Albert Camus and democracy
Or, ‘the social and political exercise of modesty’
1.
Albert Camus is not often consulted on the question of democracy, and at first blush there appears to be good reasons for this. Neither of his two book-length essays considers the topic: The Myth of Sisyphus omits the term completely, and The Rebel makes no significant mentions, although it does refer to the Marquis de Sade, in passing, as a ‘peculiar democrat’. In his journalism, he doesn’t begin deploying the term until 1944, and then infrequently, using it in a conventional sense, or in what could be taken in a conventional sense; a placeholder word that would allow his sentences to carry the same meaning even if ‘democracy’ were replaced with other terms, such as ‘government’ or ‘political system’, and so on. And yet, I would suggest that there are enough references, comments, or asides, regarding democracy, in his journalism and public statements during the mid- to late-1940s, to make the argument that even if Camus does not have an explicit or full theory of democracy, his ideas and approach to politics are implicitly democratic, and are consistent with the central ideas that may otherwise be found in Sisyphus and later The Rebel; and as such, these ideas may be consulted in order to create the social and cultural pre-conditions for democracy to be realised in our own time.
2.
The first mention of democracy, in a Combat editorial on August 21, 1944, appears during the heady days of the liberation of Paris from the German occupation. ‘We want without delay to institute a true people’s and worker’s democracy,’ Camus writes. ‘In this alliance, democracy will contribute the principles of freedom and the people will contribute the faith and courage without which freedom is nothing. We believe that any politics that cuts itself off from the working class is futile.’ On October 1, only weeks later, Camus uses the phrase ‘people’s democracy’ once more, while arguing that it requires a balance between justice and liberty – in particular, justice in the economic sphere and liberty in the political sphere. The method to achieve such democracy requires ‘intellectual and moral honesty, which alone can provide the necessary clarity of mind.’
Already there is a degree of ambiguity in Camus’ first mentions of democracy. In between these editorials he provides a clue as to why he probably hasn’t mentioned this idea before: because, as far as Camus is concerned, the pre-war system of French government was ‘not real democracy but a caricature of democracy,’ adding: ‘Democracy – real democracy – remains to be constructed’ (September 2, 1944). In an attempt to give some content to what such ‘real democracy’ would look like, he uses variations of the phrase ‘people’s democracy’, but he uses it colloquially. Meanwhile, there was at this same stage a new notion, drawn from Marxist-Leninist theory that deployed the more formal concept ‘People’s Democracy’ to develop a strategy of using national electoral systems to introduce communism via various political parties. The pre-war popular front strategy was a precursor to this. And it should be noted that Camus himself was involved in this strategy in Algeria during this earlier period; but then he was expelled from the Communist Party. However, it should also be noted that even before he joined the party he disagreed with the theory and practice of communism, but he used their organisation and resources in Algiers to try to meet more practical, local concerns.
So the ambiguity of his position in late 1944 could be seen as coming, from one side, by his belief that until then only a ‘caricature of democracy’ has existed in France, and from the other side, by his attempt to rescue the notion of a ‘people’s democracy’ from the communists; in part, he did this by adding various qualifications to his use of the phrase: ‘a true people’s and worker’s democracy’, as opposed to a further ‘caricature of democracy’, as suggested by the vanguard and dictatorship tendencies of Marxist-Leninist theory.
Twelve months later, on August 28, 1945, during the domestic elections, he would rephrase his position – perhaps to further distinguish it from this formal more conception – by referring to a ‘full democracy’ as being that which is ‘responsible to the people’. Again, this is stated in the context of his earlier assumption that the pre-war French government was not democratic: ‘1. We need a new democracy. 2. It must be a full democracy, which means that the government must be responsible to the people. 3. It must be an effective democracy, and in order for that to happen there must be no return to the ministerial instability that plagued the Third Republic.’
In fact, after October 1944, Camus would cease to use the phrase ‘people’s democracy’ altogether, but would continue to consider what a ‘true’ or ‘full’ democracy would look like in practice.
3.
