Between Existentialism and Marxism: Sartre on Philosophy, Politics, Psychology, and the Arts

by Jean-Paul Sartre

Essays written since 1960 examine key aspects, events, and figures of world politics, philosophy, poetry, painting, and psychoanalysis, and the purposes and processes of Sartre's own writing

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction, Theory, Essays, France, Ebooks

302 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960

About the author

Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and literary critic, considered a leading figure in 20th-century French philosophy and Marxism. Sartre was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology). His work has influenced sociology, critical theory, post-colonial theory, and literary studies. He was awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Literature despite attempting to refuse it, saying that he always declined official honors and that "a writer should not allow himself to be turned into an institution."
Sartre held an open relationship with prominent feminist and fellow existentialist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir. Together, Sartre and de Beauvoir challenged the cultural and social assumptions and expectations of their upbringings, which they considered bourgeois, in both lifestyles and thought. The conflict between oppressive, spiritually destructive conformity (mauvaise foi, literally, 'bad faith') and an "authentic" way of "being" became the dominant theme of Sartre's early work, a theme embodied in his principal philosophical work Being and Nothingness (L'Être et le Néant, 1943). Sartre's introduction to his philosophy is his work Existentialism Is a Humanism (L'existentialisme est un humanisme, 1946), originally presented as a lecture.

Reviews

[pippi · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting if you are into existentialism and marxism, obviously.

[Brad · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I've read this year.

"It seems to us that one can only properly criticize spontaneity - and this was the lesson of 1968 - if it is realized that the subjective maturity of the working class requires today a new form of organization, adapted to the conditions of struggle in the societies of advanced capitalism."

"We still have not defined the intellectual yet: all we have are technicians of practical knowledge who either accommodate themselves to their contradiction or manage to avoid suffering from it. But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual."

"The reasons why a people chooses socialism matter comparatively little; what is essential is that they build it with their own hands. 'What is true', said Hegel, 'is only what has become so.'. This is also, of course, the principle of psychoanalysis...the patient must rather always search for [truth] himself and change himself by his very search, in such a way that he will discover the truth when he is prepared to bear it. What holds for the individual also in this respect holds for great collective movements. The proletariat must emancipate itself by its own means, forge its own arms and class consciousness in daily battle, in order to take power when it is capable of exercising it."

"Driven by the necessities of the time, the Party, far from expressing the consciousness of the workers, was obliged to produce it. The only real force in this immense invertebrate country, it found itself impelled to concentrate power. Instead of assisting the withering away of the state by a critical independence of it, the Party reinforced the State by identifying itself with it, but was thereby overcome with administrative sclerosis...in its ubiquity and solitude, it ceased any longer to be able to see itself. All this was at first only a stop-gap remedy, a provisional deviation of whose perils Lenin was well aware, and which he believed could be corrected. Soon, however, the Soviet bureaucracy that was the inevitable product of this accumulation of responsibilities, transformed itself into a definitive system...new relations of production were instituted in the USSR under the pressure of a vital need: to produce at all costs. This end, at least, was imposed upon an almost entirely agricultural country which had just socialized the means of production."

======================

Critiques of ossified bureaucracy and its infantilizing effect on class consciousness, here, are not unique, but what is worth dwelling on here is the treatment of the "intellectual". The revolutionary new intellectual is in murky borderline territory: a traitor to bourgeois interests, yet "viewed with suspicion" (which is not often misplaced?) by workers. There is the danger of reversion to the "classical intellectual" internalizing hegemonic priorities, and of perpetuation of old prejudices...but also of what can happen where political imperatives direct "professional consciousness" (the example of the doctor with the general professional interest in doing health care work and the 'particular' [class] interest distorting that process, is poignant). Is Sartre's solution, then, in turning it all over to anarchic spontaneity? No!

It is obvious that anarchism leads nowhere, today as yesterday. The central question is whether in the end the only possible type of political organization is that which we know in the shape of present CPs: hierarchical division between leadership and rank-and-file, communications and instructions proceeding from above downwards only, isolation of each cell from every other, vertical powers of dissolution and discipline, separation of workers and intellectuals? This pattern developed from a form of organization which was born clandestinely in the time of the Tsars. What are the objective justifications of its existence in the West today?...Is it not possible to conceive of a type of political organization where men are not barred and stifled? Such an organization would contain different currents, and would be capable of closing itself in moments of danger, to reopen thereafter.

