Sartre's second century

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SARTRE'S LEGACY IN AN ERA
OF OBSCURANTISM
WILLIE THOMPSON
Introduction
This chapter sets out to suggest why we should regard Sartre's work
and political example as continuing to be highly pertinent at the start of the
twenty-first century, as well as in the likely circumstances of the decades
to follow. 1
John Gerassi described Sartre as "the hated conscience of his
century", 2 and with good reason. He certainly made himself hated for the
positions he adopted on a great range of social and political issues, and
during his active years he disdained to conceal his own hatred of the
bourgeoisie. In consequence of his intellectual superstardom, his standpoints
counted for something; in France, certainly, during the Algerian
War, his outspoken opinions provoked assassination attempts by the OAS 3
and compelled him to go into hiding. Apart from being a philosopher of
the first rank, he was also a major novelist, biographer and autobiographer,
playwright and essayist as well as a political activist—and all this in
addition to the perpetual fascination that his highly unconventional
personal life exercised upon his contemporaries (and it continues to do so
1 A previous draft of this chapter was given as a paper at the UK Sartre Society's
Centenary Conference, Institut Fran^ais, London, 19-20 March 2005.
2 Gerassi, Hated Conscience,
3 Organisation de I'Armee Secrete, a supposedly clandestine grouping of serving
and retired French military officers and men, pledged to keeping Algeria French,
and therefore bitterly opposed to Sartre's de-colonising libertarianism.