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  • The Development of Albert Camus's Concern for Social and Political Justice: 'Justice pour un juste'
  • Peter Dunwoodie
The Development of Albert Camus's Concern for Social and Political Justice: 'Justice pour un juste'. By Mark Orme. Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2007. 350 pp. Hb $65.00.

Scholarly and informative, this book reassesses the somewhat clichéd portrait of 'Camus le juste' by close investigation of his non-fictional texts, unpicking the tensions, ambiguities, and hesitations generated by the gradual slippage from the political to the ethical. Firmly anchored in concrete assessment of the available biographical data, it resituates key episodes — Algerian, French, and international — within 'the evolution of Camus's lifelong preoccupation with justice' (p. 18), seeking to expose 'the fragile relationship between politics and morality' (p. 21) operative in three interconnected phases: the formative years in Algeria; Occupation, purge, and Cold War; and, after L'Homme révolté, the Algerian War. The Introduction provides working definitions of socioeconomic, political, institutional, and constitutional justice, and reveals at the outset Mark Orme's acceptance of the figure of Camus not only as 'a man en situation who [. . .] opposes perceived injustice in all its various guises in primarily a personal and practical capacity' (p. 20), but as an intellectual whose 'underlying consistency' is 'modified by the pressures of changing (historical and personal) circumstances' (p. 23). The strength of the book lies in Orme's sensitivity to the inevitable contradictions and inconsistencies arising from this, since it allows him to track the changes of direction, the frustration and disillusionment, and indeed the 'sense of misjudgement' (p. 201) that dogs what he terms Camus's 'liberal humanist morality' (p. 50) and, in the Conclusion, his 'humanitarian pragmatism' (p. 206). Such positions proved to be inadequate when shaping the solutions proposed in L'Homme révolté (read against the grain as a highly personal text) and in the context of Algerian Independence in particular, where Orme agrees with critics who see evidence of 'cultural arrogance' and paternalism in Camus's stance (pp. 97, 100). The 'developmental methodological approach' (p. 23) adopted is underpinned by extensive Notes, which constitute an arena for critical dialogue and the inclusion of a great deal of enlightening additional material without interrupting or overloading the argument developed in the body of the text. Although both Notes and text suffer from occasional clumsy translation and from inadequate updating of the original research (the extensive Bibliography contains very few post-2000 references, for instance), this careful examination of Camus's ethicization of politics complements works such as Camus et la politique (1985), edited by Jeanyves Guérin, and David Carroll's analysis of Camus's relations with colonialism, terrorism, and justice in Albert Camus the Algerian (2007). It will interest both students and researchers, whatever their attitude to Mark Orme's closing claim that Camus remains a 'beacon of moral optimism' (p. 209). [End Page 406]

Peter Dunwoodie
Goldsmiths, University of London
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