The Logic of Political Murder

The Camus series (pt. 6)

[This is the sixth post in an ongoing series adapted from my dissertation on Camus. I haven’t done a full rewrite — just light edits for clarity and flow. The level of revision is evolving as I go, so feel free to share thoughts in the comments or DMs.]

Camus and Dostoevsky on Logical Crime

If Camus and Dostoevsky had a shared political concern, it was the collapse of foundations and the justification of crime. Here’s how Camus begins his most political book The Rebel:

There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined . . . 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.

The purpose of The Rebel was to try to understand what Camus called “logical crime” and “to examine meticulously the arguments by which it is justified.”

In a rejoinder to critics, Dostoevsky similarly wrote that his intent in his most political novel, The Possessed, was to understand “how, in our contemporaneous, transitional and peculiar society, are the Nechayevs, not Nechayev himself, made possible?” Dostoevsky’s referring to the anarchist on which The Possessed is based. The whole book (and it really is an astonishing read) is consumed with the same question as The Rebel: How is it that ordinary people are able to take part in the most extraordinary crimes?

Dostoevsky thought eighteenth-century Russia was “contaminated” by the influx of various socialist doctrines. Among the most pernicious was the belief in the progressive power of reason, which supported the Russian mind’s mania for meaningful action. Under the sway of “European progressives,” Dostoevsky argued, socialism emerged as a corrective to Christianity, a modern means to universal harmony.

In Dostoevsky’s view, these imported doctrines weakened the spiritual integrity of Russian society. They also fostered a dangerous belief in redemption through destruction. Ideas that promised liberation from suffering often masked a deeper, more nihilistic impulse. He attributed the rise of political crime to a belief in the purifying power of these ideas:

In my novel The Possessed I made the attempt to depict the manifold and heterogeneous motives which may prompt even the purest of heart and the naïve of people to take part in the perpetration of so monstrous a villainy. The horror lies precisely in the fact that in our midst the filthiest and most villainous act may be committed by one who is not a villain at all! . . . This is the most pathological and saddest trait our present time – the possibility of considering oneself not as a villain, and sometimes almost not being one, while perpetrating a patent and incontestable villainy – therein is our present-day calamity!

The intellectual proximity between Dostoevsky and Camus is striking when we consider how both grappled with the moral psychology of revolution. Where Dostoevsky offered a literary diagnosis of ideological possession, Camus worked to formalize its logic in philosophical terms.

From Philosophical Justification to Political Nihilism

In that passage above, Dostoevsky prefigures Camus’ argument about the capacity of ideology to imbue action with a sense of justice. Dostoevsky also points to specific European thinkers — Mill and Darwin, for instance — as emblematic of the modern devotion to reason, utility, and empiricism. He thought (unfairly, in my opinion) that they were all united by a blind fidelity to logic without transcendent foundations. For Dostoevsky, this meant a love of theoretical truth but a complete indifference to truths of experience. Hence there was a willingness to follow the dictates of reason without regard for social consequences. This was the very essence of political nihilism as Dostoevsky understood it.

Dostoevsky’s influence is all over The Rebel, especially the sections where Camus critiques Marxism. Here’s Camus describing the “All or Nothing” mentality of historical rebels:

Just as the movement of rebellion led to the point of ‘All or Nothing’ and just as metaphysical rebellion demanded the unity of the world, the twentieth-century revolutionary movements, when it arrived at the most obvious conclusions of its logic, insisted with threats of force on arrogating to itself the whole of history . . . Now that God is dead, the world must be changed and organized by the forces at man’s disposal.

Dostoevsky gives this same logic a dramatic form. Rather than analyzing it from the outside, as Camus does, he brings it to life through characters who embody the psychological and philosophical extremism of their time. Chief among them is Chigalev, a bizarre man who follows rationalism to its terrifying conclusion.

