little use. Though the matter is complex and Sartre’s reflections are often
ad hoc and flexible, focused, as they usually were, on specific problems
in concrete situations, we must recognize that there are nonnegotiables
in his political and ethical theories. One such is the free organic individ-
ual (the responsible subject) and another is the value concept of freedom.
They emerge at each turn of his thought. In effect, we are charting
a roughly parallel development of his ethics and his politics posed in
the conclusion ofTranscendence of the Ego, emerging into full light with
his “discovery” of the philosophical significance of society in the late
1930 s and early 1940 s, and continuing to the hypotheses entertained
in his discussions with Benny Le ́vy in the aftermath of the “events
of May, 1968 .”
Humanisms and the political
We witnessed Sartre’s strong animus against several types of humanism
in the novel that made him famous,Nausea( 1938 ). But a year later he
was applying that negative view to political principles in hisWar Diaries,
minus the total rejection displayed in the novel:
If we are looking for political principles today, we have really only four conceptions
of man to choose between. The narrow conservative synthetic conception (Action
franc ̧aise, for example); the updated narrow synthetic conception (racism, Marxism);
the broad conservative synthetic conception (humanitarianism); the analytical con-
ception (anarchic individualism). But nowhere do we find any reference to the human
condition, determined on the basis of individual “human reality.”^17
The problem, in his opinion, is that, of the many meanings of “human-
ity,” “the modern meaning – the human condition of every individual –
has not yet been unveiled” (WD 25 ).^18
What is that “modern” meaning that will engender the political
principles of the future? With the wisdom of hindsight, we can say that
it is ahumanism of “situation.”Parsing that term as Sartre uses it, we find
that every situation is at once objective, practical (lived) and historical.
How these features will emerge in Sartre’s political and social thought
(^17) WD 28 , entry of Nov. 21 , 1939.
(^18) Subsequently, he would defend a Marxist “humanism of work” (CP 37 , 55 , 200 ) and a
“humanism of need” (in the Rome Gramsci lectures, see below,Chapter 14 ).
290 Means and ends: political existentialism