Customer Reviews

Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Both Camus and Sartre won the Nobel Prize for Literature (Sartre declined it). Both are major figures in twentieth century philosophy and literature. Both were embroiled in central political and world-historical events of the middle years of the last century--World War II and the German occupation of France, the Cold War, and the end of colonialism. Paris, their home, was still the center of the cultural and intellectual world and Parisians lived exciting lives at the center of world events. Aronson captures the sense of these events and Camus' and Sartre's roles in them. I felt that I got a good idea of the context and background of the philosophies and political and personal activities of both men. I enjoyed a vicarious sense of the excitement of post-war intellectual Paris. This is definitely a nostalgia stroll down the Boulevard Saint-Germain.

Aronson, although not presented as a philosopher or historian of philosophy, has a good grasp of the philosophical issues revolving around existentialism, Marxism, and mid-century French philosophy in general. If you are interested in Camus and Sartre, their lives and loves, their quarrels, and politics you could not do better than to read this book.

But are you interested in this? I am because I grew up with this stuff and still find it fascinating. How many readers, though, will want to wade through many pages of arcane Parisian disputes about Marxism, Stalinism, and communism? How many are still gripped by details of the Algerian War? Of course these events are monumental, but not so the fussy ruminations of Parisian intellectuals. When reading this book the phrase "bombination in a tea cup" kept occurring to me.

Toward the end Aronson attempts a stab at suggesting the universal and eternal relevance of the Camus/Sartre disputes. I don't buy it. The issues that led to the Camus/Sartre quarrel are dead--of interest only to historians and aging existentialists. As a vintage existentialist, I enjoyed the book, felt I got a lot out of it, and recommend it to anyone yearning for a walk down Memory Lane in Philosophy Town.

The friendship and then the falling out between Sartre and Camus is more than biography and tells the story of the Cold War in story book dialectical form. This account brings this self-reflective history to light, beginning with the period of the War, the Vichy regime and the Resistance, then the postwar euphorias of both authors as they become public intellectuals par excellence. Their friendship and vanguard solidarity conceals hidden differences, and as the Cold War gets into gear the divergence of 'lefts' finds its exemplars. It would seem sad in one way, and yet this encounter and division produced the dialectic needed to confront the legacy of Communism and capitalism in collision, as if a fated broil. Within a few years all the issues, later the stuff of endless discourse, were tabled, and the stakes clear til the end in 1989.

Is there anybody out there who, after all these years of marketing, trusts those words written on the back of the cover? Whether it is a CD, DVD, computer game or a book, it all boils down to a single fact - praise and praise alone. I'm yet to see a publisher who will be willing to put a negative comment on his product. But, it doesn't matter. We're used to this practice by now, and it's one of the reasons why there is so much confidence for any kind of review in newspapers and on a specialized web-sites.

Edition that I'm holding, has nothing but the words of praise for Aronson, his writing skills, his research and knowledge of Sartre and Camus. It would be really weird if it weren't like that. There are excerpts from Times Literary Supplement, New York Times, and other less noted sources. Judging the book by it's covers we could think of nothing less than brilliant work, destined to be remembered for all ages to come. Yet, reality is somewhat different. This is not a bad book on any level. Amount of research that Aronson has put in it, qualifies it as a work worth of reading. That is, if you're have a little bit of interest for a subject. If you couldn't care less for Sartre, Camus, existentialism or a Cold War atmosphere in Europe, you will not be magically transformed into an activist willing to sacrifice everything for final judgment on who was right back then. There are number of scholars battling these questions, their works is widely unread and it may seem that they're battling a battled already lost. Whether he is aware of this fact or not, Aronson is writing for them, and general populace of modern times will remain as uninterested in these subjects as it always were. Try imagining some farmer in Alabama reading this, and you'll get the picture.

