Sartre’s late thought shifted from individual freedom toward political commitment

Evidence

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

Categorization

• DEFINE: Scans the defining shift of the Critique of Dialectical Reason: from consciousness/freedom to concrete situations and concerted action.
• XREF: Echoes the earlier contrast between Being and Nothingness and later social existentialism; aligns with the reader’s existentialism orientation goal. — connects to: Sartre reframed freedom as a demand for responsibility born of nuclear-age self-knowledge — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 41; Sartre made freedom and personal responsibility the burden of his resistance allegory — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 511; The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 525 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Sartre ultimately abandoned his early doctrine of absolute freedom #corroborates (0.82) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 173
• Beauvoir’s situated account of freedom moved Sartre beyond his earlier absolutism #corroborates (0.80) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 46