Sartre and de Beauvoir’s radical turns were shaped by the Algerian decolonization struggle

Evidence

For a whole generation of French writers, from Merleau-Ponty to Andre Malraux, support for the anticolonial struggles was the natural extension of the anti-fascist struggles at home and the earlier movement of solidarity with the Republic in Spain; for others, the issues of colony and empire served to open up a whole range of other buried areas as well, from ontology to gendering. Thus, for example, Sartre’s philosophical and literary radicalism from the late 1940s onwards, as well as Simone de Beauvoir’s emergence in the 1950s as the seminal figure in modern feminism, are inseparable from the reshaping of their lives and ideas due to their involvement in the French anti-war movement during the Algerian Revolution; and it is symptomatic of the whole drift of modern French thought that the decisive attack on Sarrre, mounted by Claude Levi-Straussand mounted, precisely, in the name of the anthropological pre-modern - came towards the very end of the Algerian War. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 245

Categorization

• XREF: Material grounding that European philosophical radicalism was itself alloyed with the colonized world — relevant to judging postcolonial theory’s repossession of these figures. — connects to: Sartre’s Algerian independence campaigning drew death threats and a real bomb attack — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 875

Broader Connections

• Sartre’s Algerian independence campaigning drew death threats and a real bomb attack #exemplifies (0.82) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 875