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DEFYING EVIL: ALBERT CAMUS AND HIS CENTURY Posted By Vladimir Tismaneanu On November 7, 2013 @ 12:29 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes –Albert Camus, The Rebel I disagree with Bernard-Henri Lévy: the 20th century did not belong to Sartre. From the point of view of the Evil perpetrated, it was Lenin’s century. But if one takes honesty, truth, or Good as criteria, then it was Camus’s age. When we are assaulted by so much unsettling news, when we despair as we witness the rise of moral misery, when nihilism resurrects in front of our...

Fifty years after his death, writer Albert Camus is again the focus of controversy, as the left accuses French President Nicolas Sarkozy of trying to co-opt a thinker they claim as their own. Camus, when he died in a Paris car crash on January 4, 1960, aged only 46, was one of the leading literary figures of his day, having won the Nobel Literature Prize in 1957. But Sarkozy’s proposal in November to honour him by having his remains installed in the Pantheon, the resting place for French national heroes, provoked a wave of protest from France’s left. Many commentators...

Bush reads Camus's 'The Stranger' on ranch vacation Aug 11 7:14 PM US/Eastern US President George W. Bush quoted French existential writer Albert Camus to European leaders a year and a half ago, and now he's read one of his most famous works: "The Stranger." White House spokesman Tony Snow said Friday that Bush, here on his Texas ranch enjoying a 10-day vacation from Washington, had made quick work of the Algerian-born writer's 1946 novel -- in English. The US president, often spoofed as an intellectual lightweight, quoted Camus in a February 21, 2005 speech in Brussels praising the US-Europe...

I'm really grateful to Jonah for making a distinction Andrew Sullivan missed. Nazism and Communism may have had their own metaphysical pretenses, but they both treated the human being as a thing, as a means, as an instrument, and in important ways as a non-moral (and certainly non-spirited) material agent. In the human and moral sphere, in other words, they required the surrender of any "objective" moral compass, "natural law," or allegiance to "God's law"–all those bourgeois illusions–and in this task they were greatly aided in their preparatory work by the cult of "the absurd" among the intellectuals, the literary...

January 2005 Sartre vs. CamusAlgis Valiunas The greatest French writer of the 20th century was Marcel Proust, but in their day, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960) enjoyed an intellectual cachet that Proust in his own lifetime could only have dreamed of. Each was a novelist, a playwright, a philosopher, and a political intellectual, and in these various lines of work both were the acclaimed eminences of their time and place. For a while they were considered an item: the twin geniuses of existentialism, the French philosophical movement they pioneered and embodied. And indeed they were often together,...

It was a heady moment. Liberation was at hand. The world's most powerful totalitarian state had been defeated. World-historical struggles had come to an end. Such was the situation after the Soviet Union collapsed. And the sense of triumph was palpable. In an essay reprinted in "The Norman Podhoretz Reader" (Free Press), Mr. Podhoretz wrote a "Eulogy" for neo-conservatism — the political and cultural movement with which he and the magazine he edited, Commentary, had been so closely identified. It was a eulogy that proclaimed satisfaction and closure. For two decades, Commentary had advocated unrelenting challenges to Soviet power, and...

Camus as Conservative: A post 9/11 reassessment of the work of Albert Camus Murray Soupcoff The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of...

Last Updated: Thursday, 10 July, 2003, 17:21 GMT 18:21 UK Algeria hit by plague outbreakUN health officials are helping Algeria to investigate an outbreak of plague in the west of the country which has claimed at least one life. A team from the World Health Organization and other international bodies went to the Oran region after reports of plague emerged last month. Algeria's health ministry has announced 10 laboratory-confirmed cases to date and one probable case. France, the former colonial power which has a large ethnic Algerian community, has tightened sanitary controls at its ports to guard against contaminated rats...

Not long after the tragic events of 9/11, The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view was always so different from that of most of today's Guardian contributors. Like many...

Not long after September 11th, The Guardian -- that last fanatical bastion of English left-wing obstinacy and foolishness -- published a unique book review honouring the latest Penguin edition of The Plague, the enduring fictional allegory of human suffering and sacrifice, written by French existentialist novelist Albert Camus. It was particularly surprising that The Guardian, of all publications, would publish what was really a revised introduction to the latest English-language edition of The Plague, since Camus' unique philosophical and political point of view is so different from that of most of today's Guardian contributors. Like many other European intellectual heirs...