The Burden of Responsibility
Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century
by Tony Judt · first published 1998
50% recommend50% critical
Leon Blum, Albert Camus, and Raymond Aron might seem an unlikely combination. Blum was a fin-de-siecle aesthete who became the spiritual and political leader of the French non-Communist Left in the first half of this century. Camus, best known to millions of readers worldwide for his novels The Stranger and The Plague, was a wartime Resistance figure who played a prominent part in post-1945 intellectual life in France before dying tragically young in a car crash in 1960. Aron, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre in the brilliant intellectual generation of interwar France, was a political the
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…years to win the battle, but I did it. It was all more about how this book was written, rather than what was written in it. Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century Czesław Miłosz, The Captive Mind Raymond Aron, The Opium of the Intellectuals Those books taught me that there are quite a few secular religions…
on “Ask HN: Are there any books that changed your life during college or school?” ↗…the left as well. The 60s in the communist block were a good display of that, but also the 40s in France (Tony Judt wrote a couple books about that, e.g. the French Communist Party, as depicted in The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century).
on “The Cancellation of ‘Jihad Rehab’” ↗…from the Enlightenment ideals of rational inquiry to postmodernisms primary project of questioning where the truths that this rational inquiry finds come from and whether they are valuable or not. The Burden of Responsibility by Tony Judt. Only worth reading if you are interested in French politics. Profiles three French public intellectuals who stood apart from the mainstream in their opposition to totalitarian communism.…
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