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a major influence throughout Camus’s life. During this time, Camus edited and wrote for the underground newspaper Combat. Following the liberation of Paris by the Allied forces, Camus offered his vision for postwar France. His commitment to ethical practice was evident when he wrote on September 4, 1944, “[T]he affairs of this country should be managed by those who paid and answered for it. In other words, we are determined to replace politics with morality. That is what we call a revolution” (“Morality” 28). This overwhelming burden that Camus felt for the future of postwar France did not immobilize him or leave him incapable of making a decision about how to act in a given moment. He sought the freedom to respond to the moment as was necessary and rejected being limited by any one particular system of belief. He did not “belong to any school of thought” and, like Franz Kafka, held a “marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy [that was] superficial, academic, and remote from life” (Kaufmann 12). Camus had a keen interest in the implications of deeply philosophical ideas revealed in everyday life, an interest accompanied by his commitment to an ethical philosophy.
Up to that point in his life, Camus’s personal meeting with the absurd had comprised the loss of his father at a very early age (a theme that would later deeply influence his posthumously published The First Man), his recurring attacks of tuberculosis, and an unanticipated role in the French Resistance movement. During this time his growing relationship with Sartre also provided the foundation for a defining moment in Camus’s life, a dispute that arose from a review of Camus’s The Rebel, a publication that represents his attempt at navigating the post–World War II European turbulence of the 1940s and 1950s. After the collapse of the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany, the two political systems competing for the support of Europeans were democratic capitalism (best exemplified by the United States of America) and communism (best exemplified by the Soviet Union). Although Camus had some early sympathy for communism—in fact, he was briefly a member of the Communist Party—he came to see that the best hope for Europe’s future was a third way, or an approach that did not fully embrace either political structure. Although