they despised (see footnote #1).
The true rebel must stand resolutely with all humanity, and in so doing set limits on himself. These limits will hold a tension in place, by living in the present and never at the expense of History or for some unknown future. The rebel will always create, while perpetually holding the tension of standing with humanity in fighting micro and macro injustices, but will also know that the fight must never drift too far toward tyranny.
Nothing (Negation)
Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (Wikipedia Contributors, 2019) is Camus' first example of a rebel who desires freedom in absolute terms, but eventually turns to destructive desires. Sade is the radical thinker and founder of sadist ideology and practices. Sade is an example of the very contradictory powers at work in the All-or-Nothing mentality. Camus shines a light on the heart of Sade's logic when he wrote, "Sade, in reality, obeys no other law than that of inexhaustible desire. But to desire without limit is the equivalent of being desired without limit. License to destroy supposes that you yourself can be destroyed. Therefore you must struggle and dominate" (Camus, 1956, p. 41). Stated differently, the yearn for absolute freedom (All), begins with the self, and then pivots to the pursuit of freedom for others and eventually for the entire world. But since this desire for freedom cannot achieve, nor have "the patience to await complete control of the world" (1956, p. 42), it delineates its kingdom and exerts absolute control over that serfdom, thus negating the freedoms of those serfs who should have been compatriots in the original goal of rebellion. Whether he entrapped and beat a young prostitute or tortured a beggar after hiring her as a servant (Whitney, 2026), Sade's desire for freedom, turned to domination and negation. A contemporary of Camus named Dominique Aury, made a similar observation regarding the desire for freedom turning to captivity, when she wrote, "we are all jailers, and all in prison, in that there is always someone within us whom we enchain, whom we imprison, whom we silence” (Mahon, 2020).
While Sade gave the world licentiousness, more impactfully, his idea of freedom led to a highly individualistic and egotistic struggle. To Camus, this is central to his critique of all rebels, who embark on a path to overcome some type of injustice, but ultimately forget the shared, common struggle humanity must face collectively. Sade, and later others, will refuse to stand in solidarity with fellow humans, and instead treat them as slaves and objects.
The Dandies
The next logical progression of the rebel are the Dandies and their Romantic based rebellion. Their inspiration is largely based in the worship of the figure Satan as opposed to Prometheus. Whereas Prometheus remained faithful to the collective rebellion of humanity in the face of shared in justice, the rebellion of Satan and the Dandies turns selfishly inward, similar to Sade. In fact, the Dandy, knowing full well he will expire and turn to dust, endeavors to appear lovely before his own eyes and daily lives his slogan: "to live and die before the mirror" (1956, p. 51). However, his mirror is not made of glass, but rather he wishes to see his reflection in the attention from others. At first others may be enamored by the Dandy's flash, but then they are soon bored and the Dandy must constantly 'up his game' to provoke a new reaction. But when one plays this game long enough, he loses the ability to provoke, and thus the Dandy's mentality will eventually "leave the world of appearances" and rush toward the world of action. This progression logically leads to the action of "French students of 1830 and the Russian Decemberists" (1956, p. 53).
Ivan Karamazov
In the section "Rejection of Salvation" Camus focuses on the logic of Dostoevsky's Ivan Karamazov. Ivan's logic aligns with Camus's point regarding the rebel's desire to retain allegiance with humanity's suffering, as opposed to the reactions of the Dandies and Sade. Ivan argues even if God exists, and immortality will be attained, the cost of evil (suffering and death of innocent children) is still not justified. His argument is not: since evil exists, God does not exist; rather he places a spotlight on what is occurring on God's watch. As one Substack author wrote, "Even if his [Ivan's] personal salvation were secured; even if every soul’s redemption was guaranteed, the calculus is intolerable if it depends upon one innocent child being forced to suffer. Ivan is incapable of accepting any circumstance where ultimate peace is contingent upon anyone’s pain" (Murphy, 2024). Ivan continues with the idea that if there is no immortality, there is no virtue, and sadly concludes "everything is permitted" including killing and allowing the death of others, even one's father. He recognizes that he both hates the death penalty and supports crime. This logical hinge accelerates the momentum of humanity's recognition there is no outside influence coming to save them from the injustices it suffers, and from this terminus, it casts its aim on initiating the task of creating the man-god.
Creating the man-god entails occupying the space God once held in the minds of men, and not only correcting the aforementioned evils, but to also unify humanity under one dogma. On this pivot to action, rests the logical conclusion of those who begin the project of real metaphysical rebellion turned to action, thus prophesying Socialism and Communism. Alas, the creators and herders of humanity fail to convince the masses of the value of the new ideological project. These self-proclaimed man-god creators assume a moral superiority and patronize humans by doing the thinking and acting for them. Thus these guardians quickly forget shared suffering and quickly become the very tyrant they had first endeavored to bring down.
Karamazov presciently recognized how the project of creating the man-god would proceed, through Ivan's story of the Grand Inquisitor. Recall from The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky, 1992) how in the story, Christ arrives on the scene during the Spanish Inquisition, begins performing miracles, only to be arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, who is an ancient church cardinal overseeing the care of the congregation. That night, the Grand Inquisitor visits Christ in the jail and explains to Christ that he missed every opportunity to shepherd humanity when he refused the invitations from Satan. Each of three refusals, representing miracle, mystery and authority, could have been the means for making the unintelligent seemingly happy. Stated positively, the Grand Inquisitor who represents the Church, thinks people are weak and slavish, and therefore indeed live by physical bread, that they cannot live by faith alone and need miracles for sustaining their beliefs, and that our world is a world of power and authority and nothing could be accomplished unless it were done by Caesar. In brief, Christ overestimated humanity's ability to secure their own freedom, and the Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God's existence and therefore assumed control over the needs for happiness (mystery, miracles and authority).
