Existentialism directly fueled the rights movements of mid-century

Evidence

What you read influences your life: the story of existentialism as it spread around the world in the fifties and sixties bears this out more than any other modern philosophy. By feeding feminism, gay rights, the breaking down of class barriers, and the anti-racist and anti-colonial struggles, it helped to change the basis of our existence today in fundamental ways. … The Swiss psychiatrists Medard Boss and Ludwig Binswanger developed ‘Daseinanalysis’, based on Heidegger’s ideas; later Sartre’s ideas became more influential in the US and Britain. Rollo May and Irvin Yalom worked in an overtly existentialist framework, and similar ideas guided ‘anti-psychiatrists’ such as R. D. Laing as well as the ‘logotherapist’ Viktor Frankl, whose experiences in a Nazi concentration camp had led him to conclude that the human need for meaning was almost as vital as that for food or sleep. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 889

Categorization

• XREF: Connects existentialism to the political-activist flowering of the 60s, a thread worth tracing against the later critique that existentialism was apolitical. — connects to: Surveillance, data farming, and revived conflict renew the case for existentialist freedom. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 97; Popularized existentialism supplied the counterculture’s vocabulary and impetus — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 915; Existentialism’s appeal rested on a world of sin, love, and politics. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 900 (+7 more)
• DEFINE: Briefly defines Daseinanalysis, logotherapy, and their founders as the Heidegger- and Sartre-derived therapy lineage.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing how an explicitly individualist philosophy became a mass social movement — Bakunin-like paradox.

Broader Connections

• Existentialism is by nature applied to real individual lives #expands (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 687
• Existentialist categories migrated into postwar social science via Riesman, Goffman, and Arendt #corroborates (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 895
• Existentialist philosophy was shaped by the wars and politics of the European century #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 103
• Existentialism sought lived experience rather than explaining it away through abstract systems #expands (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1025
• Nazism and Stalinism, not better theory, revived liberal natural rights #qualifies (0.75) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 285