A revolutionary party must necessarily reproduce -- up to a certain limit -- the centralization and coercion of the bourgeois state which it is its mission to overthrow. However the whole problem...is that once a party dialectically undergoes this ordeal, it may become arrested thereafter. The result is then that it has enormous difficulty in ever escaping from the bureaucratic rut which it initially accepted to make the revolution against a bureaucratic-military machine. From that moment on, only a cultural revolution against the new order can prevent a degradation of it....The danger of a bureaucratic deterioration will be powerfully present in any Western country, if we succeed in making the revolution: that is absolutely inevitable, since both external imperialist encirclement and the internal class struggle will continue to exist. The idea of an instant and total liberation is a utopia. We can already foresee some of the limits and constraints of a future revolution. But he who takes these as an excuse not to make the revolution and who fails to struggle for it now, is simply a counter-revolutionary.

2.

The essay Czechoslovakia: The Socialism that Came in from the Cold strongly reminded me of Hungarian Tragedy by Peter Fryer, albeit with more existentialist flavour. It raises that profound paradox: the greatest movements toward socialism in the most advanced sense, that is direct workers' control of the means of production to produce for common need, have sprung more from the foundations of 'bureaucratic socialism' than from so-called 'liberal democracy'. Even works like From the Vanguard to the Margins: Workers in Hungary, 1939 to the Present, by no means sympathetic to socialism, make much of the springing up of autonomous workers' organizations as fait accompli before the state could respond with reforms or hostilities. The essay closes by suggesting the way forward for the Left is to be found in critical analysis and application of lessons from these experiments (Czechoslovakia 1968, in particular) in terms of what they imply about the forms our organizing should take.

The glaring complication, of course, is that this was written from Paris in 1970. What applying the lessons of those historical failures means for praxis today is a more complicated question, not least because of the urgency of late-stage capitalism's crises.

===

The introduction and text of a Psychoanalytic Dialogue, while comparatively short, are probably the most 'fun' works in this text. What happens when the patient pulls out a tape recorder, traps the therapist in the room, and starts psychoanalyzing their panic? Real Cuckoo's Nest vibes. Being a student of social psychology and supporter of neurodiversity, it's always cool to see those power dynamics flipped on their head.

[lottie pike · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read part of this but definitely not the majority - it wasn't really what I was expecting in terms of content, but I will definitely return to some of the essays when I've actually read the authors/poets that he was writing about. Seemed a bit pointless to read them when I have no clue what or whom they're talking about

[Mohamed basha · Rating 4 out of 5]

محاوله لمعالجه الخلل البنيويي في الماركسيه من خلال الوجوديه

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A SELECTION OF SARTRE’S WRITINGS FROM THE ‘60s AND ‘70s

Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist, and political activist, who wrote many other books such as 'Being and Nothingness,' 'Existentialism & Human Emotions,' 'The Transcendence of the Ego,' 'Search for a Method,' 'Critique of Dialectical Reason,' 'The Emotions: Outline Of A Theory,' etc.

This is a wide-ranging collection of Sartre’s writings and interviews, including essays such as “The Purposes of Writing,” and “A Plea for Intellectuals”; essays on Vietnam and Czechoslovakia; essays on Kierkegaard and Mallarmé, etc.

He says, “the idea which I have never ceased to develop is that in the end one if always responsible for what is made of one. Even if one can do nothing else besides assume this responsibility. For I believe that a man can always make something out of what is made of him. This is the limit I would today accord to freedom: the small movement which makes of a totally conditioned social being someone who does not render back completely what his conditioning has given him. Which makes of [Jean] Genet a poet when he had been rigorously conditioned to be a thief.” (Pg. 34-35)

In his essay on Kierkegaard, he observes, “The singular universal is this meaning through his Self---the practical assumption and supersession of being as it is---man restores to the universe its enveloping unity, by engraving it as a finite determination and a mortgage on future History in the being which envelops him. Adam temporalizes himself by sin, by necessary free choice and radical transformation of what he is---he brings human temporality into the universe.