For Camus, the Grand Inquisitor represents every institutional form which adheres to the belief that only humanity exists (there is no God) and we create our own rules (everything is permitted), however, not all people can hold this view, and therefore there will always be a small group of "compassionate" elite who "know better" and will therefore provide life's meaning for the masses, for their own good. Lenin's communism would later embrace this same ideology with its "vanguard of the proletariat" (The Information Architects of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2026).
Camus ends this section of the book with a striking summary of all the logic of the above played out over centuries. "From Paul to Stalin, the popes who have chosen Caesar have prepared the way for Caesars who quickly learn to despise popes. The unity of the world, which was not achieved with God, will henceforth be attempted in defiance of God" (Camus, 1956, p. 61).
All (Unification from acceptance to affirmation to building Utopia at any cost)
Stirner - extreme egoism
Max Stiner, born in 1806 and died in 1856, (Philopedia, 2025) was an obscure philosopher and associated with the Young Hegelians. Camus takes an interest in Stirner because of his ideas on spooks, the Unique, and his theories on "philosophical egoism and individualist anarchism" (2025), all of which fall under the headline of total affirmation of the individual ego. This conclusion rests on his premise that all religion, ideas about God, the State and even law, duty and morality are simply constructs or fixed ideas in our minds. And even if one were to break free of one of these spooks, he is at risk of creating a new one (e.g. losing belief in God, only to create a new spook in the belief in Communism). These spooks only have fake or illusory authority in our minds. As such, humanity must break free of these constraints, thus allowing the Unique within an individual to emerge and use "one’s capacities, relations, and world as one’s own property to use and enjoy" (2025). In sum, the Unique is total affirmation of one's ego, and that "unions of egoists" should form and serve common interests until they expire.
However, as Camus notes, this extreme egoism also abandons the solidarity of humanity's shared rebellion against evil. As unions of egoists never agree to constraints, they in turn begin to justify crime in the name of the individual and unionized egos. Stated more simply, when a slave says 'no' he is implicitly saying 'no' to all slavery, speaking on behalf of all humans. Stirner would say this appeal to solidarity is a spook, and that whatever affirms the Unique is the only good - it owes nothing to the rest of humanity.
Camus notes that Stirner's philosophy, when taken to its full conclusion, leads to total destruction.
"You [the German nation] will be struck down. Soon your sister nations will follow you; when all of them have gone your way, humanity will be buried, and on its tomb I, sole master of myself at last, I, heir to all the human race, will shout with laughter." And so, among the ruins of the world, the desolate laughter of the individual-king illustrates the last victory of the spirit of rebellion. (Camus, 1956, p 65).
Nietzsche - affirmation and loving existence as it is
The key point for Nietzsche is that he arrives at the opposite conclusion as Ivan Karamazov. Recall Karamazov claimed if nothing is true, everything is permitted. Nietzsche, in response claimed "if nothing is true, nothing is permitted" (Camus, 1956, p. 71). Nietzsche was the first to recognize and conclude that God was dead in the hearts of European Christians, and as a consequence, their faith in transcendence was unknowingly abolished. From then on, his project was to prevent a total collapse into a destructive nihilism. His project was to answer the question, "can one live believing in nothing?" (1956, p. 66). In other words, his idea of a rebel was to prevent any ideology which "[aimed] at falsely replacing the vanished deity" (1956, p. 68). In fact, he uses Christianity as evidence that it abandoned the true message of Christ (which was total acceptance and consent to the world, coupled with non-resistance to the evils of death and suffering), and in its place, an "imaginary meaning" in life (1956, p. 69). Both Christianity and later Socialism, deny what exists in an effort to sell humanity on some unguaranteed promise of the future. Indeed, "a nihilist is not someone who believes in nothing, but one who does not believe in what exists" (1956, p. 69).
As to what exists, Camus, Nietzsche and others rightfully and honestly conclude our world does not have a God, and any man-made moral idols are just that: a made-up prop to sooth a meaning-seeking soul. Once a person arrives at this conclusion, they suffer both complete liberation as well as responsibility. And since "the world pursues no end" (1956, p. 72), humanity must concede the world's innocence since the world "accepts no judgement" because we cannot ascertain the intent of its creation. Therefore, humanity must drop "all judgements based on values" and replace those judgements with "absolute assent." The individual, in accepting and loving this fate, uses his energy, and limited time, to not only be "engulfed in the cosmos" but to also "[collaborate] with the entire cosmos" (1956, p. 73-74). In this form of rebellion, humanity accepts the world and cosmos is God, and instead of trying to put it on trial, we simply affirm it and re-create it.
In this quest of recreating the world, we find the familiar Nietzschean concept of the Übermensch - one who embraces his fate, creates his own values and meaning and one who wishes to live in such a way endlessly (the eternal recurrence). Alas, for Camus, this is where Nietzsche failed to place limits and negated the Greek idea of "nothing to excess." In Camus' mind, "the doctrine of the superman led to the methodical creation of sub-men" and when one says "yes!" to everything, one will say "yes" to murder and we find ourselves in the "everything is permitted" territory again (1956, p. 76). And from there, we are a mere hop-skip-and-jump to saying "yes" to concentration camps. In Camus' view, we can embrace our existence by loving the world as it actually is, even in its immediate, fragile, mortal reality, while also standing in active resistance to the injustices humans suffer under the evils of metaphysical and all forms of physical slavery.
