What happened to Sartre, who had previously defined himself as an anti-bourgeois writer, in the early years of that conflict and what do The War Diaries reveal about the evolution of his thought? In an interview conducted in May 1975, Jean-Paul Sartre looked back on a “great change in my thinking” that occurred during World War II. Birchall has also translated the writings of Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer. These works have contributed greatly to the contextualization of his place within the broader history of the French and European Left.īeyond his work on Sartre, Birchall is the co-author (with Tony Cliff) of France: The Struggle Goes On (1968), as well as Workers against the Monolith: The Communist Parties since 1943 (1974), Bailing Out the System: Reformist Socialism in Western Europe, 1944-85 (1986), The Spectre of Babeuf (1997), A Rebel’s Guide to Lenin (2005), and Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (2011). Birchall is the author of a major study of the philosopher, Sartre against Stalinism (2004), and has written numerous articles and reviews on Sartre’s philosophical and political thought. To address the centrality of the Second World War in Sartre’s biography, The National WWII Museum’s Institute for the Study of War and Democracy has drawn on the expertise of Ian Birchall. What is often overlooked about Sartre is the importance of World War II to his life and thought. Faulkner and Dos Passos), jazz, opposition to colonialism, antisemitism, and psychoanalysis.Ī sharp and incisive essayist and biographer, he also penned some of the greatest texts of twentieth-century literature like the novels Nausea (1938) and The Roads to Freedom series (1947-51), the short-story collection The Wall and Other Stories (1939), and plays such as The Flies (1943), No Exit (1944), The Devil and the Good Lord (1951), and The Condemned of Altona (1959). Always zealously guarding his independence as an author, Sartre wrote about topics as diverse as American literature (e.g. He was extremely active in leftist politics in France and internationally for more than 30 years. Sartre also became a crucial figure in Marxist thought with “Materialism and Revolution” (1946), The Question of Method (1957), and the first volume of Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). His works, including The Transcendence of the Ego (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination (1940), Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (1943), and “Existentialism is a Humanism” (1945), are still studied today. Between roughly 19, when he was at his most productive, Sartre exerted enormous influence on such currents as existentialism (with which he is most associated), phenomenology, and philosophical anthropology. One risks dramatic understatement in designating Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) as among the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.

Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Gift of Charles (A.B.’84) and Linda Googe, 2019.17.157.

Top Image: Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the year Sartre won the Nobel Prize.

Post wwii optimism and pessimism