"This clearly means that the foundation of History is freedom in EACH MAN. For we are all Adam in so far as each of us commits on his own behalf and on behalf of all a singular sin: in other words finitude, for each person, is necessary and incomparable. By his finite action, the agent alters the course of things---but in conformity with which this course itself ought to be. Man, in fact, is a mediation between a transcendence behind and a transcendence in front, and this twofold transcendence is but one. Thus we can say that through man, the course of things is deviated in the direction of its own deviation.” (Pg. 160-161)

In 'A Plea for Intellectuals,' he argues, “if petty-bourgeois intellectuals are led by their own contradictions to align themselves with the working class, they will serve it at their risk and peril; they may act as theorists but never as organic intellectuals of the proletariat, and this contradiction, no matter how well it may be understood, will never be resolved. Thus our axiom is confirmed that intellectuals cannot receive a mandate from ANYONE.” (Pg. 259)

Later in this same essay, he adds, “Thus an intellectual cannot join workers by saying: ‘I am no longer a petty-bourgeois; I move freely in the universal.’ Quite the contrary; he can only do so by thinking ‘I am a petty-bourgeois; if, in order to resolve MY OWN contradiction, I have placed myself alongside the proletariat and peasantry, I have not thereby ceased to BE a petty-bourgeois; all I can do, by constantly criticizing and radicalizing myself, is step by step to refuse---though this interests no one but myself---my petty-bourgeois conditioning.’” (Pg. 261)

In the “A Friend of the People” interview, he says, “I do not think intellectuals can be defined exclusively in terms of their profession… I should say they can be found in the occupations which I would call the techniques of practical knowledge… the technicians of practical knowledge develop or utilize by means of exact disciplines a body of knowledge whose end is, in principle, the good of all. This knowledge aims, of course, at universality… But the technician of practical knowledge can just as well be a engineer, a scientist, a writer or a teacher.

"In each case, the same contradiction is so be found; the totality of their knowledge is conceptual, that is to say universal, but it is never used by ALL men; it is used… above all by a certain category of persons belonging to the ruling classes and their allies. Thus the application of the universal is never universal, it is particular, it concerns particular people… [the technician] finds that in fact he typically works for the privileged classes and is therefore objectively aligned with them… But when one of them becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work is serves only PARTICULAR INTERESTS, then his awareness of this contradiction… is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual.” (Pg. 286-287)

This collection will be of keen interest to those interested in Sartre’s later thought---particularly its political ramifications.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not optional. Not just "for the late style freaks."

The interviews, all of the political essays and the long concluding section on intellectuals are required reading. These are all written around the Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot and supplement them. I would skip the essays on art criticism and the section on psychoanalysis if that's not a draw for you. They were terrible but the rest was so good that it's still a 5 for me. The section on psychoanalysis was worth it simply to reveal where Sartre can't connect with the clinical practice. He attempts to take away the distance and non-reciprocity characteristic of laying on the couch because it can't fit within his system, there cannot be an aloof position for the analyst. He simply doesn't get it when it comes down to it - he tries to flatten the entire field to fit into his particular Marxist mode of thought. Since, like a good Marxist, he says you can't reason out of your class origin or historical moment, there is no place from which to objectively analyze "outside" of one's relations. The analyst's position is merely an opaque surface, an alien, unfeeling visage that allows one a momentary rupture, a moment when the "view from outside" renders their own neurotic complexes (now just our everyday behavior) more than merely comprehensible. One gets a shock that disables and nullifies the utility of our complexes. This can happen in open reciprocal conversation but it's more likely to occur in front of someone whom you pay to not condescend to and console you.

Sartre is everywhere in this agonizing about his own class position and trying to reason through it and justify it's ability to get on "the right side of history." He is trying to find a way to recuperate his Project from its middle class origin. In so doing, he gives one of the best, most lucid articulations of dialectical thought I've ever read. In fact, if you, like me, have ever been confused by what dialectical reason actually means, the trio of lectures "A Plea for Intellectuals" is one of the best demonstrations of it's "method." Alongside the dialectic of the Critique's serialization vs the group-in-fusion, he poses here the constant lure for the intellectual, an inherently suspect category that must simply live its contradictions seriously, to fall into the category of "false intellectual" (basically everyone on TV). Sartre endeavors to make himself a tragic hero in "A Plea for Intellectuals." It's like he was writing his own eulogy.

As a middle class intellectual, he does romanticize the poor and the working class and underplays how exploited the middle class intellectual is, how they aren't simply fighting for someone else, they are fighting for their own disalienation (I keep thinking that there is a productive cross-reading that one could do with Sartre here in this book and Barbara Ehrenreich's writings on the PMC). He's also completely wrong about how the working class views the dominant class. One thinks he wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of the cultish worship of a Musk or even the regular viewing of "the Kardashians" among people who should know better...

