meanness is in the system.”^3 But the responsible individuals are the prey
of the existentialist. Secondly, his conception of political commitment
involved a “curiously ambivalent” attitude toward physical violence.
Though he opposed violence for its own sake, in a society such as ours
in which he believed violence was systemic, he considered violent
opposition to be “counter-violence” and thus justified within limits.^4
Thirdly, he maintained a fundamentally anarchistic view of authority and
a pessimistic opinion of social relations. Despite flashes of enthusiasm in
later life for the effectiveness of small, spontaneously organized action
groups such as Party cells, that threatened exploitative institutions,
they seemed often, if not always, to be absorbed by those organizations
or to harden into similar collectives themselves. Sartre gave this as the
reason why hisCritique of Dialectical Reasonshould be read as a funda-
mentally anti-Communist book (“a Marxist work written against the
Communists,” as he put it).^5 So let us pursue this path according to
several shifts in his political stance, keeping in mind that there is an
ethical dimension to most of these moves as Sartre seeks to determine
the responsible parties sustaining and navigating the waves of impersonal
structures and social causes – an existentialist hallmark.
Political bent of the student, scholar, teacher ( 1915 – 1939 )
In his early years, Sartre’s relation to the political was oblique; on the
one hand, it reflected his relations with his maternal grandfather, his
stepfather and, on the other, it was influenced by his friends and teachers
at the two prestigious Parisian lyce ́es he attended, Henri-IV and Louis-le
Grand, and the ENS. The two adults exemplified the moderate conser-
vative ideals of the Radical-Socialist Party of the Third Republic, which
each seemed to champion and which Sartre dismissed as the party of
functionaries, anticlericals and the petit bourgeoisie.
His close, long-lasting friendship with Paul Nizan, on the other hand,
certainly affected Sartre’s distrust of the Communist Party that was
never completely healed, even in the midst of his fellow-traveling in
the early 1950 s. Nizan, who died at the battle of Dunkirk in May of 1940 ,
(^3) CP 283.
(^4) See his address to the inaugural session of UNESCO at the Sorbonne, Nov. 1 , 1946 ,ch. 10 ,n. 1.
(^5) L/S 18.
Political bent of the student, scholar, teacher (1915–1939) 285