Sartrean Politics: Transition and Division

Abstract

In an illuminating commentary on Sartre’s intellectual itinerary, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis characterised Sartre’s politics as a ceaseless quest for the agent in the historical process.¹ For Pontalis, Sartre’s political evolution is best understood as an attempt to locate and engage with privileged agents of social change at different moments in Sartre’s own ideological evolution. In practical terms this translated itself into a three-stage developmental process during which Sartre successively privileged first the individual, second the Communist Party, and third youth. In Pontalis’s interpretative schema what remains paramount throughout is the systematic rejection by Sartre of all forms of philosophical and political passivity, and an ensuing commitment to focus on those key agencies whose historical agenda was actively to dislocate in some way or other the established order of things. Although perhaps slightly reductive in scope and complexity, Pontalis’s interpretation has the merit of providing a contextualising framework within which to explore the nature of Sartre’s involvement in politics in the postwar period.