There's some salubrious, clear-headed, and radical prose in here that makes it worth engaging with nonetheless. Useful for ground-clearing. Important. Not just a rag-tag amalgamation of cutting room floor clippings. A good corrective if your only experience of Sartre is "Existentialism as a Humanism." And if you have been reading late Sartre, it's a necessary supplement filled with reflections about and in dialogue with the works you are reading.

[مُـحـمد | Mohammed · Rating 4 out of 5]

مع أهمية النظرية الماركسية في وضع العصا في عجلة الرأسمالية المستغلة وإجبارها على تغيير الكثير من أساليبها الظالمة الا نني أشكل على بعض الأمور من الناحية العلمية, الديالكتيك او الفكرة التي طرحها "هيغل" "بأن الوعي سابق الوجود" الذي كان احد طلبته "كارل ماركس" في هذا الطرح يرى هيغل" ان الوعي سبق الوجود في التكوين وله تبريرات كثيرة في هذا الطرح نحن في غنى عنها في هذا المقال على الأقل , ألان ما يهمنا ان هذا الطرح شق الصف "الهيغلي" الى (يمين ويسار أي اليمين الهيغلي واليسار الهيغلي " وما يهمنا هو اليسار الذي تبنى نظرة معاكسة للنظرة او الفكرة السابقة وكان من اهم رواده "كارل ماركس" الذي يرى من خلال فكرته العكسية "ان الوجود سابق الوعي وهي ما تسمى بالمادية الجدلية" حيث يفترض هنا الاتجاه اليساري أن المادة هي من شكلت الوعي عند الإنسان بعد مرور الزمن حيث ان الإنسان لم يكن واعيا في حالته الوجودية الأولى لكنه حصل على وعيه نتيجة وجوده وتفاعله مع الحياة والعامل المهم في الحصول على الوعي هي "الإنتاج وعلائق الإنتاج" , اذ يرى ماركس أن الإنسان مرً بأنماط إنتاج متعددة لم يكن لديه ذات الوعي, هذا يعني أن نمط الإنتاج المشاعي عندما كان الإنسان يلتقط الطعام لم يكن بذات الوعي عند جماعة نمط الإنتاج الآسيوي وهؤلاء يختلفون عن نمط الإنتاج الإقطاعي والرأسمالي , هذه التحولات في أنماط الإنتاج تدفع بماركس إلى الاعتقاد بأن الوجود سابق الوعي, "لو كان الإنسان واعيا لأنتقل إلى الإنتاج الرأسمالي دون المرور بهذه الأنماط الأخرى",.

[Periplus Bookstores]

Kumpulan esai dan wawancara ini menyajikan gambaran yang hidup tentang luas dan kesatuan pemikiran Sartre, terutama dalam usahanya untuk menggabungkan eksistensialisme orisinalnya dengan pemahaman Marxisme yang diperbarui. Karya-karya yang terangkum di sini mencakup periode penting setelah publikasi Critique of Dialectical Reason pada tahun 1960, yang menjadi titik balik filosofis dalam perkembangan pemikiran pasca-perangnya, hingga awal studinya yang mendalam tentang Flaubert pada tahun 1971.

Buku ini memperlihatkan bagaimana pemikiran Sartre terus berkembang dan merespons perubahan politik dan budaya di dunia kontemporer. Pembaca akan menemukan analisis mendalam tentang konsep-konsep kunci seperti kebebasan, tanggung jawab individu, alienasi, serta pengaruh kondisi sosial dan ekonomi terhadap kesadaran individu.

Karya ini sangat cocok bagi para akademisi, mahasiswa filsafat, teori politik, sejarah intelektual abad ke-20, dan siapa saja yang tertarik pada persinggungan antara filsafat kontinental dan pemikiran politik radikal.
https://blog.periplus.com/2025/07/07/...

[Timothy Morrison]

Copied: Reading George Novack’s essay, Marxism Versus Existentialism, has sent me down an exploratory path of the two philosophies that have the greatest appeal to me.

Novack, in his exploration, comes to the conclusion that the two philosophies can never be mixed. He spells this out firmly and unapologetically in his final sentence by saying that “Their mismating can produce only stillborn offspring, whether in philosophy or in politics.”

