Sartre's Political Practice

Sartre's political actions, rather than his political thinking, are the subject of these notes: the way he has judged the history through which he has lived, how he chose sides, and why, the people he allied himself with, and those he allies himself with today. It is a limited topic, and an arbitrary one to the extent that a political dimension cannot be peeled away from the overall theoretical endeavour of the French philosopher. And not because every philosophy is at the same time an ideology-consciousness or false consciousness of society; but for the specific reason that Sartre's theoretical endeavour is a reflection upon how man takes his place in history and operates within it. Situation, project, freedom, alienation, violence-the Sartrean themes-are the conceptual material underlying his choices, which, in their turn, continually refer back to his material.