‘I can want only the freedom of others’ Jean-Paul Sartre

Jean-Paul Sartre is best known as the pre-eminent philosopher of individual freedom. He is the one who told us that we are totally free. Robert Bernasconi shows how the early existentialist Sartre became, in stages, the political champion of the oppressed. Extracts are drawn from the full range of Sartre’s writings: the novel Nausea, the drama No Exit, the political essay ‘Communists and Peace’, as well as the major philosophical texts, Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason. They show why of all major twentieth-century philosophers Sartre was the one who most easily passed beyond the confines of the academy to a general readership.