In the end, while many may have misunderstood Nietzsche or even blame him for the rise of the Nazis, he was the first, in a long line of thinkers to not only recognize the problem, but to also propose a solution to it. Camus appreciated much of what Nietzsche wrote and thought, but in the end, shied away from Nietzsche's push to another absolute in response to the metaphysical vacuum.
The Poets & Surrealists - exemplifying 'yes and no'
Lautréamont was the pen name of Isidore Lucien Ducasse, born April 4, 1846 in Montevideo, Uruguay, and died in Paris on November 24, 1870. In this brief section, Camus discusses how Lautréamont wrote two diametrical opposite writings and how both of these works embrace total revolt and total acceptance.
Les Chants de Maldoror heralds the surrealists with its strange and seemingly incoherent stories. The poetic novel touches on a number of verboten topics and ideas such as bestiality, homosexuality, blasphemy and violent crime. The work symbolizes a total rejection of divinity and the very existence of the universe. In sum, divinity is scorned, humanity is diminished, and the cosmos is viewed as a profane insult.
His other work Poésies tracks completely in the other direction, representing total acceptance of existence, virtue, wisdom and academics. This minor work stands in sharp contrast to the bleakness of Maldoror, employing language that is markedly more positive, uplifting, and deeply humanistic.
In sum, Camus uses Regarding Lautréamont to demonstrate how revolt screams 'I reject everything' or how conformity whispers 'I assent to everything.' They are both examples of how people might avoid embracing the more difficult middle ground of choosing solidarity and authenticity. Total negation and total submission reach the same conclusion of nihilism, each simply wearing different masks.
Arthur Rimbaud, born October 20, 1854 and died November 10, 1891 was another person who exemplified in his writing and his life, to some extent, this tension between the 'yes and no.' Raised in a strict home under the management of his mother (who he privately referred to her as "Mouth of Darkness"), he was cultivated with a classical learning mindset (Wikipedia Contributors, 2022). But from a young age, he revolted and ran away multiple times, and after a short period of creativity in which he wrote poems and other works, he ultimately chose silence and exiled himself from poetry and travelled the world extensively.
Camus endorses Rimbaud as a true rebel poet, but when he fell silent (stopped writing), he turned his back on rebellion, only to find true revolt at the end of his life when he confronts death. Camus wrote, "At the moment when he carries in his breast both illumination and the darkness of hell, when he hails and insults beauty, and creates, from an insoluble conflict, the intricate counterpoint of an exquisite song, he is the poet of rebellion-the greatest of all" (Camus, 1956, p. 89). But when Rimbaud settles for a life of mere trading, Camus critiques him as someone who "only wants to marry someone 'with a future'" (1956, p. 90). Eventually he returns to the rebel fold, as it were, on his deathbed. "The young Rimbaud comes to life again on the brink of the abyss and with him revives the rebellion of the times when his imprecations against life were only expressions of despair at the thought of death. It is at this point that the bourgeois trader once more rejoins the tortured adolescent whom we so much admired" (1956, p. 90).
Metaphysical rebellion seemingly reaches it apex with André Breton and the Surrealist movement. Under the pioneering thinking of Breton, the Surrealists questioned everything about reality and existence. Combining both the artistic ideas of Dadaism with his Freudian knowledge of the unconscious, Breton was quite open, and promoted ideas which threw cause for doubting everything humanity knows about existence. As Camus notes, Breton's revolt is quite explicit: "Incapable of accepting the fate assigned to me, my highest perceptions outraged by this denial of justice, I refrain from adapting my existence to the ridiculous conditions of existence here below" (1956, p. 92). Camus uses Breton and the Surrealists as examples of rebellion which, again, breaks from solidarity with humanity. He cites Breton who wrote, "the simplest surrealist act consisted in going out into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd" (1956, p. 93).
From Deriving Meaning for the Individual to Revolutionary World Conquest
All the preceding examples were case studies of people who rebelled against our absurd condition (a "fight against death ... [to claim] that life has a meaning" (1956, p. 101). Some signaled that the meaning of life is to affirm its meaninglessness, and consequently to embrace the cold indifferent justice the universe displays. While others affirmed or sought a total unification of all, be it their own brand of unification or some larger cause. After both types of metaphysical rebellions are played out long enough, individual metaphysical rebellion becomes bored and wishes to enlarge its preferred strongholds. With God dead (the former master), mankind (the slave) sets it's own agenda, and not only builds a new church "among the debris of the fallen City of God", but then begins its own form of tyranny and becomes the new master, thus forgetting the one crucial aspect of rebellion: human solidarity. As Camus wrote,
In principle, the rebel only wanted to conquer his own existence and to maintain it in the face of God. But he forgets his origins and, by the law of spiritual imperialism, he sets out in search of world conquest by way of an infinitely multiplied series of murders. He drove God from His heaven, but now that the spirit of metaphysical rebellion openly joins forces with revolutionary movements, the irrational claim for freedom paradoxically adopts reason as a weapon, and as the only means of conquest which appears entirely human (1956, p. 103)
Camus then analyzes the major revolutionary movements through history, beginning with the tearing down and murders of the monarchy, then to total eradication of God and finally to individual and state terrorism. From the French Revolution to Marxism and Communism, Camus consistently reminds us that to truly rebel, means to never forget that you, as a human, must stand in solidarity with all humans, rather than attempt to become a new God or terrorizing master.