As I have argued previously – in relation to the composition of The Plague – it was the post-war purge, rather than the resistance to the German occupation during the war itself, that distinguishes Camus’ thinking from his contemporaries; his turning against the excesses of the purge, his opposition to the death penalty which emerges from this, and his argument against the legitimacy of political violence more generally, all derive from this immediate post-war period. So it is interesting to note, in the context of the current discussion, that during the latter months of 1944, as he begins developing these other ideas, Camus will, in his editorials, begin tentatively testing them against this question of democracy. In particular, democracy becomes associated with the idea of a politics grounded in argument and criticism, instead of polemics and violence, and the need for a limit to distinguish one from the other.
‘Strong democracies’, he writes on October 15, are characterised by ‘the power that comes from unity and the power that comes from criticism.’ On December 9, he is more explicit, countering this unity to the disunity of violence: ‘We believe that true democracy means not allowing guns to speak before people.’ On October 18, he argues that to curb the violent excesses of the purge a limit needs to be placed on moral justice, because the alternative is the application of some higher moral law that ‘involves the assertion of punishment incompatible with the spirit of democracy’.
As Camus noted earlier, such limits are born of the balance between liberty and justice, with the excesses of justice during the purge being at the cost of liberty. In correcting that imbalance, Camus links the need for limits with the rule of law. And he does both in the context of a discussion on the role of free expression and the freedom of the press in a democracy. On December 16, he asks his readers: ‘is it possible to imagine a position that would protect the right of free expression while at the same time limiting its abuse? Is it difficult to imagine a democracy that would not be obliged to impose coercive rules yet would not be vulnerable to a variety of excesses?... Democracy presupposes law. A free press presupposes laws defining the status of the press.’
4.
But that is considering only democracy at the national level. During the same period, in late 1944, Camus started thinking about another aspect of this question of democracy that would become a dominant theme in his writing over the next couple of years, related to democracy at the international level. The seed for this line of inquiry was planted in October 17, 1944, in an editorial about any future peace conference that would try to reorder Europe and the world in the post-war period. ‘One can’t have democracy at home and deny democracy abroad,’ Camus wrote, ‘one can’t have a democratic war without seeking a democratic peace.’
Recalling his earlier sketch of democracy (from October 1944) as involving justice in the economic sphere and liberty in the political sphere, he then reassessed this claim in the international realm. ‘For six months we have called for the creation of a true popular democracy’, he stated on February 9, 1945, ‘based on economic justice and liberal politics.’ Adding:
‘For six months, aware of the contradictions that are suffocating a world caught between an economy that is now international and a politics that is stubbornly national, we have called for a world economic federation, in which raw materials, commercial markets, and currency would be internationalised and which would also lay the groundwork for a political federation that might prevent the nations of the world from slitting each other’s throats every twenty years.’
In other words, what Camus is calling for is a form of international democracy, to create the context within which national democracies could operate, with each reinforcing the other. These reconsiderations were written in the week following the Yalta Conference – between Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin – which set the parameters within which the San Francisco Conference would later establish the United Nations. Would that international order operate by unanimous or majority vote of all its member nations? Or would it operate according to a veto power held by the five great powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and China? ‘Clearly,’ Camus wrote, on February 16, ‘the question of the veto comes down to this:
‘either the future League of Nations will be a federal instrument that will strictly enforce the rules of an international democracy, or it will be an organisation that will call upon the great powers to demonstrate the supreme virtue of sanctioning themselves for their own imperialist aims. Although we are widely reputed to harbor utopian inclinations, we have only moderate confidence in human virtue, hence we conclude that it is a question of choosing between international democracy on the one hand and recognition of imperialism on the other.’
‘If this report [from the Yalta Conference] is accurate,’ Camus concludes in that same editorial, ‘it is of considerable importance, for it would effectively put an end to any idea of international democracy.’ And, as each provides the context for each, so too, according to his previous statements, this would be the end to the possibility of national democracy.
