Communists rejected existentialist freedom because it evaded fixed political commitment.

Evidence

A 1946 pamphlet by the Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre had summed up existentialism as ‘a dreary, flabby mixture’ leading to too much dangerous ‘open-mindedness’. People were free, Sartre said — but Lefebvre demanded to know, ‘what would a man who every morning chose between fascism and anti-fascism represent?’ How can such a person be considered better than someone ‘who had chosen, once and for all, the fight against fascism, or who had not even had to choose?’ Lefebvre’s point sounds reasonable until you think about what it implies. The party demanded the kind of commitment that means never having to think again, and this Sartre could not support — yet. Later, he tied himself in knots trying to resolve the conflict between his support for revolutionary politics and his basic existentialist principles, which ran counter to it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 792

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Sartre’s later ‘dirty hands’ politics and his tortured attempt to reconcile existentialism with Marxism throughout the 1950s — the Critique of Dialectical Reason arc. — connects to: Both Church and Marxists condemned existentialist freedom for undermining their authority — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 42
• SEED: The tension between ‘commitment that means never having to think again’ and genuine critical freedom is a sharp essay angle on political purity versus open-mindedness.