C. G. Martin 1 The Outsider Camus & Sartre: Their Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It. By Ronald Aronson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 291 pp. [First published online in Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture 8.1 (2008)] On 11 December 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of Camus’s notorious press conference after winning the Nobel Prize, when the author told students that he would choose his mother before justice, five scholars (Tom Conley, Stanley Hoffman, Jeffrey Mehlman, Hazel Rowley, and Susan Suleiman) gathered at Harvard to discuss and debate before a packed crowd the political, aesthetic, and ethical issues that continue to rise from the “Camus/Sartre” conflict. Avoiding partisanship, Homi Bhaba introduced the conversation with the (self-admittedly) lame pronouncement, “We need them both.” More than once in his book, Camus & Sartre: Their Friendship and the Quarrel that Ended It, Ronald Aronson asks of his subjects, those famous correlates to Cold War polarities, “Which was right?” The question is obviously rhetorical but suggests a similarly impossible entanglement of values and sympathies. The purpose of his book is really to rehabilitate both in the post-Cold-War world as public intellectuals whose strengths and weaknesses are best understood in relation to each other. In general, Aronson strikes the right balance, although he doesn’t entirely avoid binary thinking. In the last chapter, for instance, he summarily writes that in the years of the intensifying Algerian anticolonial struggle, their antagonism hardened as each man took the other as the exemplar of the attitude he was fighting against. It was a situation of tragic ironies. In the name of serving the oppressed, Sartre accepted oppression. In loving his people, Camus muted his usual denunciations of oppression. Each one was half-right and half-wrong, locked into two separate but mutually supporting systems of bad faith. It’s worth asking, however, whether the generous comparative approach that shaped both the Harvard discussion and (to a lesser degree) Aronson’s valuable study predetermines the outcome of the analysis and reproduces a familiar and politically evasive narrative. In both, quantity (“half-right and half-wrong”) can be weirdly confused with quality. Reciprocity in