Camus versus Sartre
The Unresolved Conflict
RONALD ARONSON
By what incredible foresight did the most significant intellectual quarrel of the
twentieth century anticipate the major issue of the twenty-first? When Camus
and Sartre parted ways in 1952, the main question dividing them was political
violence—specifically, that of communism. And as they continued to jibe at
cach other during the next decade, especially during the war in Algeria, one of
the major issues between them became terrorism. The 1957 and 1964 Nobel
Laureates were divided sharply over which violence most urgently demanded
to be addressed and attacked—the humiliations and oppressions, often masked,
that Sartre described as systematically built into daily life under capitalism and
colonialism, or the brutal and abstract calculus of murder seen by Camus as
built into some of the movements that claimed to liberate people from capitalist
and colonial oppression
Given Camus’ preoccupation with today’s most publicized issue, it is no acci-
dent that one of his recently published books is a collection of his writings on
terrorism.! Nor is it surprising that Camus is the intellectual guiding light of
Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, that American liberal’s declaration of war
on Islamist fundamentalism? And given his support for revolutionary violence,
and even terrorism, it is equally appropriate that one of Sartre’s most recently
translated books contains his essays on colonialism and anti-colonial struggles.*
Or that finally, the story of the Camus-Sartre conflict is being told, not only by
myseltin Cantus and Sartre: The Story of @ Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended
IA but also by David A. Sprintzen’ and Adrian van den Hoven in Sartre and
Camus: A Historie Confi which at long last presents the documents of
the break, and by Ronald Santoni in his discussion of Sartre's ambiguous attitude
toward violence, which, among other things, manages to demonstrate that the
Sartre-Camus conflict remains, fifty years later, philosophically unresolved. And
Sartre Studies International, Volume 11, Issucs 1 & 2, 2005, 302-310Camus versus Sartre | 303
I would argue—against today’s conventional wisdom so persistently asserted by
‘Tony Judt—it is also historically unresolved, despite today’s American fashion of
retrospectively condemning Sartre and venerating Camus.”
heir debate remains unresolved because, first, if the issue of violence is to be
discussed fully and honestly today, and if the worldwide politics of violence is to
be grasped, all forms of violence deserve to be placed under the microscope, the
systemic kinds singled out for attack by Sartre no less than those anti-systemic
on ribed by Camus. The intentional violence of terrorism demands to be
interrogated alongside the violences inscribed in routine social practices and the
violence of wars against terrorism. I am not asserting that these are all therefore
the same, or that distinctions of kind and degree are obviated, or that one type
of violence therefore justifies another. But we should at least understand the
political-moral stance of those who criticize the American response to 9/11 as
forcefully as they sympathized with the United States afier 9/1 1—which within
cightecn months turned Le Monde’s “We are all Americans” into sharp criticism
of President Bush for seeking war in Iraq “with or without the UN.”
Since both Camus and Sartre were of the Left, an equally appropriate way to
highlight the continuing salience of their debate leads us to those now-vanished
radicals who exclaimed, at the Berlin Wall in November 1989, “One down, one
to go!” Their point, which both Sartre and Camus would have immediately
appreciated, was that while the fossilized structures created by the communist
revolutionary violence about which Camus wrote so powerfully were in the
process of being overcome, the various forms of systemic violence about which
Sartre wrote so penetratingly still awaited their time of reckoning. And today
we may add that the terrorist violence decried by Camus is very much with us,
as is the state violence decried by Sartre.
