Camus: Portrait of a Moralist

Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. By Stephen Bronner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. 172p. $37.95 cloth, $14.95 paper.

This very fine book presents an overview and critical commentary of the life, writings, and intellectual itinerary of Albert Camus, the Nobel Prize novelist, playwright, and essayist who was one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century. It brings to mind an earlier book by Conor Cruise O'Brien, Albert Camus of Europe and Africa. As did O'Brien, whose influential little work, a contribution to the Past Master series, Bronner cites and criticizes, and offers a lucid, eminently readable, and highly personal interpretation of Camus. His book is not philosophically deep and does not offer much in the way of intensive textual exegesis. Instead-and this is its strength-it presents an engaging account of Camus that honors its own subject's lucidity, discussing the central themes of Camus, situating them in historical context, crediting them with insight, and then respectfully arguing with them. In doing this Bronner demonstrates a mastery of twentieth-century political history and the corpus of Camus.

Bronner's central idea is that Camus was a "moralist," an heir of Enlightenment humanism whose writings displayed great sensitivity to moral ambiguities and individual suffering. Bronner's Camus is keenly aware of the contingencies of human existence and staunchly committed to a conception of human dignity and freedom. He is also adverse to systematic philosophical thinking and predisposed to view complex political issues in "symbolic terms" that often obscure or resist concrete political alternatives. Bronner develops this general theme by tracing the evolution...