Sartre’s radical freedom doctrine unintentionally justified the status quo

Evidence

To Marcuse, Sartre had erroneously made absurdity into an ontological rather than a historical condition. As a result, he fell back into an idealistic internalization of freedom as something opposed to the outside, heteronomous world. Despite his avowed revolutionary intentions, his politics and his philosophy were totally at odds. By locating freedom in the pour-soi (being-for-itself, a version of Hegel’s fur-sich) and denying that the pour-soi could become en-soi (being-in-itself, or ansich), Sartre severed subjectivity from objectivity in a way that denied reconciliation even as a utopian possibility. Moreover, by overemphasizing the freedom of the subject and ignoring the constraints produced by his historical condition, Sartre had become an unwitting apologist for the status quo. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 826

Categorization

• XREF: Marcuse’s critique of Sartre’s idealist freedom connects to his broader arguments, developed in Eros and Civilization, against abstract subjective autonomy — and to the Institute’s running critique of idealist philosophies that bracket material conditions. — connects to: Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 185; The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 525; Radicalization theory was designed to serve counterterrorism policy, not truth — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 599 (+1 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how far does this 1948 Marcuse critique of Sartre anticipate Adorno’s later polemics in The Jargon of Authenticity?

Broader Connections

• Sartre grounds all value in an unjustified, self-legitimizing freedom #expands (0.85) — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre, 185
• The war drove Sartre from individualist freedom toward Marxist social determinism #qualifies (0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 525
• Radicalization theory was designed to serve counterterrorism policy, not truth #epitomizes (0.75) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 599