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Abstract
This paper reconstructs Albert Camus's notion of the absurd in order to elucidate his critique of historical teleology. In his life and work, Camus endeavoured to develop a fallibilist historical sensibility suitable for a cosmos shorn of meaning, which led him to reject ideas of progress and their traces of messianism when elaborating his treatment of rebellion. By making use of Camus's ideas about the absurd and rebellion, I suggest that these two themes productively unsettle contemporary cosmopolitanism as a teleological orthodoxy of human progress and fruitfully, if paradoxically, lie at the heart of a concept of cosmopolitanism “without hope.”
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Tom Bailey for his careful reading of and insightful comments on drafts of this paper. I have also benefitted from the feedback I received at the “Cosmopolitanism and Conflict” conference held at John Cabot University, Rome, in October 2013, where an earlier version of this paper was presented.
Notes
1 S. Vertovec and R. Cohen, eds., “Introduction,” in Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4; R. Fine, Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 1–6.
2 J. Waldron, “What is Cosmopolitanism?,” Journal of Political Philosophy 8.2 (2000): 227.
3 A. Camus, Camus at Combat: Writings 1944–1947, ed. J. Lévi-Valensi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006a), 267.
4 Camus, Camus at Combat, 272.
5 Camus, Camus at Combat, 266, 146.
6 A. Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 6.
7 J. C. Isaac, Arendt, Camus, and Modern Rebellion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 92–4.
8 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 31.
9 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 65.
10 A. Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintage Books, 1984), 77–8.
11 W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 245–55. As Hannah Arendt notes, Camus was committed to a mode of thinking marked by the rejection of any “historical system” (H. Arendt, “Concern with Politics in Recent European Philosophical Thought,” in Essays in Understanding 1930–1954 (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), 438).
12 I. Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,” in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 41–53, 93, 130.
13 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 51.
14 See A. W. Wood, “Kant's Philosophy of History,” in Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace and History, ed. P. Kleingeld, 243–62 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 245; G. W. Brown, Grounding Cosmopolitanism: From Kant to the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 37–44.
15 See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Fine, Cosmopolitanism, 29–38.
16 K. Marx and F. Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. C. Tucker, 473–91 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 476–7.
17 J. Habermas, “Kant's Idea of Perpetual Peace, with the Benefit of Two Hundred Years’ Hindsight,” in Perpetual Peace: Essays on Kant's Cosmopolitan Ideal, ed. J. Bohman and M. Lutz-Bachmann, 113–54 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997).
18 A. Linklater, “Moral Progress and World History: Ethics and Global Interconnectedness,” in Questioning Cosmopolitanism, ed. S. van Hooft and W. Vandekerckhove, 21–35 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 27.
19 Kant, “Idea for a Universal History,” 51–2 (first emphasis mine).
20 R. Falk, “The Making of Global Citizenship,” in The Condition of Citizenship, ed. B. van Steenbergen (London: Sage, 1994), 140.
21 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 35.
22 Catriona McKinnon offers the following gloss on what she refers to as the “duty” of cosmopolitan hope: “The cosmopolitan objective exists in the future, and is believed to be good and possible by cosmopolitans who desire it in virtue of their belief that it is good, and yields a disposition in them to act so as to make the realization of the cosmopolitan objective more likely, all else being equal.” See C. McKinnon, “Cosmopolitan Hope,” in The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism, ed. G. Brock and H. Brighouse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 240.
23 See D. Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), where this prescriptive imperative is expressed clearly. Further examples are C. Barry and T. W. Pogge, eds. Global Institutions and Responsibilities: Achieving Global Justice (Malden, MA and Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); and P. G. Harris, ed. Ethics and Global Environmental Policy: Cosmopolitan Conceptions of Climate Change (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2011).
24 A. Camus, American Journals (New York: Paragon House, 1987), 49.
25 Camus, The Rebel, 22.
26 Camus, The Rebel, 245. See also A. Camus, “Prometheus in the Underworld,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 138–42.
27 A. Camus, “On the Future of Tragedy,” in Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 310.
28 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 187.
29 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 123.
30 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 31. Cf. Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 92: “For hope, contrary to popular belief, is tantamount to resignation.”
31 A. Camus, Notebooks: 1942–1951 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1965), 86.
32 A. Camus, Notebooks: 1935–1942 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1963), 105.
33 M. Nussbaum, “Patriotism and Cosmopolitanism,” in For Love of Country?, ed. J. Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 4.
34 Camus, The Rebel, 304.
35 Camus, The Rebel, 305.
36 See A. Camus, “Bread and Freedom,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death (New York: Vintage Books, 1960), 87–97; and M. Crowley, “Camus and Social Justice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Camus, ed. E. J. Hughes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 93–105.
37 Camus, The Rebel, 80.
38 Camus, The Rebel, 79.
39 Camus, The Rebel, 19.
40 Camus, The Rebel, 13.
41 Camus, The Rebel, 13.
42 Camus, The Rebel, 14.
43 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 187.
44 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, 19.
45 As Camus observes, “this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men” (Camus, The Rebel, 22).
46 For a nuanced treatment of Camus's complex French-Algerian identity, see D. Carroll, Albert Camus the Algerian: Colonialism, Terrorism, Justice (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).
47 For a different approach to this issue, see K. A. Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).
48 Camus, The Rebel, 285.
49 A. Camus, “Reflections on the Guillotine,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 217.
50 Camus, The Rebel, 304.
51 Camus, The Rebel, 21.
52 A. Camus, Exile and the Kingdom (London: Penguin Books, 2006b), 43–55.
53 A. Camus, “Create Dangerously,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 249–72.
54 Camus, “Create Dangerously,” 264.
55 Camus, The Rebel, 283.
56 See F. Dallmayr, “Cosmopolitanism: In Search of Cosmos,” Ethics & Global Politics 5.3 (2012): 182
57 See A. C. Grayling, Friendship (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).
58 Friendship may be regarded as the central theme of The Plague, where the prospect of the forced loss “not of love only but even of friendship” provokes “living for the moment only” and thus “without hope.” In the end, resisting the plague is done “for friendship's sake” (A. Camus, The Plague (New York: Vintage Books, 1948), 182, 255).
59 Camus, The Rebel, 161–2.
60 A. Camus, “Letters to a German Friend,” in Resistance, Rebellion and Death, 3–32; A. Camus, “Call for a Civilian Truce in Algeria,” in Algerian Chronicles, ed. A. Kaplan, trans. A. Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 149–59.
61 Camus, “Letters to a German Friend,” 28.
62 Camus, American Journals, 53.
63 Camus, The Rebel, 306.
64 Camus, The Rebel, 304.
65 Camus, Camus at Combat, 261.
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Patrick Hayden
Patrick Hayden is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews, Fife, Scotland. His research focuses on the implications of the work of critical theorists and existentialists for issues in global politics. He is the author of Hannah Arendt: Key Concepts (London: Routledge, 2014), Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (London: Routledge, 2009), Critical Theories of Globalization (with C. el-Ojeili, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), Cosmopolitan Global Politics (Farnham: Ashgate, 2005) and John Rawls: Towards a Just World Order (Cardiff: University of Wales, 2002), as well as numerous articles and various edited collections.