‘To say that their conflict is unresolved is also to say that when either one,
Sartre or Camus, appears to win their debate, we all lose. Each man described
and denounced a single dimension of contemporary violence, Camus targeting
revolutionary violence and Sartre targeting, the violence structurally imposed
by social systems based on inequality. Each man had a dazzling, yet partial,
insight, and each was blind to the other’s insight
This is more than a matter of chance. After all, they were close during the
decisive years of their political formation (1943 to 1947), they were part of
each other’s space until their break in 1952, and they were France’s two lead-
ing political intellectuals on the Left until Camus’ death in 1960. As [ argue in
Carus and Sartre, cach man shaped himself against the other—and each one’s
understanding called for being completed by the other's. But the either/or
demands of the Cold War and the fact that each man developed his views in
part against the other's, both before and after the two of them broke, guar-
anteed that each would possess no more than a half-truth.’ And so Sartre kept
silent about or excused the atrocities committed by movements of national
liberation, while fiercely denouncing, every misstep of the French government,
and Camus came close to being obsessed by anti-communism, never question-
ing the (violently imposed and maintained) Frenchness of Algeria and dismiss
ng as irrational the Algerian demand for independence.
des304 | Ronald Aronson
Like the factions that embraced them during the Cold War, cach man
obscured his contradictions by employing a double standard of judgment,
accepting, behaviors on the one side that he declared reprehensible on the
other. The fact that both men did so with almost perfect symmetry in relation
to cach other suggests that each one was—I cannot avoid the expression—act-
ing in bad faith, intentionally hiding from an uncomfortable part of the truth.
It also suggests that their conflict’s resolution waits on more than the victory
of one side, and on more than our own theoretical as well as historical com-
prehension of the truths and distortions on both sides. In the end, the Camus-
Sartre conflict will be resolved only as the concerns of both men—their insights
as well as their blindnesses—are placed on the political agenda at the same time,
in this world that has fallen under the spell of September 11
While not ev hing, has changed since 9/11, something is fatefully new:
the American perception of permanent vulnerability, Al Qaeda has declared a
non-state and non-revolutionary war on the United States and its citizens, and
for now seems able to draw on an endless supply of suicidal cannon fodder,
wealth, and energy, as well as. a bottomless pool of popular support. Though
completely hegemonic since the end of the Cold War and not remotely chal
lenged by any other state, the United States is nevertheless threatened today by
a movement of suicidal religious martyrs. Because of these developments, it has
been tempting to see a new departure in events since 9/11, including, President
Bush’s “with us or against us” speech and the two subsequent invasions that
have killed several times as many innocent people as the Trade Center/Penta-
gon attacks without making Americans any safer. The Bush administration has
declared a permanent state of war, at the same time implementing a new and
ambitious strategic vision.
Still, any claims that the present US forcign and military policy is a dramatic
departure in response to (or taking advantage of) a new situation, for example,
s expressed by the neo-conservative Project for a New American Century,
must not ignore an older fact—that “our country’s battles,” in the words of the
US Marine Corps Hymn, have always extended “from the halls of Montezuma
to the shores of Tripoli.” Any analysis of today’s “war against terrorism” must
ponder American history, including the continental and then overseas expan-
sion of the nineteenth century, the hegemony proclaimed as a result of wo
world wars, and then the Cold War half-century, which, in the Western Hemi-
sphere alone, saw American-supported disasters in Argentina, El Salvador, and
Guatemala; the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile; the systematic
strangulation of Cuba; the not-so-secret war against Sandinista Nicaragua; and
the invasion of the Dominican Republic and Grenada. During this time, Ameri-
can intervention in the Middle East and South Asia has also taken a myriad of
forms, from US involvement in the overthrow of Mossadegh in Iran in 1953
and support for the Saudi dynastic state and the Israeli domination of the Pales-
tinians, to support for Islamist fundamentalism in Afghanistan and the military
dictatorship in Pakistan. Thus, the invasion of Iraq is arguably inseparable from
other aspects of the North’s domination of the South, especially the American
quest to control much of the world’s oil supply.amus versus Sartre | 305
In other words, while Camus? insights into the mentality behind terrorism
might introduce a study secking to understand violence in the present, a seri
ous examination of the subject would make equal use of Sartre’s insights into
the violence built into our economic and social systems. Berman appropriately
starts from Camus? The Rebel in his argument advocating ideological combat
against Islamist fundamentalism. ‘To make his analysis more than a half-truth
and to understand what it means to struggle against the structural oppression
of global capitalism, we need also to start from Sartre’s The Communists and
Peace and Critique of Dialectical Reason.
