camus and sartre: the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended itby ronald aronson

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Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It by Ronald Aronson Review by: Stanley Hoffmann Foreign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2005), pp. 189-190 Published by: Council on Foreign Relations Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20034243 . Accessed: 11/06/2014 10:56 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Foreign Affairs. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 194.29.185.147 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 10:56:41 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It by RonaldAronsonReview by: Stanley HoffmannForeign Affairs, Vol. 84, No. 1 (Jan. - Feb., 2005), pp. 189-190Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20034243 .

Accessed: 11/06/2014 10:56

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Council on Foreign Relations is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to ForeignAffairs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 194.29.185.147 on Wed, 11 Jun 2014 10:56:41 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Rerent Ronks

complexities of Nazi decision-making, a product of overlapping bureaucracies, and the determining role of the Fuihrer. He also points out that the public reaction in

Germany turned from negative to positive once Germany was at war-there, as else where, war meant "the suspension of critical stance." Browning does not say just how

much antisemitism shaped Germans' com mitment to building a racial empire under German control-an issue Daniel Goldha gen has handled with vigor-but his massive account is utterly convincing in its historical detail, even if interpretation is not what he and most other historians do best.

A DemocraticAudit of the European Union. BY CHRISTOPHER LORD. New York:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, 270 pp. $69.95.

It is with great anticipation that one turns to a book that aims to carry out an "audit" of the European Union to find out just how democratic its institutions are and to determine what can be done to make up for any "democratic deficit," by making its institutions more responsive to the peoples of member states. Lord, the Jean

Monnet Professor at the University of Leeds, cannot be accused of a lack of se riousness, but the scrupulousness of his

methodology and the evenhandedness of his meticulous approach make for mad deningly difficult and inconclusive reading. Indeed, the final chapter warns against "sweeping generalizations for and against the existence of a democratic deficit."

Amen. But although there is undoubt edly much wisdom in Lord's multiple findings, one wonders who, except other social scientists, will find the time to separate the really important ones from the others or, having read the book, the

energy to do something about them. (This raises one further question: The EU is one of the few really inspiring political inno vations of the last half-century, so why is the literature about it so often soporific?)

M4za Beast". Attacking the Roots of War. BY COLUM MURPHY. Bursinel:

Pandora/Smisao, 2004, 445 pp. $25.00. As a UN official in Bosnia, Murphy carried out his mission with distinction, but his analysis of, and intense feelings about, the Bosnian war put him at odds with the UN, with its strict impartiality between the Serbs and their victims from 1991 to 1995. This memoir is valuable both as a portrait of a deeply moral man in an awful situation and as an account of the sufferings of the Bosnians, the skillful

maneuvers of Slobodan Milosevic, and the machinations of UN officials sympa thetic to the Serbs. He concludes that "it is hard not to be hard on the performance

of the international community in Bosnia." Humanitarianism without a political design is insufficient, and "the political leadership

of the international community ... was deeply flawed"-doing nothing to prevent the slaughter at Srebrenica, which Mur phy describes with eloquent indignation.

Murphy's sense of right and wrong, his distaste for "realist" justifications of inaction, and his concern for the victims of the beast of war give this volume its glow and its emotional power.

Camus and Sartre: The Story ofa

Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It. BY RONALD ARONSON. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2004, 302 pp. $32.50 (paper, $19.00).

This excellent study of the friendship and break between Albert Camus and

F O R E I G N AF FA I R S January/February 200S [189]

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Recent Books

Jean-Paul Sartre deals with a subject that goes far beyond intellectual history; it illuminates choices that millions of French readers have personally had to make.

Although both grew up without fathers, the two men came from very different

milieus: Sartre was bourgeois (and hated it), whereas Camus was raised in Algeria by an illiterate mother. Camus' political involvement grew out of his concern for the lives of the Algerian poor; Sartre

was drawn to politics only after spend ing time in a World War II prison camp, long after he had won acclaim as a philosopher and novelist. When France was liberated, the two men became the country's leading new intellectuals and heralds of existentialism (a label Camus never accepted), and over the next 15 years until Camus' accidental death in 1960 they figured in a kind of three-act politico-intellectual play, which Aron son recounts with erudition, empathy, fairness, and elegance. At first, Camus and Sartre were close friends united by common experience in the Resistance, promoting social change while evinc ing a clear-eyed determination to face the ethical and political dilemmas of a somber universe. The great issue that began to divide them in the 1950S was communism, and the 1952 publication of Camus' The Rebel led to their break. Their opposing views on violence sub sequently led them to react differently to war in Algeria, with Sartre accepting

violent means as an acceptable tool in the fight for decolonization while Camus, horrified by the atrocities of both sides, stayed silent in public. Ultimately, of course, neither silence nor shrillness had any impact on the course of events.

Eastern Europe and Former

Soviet Republics ROBERT LEGVOLD

Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan. BY ADRIENNE LYNN

EDGAR. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, 304 pp. $37.50.

Governed by what is surely the most eccentrically despotic regime in the post-Soviet space and by a leader who has christened himself "Turkmenbashi" (father of all Turkmen) and renamed

months of the calendar after himself and his mother, Turkmenistan is a head scratching mystery for almost everyone on the outside. Edgar, despite a brief stab at the book's end, does not explain how this has come about. But in tracing the formative impact of the Soviet revo lution on Turkmen society in the 1920S and 1930s, she does a magnificent job of making comprehensible the nation now tyrannized by the "Glorious Leader." None of the former Soviet republics better illus trates the Bolsheviks' role as inadvertent nation-builders, taking a largely nomadic tribal people, whose identity was tied

more to genealogy than to territory, and transforming it into a socially stratified, settled, semimodern, language-based national entity. Socialism, their goal, failed-indeed, because of what it could not change-but the national shell remained.

[190] FOREIGN AFFAIRS Volume84No.1

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