But Camus did not want to put an end to either idea; he wanted to keep those possibilities alive. And the impetus for this was the question of Algeria. For Camus, opposition to colonialism could only come to fruition within the context of such international democracy, with both the imperial nation and its colony being replaced by two federated democratic nations. A few months after this editorial regarding the Yalta Conference, Camus visited Algeria for the first time since the war and occupation had exiled him in France. ‘Algerians are excluded from democracy,’ Camus wrote, on May 18, 1945: ‘they wanted to become French citizens, but no longer do, because France has failed.’ And France has failed, we may recall, because Camus had already diagnosed it as a mere ‘caricature of democracy’ (September 2, 1944) – in large part, we can see now, because of its imperialist policies. In the current editorial, Camus raises this charge more explicitly:
‘The Arab people wanted the right to vote because they knew that, with it, and through the free exercise of democracy, they could eliminate the injustices that are poisoning the political climate of Algeria today… But the Arabs seem to have lost their faith in democracy, of which they were offered only a caricature. They hope to achieve by other means a goal that has never changed: an improvement in their condition.’
Camus took up this line of argument again the following year, in his series of essays, “Neither Victims Nor Executioners”. ‘What is national democracy, and what is international democracy?’ Camus asked in an article published on November 26 1946. ‘Democracy is a form of society in which the law is above those who govern, the law being the expression of the will of all, represented by a legislative body. Is that what people are attempting to establish today? They are indeed elaborating for us an international law. But that law is made and unmade by governments, that is, by the executive. We are therefore in a regime of international dictatorship.... [and] the only option open to us is to resist this international dictatorship on an international level using means not in contradiction with the ends we seek.’
In the very next article in the series (November 27) Camus repeats his argument from the previous year regarding his criticism of the Yalta Conference, adding to it the claim that current political thought (regarding imperialism, and the international order as the clash of such empires) as being out of step with the historical reality, which he had reported on from Algeria the previous year, and which was still being largely ignored in the West. ‘The clash of empires is already taking a back seat to the clash of civilisations.’ He writes. ‘Indeed colonised civilisations from the four corners of the earth are making their voices heard. Ten or fifty years from now, the challenge will be to the pre-eminence of western civilisation. It would therefore be better to anticipate this by opening the World Parliament to these civilisations, so that its law will truly become universal law and the order that it consecrates will truly become the world order.’
In other words, that truly would be an international democracy, which would provide also the conditions for national democracies to be formed.
For Camus, the resistance to international dictatorship could begin in both Algeria and France, with the latter retracting its colonial policies, and the former pushing back against those policies, with each providing the conditions for the other to become more democratic. This process of resistance –or rebellion, as he would later call it – required ‘using means not in contradiction with the ends we seek.’ That is, as he pointed out in 1944, a politics grounded in argument and criticism, instead of polemics and violence, and the need for a limit to distinguish one from the other.
5.
In the year following the “Neither Victims Nor Executioners” series, Camus only made a few references to democracy, but his ideas on the topic were becoming increasingly refined, and more closely related to the structure of dialogue, and the restoration of communication, as an alternative to political violence and the intransigent habits of mind that resort to such violence. On March 17, 1974, he argues that ‘there is no democracy without dialogue and every policy needs to be balanced and constrained by the judgement it warrants.’ That same month, he states: ‘Those not willing to commit murder in order to win an argument only have recourse to freedom of speech in order to persuade.’ (March 21 1947) Then, on April 30, he writes:
There may be no good political regime, but democracy is surely the least bad of the alternatives. Democracy is inseparable from the notion of party, but the notion of party can easily do without democracy.1 That happens when one party or group imagines itself to be in possession of the absolute truth. That is why the Assembly and deputies need to ingest a dose of modesty.... After all, a democrat is a person who admits that his adversary may be right, who therefore allows him to speak, and who agrees to consider his arguments. When parties and people are so convinced by their own arguments that they are willing to resort to violence to silence those who disagree with them, democracy no longer exists.
It is this notion of ‘modesty’ that becomes the key feature of a little known essay, published in Caliban, in November 1948, that is probably Camus’ most sustained piece of writing on the question of democracy.
It is titled: “Democracy is an exercise in modesty”.