Chigalev and the Tyranny of Reason

In The Possessed, Dostoevsky expresses this attitude through the character Chigalev. He’s the learned rebel who reasons his way to a perfectly harmonious society. Believing he has solved the problem of freedom and equality, he announces his findings to the group:

Dedicating my energies to the study of the social organization which is in the future to replace the present condition of man, I’ve come to the conviction that all makers of social systems from ancient times up to the present year . . . have been dreamers, tellers of fairy-tales, fools who contradicted themselves, who understood nothing of natural science and the strange animal called man . . . But, now that we are all at last preparing to act, a new form of social organization is essential. In order to avoid further uncertainty, I propose my own system of world-organization.

Chigalev’s “system” is embraced on account of its logical consistency. The problem is that it sacrifices present experience entirely. Like the historical rebels Camus condemns in The Rebel, Chigalev is obliged to act in the name of a hope. His actions are directed toward the future, toward the realization of some obscure freedom.

This denial of the present is a major theme in both The Possessed and The Rebel. To take one example from The Possessed, there’s a young socialist, Yulia, who is pathologically fixated on the future. “The public must understand,” she demands, “that the attainment of an object of universal human interest is infinitely loftier than the corporeal enjoyments of the passing moment.”

Camus thought such utopian aspirations fundamental to modern revolutionary ideologies. Marx, he claims, “was obliged to speak in the future tense and in the abstract. Thus it is not astonishing that he could blend in his doctrine the most valid critical method . . . with a utopian messianism.”

What unites these revolutionary ideologies is not just their future-oriented fanaticism but their shared faith in the instruments of scientific reason. Whether cloaked in Marxist or nationalist terms, the underlying pathology remains the same: a belief that human suffering can be mastered and engineered away through abstract systems of control.

Science, Nihilism, and the Will to Mastery

Against the backdrop of their political thought, Camus and Dostoevsky’s resistance to scientism is much clearer. Translated to the political realm, the methods of science — reason, empiricism, and logic — become extensions of the will to mastery. For Camus this was manifest in Nazism:

The systematic and scientific aspect of the Nazi movement hides an irrational drive that can only be interpreted as a drive of despair and arrogance.

Among other things, Nazism illustrated what’s possible when science and technology is divorced from a transcendent or external value system. It also connects Dostoevsky’s philosophical anthropology to Camus’ political thought; that is to say, Nazism imbues the negation of nihilism with the individual’s passion for higher meaning in a terrifyingly stark way. And this is precisely the vision of nihilism foreshadowed in Dostoevsky’s works. When Camus writes that Dostoevsky’s characters “prefigure our nihilism,” this is likely what he had in mind.

The Contradictions of Rebellion

In his study of totalitarianism, Camus asks why modern revolutions tend to betray in action what they affirm in theory. Communism begins with noble aspirations of delivering all men from bondage, but ends nevertheless by enslaving them all. Camus is straining in all this work to understand how rebellion reached this point of extreme contradiction. He begins by taking it as a function of the absolutist quest itself. The pursuit of absolute freedom collapses into contradiction because such freedom is possible only through totalitarian means, through absolute negation. Camus again:

Complete freedom can only exist and justify itself by the creation of new values identified with the entire human race . . . The shortest route to these new standards passes by way of total dictatorship.

For Camus, Dostoevsky’s value wasn’t just psychological or literary. He saw in Dostoevsky’s characters early portraits of the totalitarian mindset. Figures like Chigalev and the Grand Inquisitor were eccentric inventions, no doubt, but they were also warnings about the future.

Chigalev and the Grand Inquisitor as Modern Prophets

In The Rebel, Camus devotes an entire section to the legacy of Chigalev, whose system he compares to the totalitarian defenders of state terrorism in the twentieth century. It’s the “implacable” nature of Chigalev’s mind that marks him as a precursor to modern revolutionaries. The premise of Chigalev’s system is unlimited freedom. “I am perplexed by my own data,” he says, “and my conclusion is a direct contradiction of the original idea with which I started. Starting from unlimited freedom, I arrive at unlimited despotism.” According to Chigalev, a scientific account of man shows that “there can be no solution of the social problem but mine.”

