it, to reject it and take it up again, to absorb it. This is the condition for
arriving at atrue socialism”(L/S 61 , emphasis added).
In a way that echoes the title as well as the thesis of “Socialism
or Barbarism” – a leftist group with which he had ambivalent relations
over the years – Sartre summarized his vision of the future: “Either
man is finished...or else he will adapt by bringing about some form of
libertarian socialism.” He explains what he sees as the coming revolu-
tion: “Revolution is not a single moment in which one power overthrows
another; it is a long movement in which power is dismantled. Nothing
can guarantee success for us, nor can anything rationally convince us that
failure is inevitable. But the alternatives really are socialism or barbar-
ism” (L/S 83 – 84 ).
“All Power to the Imagination”
A graffito on the walls during the events of May 1968 read: “L’Imagin-
ation au pouvoir.” The cry to leap from the political rut into which
parties of all stripes were stuck voiced the spirit of the rebels in the
streets. It also echoed the persistent theme of Sartrean thought since
he penned his thesis on the imagination for his DES in 1926 – 1927.
As we remarked at the outset, it has been the thesis and the theme of
the present work. The path toward existential politics charted in the
present chapter should support, if not confirm, that Sartre was at heart
a philosopher of the imaginary.^34 Given the major role played by the
concept of the imagination throughout Sartre’s thought – not to mention
the ease with which he moved into imaginative literature and his pen-
chant for striking “phenomenological” descriptions, it should come
as no surprise that his guiding values of “socialism and freedom” should
assume synthesis “if only in the imagination” (SG). Such is his “vision”
of the “new man,” the “socialist man,” whom we cannot yet experience
but who will emerge with the advent of a “true” socialism (ORR
336 – 337 ). In a remark that anticipates his hope for a society of fraternal
equality and cognitive transparency repeated in his last discussions
(^34) I have developed this thesis elsewhere with additional evidence. See, for example, “L’Imagin-
ation au Pouvoir. The Evolution of Sartre’s Political and Social Thought,”Political Theory 7 ,
no. 2 (May 1979 ): 157 – 190 , and “Sartre as Philosopher of the Imagination,”Philosophy Today
50 , supplement ( 2006 ): 106 – 112 (double columns).
312 Means and ends: political existentialism