The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt

“We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and they have a perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose—even for transforming murderers into judges.” 

At the beginning of The Rebel, Camus gestures toward some of his main thematic preoccupations for the work as a whole. In calling his time the era of “the perfect crime,” he alludes to the ravages of World War II and totalitarian ideology’s ongoing grip in Eastern Europe—the results of destructive forms of “philosophy” that enabled mass violence and repression. In claiming that modern-day “criminals” are no longer naïve idealists driven by love (“helpless children”) but rather cold and calculating ideologues (“adults”), he also alludes to the changed nature of rebellion in the centuries since the French Revolution, a theme he explores in more detail later in the work.

“Ideology today is concerned only with the denial of other human beings, who alone bear the responsibility of deceit […] murder is the problem today.” 

Camus outlines the biggest issue he sees within the ideologies dominant in his time: their totalizing nature, which leads to the “denial of other human beings” and the steady erosion of freedom in the name of those ideologies. By identifying “murder” as the result of this way of thinking, Camus again alludes to the mass violence of the 20th century, suggesting that extremist thinking ultimately leads to death for any who dare to dissent.