Humanizing Business – A Sartrean Perspective

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre, the quintessential French intellectual of the mid-Twentieth Century, had virtually no business experience of his own, and was quite aware of the disadvantages of this. In a 1940 letter to his friend Simone de Beauvoir, written while on military service during the so-called “phony war” that preceded the French government’s surrender to Nazi Germany, he wrote a candid portrait of himself as coming from a family of state employees and hence being hopeless with respect to handling money, at home with neither the working class nor the class of employers, totally unfamiliar with farm life, a thoroughly citified Parisian. During the next several years he wrote his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, and gradually developed a greater sensitivity to social issues. The individual who emerged in later years, especially in his later magnum opus, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, was a proponent of socialism, a sometime supporter of the Soviet experiment who eventually declared it to be failed and wrote a very insightful although incomplete analysis, in the second volume of the Critique, of that experiment as it developed during the 1930s. He was very much at home in cafés and restaurants, small businesses par excellence, and with the house that published almost all his writings, Gallimard, but apparently had very few personal dealings with large corporations. Nevertheless, it will be possible to draw some useful lessons concerning business from at least three of his analyses in the Critique: of the market and of the “Top Ten” record phenomenon in the post-War United States in Volume One, and of the boxing industry near the beginning of Volume Two.