This same theme is expressed in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov through the Grand Inquisitor. Here, however, slavery is offered as a gift to mankind. The uncertainty of freedom is replaced by the stability of slavery. Like Chigalev, the Inquisitor’s arguments are rooted in a purely objective view of human nature. To stifle doubt, men have:

Set up gods and challenged one another, “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same...

The Grand Inquisitor fancies himself a redeemer. Convinced that men crave coherence more than freedom, he offers them a respite. At bottom, the Inquisitor is a simplifier; he relieves men of the burden of choice.

“Didst Thou forget,” he asks, “that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?”

For the Inquisitor, humans are suited to slavery despite their rebellious nature and the tyrants of the world are “the unconscious expression” of our “craving for universal unity.”

The Political Theology of the Inquisitor

It’s worth noting that Dostoevsky considered the Grand Inquisitor the “culminating point . . . of his religious and political thought.” For him, the Inquisitor’s blueprint represented the realization of a political order dedicated exclusively to order and reason. Indeed, the point of his system, as Bruce Ward argues, is to “articulate a social order which most closely corresponds to human nature.”

In his repudiation of Christ, the Inquisitor says his formula is a logical inference derived from empirical observations of life and man. In this way, he crowns a central theme of Dostoevsky’s, which remains undeveloped in previous works like The Adolescent. In that lesser known book, revolutionaries inspired by Europe vow to “live according to the laws of nature and of truth.” But despite their grandiose aims, they fail to realize their political utopia. Like the nihilists in The Possessed, they incite chaos in order to build a “modern well-organized state.”

The would-be revolutionaries in The Adolescent never quite get to the state-building part. They succeed only in the creation of disorder. In the Inquisitor’s social formula, however, the well-organized state of which they dream is fully articulated. And the paradoxical denial of the ground of freedom which began with Hegel terminates in the complete abnegation of freedom itself.

The Inquisitor is perfectly willing to sacrifice moral responsibility in exchange for order, which is ultimately all we really want. In this, he becomes a mirror not only of totalitarian ambition but of the modern temptation to delegate our freedom to systems that promise salvation. This convergence of politics, psychology, and ideology sets the stage for understanding Camus’ fiction, which he used as a vessel to explore many of these same themes in a different register.

Conclusion

Before getting further along in this series, it’s worth pausing to say a little more about Camus’ conception of the artist’s role in society, because his fiction (which we’re diving into in the next post) is in many ways a reflection of this. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Camus remarked that “Whatever our personal weaknesses may be, the nobility of our craft will always be rooted in two commitments, difficult to maintain: the refusal to lie about what one knows and the resistance to oppression.”

For Camus, the artist was obliged to tell the truth and to guard against tyranny. During his absurd and revolt periods, Camus’ writings are political and they’re concerned with the relationship between politics and values. And he uses the medium of fiction to address these concerns. He thought art as uniquely equipped to articulate a politics of value. It’s able to confront the absurd without purporting to resolve it. Art also communicates truth through the symbolic representation of experience. Symbols are so important to Camus’ political thought because of their rootedness in common experience. As we’ll see later in the series, shared experience was vital to Camus’ vision of human solidarity.

Camus’ fiction, then, is motivated by his conception of the artist as well as his belief in the transformative power of symbols. Throughout his writings, Camus continually draws on ancient symbols in order to illuminate contemporary experiences. This is true in each period of Camus’ writings. When Camus articulates the experience of absurdity, for example, he invokes the myth of Sisyphus. Camus likewise grounds his vision of revolt and solidarity in such Christian symbols as exile, judgment, and kingdom. Finally, when he formulates his philosophy of limits, Camus uses the classic Greek symbol of moderation, Nemesis.

Despite his reliance upon symbols, however, Camus’ foremost concern is experience. Ideas, doctrines, and ideological dogmas all abstract from experience, and thus fail as grounds for action. When Camus moves beyond his sensualist phase, symbols become a key bridge between theory and action.

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