It is summer and time for an endless wasting of time by some kind of a beach, and I kinda took this one with me as a literature for summer vacation. Despite all the advices in "literary supplements" of local newspapers and magazines who all seem to take a easy way out, I wanted to read something I've been putting for for a year or two. You should have seen some of the looks on the beach :)

Anyway, this is non-fiction and it reads as one. Despite it's topic being lives and quarrels of two of the greatest thinkers and artists of 20th century it doesn't reach for the language of philosophy or the one of the Theory. Aronsons's way of telling the story will be readable for all levels of readers out there and that is one of the commendable facts about this book. Yet, it seems to me that it isn't written with such a grandiose objectivity as covers would seem to apply. This book is written with passion and zeal, and they lie strongly on Camus side. Aronson is much quicker to jump on Sartre rather then Camus, and sometimes this causes rather dubious paragraphs. Yet, for an insight on 20 years period of War and post-War France (and in a nutshell Europe as well), this book presents itself a valuable resource. It is not written to motivate an unknowledgable reader, it is written matter-of-factly for anyone who is engrossed in this period of history, or has an interest for lives of Camus and Sartre. In that light it is regrettable that book holds no bibliography of cited works (still, there are over 800 footnotes) for easy reference nor a waypoints for further research. Aronson is honest enough to acknowledge at some point that this is not a final conclusion of the matter and that there are yet space for further research and interpretation of the relationship between these two. Considering his references one could easily conclude that this is one of the better books on the subject and it should be read and commented by any scholar who has interest in this field. Others could use it as well. It presents a nice introduction to problems that we're facing today, and once again it shows how everything is connected. Only by answering questions posed in this book, one could start to hope to adequately answer questions of today. And that is, be not mistaken, not a mundane job to be taken lightly. Aronson's book will do for a nice introduction. Other than that, it's finer points, will be left for specialists in the field to battle upon.

man myself)and it's difficult to stomach an "even-handed" (i.e., non-judgemental) account of his behavior during and after WWII, but, solely from the perspective of this work being a window into the relationship of, arguably, the two foremost French thinkers of the twentith century (and please don't throw-up Foucault, Derrida and crew against C & S) - it has considerable value and is worth the read.

While this book is supposedly meant to be a "balance" between the "fundamental legitimacy" of the philosophies of these two men, it is more an apology for Sartre than any kind of a balanced introspective of two men who shaped much of French intellectual debate after WWII.
Sartre essentially sat out WWII and offered up "Being and Nothingness" in 1943 while Camus not only wrote "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus" in 1942, but was an active resistance fighter who fought the Nazi occupation of France. Sartre seems to have been quite envious of Camus' courage, but could never seem to be able to do anything but convert his loathsome cowardice during WWII into attacks (in the safety of salons of Paris) on Camus after publishing the venomous review of Camus' "The Rebel".
Aronson's greatest failure in this book is to try to find a moral equivalency between Sartre, who supported violence in overthrowing colonial regimes except the colonialism of the Soviet Union which he supported, and Camus, whose virulent anti-communism was way out of the "mainstream" of much of European thought after WWII. While Sartre found every reason he could to support communist regimes around the globe, he ignored the fact that the Soviet system was really an evil empire far worse than any created by the West. Stalin's forceful death by starvation of over 20 million citizens of the Soviet Union went un-noticed by Sartre as he condemned the "Imperialists" of the West. Only after the Hungarian uprising of 1956 did Sartre abandon his blind allegiance to the Soviet Union, while still supporting communist hegemony elsewhere.
Camus, on the other hand is condemned for not supporting the overthrow of regimes installed by Western European nations, even though none of them came close to the brutal nature of Soviet imperialism in the Ukraine, Chechnya, and the other conquered satellites.
Aronson's book however is really just another attempt by admitted academic leftists in the USA and other Western universities to hang onto a discredited economic system which has failed in every country it has been tried. This book is essentially not about Sartre vs Camus, but about how Marxism and its supporters have been given a bum rap. It isn't the system that is bad, but it was only implemented improperly. If only someone would just do it "the right way" then the utopia promised by Marx and his followers would be able to blossom and relieve us of the ills of capitalism. By offering a theory which places Camus and Sartre as moral equivalents, where a supporter of freedom of thought like Camus is equal to an opponent of freedom like Sartre, the left tries to level the playing field of history where the lessons to be learned are ignored or dismissed as an aberration. Only tenured professors who have never worked for a living or experienced the ravages of the philosophy he espouses could possibly write such a book. If you are looking for a book that deals with the issues that divided Camus and Sartre, you would be far better off reading "In Denial" or one of Jean Francois Revel's books.

is way off the mark. There's more to say about this book, but for now, let me just say that the guy above doesn't have any idea what he's talking about.