Camus on fascism: gangster morality and irrational terror

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• More teaser, in reedited form, from Why Camus Matters (Bloomsbury, 2024–25). This section looks at Camus’ section “State terror and irrational terrorism” in The Rebel. It situates Camus between two predominant understandings of fascism: the neoliberal-postmodern, for which fascism is the hypertrophy of administrative reason, and the understanding of fascism as the political manifestation of reactionary irrationalist revolt against modernisation. MS

How does Albert Camus stand in relationship to these two competing orientations towards fascism, in this new period in which entire nations seem committed to revisiting the rhetoric, ideologies, and many of the policies of the interwar fascist regimes — whilst denying, at need, the undeniable historical echoes that their endeavours have set up?

With Hitler’s invasion of Poland and the outbreak of war, Camus seems for a time to have been bewildered, even despondent. Nevertheless, by 1943–44, we see his writing addressing the fascist spectre: notably, in the play Caligula, about a nihilistic tyrant who effectively commits suicide by behaving so hatefully that he provokes his own killers, and also in “Letters to a German Friend”, published in a clandestine press.

In the resistance newspaper, Combat, in late 1944, as Allied forces begun invading Germany…