Remembering Sartre

In this article reviewing three books on Sartre written by Ronald Aronson, Bernhard-Henri Lévy, and Ronald Santoni, I note that an enduring interest in Sartre’s life and philosophy centers on the justifiability of revolutionary violence and terror. I argue that critics too often, and sometimes obsessively, focus on the same texts and actions, typically related to his support for communism in the 1950s. They thus often reproduce a Cold War narrative of his life and work, wrongly obscuring his other great political engagement on behalf of national liberation and anticolonial resistance movements around the world. When critics do, however, consider his views in relationship to decolonization, they are often reduced to the muckracking pages of his preface to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth – a text that is in fact unrepresentative of positions he took in more sustained works, such as The Critique of Dialectical Reason and the 1964 “Rome Lecture” on ethics. I suggest that this “Cold War lens” ought to be removed, so that a fuller and more nuanced understanding of Sartre’s views on political violence might be achieved. Indeed, Aronson’s book is the only one among the three that begins to make this move.

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Paige ArthurEmail:

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Paige Arthur   is the Deputy Director of the Research Unit at the International Center for Transitional Justice, an international organization that assists countries pursuing accountability for past mass atrocity or human rights abuse. She holds a Ph.D. in History from the University of California, Berkeley (2004), and is a specialist on the intellectual politics of European decolonization and of its aftermath. She has written about the politics of race in 1970s France (article forthcoming in Jonathan Judaken, editor, Race After Sartre) as well as the contemporary relevance of Third Worldism (Ethics & International Affairs, 2002). Her current research focuses on the relationship between identity politics and transitional justice. For more than 5 years, she was an editor of the journal Ethics & International Affairs, published by the Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs. She was also the Senior Program Officer for the Ethics in a Violent World initiative at the Carnegie Council. She has taught at both UC Berkeley and the New School.