In this brief paper (it is less than three pages) Camus defends the thesis: ‘Democracy is the social and political exercise of modesty.’ In social and political thought, he argues, there are two forms of reactionary thinking, one that assumes that people can’t change and that everything is inevitable, and the other that assumes that people can change but it depends on this or that ‘factor’ – by ‘factor’, he is referring to the content of an political ideology, a philosophical system, or a religious doctrine. Camus is being intentionally vague here, but it is clear also that these two forms of thinking are characteristic of both conservative and progressive postures. ‘These two types of thinking move in opposite directions,’ he states, ‘but they share one common characteristic: they express themselves with absolute certitude.’ Based upon these assumptions, guided by such certitude, it follows that it is logical to oppress:
1) those who think that no change is possible; 2) those who don't agree on the factor; 3) those who, although they are fully agreed on the factor, don’t agree on the means to be used to modify the factor; 4) all those, in general, who think that things aren’t that simple.
Camus, however, thinks otherwise.
In both cases, we are faced with an obstinate simplification of the problem. In both cases, they introduce into the social problem a rigidity or a social determinism that should not reasonably be there. In both cases, one feels sufficiently convinced to make or let History do its work, according to these principles, and justify and aggravate human suffering.
Camus inverts this and, accepting the full complexity of the social problem, accepts in advance his individual uncertainty, and the refusal to justify human misery. This means rejecting ‘a political philosophy that pretends to know or regulate everything.’ The less an individual is dependent on such a system, such an ideology, or such a doctrine, the more dependent they become on other individuals, who are likewise in the same condition. And what that situation calls for – if each of these individuals is to remain conscious of that condition – is a democracy.
‘As a result the democrat is modest,’ Camus writes. ‘He admits to a certain degree of ignorance and recognizes that his efforts possess characteristics that are in part risky and that he does not know everything. And because he admits that, he recognises that he needs to consult others, to complete what he knows with what they know. He recognizes no rights for himself unless they are delegated by others, and he constantly subjects them to their agreement. Whatever decision he decides to take, he admits that the others for whom the decision is being taken can have another opinion and let him know that.’
6.
What is interesting about this understanding of democracy is that it is entirely consistent with the ideas Camus presents, in another register, in The Myth of Sisyphus, published several years earlier, and which he will later present in The Rebel, in another few years.
In that very first article, in August 1944, where he mentions democracy for the first time, it is in the context of seeking a working definition for the word ‘revolution’. The slogan of Combat at the time, of course, was “From Resistance to Revolution”. In that article, Camus writes: ‘We do not believe in ready-made principles or theoretical plans. In the days to come we will define, through our actions as well as in a series of articles, the content of the word “revolution”.’ This rejection of ‘ready-made principles or theoretical plans’ is consistent with Camus’ position in The Myth of Sisyphus, which rejects the subordination of the individual to various ideologies, systems, or doctrines; a subordination which he refers to there as a form of ‘intellectual suicide’, and which later, in The Rebel, he would repeat as being a ‘suicide of the mind’.
By the time he completes The Rebel in 1951, he has already introduced into his thought the need for limits, and the restoration of communication between individuals as an alternative to political violence and the intransigent (suicidal) habits of mind that resort to such violence (in the form of intellectual or physical murder) to justify this or that ideology, system, or doctrine. The radical nature of Camus’ thought is still largely misunderstood; especially by scholars, who keep trying to press his thinking back into the very shapes he otherwise argues against; and by the public, who accept these shapes unquestioningly.2 His thinking about democracy is no less radical.
In a sense, Camus does make good on his initial promise in that August 1944 article, to define the content of the word ‘revolution’; except that, by 1951, such revolution, within the limits of democracy, is what Camus comes to call rebellion.
We could very well call it – more modestly, but no less radically – a form of citizenship.
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For what it’s worth, I agree with the second part of this statement (and what follows), but disagree with the first part of this statement. The formation of political parties in the early 19th century – the two-party system in the United States and Great Britain, and later the development of the multi-party system in Europe – was actually formed as a bulwark against democracy. These were part of the initial props used to create the façade of democracy, or what Camus himself would later call the ‘caricature of democracy’. Moreover, his own argument here regarding modesty would, in practice, dissolve the partisan bonds that hold a party together. But that is an argument for another time. Meanwhile, see my recent essay on the pre-history of the two-party system in Australia