At the beginning of September 1952, Les Temps modernes published its
August issue, containing the seventy pages of the Sartre-Camus rapture—
Camus” seventeen-page reply to Francis Jeanson’s April review of The Rebel,
and Sartre’s and Jeanson’s even longer replies to Camus.” This conflict that
broke up a friendship also confirmed a split among the French and the interna-
tional Left. It went so deep and became so ugly as to be almost Manichaean:
just before replying, to Camus, Sartre, after saying that “an anti-communist is
dog,” famously “swore a hatred of the bourgeoisie” that he insisted he would
carry to his grave. Returning to political writing two and a half years after being
silenced by Sartre, Camus used the worst insult possible in 1950s France—that
politically and morally, the pro-communist Left resembled the pro-Nazi col-
laborators of 1940.
Although one’s own side in this debate was never wholly good, the other
side, the enemy, was certainly regarded by both men as totally evil. Camus never
embraced capitalism and saw the existing system of parliamentary democracy as
the least bad one, but for ten years after 1945, his main political energies were
directed against communism. Then, during the war in Algeria, he red-baited
the Front de libération nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front), He was
willing to support Mendés- France for prime minister, because he called vaguely
for peace, and to meet with Algerian Governor-General Jacques Soustelle and
even Charles de Gaulle, as the general awaited the call to lead France again, But
Camus could not bring himself to pronounce the name “Front de libération
nationale,” to include the rebels in his calls for negotiations, or to speak the
forb
iden word “independence.”
From 1952 to 1956, fellow traveler Sartre not only gave scandalous inter
views extolling Sovict life but also, as he later admitted, “blocked out all ideas
of morality” with regard to politics. At the time of the Rosenbergs? execution
in the United States and the East German uprising (June 1953), he could be
heard violently denouncing the one while remaining silent about the other. As
prominent Communist Pierre Hervé was being expelled for daring to call for
more democracy, Sartre added his voice to the party chorus of condemnation,
dismissing Hervé as a mediocre writer and a reformist. Having vowed hatred
for his own class and having decided to support the French workers, the bulk
of whom were in the Parti communiste frangais, during this period Sartre lined
up behind the party, embraced the Soviet Union, and ignored the show trials in
Zastern Europe, the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot in the Soviet Union, and, three
rs later, Khrushchev’s “secret speech” about Stalin’s crimes.306 1 Ronald Aronson
In acquiescing to the Cold Wa
became leade!
*s demand to choose sides, Sartre and Camus
s of their respective factions, Sartre of the fellow-traveling, Left
and Camus of the anticommunist Left, and in the process rose to their full
height as political intellectuals, They became Sartre and Camus as we know
them today. For all of their (very different) insights and powers, they at times
also became classic examples of bad faith—judging according to a double stan-
dard, conjuring away uncomfortable facts, remaining silent about evils they
should have protested, travestying their commitments to freedom and to truth.
Choosing sides and the resulting Manichacanism diminished each man sign
cantly, mufiled and distorted his voice, and compromised what he had to say.
Yet cach stopped short of losing his way completely. Camus never joined up
in the Cold War (he refused to become part of the organized anti-communist
establishment in France) and never approved of the arms race, while
sloughed off his four years of fellow traveling to write several of his greatest
works and become one of the world’s great independent political voices of the
late 1950s and 1960s.