Murdering the Monarchy; Establishing the New God
While kings have been overthrown for centuries, 1789 is a pivot point in which history arches away from dethroning a man, and rushes headlong into "overthrowing the principal of divine right" (1956, p. 112). As more became skeptical of the existence of God, divine right also suffered and was diminished. The king, by order of divine right exercised both justice and grace. But as the monarchy lost power in the minds of people, the question of who or what will uphold justice became the problem. Camus notes of this period, that justice was "confused with equality" and in the section on The Social Contract he notes that God and religion were replaced with "the general will" and the eminency of "reason" respectively (1956, p. 115). And when these ideas replaced God, a "new God [was] born" which was "absolute, sacred and inviolable" (1956, p. 116).
One of the most important items of the new God's agenda was to not only pronounce guilt on the monarch, but to establish the principal that any monarch should be treated as external to the Social Contract, and therefore it is not simply a crime to be a king, but rather the idea of monarchy itself was crime! When the logic lands on the idea that an institution is criminal by its very nature, then it has embraced the logic which leads to terror. Coldly stated, these revolutionaries endorsed the idea of any means necessary to achieve the ends of the new God. Camus notes that with the execution of Louis XVI, the Christian God was disincarnated on earth and the "secularization of our history" began (1956, p. 120).
Louis de Saint-Just was a key figure in carrying out the will of this new God. Saint-Just's fanatical ideology helped obliterate the concept of divine right and monarchy. In forming the new God of the general will and reason, or in a word Virtue, the concept of the death penalty was institutionalized. Indeed Saint-Just was originally against the death penalty, but the new constitution included this law to motivate people to support and love the new Republic. A patriot "supports the Republic in general; whoever opposes it in detail is a traitor" is another way Saint-Just applied the logic (1956, p. 126). From here, any oppositional or critical voice faced the guillotine. In the name of purifying the Republic, all impure, unvirtuous practices (and people) needed to be eliminated, for it is worth "[cutting] off a few heads to save a great many" (1956, p. 126).
Saint-Just and his fellow Jacobins simply established a new form of tyranny which would lay the groundwork for even greater tyrannical rule in the future. Indeed, Saint-Just was the "forerunner of the totalitarian rulers of the 20th century when he said on another occasion, 'We must not only punish traitors, but all people who are not enthusiastic. There are only two kinds of citizens: the good and the bad. The Republic owes to the good its protection. To the bad it owes only death'" (Reinhard, 2019).
The Evolution of Reason-as-the-new-God and History Leading to Destination
Camus further observed that Hegel embraced the motives of the French Revolution and breathed new life into it through his theory of the dialectic. Hegel’s central insight is that reality—history, consciousness, spirit—unfolds not in a straight line but through the clash of opposing forces or ideas. Every state of affair (a thesis) contains within itself the seeds of its own negation (an antithesis), and their conflict is resolved in a higher synthesis that both preserves and surpasses them. This movement—Aufhebung, often translated as “sublation”—is not just a logical schema but the living engine of thought and history. Nothing rests; everything is in the process of becoming.
The French Revolution, while killing divine right and installing Reason as the new God, is simply viewed as a mere step in the evolution of human history in Hegel's perspective. According to Hegel and German ideology, human will and reason are now the apex of ideas, motives and ends. Camus notes, "reason has embraced the future and aspired to conquest" (1956, p. 134). The capriciousness of divine right and transcendence are replaced with "the formal principles of reason or justice [which serve] to justify a rule that is neither just nor reasonable" (1956, p. 135).
Some of the vestiges and desires for transcendence (a desire for heaven after life, or an aim for Utopia on earth) remained after the regicides. Camus argued that the dialectic process ultimately killed this yearning. For one thesis must be sublated by an antitheses, which at its core is violent. Therefore, violence or destruction must always precede an aim for a utopia. "Violence, in both cases, is the victor" (1956, p. 136). As such, this evolving process finds perpetual tension in the slave-master morality struggle and the aim for transcendence dies (deicide). "First Hegel and then the Hegelians have tried, on the contrary, to destroy, more and more thoroughly, all idea of transcendence and any nostalgia for transcendence" (1956, p. 136).
What is left in this wake of perpetual destruction is the struggle for humans and humanity to gain self-consciousness, which at its core is simply a struggle to negate something external to itself (the world, others). But even more importantly, once one is conscious of itself, it demands other conscious humans to recognize his own existence. Camus summarizes this conflict as, "man is not recognized-and does not recognize himself-as a man as long as he limits himself to subsisting like an animal. He must be acknowledged by other men. All consciousness is, basically, the desire to be recognized and proclaimed as such by other consciousnesses" (1956, p. 138). Hegel's master-slave dialectic at its core is the desire and pursuit of "prestige" which ultimately is played out as a battle and struggle to the death on the world stage. In its essence, this is the theory which explains so many world conquests and millennia-long protracted wars, fights and struggles. Camus notes how absurd this struggle is, since as soon as one consciousness has secured victory over another consciousness (through destruction), it can no longer be recognized! The ultimate logic and mandate is "to kill or enslave" (1956, p. 140). This logic will drive 20th and even 21st century history.
