Michael Scriven, Jean-Paul Sartre

Abstract

"Michael Scriven, Jean-Paul Sartre: Politics and Culture in Postwar France In response—notably to the publication of Le Siècle de Sartre by the high-profi le philosopher and novelist Bernard-Henri Lévy, there has been a considerable renewal of interest in Sartre in France in the last year. Sartre’s work has suffered a comparative critical neglect for some years in his home country and Lévy’s wide-ranging and provocative book does much to reaffi rm the centrality of Sartre in twentieth century French thought. Michael Scriven’s latest contribution to the critical debate about Sartre in the Anglophone context, although rather different in its focus, similarly seeks to emphasize the lasting importance and continuing relevance of Sartre’s intellectual and political concerns to the contemporary world. Scriven sets out to elucidate the ways in which the political and the cultural uniquely intersect in Sartre’s writings and form a synthesis such that each is constantly illuminating of the other. Scriven divides his material into two parts and their respective titles, ‘Sartre’s Revolutionary Politics’ and ‘Sartre’s Cultural Politics’, clearly suggest that it is the political dimension in Sartre, in its various manifestations in his life and writings, which is to be the unifying theme of the study. This suggestion is borne out by the importance which Scriven explicitly attaches, at numerous points, to situating Sartre in the French socio-political context of his time. Central to Scriven’s argument throughout is the important claim, for example, that the originality and dynamism of Sartre’s work owes much to the tension between his commitment to active engagement in political debate and revolutionary politics under the Fourth Republic whilst continuing to employ the intellectual methods which he acquired under the Third Republic and the cultural forms characteristic of that period."