to compare it with what might be called the “ratifying” lecture/event
“Is Existentialism a Humanism?” that took place two weeks later.
IntroducingLes Temps Modernes
This programmatic text presents Sartre’s view of the editorship he
intends to give his review.^8 In view of its subsequent history, one can
see how closely he pursued the twin ideals of socialismandfreedom that
guided its inception. Philosopher – and specifically metaphysician – that
he was, he models his journal on the pursuit of asynthetic anthropology
in the broad, French sense that would embrace the “human sciences”
as well as literature and the arts. Exploiting the distinction between the
analytic spirit and the spirit of synthesis, Sartre irenically weighs the
respective values and dangers of each: “atomistic” materialism with its
respect for the individual and “collectivist” domination with its sense
of the whole. The former he associates with the bourgeois mind, its false
ideal of disinterested, value-free inquiry, its blindness to class identity,
and its “mechanical” psychology. Turning to literature, as the new
journal must, Sartre finds these bourgeois qualities incarnate in the work
of Flaubert and especially Proust.^9 The threat of synthetic thinking, he
grants, is the ease with which it can slip into totalitarianism, willing
to dissolve the individual in the group and its objective interests. “Thus
do the analytic demands of Rousseau frequently interfere in many minds
with the synthetic demands of Marxism” (Introduction 263 ). The prob-
lem lies with the copula as this essay makes clear: socialismorfreedom is
a neat if not easy choice; but socialismandfreedom is problematic; its
resolution depends on the meaning one gives to “freedom.” Sartre
agrees and from now on he will champion a “concrete” or what is more
commonly called “positive” freedom that, he argues, demands a kind of
socialism.
Despite its philosophical grounding, the focus of the journal is not
primarily theoretical; its stated project is to be liberating. So the
(^8) Following Jeffrey Mehlman’s translation ofPre ́sentation des Temps ModernesinWL 249 ;
9 hereafter Introduction with reference to theWLedition.
On Proust as exemplary of this bourgeois penchant for “psychological” explanations, see
What is Literature?, “The bourgeois saw onlypsychologicalrelations among the individuals
whom his analytical propaganda circumvented and separated” (WL 107 , emphasis his).
IntroducingLes Temps Modernes 233