To Kill: The Terrorists
In order to comprehend the figures Camus discusses in Individual Terrorism, it might be useful for the reader to understand a bit of the 'big rocks' of Russian history. See footnote 2 for a very rough outline of Russian history from Peter the Great (1682-1725) to Nicholas II (1894-1917).
The period between roughly 1830 and 1890, under Nicholas I and Alexander II, Russian intellectuals wrestled with how to bring Russia into enlightenment with the rest of Western Europe. While Nicholas applied heavy-handed rule over the people, many of the leading Russian thinkers found refuge in philosophy, and in particular Hegel’s. One key idea they interpreted from Hegel was that history arced toward freedom and the suffering in Russia was a necessary part of the unfolding dialectic.
For example, Vissarion Belinsky, at first, read Hegel as "justification for a form of social quietism" (1956, p. 151). But as Belinsky thought more on the Hegel's thesis, he concluded that if history and everything is logical in a quest to reach the final conclusion, then one agrees with the whip, serfdom and people exiled to Siberia. Belinsky realized he wanted no part in this arc of history. He contended either justice for all, or total rebellion to existence as we know it. He simply could not accept history as it stood, and therefore it must be burned down for new growth to occur.
From here, revolution for the sake of revolution spirals into an ever-more desperate quest to bring history's existing structures to the ground. The nihilists of the 1860s rallying cry became "annihilation of the past is the procreation of the future" (1956, p. 153). Even killing one's own mother is endorsed by Dmitry Pisarev, as a form of intellectual terrorism - anything to shock and provoke. Mikhail Bakunin didn't limit his revolutionary vision at the individual level. He actively tried to unite the oppressed in a rallying cry against God himself, taking the Satanic form of rebellion, struggling against creation itself. While he foresaw Marxist tyranny, and was against it, he nevertheless dreamed and fought for a "revolutionary Slav empire" but one without history or foundations (1956, p. 159). And lastly, Nachaiev represented the purest, most logical form of idea articulated by Belinsky and the nihilists. Camus succinctly describes this particular radical.
'Every part of him [the revolutionary] should be concentrated in one single passion: the revolution.' If history is, in fact, independent of all principles and composed only of a struggle between revolution and counterrevolution, there is no way out but to espouse wholeheartedly one of the two and either die or be resurrected. Nechaiev pursues this logic to the bitter end. With him, for the first time, revolution is going to be explicitly separated from love and friendship (1956, p. 160-1).
Logically, Nechaiev concludes anyone who puts limits on the revolution should be killed, for nothing and no one is more important than the revolution. Thus, breaking friendships and family relationships, blackmailing, manipulation, and violence (even among those who are part of the cause) are justified against one and all. From here, all forms of terrorism are permitted, and Russia, Europe and the United States will see a series of assassinations from the late 1870s all the way to 1905.
To close out this section, Camus notes a few aspects of what he calls the fastidious assassins, who were a small group of revolutionaries, in a seemingly small way, that set limits on their rebellion, thus retaining a sliver of morality. Unlike Nechaiev, these assassins acknowledged that killing created a obligation for moral payment, which could not be paid by simply arguing the killing was out of moral necessity. Camus finds this part important, because we can see in a limited way, the recognition of some form of a rebel retaining his or her commitment to human solidarity. Camus wrote, "It is the agonizing and fugitive discovery of a human value that stands halfway between innocence and guilt, between reason and irrationality, between history and eternity" (1956, p. 171).
However, from a revolutionary perspective, this strategy cannot lead to the long term ambition of the cause. The "priests and bigots" arrive on scene and see these martyrs-to-the-cause as mortar for their new church. Happy to sacrifice martyr lives while preserving their own, these wolves care nothing of morality and even double-down on revolution-at-all-cost-except-my-life, in order to bring about the birth of history. There are no scruples for these men. Instead, they seize and clutch all authority and power. Lenin demanded "absolute secrecy, meticulous care in the choice of members, creation of professional revolutionaries" (1956, p. 174). Thus the full cycle is complete: the slaves rebelled against their masters, but having no template on which to build their new world or God, they become the new masters and ruled cruelly over the sheep.
To Enslave: Marx's Vision of State as the Human God
Besides killing, the other option for these newly-freed "slaves" is to enslave a new generation of people, not under the auspices of the old, religious God, but under the banner of a new Human God, under the auspices of the final destination of history. Camus notes the hallmarks of this campaign in which the State promoted the idea of "everything is meaningless and that history is only written in terms of the hazards of force" (1956, p. 178). There was a crucial difference between Hitler and Mussolini, and the Marxists. The fascist dictators had no morality at all, and thus the only virtue was action, motivated by revenge from prior injustices. And when those were seemingly corrected, a new injustice needed to be formed to keep the gang moving forward - "perpetual strife demanded perpetual stimulants" (1956, p. 179). And when Hitler ultimately failed in his quest, he blamed the German people for the lack of success. His ultimate end was suicide, which was always going to be the outcome for those who followed. The Russian Communists, on the other hand, have always had an ultimate aim and thus some moral heading which spurred them through much resistance. They aspired to not only kill the old God, but to build a city of the Human God - to deify the man-God.
Camus makes a few crucial points to consider when discussing Marx. The first general point is that Marx's prophecies were short term in nature and were quickly outdated by progress, and relatedly, Marx's followers who actually had an impact on history and events did not really stay true to his ideas and simply "appropriated the prophecy and the apocalyptic aspects of his doctrine" (1956, p. 189).
