Albert Camus (1913–1960) was a French-Algerian philosopher, novelist, and essayist. Born in colonial Algeria to a working-class pied-noir family, he developed absurdism — the position that human desire for meaning confronts the universe’s indifference, and that the proper response is revolt: living fully without transcendent justification.
Core ideas
- The absurd: the gap between human longing for meaning and the world’s silence. The absurd is not in the world or in the person but in the confrontation between them.
- Revolt: the proper response to the absurd — neither suicide (refusing to live) nor philosophical suicide (adopting a faith that resolves the tension) but continuing to live and act in full awareness of meaninglessness.
- Limits of revolution: in The Rebel (1951), Camus argues that revolution tends to replace the tyranny it opposes with a new tyranny, and that revolt (refusal of injustice without totalizing ideology) is more honest than revolution (systematic transformation of society according to a blueprint). This caused his break with Sartre and the French left.
- Solidarity without transcendence: Camus argues for solidarity among people facing the absurd — not because it is metaphysically grounded but because shared revolt against injustice and meaninglessness is the most honest form of human connection.
Notable works
- The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
- The Stranger (1942)
- The Rebel (1951)
- The Plague (1947)