Sartre’s Critique aims to reconcile individual responsibility with uncontrollable collective and contingent historical events.

Evidence

It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later. He had already moved away from some of what he had said in Being and Nothingness, with its individualist conception of freedom. Now, he sought to develop a more Marxist-influenced view of human life as purposeful and social. This was one reason why he never managed to write the follow-up volume on existentialist ethics: his ideas on the subject had changed too much. He did write many draft pages, published after his death as Notebooks for an Ethics, but he could not give them a coherent shape. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 525 (#expands, via linked claim)

Very soon after the Hungarian uprising, Sartre began to write a new work of vast extent, the Critique of Dialectical Reason. It was an attempt to create something on the scale of Being and Nothingness, but built around his new social thinking and the ideal of political commitment. Instead of emphasing consciousness, nothingness and freedom, he now brought everything back to concrete situations and the principle of concerted action in the world. Beauvoir considered the Critique of Dialectical Reason Sartre’s ultimate response to the catastrophe of 1956. As if merging Marxism with existentialism were not acrobatic enough, he was now trying to adapt the result to a situation in which the Soviet Union had proved itself untrustworthy. As Sartre himself put it in 1975, ‘The Critique is a Marxist work written against the Communists.’ It could also be seen as an existentialist work written against the old, unpoliticised existentialism. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 853 (#responds-to, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sartre’s Critique philosophically grounds already-accepted Marxist history; The May Events of 1968 vindicated Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique; Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 511 (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s Critique reworked Marxist economism into praxis-language for a new era of revolutionary ferment #expands (0.85)
• The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism #expands (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 525
• Sartre’s late thought shifted from individual freedom toward political commitment #responds-to (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 853
• The Critique’s final section turns abstract structures into concrete history #expands (0.78) — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 557
• Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory #epitomizes (0.72) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 511
• The group in Sartre mirrors individual consciousness as an ontological failure #expands (0.72)