 Recorded books and R.B. Digital present The Rebel by Albert Camus, translated by Anthony Bauer, narrated by Eduardo Ballerini. Forward! With the publication of this book, a cloud that has oppressed the European mind for more than a century begins to lift. After an age of anxiety, despair, and nihilism, it seems is possible once more to hope, to have confidence again in man and in the future. M. Camus has not delivered us by rhetoric or by any of the arts of persuasion, but by the clarity of his intelligence. His book is a work of logic. Just as an earlier work of his, Limit de Cisif, began with a meditation on living or not living on the implications of the act of suicide, so this work begins with a meditation on enduring or not enduring, on the implications of the act of rebellion. If we decide to live, it must be because we have decided that our personal existence has some positive value. If we decide to rebel, it must be because we have decided that a human society has some positive value. But in each case, the values are not given. That is the illusionist trick played by religion or by philosophy. They have to be deduced from the conditions of living and are to be accepted along with the suffering entailed by the limits of the possible. Social values are rules of conduct implicit in a tragic fate, and they offer a hope of creation. The rebel, that is to say, offers us a philosophy of politics. It is a kind of book that appears only in France, devoted in a passionate intellectual sense to the examination of such concepts as liberty and terror. Not that it is a theoretical work, on the contrary it is an examination of the actual situation of Europe today, informed by a precise historical knowledge of the past two centuries of its social development. It is an attempt to understand the times. Camus believes that revolt is one of the essential dimensions of mankind. It is useless to deny its historical reality. Rather, we must seek in it a principle of existence. But the nature of revolt has changed radically in our times. It is no longer the revolt of the slave against the master, nor even the revolt of the poor against the rich. It is a metaphysical revolt, the revolt of man against the conditions of life, against creation itself. At the same time it is an aspiration toward clarity and unity of thought, even paradoxically toward order. That at least is what it becomes unto the intellectual guidance of Camus. He reviews the history of this metaphysical revolt, beginning with the absolute negation of Saad, glancing at Baudelaire and the dandies, passing on to Steerner, Nietzsche, L'Autraiment and the Surrealists. His attitude to these prophetic figures is not unsympathetic, and once more it is interesting to observe the influence of André Breton on the contemporary mind. Camus then turns to the history of revolt in the political sense, his main object being to draw a clear distinction between rebellion and revolution. Here and not for the first time, Camus' ideas come close to anarchism, for he recognizes that revolution always implies the establishment of a new government, whereas rebellion is action without planned issue. It is spontaneous protestation. Camus reviews the history of the French Revolution, of the regicides and deicides, and shows how inevitably, from Rousseau to Stalin, the course of revolution leads to authoritarian dictatorship. Saint-Just is the precursor of Lenin, even Bakunin, to whom Camus devotes some extremely interesting pages, pointing out, for example, that he alone of his time with exceptional profundity declared war against the idolatry of science. Even Bakunin, if we examine the statutes of the Fraternité internationale, 1864 to 1867, which he drew up, is found insisting on the absolute subordination of the individual to a central committee of action. All revolutions in modern times, Camus points out, have led to a reinforcement of the power of the state. The strange and terrifying growth of the modern state can be considered as the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions, foreign to the true spirit of rebellion, but which nevertheless gave birth to the revolutionary spirit of our time. The prophetic dream of Marx, and the over-inspired predictions of Hegel, or of Nietzsche, ended by conjuring up, after the city of God had been raised to the ground, a rational or irrational state, which in both cases, however, was founded on terror. The counter-revolutions of fascism only serve to reinforce the general argument.