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Camus: Portrait of a Moralist, by Stephen Eric Bronner. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Paper, $14.95. Pp. xii, 179.
This concise, lively and remarkably evenhanded treatment of the life and work of Albert Camus weaves together biography, philosophical analysis and political commentary. Although many books have been written on Camus already, Stephen Eric Bronner makes the case that now is a good time to reappraise his significance. Looking back from the vantagepoint of a new century, the rigid ideological split between the Communist and the nonCommunist left brought into being by the Cold War is receding in importance. Camus infuriated many people just because he refused to define himself in terms of the political categories of his age. Born into the working class, a one-time member of the Communist Party in his native Algeria, he went on to edit the Resistance newspaper Combat in France during World War II. After the war he opposed Stalinism but distanced himself from the Gaullists. The positions he took were motivated by principle, not commitment to some ultimate political goal. Therefore, Bronner contends, Camus today serves as "a telling example for a multilateral world in which the old ideological certainties have vanished" (146).
Yet Bonner criticizes Camus' tendency to view politics in symbolic terms. This tendency led him into error, most notably in his opposition to Algerian independence. Despite Camus' assertion in his 1957 Nobel Prize acceptance speech that he would defend his mother before he...