Inde
-d, as | explain in Camus and Sartre, the Cold War itself, its demand
that everyone take sides in a pitched struggle of good against evil—to which
Sartre and Camus fell victim and became accomplices in their distinctive w
converted the authors? tragic world-histori
cal conflict into a mere morality
play.! If one was right, it seemed, then the other had to be wrong, and their
story lacked complexity and interest. No wonder no one has felt compelled to
tell it in full. And as we know today, the two men left burdens of interpretation
and explanation for their followers, bequeathing them the task of untangling
their strengths from their weaknesses, their true insights from their false ones,
Both adversari rve to be seen with understanding and sympathy,
well as critically. Each one struggled against the demand to takes sides and the
looming personal split for several yet at the same time each continued to
develop and respond to events in ways that made the split more likely. A histori
cal logic animated the controversy as Sartre and Camus, avoiding the clichés
of communism and capitalism, were impelled to voice the deepest reasons why
thoughtful people, intellectuals committed to the broadest possible freedom
and social justice, would support communism or become anti-communists.
After their split, the Cold War’s cither/or demands would dominate the
Left: supporting revolutionary social change often meant becoming indiffer-
ent to political freedom; defending political freedom often meant rejecting
the only significant project challenging capitalism. Much of the Left learned
to justify one side or the other. Thus were the hopes of a generation to mov
toward socialism and freedom—both Sartre’s and Camus’ hope in the postwar
period—to be dashed. People on the Lefi were pressured to make an impos-
sible choice between what became Sartre’s grim realism (communism as the
only path to meaningful change) and Camus’ visceral rejection of communism
(which left him unable to identify himself with any significant force strug-
gling for change). Sartre and Camus voiced the half-rights and half-wrongs,
the half-truths and half-lies of what became the tragedy of the Left—not only
in France but across the world—for at least the next generation. Camus and
desCamus versus Sartre | 307
Sartre came to insist that there were only two alternatives—Camus’ rebel and
Sartre’s revolutionary—as reflected in their plays, Camus? The Just Assassins
and Sartre’s The Devil and the Good Lord, and theorized in The Rebel and The
Communists and Peace.
These historical issues take on an urgent meaning today as we try to come
to grips with terrorism and the war against it. Manichacanism again stalks the
world, with its either/or demands to side for or against the United States, for
good and against evil. And an inability to think about violence coherently is
widespread. There may not be any direct link between Sartre’s and Camus?
half-truths and double standards and the Manichaeanisms put forth by sup-
porters of US policies and by those who rationalize terrorism. But it is certainly
striking that supporters of the “war on terrorism” invoke Camus, and those
who say that terrorist tactics are “the only ones” available to oppressed people
sound so much like Sartre. And it is undeniable that much current Ame
pro-war thinking concerning Iraq is based on Cold War models, and that
some}
nes this brings people back to Camus. After reading my book, Edward
Rothstein, writing in the New York Times, commended Camus to today’s neo-
conservatives."! Some moderate leftists who are deeply disturbed about Islamist
fundamentalism and are determined to combat it have signed on to the disas-
trous American invasion of Iraq. And there are some on the Left, courageous
enough to confront American domination head-on, who remain mute about
the horrific nature of Al Qaeda’s terrorism, as if American misdeeds rule out
an equally moral analysis of Al Qaeda’s nihilistic violence, the post-9/ 11 com-
ments of Noam Chomsky being, a famous example.!? These are traps waiting
for us in today’s “need to choose”—similar to what Sartre and Camus expe-
ienced—that can impose itself in ways that drive people to distort and lie. As
ri
were Sartre and Camus, we are often invited, or demanded, to embrace half a
truth at the expense of a fuller truth.