Second, Marxist ideology rests on a a premise based in ancient Judeo-Christian thought - that world history is linear (broadly aligned with Hegel's Dialectic). Specifically, there was a beginning point, followed by necessary struggles, strife, setbacks and then progress, which will ultimately be followed by some future outcome and destination, all of which sacrifices the present (and human life) in the name of some 'better' future. Camus contrasts this linear idea of history with the Greek concept of life being cyclical (e.g. the Stoic idea of ekpyrosis). Marxist ideology and Christianity both view Nature as an obstacle to overcome, and thus try to subjugate Nature, as opposed to living in accord with Nature. Furthermore, he uses Joseph de Maistre as a parallel to Marxist ideology, in which Christianity views itself as a unifier which holds the key to ultimate human destiny. While both Marxist and Christian ideology are radically different, they share crucial similarities in terms of history, destiny and the need for violence (and an impersonal cause) to bring about ultimate outcomes for humanity. Camus channels Maistre:
Humanity marches, by way of crimes, violence, and death, toward this final consummation, which will justify everything. The earth for Maistre is nothing but 'an immense altar on which all the living must be sacrificed, without end, without limit, without respite, until the end of time, until the extinction of evil, until the death of death' (1956, p. 192).
The one crucial difference between Marx and Maistre (Christianity) is that Marx is an atheist, and the God he is attempting to create is the Human God. It is rather sad and somber to think that both Marxism and Messianism aim to unify humanity, even if it means violence and death for many, when the Western world had a somewhat even-keeled approached in the form of "that Greek thought [which] was the spirit of unity" and balance (1956, p. 193). Alas, both these men despised the Greeks. To summarize this second idea, which Camus called the Bourgeois prophecy, it simply is the idea that humanity will always make progress toward a defined end, and therefore the present sacrifices (even if they are in the currency of human lives) are worth it.
The third idea, in essence, focuses on the question of how and at what point will the proletariat assume power and then govern? The transition from the dictatorship of the proletariat to a stateless, classless society was left strikingly undefined. Exploiting this vagueness, Lenin declared the withering-away of the state permanently delayed, cementing a transitional apparatus into an enduring autocracy. What was supposed to be the last phase of the struggle between the proletariat and capital, simply turns into another slave-master struggle. And when this prophecy did not come to fruition, it was forced and entrusted "to a handful" (1956, p. 217), only perpetuate the revolution, thus causing the death of millions of people. And the justification for this new form of tyranny? Eventually, we will achieve the golden age.
Suffering is never provisional for the man who does not believe in the future. But one hundred years of suffering are fleeting in the eyes of the man who prophesies, for the hundred and first year, the definitive city. In the perspective of the Marxist prophecy, nothing matters. In any event, when the bourgeois class has disappeared, the proletariat will establish the rule of the universal man at the summit of production, by the very logic of productive development. What does it matter that this should be accomplished by dictatorship and violence? In this New Jerusalem, echoing with the roar of miraculous machinery, who will still remember the cry of the victim? (1956, p. 207).
Communism was supposed to relieve man of oppression so he could create (see 1956, p. 216), but all it did was grind man to an even lower status and multiply "additional degradation" (1956, p. 209). However, outside of Russia, the revolution never gained enough strength, because Western economies continued to evolve and adapt; innovation flourished, profit-sharing grew, new rising classes emerged and the competition between classes shifted to competition between nations. Perhaps most importantly, the standard of living grew, largely due to "reforms and trade unions" (1956, p. 213). But to the east, in Russia, the end was not achieved, and the people were enslaved and the police state implemented to maintain an iron grip on its population.
True Rebellion: Solidarity + Limits + Creation
A lot has been written in support of what humanity confronts with our existence. We are slaves to death and the fate we must face in this world. That initial urge to fight against that injustice ignites the flame to not only free one slave, but all slaves. As it gains momentum, inevitably that rebellion turns to either negation or unity. Negation and nihilism simply destroy, while the quest for unification for all, eventually turns to what Camus calls Caesarian revolution (1956, p. 250). While it initially frees, it quickly turns to eradicate all limits to unify all, but in that process forgets human solidarity and denies the essence of what it means to be human. Every time we suffer, experience defeat and engage our "inexhaustible pride" to get back up and give our hope meaning, we rebel and we exist! At this precise moment, the true rebel must affirm his dignity and the limits he will accept, in order to remain in solidarity with all humanity and to recognize "a beauty common to all men" (1956, p. 251). Camus beautifully sums this argument.
Rebellion, in fact, says and will say more and more explicitly - that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state - in artistic creation. Before doing so, let us only note that to the "I rebel, therefore we exist" and the "We are alone" of metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are (1956, p. 252).
Authentic Rebel Creation
For Camus, genuine rebellion can be found in art - be it music, painting sculpture or the novel. Furthermore, art is no escape from the world’s suffering. It is the world rendered with its fullest honesty - a fusion of protest and affirmation, of limits held and passions declared. In its blend of solidarity and singular voice, art comes closest to the authentic spirit of rebellion. The true rebel artist neither destroys, nor simply accepts; nor does mere commentary define the artist.
