ABSTRACT
Asked by Émile Simon about the foundations of his thinking in 1948, Albert Camus gave this answer: “The insurmountable obstacle appears to me to be the problem of evil. There is the death of innocents which signifies the arbitrariness of the divine, but there is also the murder of infants which embodies [traduit] human arbitrariness” (Camus 1948: 476). As the existence of this Routledge Handbook attests, in the period following September 11, 2001, we might be a good deal less surprised by Camus’s response than his Marxissant contemporaries were, in their preoccupation with the economic, structural preconditions of political life. We live in an age in which the old questions of theodicy have rebecome contemporary: What is evil? How is it possible? Is it necessary? What does its existence say about the human condition? Is evil’s continuing career the best argument in the armory of the atheists? Or does its existence challenge forth the most profound grounds for faith?
