Sartre, Jean-Paul

(1905–1980)

   The prolific, erudite Jean-Paul Sartre significantly influenced the spheres of 20th-century philosophy, politics and literature. The Parisian began his intellectual life at the select École Normale Supérieure, and in 1929 he graduated with a doctorate in philosophy. While serving as an army meteorologist in World War II, Sartre was captured by the Germans but released due to ill health in 1941. He was able to flee to Paris and become a key actor in the French Resistance, helping to found the ephemeral group Socialisme et Liberté. In the period following Allied victory, Sartre became increasingly politicized and by 1957 considered himself a Marxist. He was involved in the foundation of the Rassemblement Démocratique Révolutionnaire, a group which aimed to cross all political lines and appeal to the consciousness of every individual. Sartre advocated communism but never joined the French Communist Party (PCF). Nevertheless, he stayed close to the organization until 1968, finally breaking with it in that year after having become disillusioned with its pro-Soviet stance on events in Hungary in 1956, its role in the Algerian war of liberation, and what he perceived to be its betrayal of the Paris May Revolution (Sartre felt the PCF had aided the restabilizing of the ruling establishment at a time when it was suffering an acute crisis).

   Following this break Sartre associated with a number of minor Maoist “groupscules,” and edited the government-banned La Cause du Peuple journal. Throughout this time, he was a committed human rights and peace activist, condemning Soviet concentration camps, in his 1952 work The Communists and Peace and protesting vehemently against the Rosenberg executions. He also signed a manifesto opposing the Cold War, and attended the 1954 World Council for Peace meeting in Berlin. Sartre was unflinching in his criticisms of Soviet foreign policy, attacking the invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia.

   Sartre was concerned with marrying existentialist ideas of self-determinism with communist principles holding that socio-economic influences beyond individual control determine human existence, for example in his essay Between Existentialism and Marxism (1972). The existential theme of Sartre’s La Nausée (1938), in placing a stress on the power of unconscious things over living beings, echoed Karl Marx’s concept of commodity fetishism, the criticism of the hold commodities exert on humans. Sartre used his Search for a Method (1963) and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1976) to promote a popular, politically activist existentialism and assert that only dialectical, and not analytical, reason can be used to understand the project of human history. Every member of a society, despite the contradictions and vicissitudes throughout the progress of history, has total responsibility for the rest of mankind, and so the course of that history is ultimately rational. It is questionable whether the key existential tenets of free will, individuality and the meaninglessness of life can be reconciled with the determinism, collectivism and teleological strands of Marxism. For some the Critique of Dialectical Reason represents a critique of Marxism itself, but Sartre saw himself as engaged in a Marxist theoretical project drawing on Marx rather than the vulgarized ideology of later Marxists.