This may be true, Existentialism is not at all a political philosophy, it is an individualist one that contends that the absurdity of life (and death) demands of us to embrace our freedom in radical ways. Of course, it would be shortsighted to claim that embracing rebellion is not political due to its individualistic orientation. Albert Camus makes that clear when he says “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.” Paradoxically, Camus also notes that “every act of rebellion against oppression is justified in itself but installs a new form of servitude.”

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

I mean there's just an incredible amount of insight in these pages, it's unreal. I only give it 4 instead of 5 stars because there are admittedly some long sections where I have no idea what he's on about (something something universalizing the totality of the contradictory phenomenon that is both the limit and the beginning of the particular, which is also the universal) but then when I get back on the tracks it's absolutely amazing. I'd probably skip the Vietnam chapter but definitely read the chapter where he talks about the role of intellectuals.

[Tom the book lover · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed diving into Sartre, who I’ve been interested in for a while. Whilst deeply interesting, this book might not be the best entry, for I lacked supplementary context at several moments.
Loved his chapter on the vietnam war & genocide, very current.
I also found the section on psychoanalysis intriguing. Keen to visit Freud next.

Will have to take on being and nothingness soon. But god is it long!

[Joe Sabet · Rating 1 out of 5]

The only essay worth reading imo is the one on the vietnam war and genocide.

[Travis Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense...as usual..:the section on the intellectual was worth it.

[Andrew Noselli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three-star rating, but five stars for philosophical language and ideas.

[a]

surprisingly good sometimes, but slowly just becomes another self-hating bourgeois in the aftermath of May 68

[Manolis P.]

Καλουτσικο βιβλίο αν και τραβηγμένο σε πολλά σημεία αλλά δεν είναι και κάτι που θα σου μείνει αξέχαστο.

[Yano Hz · Rating 4 out of 5]

His writings on the Vietnam War were my favorite.

[Will Bell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like a yoga session, starts easy, gets tough during the middle and then the end is a nice restorative meditation.

[lucas]

Nothing to say. Constructing a thought in alignment with anything said in this would be intellectually deleterious

[J · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not trained as a student of philosophy. My background and specialty (if any) is literature. There are ideas in this book which are likely considered dusty and derelict by modern standards but which hit me rather brightly. I'll explain that in a moment.

Some of the selections in this book couldn't hold my interest, specifically the bit about Kierkegaard - I read it but didn't take much from it. That said, Sartre's "The Purposes of Writing", "Vietnam: Imperialism and Genocide", "Czechoslovakia", and especially "A Plea for Intellectuals" and "A Friend of the People" were...riveting? Pretty much.

Sartre's overview of the place of the intellectual in France from the 14th century to the 20th in "A Plea for Intellectuals" was absolutely fantastic. He took one of my favorite eras (the Enlightenment) and made me question my devotion to its pioneers. The idea that Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau et al. "were called to create a rational conception of the Universe which would embrace and justify the actions and demands of the bourgeoisie" (234) was - I just sat there looking at those two pages spread open. Of course that was their purpose, whether they knew it or not. The idea of "natural laws" governing human interaction works perfectly alongside the sanctification of property and profit! I doubt this concept is new for most people who might read this review but bear in mind I'm not a theorist by nature.

The other major gut-check for me was Sartre's "A Friend of the People" - which was his epilogue to "A Plea..." following the upheavals of May 1968. The best, most concise description of the intellectual that Sartre gives is as follows: "...when one of them [a technician of practical knowledge] becomes aware of the fact that despite the universality of his work it serves only particular interests, then his awareness of this contradiction - what Hegel called an 'unhappy consciousness' - is precisely what characterizes him as an intellectual" (287). According to Sartre a technician of practical knowledge develops or utilizes "by means of exact disciplines a body of knowledge who end is, in principle, the good of all" (286). So it's the contradiction between universalist goals but particularist reality, and the realization of that contradiction, that makes an intellectual. Then what do you do? You examine yourself, you question your bourgeoisie nature (because you're made possible by the bourgeoisie and surplus) and you work to make others aware of the contradiction, and you work with and under, beside and among the proletariat.

Sartre. Bro.

[Zach Wyatt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love Sartre, and I love Marx, and there are some beautiful points here, but I think have been made more succinctly elsewhere. This was a tough read and requires a lot of specific contexts. Heady stuff but altogether important critiques of current (then and now) Marxists losing the plot and being not only idealist but static in their understanding of Marx's ultimate goal.