‘The current double standards about political violence give us reason to
ask how similar habits developed in Sartre and Camus. At first, the two men
sted choosing sides. In 1944, Combar’s motto was “From Resistance to
Revolution,” and Camus’ editorials spoke clearly about combining socialism
and individual freedom. Even so, as in “Letters to a German Friend,” Camus
insisted on turning to violence only as a last resort. After mid-1945, both he
and the Communists had begun to exclude each other from the coalitions they
would be willing to embrace, but Camus did not yet see the Communists as
an enemy, let alone the main enemy. And even as he began to do so, Camus
would continue to look for a third way between communism and capitalism for
another several years. Touchy and self-righteous about being criticized, Camus
started ruminating about the incompatibility of communism and freedom
after he was sharply attacked by Communist editor Pierre Hervé in Action in
June 1945. Camus had already abandoned his high hopes for postwar change,
and soon communism— not capitalism or colonialism—became the problem
for him. In 1938 and 1945, he had written some of the most enlightened
newspaper articles about Algeria to appear in the French press, including, the
Communist press. Despite his farsightedness about colonialism, and for all his308 | Ronald Aronson
principled clarity about war and revolutionary violence, Camus never applied
a similar analysis to colonial daily life, even after rendering it so unforgettably
in The Stranger. Rather, his personal hurt about communist attacks combined
with an aversion to overt violence and especially to abstract and necessitarian
justifications for revolutionary violence. And then his development into the
mid-century’s foremost critic of communist violence was sharpened by his rela-
tionship with someone who was moving, though more slowly than Camus, in
the opposite direction—Sartre.
In The Flies, Sartre had presented violence in an almost metaphysical way, as
Orestes’ path to becoming real. As Sartre became political, his support for revo-
lutionary change was connected with his deep unde
dimension of existence against the French Communist Party’s “dialectical mate-
rialism,” in writings such as “Materialism and Revolution.” He puzzled over
the relationship of objective realities and individual action, and always insisted
on the human ability to make oneself from what one has been made, on the fact
of choice. And then, in The Communists and Peace, Sartre began his unique con-
tribution to the problem of violence, conceptually grasping and demonstrat-
ing the structural violence imposed by bourgeois society on workers. Armed
with his insights, Sartre for the first time appreciated communist violence as a
response, the only effective one, to bourgeois violence. But absorbing history
and society into his thought was no casy matter, nor was declaring his support
for the Communist Party and, later, the Algerian rebels, In the either/or ¢li-
mate nurtured by the Cold War, he went overboard. He extolled revolutionary
violence as “the beginning of humanity,” refused to criticize terrorism, gave a
blank check to anti-colonial rebels for any and all atrocities, and even accepted
the Munich massacre of Israeli athletes as the “only means of struggle” by an
oppressed people. Sartre held that the oppressed can overthrow the structural
violence imposed on them only through turning this violence back on their
oppressors. To demand from the outside that such violence be measured and
controlled is to undermine their capacity to struggle. Sartre’s logic was sweep-
ing: non-violence only perpetuates oppression; violence, the tool of oppression,
is the only possible path of liberation.
Camus’ blind spot lay in the other direction. For all his courageous efforts
to resolve the Algerian conflict with a minimum of violence, Camus never
accepted Algerian independence, toyed with solutions that would keep Alge
under French control, and—as French Algeria’s most famous son—refused
to tell the truth about colonial privileges to his pied-noir community. He
repressed the reality of the FLN. He refused to connect their violence with the
facts of Arab life in French-ruled Algeria, and he ignored connection of
either with the daily violence-imposed privileges of his pied-noir communi
In his principled, almost deontological opposition to overt violence, he never
talked about daily life.
Such were the blind spots about violence of these two brilliant critics of
violence, Camus managed to combine his insight and bad faith in a single
provocative statement during his Nobel Prize visit to Sweden in Des
1957: “1 have alway
anding of the subjective
ember
s condemned terror. | must also condemn a terrorism thatCamus versus Sartre | 309
is carried out blindly—in the streets of Algiers for exampl
strike my mother or my family. I believe in justice, but Iw
before justice.” Sartre’s most outrageous statement appeared in his 1961 pref-
ace to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. This stunning essay starts by
analyzing and denouncing colonial violence, asserts that its damage was being
undone by the natives? own violence, and then celebrates that violence being
turned against Europeans. It is one of Sartre’s most vivid and brutal pieces of
writing, both in its argument and its worldview.
Camus tried to ignore the violence perpetrated by settlers, but Sartre now eulo
gized violence as liberation and therapy. Writing, as always from on high, Camus
laid down rules for conducting, conflict, while Sartre, the total partisan, called for
the natives doing, away with colonialism “by every means within their power.”
