A courageous and extraordinary essay,"The Rebel" (English title) was written at a time when many French intellectuals were either members of the Communist party and/or apologists for Stalin. The moral authority of France's intellectual 'elite' was unquestionably sympathetic to the orthodox Left in the immediate postwar period of the late 40's through the 50's. Camus' essay represents what philosophers Richard Rorty and Jurgen Habermas both envision as the highest vocation for the model citizen: Camus protests "in the name of the society itself against those aspects of the society which are unfaithful to its own self-image." (Rorty, Contigency, irony, and solidarity, 1989, p.60).