i’ve been slowly reading through the grandly-titled Resistance, Rebellion, and Death, a collection of some of Camus’ essays. He seems resolutely sceptical about just about every abstraction going, noting somewhere that he can at most summon up a vague, general benevolence towards Mankind, but can love individuals. To a Communist apologist he writes:
For you are willing to keep silence about one reign of terror in order the better to combat another one. There are some of us who do not want to keep silent about anything. It is our whole political society that nauseates us. Hence there will be no salvation until all those who are still worthwhile have repudiated it utterly in order to find, somewhere outside insoluble contradictions, the way to a complete renewal. In the meantime we must struggle. But with the knowledge that totalitarian tyranny is not based on the virtues of the totalitarians. It is based on the mistakes of the liberals.
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