Reference Writers: Jean-Paul Sartre

 

Jean-Paul Sartre Archive

1905-1980

Jean-Paul Sartre - sketch taken from Hegel Made Easy of intellectual looking east european man in thick glasses

“What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. If man as the existentialist sees him is not definable, it is because to begin with he is nothing. He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” Existentialism is a Humanism


Biography

Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946

The Time of the Assassins*, 1946
The Historical Process*, 1947
The Birth of Israel*, 1949

From Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960)

Marxism & Existentialism (The Search for Method 1)
The Problem of Mediations (The Search for Method 2)

The Dogmatic Dialectic and the Critical Dialectic (pp. 15-41)
Critique of Critical Investigation (pp. 42-48)
Collectives (pp. 253-259)
The Fused Group (pp. 345-357)
Bureaucracy and the Cult of Personality (pp. 655-663)
Racism and Colonialism as Praxis and Process (pp. 714-734)
The Intelligibility of History (final section, pp. 805-818)

We Are All Assassins*, 1958
Letter in Support of the Jeanson Network*, 1960
Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”, 1961


A Fellow Traveler of the Communist Party*, 1972
Illegalism and Ultra-Leftism*, 1972
Elections: A Trap for Fools, 1973
The Slow Death of Andreas Baader*, 1974
Introduction to “It is Right to Rebel”*, February 26, 1974

To the Nutcase*, by Louis-Ferdinand Céline 1948


* Translated especially for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor, under Creative Commons Licence.

 

Further reading:

The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, 1949
One Dimensional Man, Herbert Marcuse, 1964
Preface to History & Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs, 1967
Sartre: Outsider Looking In, Raya Dunayevskaya, 1973
Marxism Versus Existentialism, George Novack
Is Nature Dialectical?, George Novack
Existentialism and Marxism, Doug Lorimer
Engels on Materialism
The Algerian War 1954-1962
Dialectic and History, Lévi-Strauss, 1962