Heroes, Critics, and Teachers: Thinking with Stanley Hoffmann and Albert Camus

Abstract:Unusually for a scholar of international affairs working within the confines of academic social science, Stanley Hoffmann resisted tendencies to divorce descriptive and analytical work from ethical considerations, to study politics in isolation from culture and personal experience, and to focus on institutions and systems rather than individuals. All of these elements of intellectual non-conformity found expression in—and also reflected the influence of—his hero, Albert Camus. Hoffmann’s engagement with Camus—reconstructed here from his scattered writings on that figure, and his accounts of his own life—in turn reveal crucial features of Hoffmann’s own sensibility and experience, which shaped the scholar that he was and the work he produced. Camus served as an ethical exemplar, whose model and inspiration, set in balance with that of Hoffmann’s mentor Raymond Aron, helped to define and sustain Hoffmann’s distinctive balance between realism and idealism.