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. . .As soon as a man, through lack of character, takes refuge in doctrine, as soon as crime reasons about itself, it multiplies like reason itself and assumes all the aspects of the syllogism. . . . The purpose of this essay is once again to face the reality of the present, which is logical crime, and examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified.(p. 3)

This can be very interesting if, like me, you abhor historical Sovietism and all that it has wrought. I found that Sarah Bakewell's excellent new book At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails provided just the background I needed to start this. Published in French in 1951, what I especially like so far is Camus's refusal to embrace the concept of the worker's collective. He writes only about the individual and his or her need for rebellion. A very brave book. For example:

Man's solidarity is founded upon rebellion, and rebellion, in its turn, can only find its justification in this solidarity. We have, then, the right to say that any rebellion which claims the right to deny or destroy this solidarity loses simultaneously its right to be called a rebellion and becomes in reality an acquiescence in murder. (p. 22)

How they must have hated him. The section on the lunatic Marquis de Sade is breathtaking. My disgust always prevented me from reading him for subtext. But Camus shows us how...

Two centuries ahead of his time and on a reduced scale, Sade extolled totalitarian societies in the name of unbridled freedom. . . . The history and the tragedy of our times really begin with him. . . . Our times have limited themselves to blending, in a curious manner, his dream of a universal republic and his technique of degradation. Finally, what he hated most, legal murder, has availed itself of the discoveries that he wanted to put to the service of instinctive murder. Crime, which he wanted to be the exotic and delicious fruit of unbridled vice, is no more today than the dismal habit of a police-controlled morality. Such are the surprises of literature. (p. 46)

Lucretius is touched upon, Valentinus and some of the other Gnostics, Milton's Paradise Lost, Dandyism, the Romantics, Ivan Karamazov's moral position on crime—particularly patricide—in Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Nietzsche, of whom Camus said, "he recognized nihilism for what it was and examined it like a clinical fact." (p. 66)

"When the ends are great," Nietzsche wrote to his own detriment, "humanity employs other standards and no longer judges crimes as such even if it resorts to the most frightful means." He died in 1900, at the beginning of the century in which that pretension was to become fatal.(p. 77)

Rimbaud is "...the poet of rebellion—the greatest of all." His decision to stop writing being perhaps the ultimate act of rebellion. "He illustrates the struggle between the will to be and the desire for annihilation, between the yes and the no, which we have discovered again and again at every stage of rebellion." (p.91)