On Rebellion & Revolution

In The Rebel Camus seeks to criticize “the astonishing history of European pride” that laid the groundwork for both Nazism and Stalinism and that lies at the heart of our contemporary sense of moral confusion. The book reverberates with echoes of Nietzsche’s The Will to Power. It clearly parallels the similar efforts of more philosophically esteemed contemporaries, such as Adorno and Horkheimer’s The Dialectic of Enlightenment and Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. And it prefigures such contemporary “postmodern” theorists as Foucault and Lyotard, who similarly seek to indict the “grand narratives” that animate the modern Western world.

And yet...