All authentic artists deeply comprehend the absurd nature of existence, but do not respond with a desire for negation. Rather, they exhibit an inherent urge to join in solidarity with humanity by recognizing certain aspects of it that should be rectified. Camus notes, "to create beauty, he must simultaneously reject reality and exalt certain of its aspects. Art disputes reality, but does not hide from it" (1956, p. 258). Additionally, the artist will advance some aspect or promote a "metaphysical demand for unity" but within limits or even a closed universe. In this way, the rebel maintains the tension of disagreement while not riled up to the point of demanding negation or total unity. The aim of the rebel musician is to capture the recognition of disorder, but then to turn it toward harmony. The rebel painter or sculptor will freeze a moment in time, which encapsulates a single gesture, stare or detail which stands for all frustrations, reliefs, defeats or victories.
Camus notes one unique form of art, which is different than the other forms: the novel. While other art captures a moment, the novel is slightly more active, in that it advances evolution of thought. People are drawn to the novel not simply to escape reality, but also to re-engage with it. The novel frees the story from a single moment or feeling, and seeks to broaden, yet encapsulate a universe. The authentic rebel novel will define the injustice and then seek a way to formulate a plan or craft an attitude which will assist the reader in grasping some form of unity which he lacks. Great novels release the writer and the reader from the constraints of time, and allow them to define and fix injustices in an entire lifetime. Camus observes, "What, in fact, is a novel but a universe in which action is endowed with form, where final words are pronounced, where people possess one another completely, and where life assumes the aspect of destiny? The world of the novel is only a rectification of the world we live in, in pursuance of man's deepest wishes" (1956, p. 262-263).
Conclusion
It is no surprise Camus channels Heraclitus to denote the endless tension humanity must strive for as it tries to reconcile perceived injustices with an approach which does not perpetuate those same or greater injustices! The rebel walks a fine line between acceptance, inaction, rejection of reality and action! Like a bow, the tension is formed between what is and what ought to be. Too little tension and the bow is worthless, while too much tension, the bow breaks and is also useless. Hence Camus quotes Rene Char, who said, "Obsession with the harvest and indifference to history, are the two extremities of my bow" (1956, p 303). This sentiment expresses the ideal rebel; one who focuses on his immediate life, or project or creation, but also one who fights against those whose ideology murders others for the sake of a better world in some distant future. Thus, he inexhaustibly strives for that tension between incessant human solidarity in the face of injustice, while also refusing to fix those ultimate injustices at all costs (e.g. murder).
References
Camus, A. (1979). The Myth of Sisyphus (J. O’Brien, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Original work published 1955)
Camus, A. (1956). The rebel : an essay on man in revolt (A. Bower, Trans.). Alfred A. Knopf.
Dostoyevsky, F. (1992). The brothers karamazov (L. Volokhonsky, Trans.). Everyman’s Library.
Mahon, A. (2020). The marquis de sade and solitude. Princeton U Press. https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/the-marquis-de-sade-and-solitude
Murphy, S. (2024). Why do people rebel and why is rebellion important? In Substack.com. Sean Murphy. https://murphlaw.substack.com/p/on-rebellion
Philopedia. (2025, December 8). Johann kaspar schmidt (max stirner) - philosopher. Philopedia. https://philopedia.org/philosophers/max-stirner/
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Footnotes
Footnote #1: Claude (Sonnet 4.6) notes, "This is the proto-structure of every modern ideology that sacrifices the present, living human being to an absolute beyond the world — whether that beyond is the Gnostic Pleroma, the Christian afterlife, the Hegelian World Spirit, or the Marxist classless society. All of them locate the real and the good elsewhere, and all of them accordingly devalue — and in their political expressions, destroy — the actual human beings standing in front of them.
"The Greeks, by contrast, with their deification of moderation, their plural and mortal gods, their cyclical time, and their Promethean rebels who disputed with Zeus rather than attacking all of creation, had managed to maintain a world in which rebellion was possible without becoming nihilistic, and in which the present, finite, mortal human life retained genuine dignity on its own terms, without requiring any transcendent validation from beyond. This is the lost world that The Rebel is mourning — and it is against its loss that the entire book's terrible catalogue of metaphysical and historical rebellion unfolds."
Footnote #2: Leveraging Claude (Sonnet 4.6) and other AI tools, below is high level review of Russian history, which might help the reader understand Camus' chapter Individual Terrorism.
Class Composition of Russia - To grasp the logic of 19th‑century Russian radicalism, one must begin with a political reality so stark it feels almost unreal. Around 1800, Russia was a pure autocracy ruling a nation in which roughly ninety percent of the population were serfs - legally bound to the land, effectively the property of their landlords, and in daily life scarcely distinguishable from slaves. The empire sprawled across continents, sustained by an immense bureaucracy and an obscurantist Orthodox Church, presiding over a society made up overwhelmingly of peasants. Periodic waves of reform and repression washed through the state, but the autocracy itself remained immovable.
The gulf separating the tiny educated elite from the peasant masses was not just economic; it was civilizational. Russia lacked a meaningful middle class, a tradition of representative politics, or an independent judiciary. The cultured nobility inhabited a world entirely alien to the serfs who worked their estates. This chasm - vast, morally unbearable, and structurally locked in place — is the wound from which all Russian revolutionary thought flows.
Peter the Great to Catherine the Great - The central irony of Russian history is that modernization came from above - and in doing so, created the very intellectual class that would later turn against the autocracy.
Peter the Great (1682–1725) launched Russia’s forced march into European modernity, overhauling the military and state while provoking constant unrest. He was a paradox: a modernizing despot who dragged the nobility into European dress, manners, and education, even relocating the capital to St. Petersburg as a symbolic gateway to the West.
