At the same time, he cannot accept the historical logic that leads to revolution ending in a police state. However, he is not willing to deny the positive aspects of revolt because that would amount to acceptance of the status quo with all its injustices. Just as he concluded in the earlier work that suicide was not justified, in this work he rejects a logic of murder. The analysis starts with the concept of the absurd which Camus developed in the Myth of Sisyphus. The fundamental question Camus poses in the essay is whether premeditated murder to achieve a political goal can be justified. It is fascinating the way Camus tracks his theme among these various thinkers and movements and draws out the differences and similarities among them.

The book is relatively long because Albert Camus looks at these questions in a broad range of contexts: “metaphysical rebellion” against the human condition including the revolt against God who permits suffering (Prometheus, Cain and Abel, Epicurus and Lucretius, DeSade, Rimbaud, Lautreamont, Nietzsche, the Surrealists), “historical rebellion” consisting of political and social revolution against oppression (the French Revolution in particular Robespierre and Saint Just, the Russian terrorists of the 19th century, Hegel and Marx, and Russian communism), and art (Dostoyevsky). However, rebellion also has a potential negative side - the rejection of all restraints on liberty, the nihilist conclusion that everything is permitted and the political principle that the ends justify the means, including killing people to achieve a future ideal society. Rising up against slavery, oppression, injustice and other forms of domination is a positive. This “essay” (307 pages in English translation) is an extended analysis of the contradictory positive and negative elements of rebellion and how the negative elements can lead to the excesses of revolution.

The rebel author albert