When a winner of the Nobel prize for literature writes about the history of political ideas, you get Albert Camus’s The Rebel. Published in 1954, Camus’s beautifully written book is one-stop shopping for those who want a history of modernity and the crisis of the West.
Writing less than a decade after the end of World War II, Camus strikingly offers the Nuremberg Trials as a witness to our crisis. The ideological strains on Germany in the ‘30s were not unique to that country, he thought, but a feature of Western civilization.
At Nuremberg, only at times did “the real subject of the trial, that of the historic responsibilities of Western nihilism” come into view. The reason is clear: “A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization.”
What nihilism? In the dock at Nuremberg, Hans Frank, the Governor General of Nazi occupied Poland, testified that Hitler had a “hatred of form.” Camus tags Hitler a convulsionist—someone bent on self-creation because utterly intolerant of the limits placed upon us by the cosmos.
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