Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
Sartre's second century
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208 Chapter Fourteen<br />
superior place and status in the world. This was certainly intended to apply<br />
to the bourgeoisie—and a fortiori to the fascists—of that particular time,<br />
and would equally fit the apostles of global corporatism in the present. If<br />
we are all in some degree prone to bad faith, such people are sure to be<br />
particularly severely addicted, and if bad faith is to be deplored they are to<br />
be especially condemned. To be sure, Brunet, the Communist militant in<br />
The Roads to Freedom (of which the first volume appeared in 1945) is<br />
also mired in dogmatic bad faith and yet is a relatively sympathetic<br />
character; however, his project is to destroy the existing social universe,<br />
not to assert his rightful place within it. Even setting aside the questions of<br />
ethics and commitment, if found to be convincing and taken seriously,<br />
<strong>Sartre's</strong> analysis of the cogito, consciousness, choice and responsibility,<br />
leaves no room for any of the obscurantist fantasies noted above.<br />
Political Legacy<br />
Even those most appreciative of <strong>Sartre's</strong> life and writings are<br />
constrained to admit the fallibility of some of his political judgments. His<br />
commitment to political engagement, which he assumed in the mid-1940s,<br />
was sometimes expressed in dubious fashion, for example, his degree of<br />
identification with the Soviet bloc and the French Communist Party in the<br />
early 1950s, and his embrace of the French Maoists in the late 1960s and<br />
early 1970s. Nevertheless, even when he was wrong, Sartre was, as the<br />
phrase has it, "right to be wrong". If he chose highly contentious allies<br />
with politically disreputable connections, he did so from the position that<br />
it was necessary to decide between the available alternatives as they<br />
actually existed, rather than to paralyse one's action on the pretext that an<br />
imaginary perfection was not to be had. <strong>Sartre's</strong> primary and fundamental<br />
commitment was to a project of emancipation: it is the thread that runs<br />
through all his work from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.<br />
From the mid-1940s, he correctly identified the principal threat to an<br />
emancipatory programme as capitalism, and in particular American<br />
capitalism and the imperial ambitions it generated in the US state system<br />
(though never failing to appreciate the cultural attainments of American<br />
society). In the context of the early twenty-first <strong>century</strong>, that insight<br />
appears particularly prescient and well-founded, the more so when the<br />
imperial project's ideological wrapping takes the form of market fundamentalism<br />
and the kind of parliamentarianism that Sartre despised. No less<br />
relevant is his intransigent denunciation of colonialism, a condemnation<br />
which he expressed both in writing and in action, putting himself on the<br />
line in both respects during the Algerian War. Once again, the relevance is