The Development of Camus’s Concern for Social and Political Justice: “Justice Pour Un Juste”

This book seeks to assess the emphases and complexities of Albert Camus’s lifelong preoccupation with justice within the sociopolitical sphere, against a background of changing personal and historical circumstances. Building on existing scholarship, it provides a chronological account of Camus’s developing ideas on the concept, as expressed in his non-fiction, where the writer’s personal concerns come directly to the fore. The study shows how Camus’s understanding of social and political justice is essentially that of a humanitarian pragmatist, whose underlying engagement with the concept assumes that theoretical deliberation may accompany, but should not override, the pursuit of practical objections. The book argues that whatever the pressures brought to bear by history and the different phases of his own life, Camus maintains his humanitarian generosity and refuses to sacrifice moral responsibility on the altar of politico-ideological prejudice. The book thus explores the reality of Camus as a man imbued with justice, in the context of the historio-political and moral challenges of the mid-twentieth century.