The Burden of Responsibility
Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century

Using the lives of the three outstanding French intellectuals of the 20th century, renowned historian Tony Judt offers a unique look at how intellectuals can ignore political pressures and demonstrate a heroic commitment to personal integrity and moral responsibility unfettered by the difficult political exigencies of their time.

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 theorist, journalist, and critic of Communism who made a major contribution to the recent revival of liberal thought in contemporary France. In "The Burden of Responsibility," Tony Judt offers a distinctive and original reinterpretation of the writings and public role of these three men, arguing that they have much in common. Despite the great differences in their backgrounds, their interests, and their views, all three were men of integrity who took seriously their responsibility as public intellectuals.