Camus moderated his vision and his statements according, to what he thought was
his own picd-noir community’s intolerance, but Sartre assailed his own commu-
ity while making himself the foremost European voice of the Third World.
If Camus’ anti-communism masked his inability to treat the natives in any
other way than patronizingly, Sartre gave a pass to the worst anti-colonial
atrocities. ‘The theme of “dirty hands” had been Sartre’s way of understanding
the role played by violence in struggles for social change, but he now cast it into
an ethic of struggle, even beyond the claim that the ends justified the means:
he gave violence itself an ethical and psychological value, a liberating function.
vamus had sought to keep his and France’s hands clean during the Resistance,
but as this determination led him toward anti-communism, he more or less lost
interest in workers’ struggles except for those, as in East Germany and Hun-
gary, that rebelled against the Communist Party. And in Algeria, his insistence
fon clean hands coincided with his continued support for the French colonial
presence, despite his frequent denunciations of colonialism.
—and may one day
defend my mother
We are not done with the Camus-Sartre debate today, because its issues have
not yet been resolved. As the facts of contemporary terrorism and the “war
against terror” make compellingly clear, something is even more awry in our
world than during the Cold War. However new may be its details and some
of its features, we continue to be plagued by core issues of the twentieth cen-
tury. Camus, for one, would turn over in his grave to see his ideas used, even
indirectly, to justify the American war in Iraq. Yet his half of the truth about
violence has played nicely into the hands of the neo-conservatives dominating
the US Defense Department's strategic thinking after September 11 and dur-
ing the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Because we still live amidst the Cold War’s obfuscation of violence on both
sides, we are all at risk. The victors have continued to taboo any serious talk
about systemic violence and to self-rightcously inveigh against violence commit-
ted by the world’s underclass. The “war against terrorism” seeks to delegitimize
any and all anti-systemic acts of violence in advance, even when no effective
alternatives exist. And those on the other side sometimes go soft on terror
ism.310 | Ronald Aronson
As we remain caught between antithetical positions, we can see that neither
man really won the Sartre-Camus debate. Rather than any historical working
through, which might genuinely move us beyond their opposing, insights, our
collective comprehension is still stuck. But what would it take to go beyond this?
I have been pointing to a theoretical bringing together of Sartre’s and Camus?
halves of the truth, but to bear fruit, this must eventually take place within a
political process that decides it needs both men’s insights, and that it will benefit
by bringing them together rather than by keeping them at loggerheads. Only
then will we be able to genuinely see both men appreciatively and critically at one
and the same time, and to see how the two, taken together, might lead to more
productive ways of thinking and acting. ‘The successful accomplishment of this
goal presupposes a political movement animated by a single moral standard—a
movement that rejects terrorism and wars against terrorism alike.
Notes
Albert Camus, Réflexions sur le terrorisme (Paris: Nivolas Philippe, 2002)
Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).
Paul Sartre, Colonialism and Neo-colonialion (New York: Routledge, 2001)
“anus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended
Ie( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004),
David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven, eds. and trans., Sartre and Camus: A His
toric Confrontation (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2004).
6, Ronald Samtoni, Sartre on Violence: Curiously Ambivalent (Unive:
University Press, 2003).
7. Today’s writers tum the tables on the prevailing Parisian fashion of the carly 1950s. See
Herbert R. Lottman, Alert Camus: A Biography (Comte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1997),
xiv-xv; and Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French
Twentieth Century (Chicago: U Chicago Press, 1998)
8. Aronson, Camus and Sartre.
9. Ibid.
10,
n
wee
=
Park: Penn State
Sce Sprintzen and van den Hoven, Sartre and Camus
ward Rothstein, “Connections: Camus and the Neo-Cons: More in C
‘They Might Suspect,” New York Times, 7 February 2004.
12. See Noam Chomsky, 9-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001).
mon ‘Than