Catherine the Great (1762–1796) styled herself an Enlightened monarch, reading Voltaire and corresponding with the philosophes. Yet her reforms remained constrained by autocratic power, and she ultimately expanded serfdom to secure noble loyalty - embracing Enlightenment ideals while presiding over one of the world’s most entrenched systems of human bondage.
Here lies the seed of Russian radicalism: Enlightenment ideas arrived in Russia without the social conditions that produced them elsewhere. No bourgeois revolution, no mass print culture, no tradition of individual conscience - only abstract ideals circulating among a tiny elite with no legitimate political outlet.
Alexander I and the Decemberists - After Russia’s victory over Napoleon, young officers encountered Western European political life for the first time - constitutional governments, civic institutions, and societies not built on serfdom. They returned home with the first stirrings of revolutionary thought, which soon surfaced in the failed Decembrist Uprising of 1825.
Alexander I (1801–1825) embodied this tension. He appeared liberal, toyed with constitutional ideas, and abolished serfdom in the Baltic provinces, yet after Napoleon’s defeat he drifted into mysticism and reaction, abandoning the reforms he once seemed ready to pursue.
The officers who marched through Paris and Berlin came home to a Russia still chained to serfdom. Their disillusionment produced the Decembrist revolt - Russia’s first modern attempt at revolution, Romantic in tone, Byronic in spirit, and brutally crushed by Nicholas I in December 1825.
Nicholas I: The Iron Lid (1825–1855) drew exactly the wrong conclusion from the Decembrist revolt. He responded with the doctrine of Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality - an ideological fortress built on censorship, surveillance, and enforced conformity. The Third Section shadowed the intelligentsia, foreign study became suspect, and even Hegel was discouraged, which only made him more eagerly read in private circles.
Cut off from political action after 1825, Russian intellectuals turned inward, finding in German idealism a sense of historical purpose amid autocracy and a society built on the misery of serfs. This produced the era’s central paradox: Nicholas’s repression pushed thinkers toward philosophy — and the philosophy they embraced was Hegel’s, with its promise that history moved inexorably toward freedom and that their suffering was a necessary step in that unfolding dialectic.
German Ideology Imported to Russia - Hegel’s influence on the Russian intelligentsia was immense. His vision of history moving toward freedom and justice - and of individuals aligning themselves with that movement - became a kind of secular faith for young Russian thinkers.
These ideas spread through the small philosophical circles of Moscow and St. Petersburg in the 1830s and 1840s, where figures like Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, and Mikhail Bakunin wrestled passionately with German idealism.
Belinsky, the era’s moral voice and leading critic, experienced Hegel as a personal crisis. He first accepted the notion that “the rational is the real,” which seemed to justify Russian autocracy as historically necessary. Then he recoiled, condemning Hegelian progress as “a Moloch to whom living human beings were sacrificed.”
Bakunin and Herzen traced different paths through the same problem. Bakunin moved from idealism to revolutionary anarchism, concluding that true fidelity to the dialectic meant destroying existing institutions. Herzen, disillusioned by the failed revolutions of 1848, developed a distinct Russian socialism, arguing that the peasant commune (the mir) made it possible for Russia to leap directly to socialism without passing through Western capitalism.
The "Sons": Nihilism and Radicalization of the Intelligentsia - The philosophical circles of the 1830s and 1840s were the movement’s Fathers. Their successors - the Sons of the 1850s - were hardened by the Crimean War disaster and by the crushing of Europe’s 1848 revolutions. Their nihilism and populism came with a performative radical style in dress, speech, and attitude, and with open impatience toward higher education.
The Crimean War (1853–56) was the decisive break. Russia, vast and self‑assured, was humiliated by a technologically superior West, exposing the rot of the autocratic system. The new generation concluded that the Fathers’ idealism - their faith in Hegelian historical progress - was naïve. The nihilists rejected that optimism entirely. Though often described as believing in nothing, they in fact believed in their own ideas with fierce, even fanatical conviction.
Alexander II (1855–1881) was the century’s most serious reformer - and his fate remains one of Russian history’s darkest ironies. The Crimean defeat exposed how badly Russia lagged behind the modern West, and Alexander concluded that modernization had to begin with ending serfdom. In 1856 he warned the Moscow nobility: “It is better to abolish serfdom from above than to wait until the serfs begin to liberate themselves from below.”
Serfdom was abolished in 1861, but the terms were bitterly disappointing. Former serfs owed heavy “redemption payments” for the land they received, often leaving them poorer than before, and the village communes (mirs) became a new form of collective constraint.
Rather than calming the radicals, emancipation energized them. Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) launched a campaign of political assassination, and after several failed attempts, Alexander II was killed in 1881 - on the very day he approved plans for a representative assembly and further reforms aimed at addressing revolutionary demands.
The supreme irony: Russia’s most liberal Czar was murdered at the moment he was moving toward constitutional change.
Alexander III and Nicholas II - Unlike his father, Alexander III (1881–1894) was a committed reactionary. He revived the doctrine of “Autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Nationalism,” embraced Slavophile isolation, and insisted that Russia protect itself from Western influence. The secret police expanded dramatically, Jews faced new waves of persecution, and even mild liberalism was crushed.
Nicholas II (1894–1917) carried this reactionary course forward with less judgment and greater obstinacy, steering Russia toward disaster through the Russo‑Japanese War, the 1905 Revolution, and ultimately the First World War.
Other links
Quotes and Review of Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus from November 2022.
