Sartre's second century

208 Chapter Fourteen
superior place and status in the world. This was certainly intended to apply
to the bourgeoisie—and a fortiori to the fascists—of that particular time,
and would equally fit the apostles of global corporatism in the present. If
we are all in some degree prone to bad faith, such people are sure to be
particularly severely addicted, and if bad faith is to be deplored they are to
be especially condemned. To be sure, Brunet, the Communist militant in
The Roads to Freedom (of which the first volume appeared in 1945) is
also mired in dogmatic bad faith and yet is a relatively sympathetic
character; however, his project is to destroy the existing social universe,
not to assert his rightful place within it. Even setting aside the questions of
ethics and commitment, if found to be convincing and taken seriously,
Sartre's analysis of the cogito, consciousness, choice and responsibility,
leaves no room for any of the obscurantist fantasies noted above.
Political Legacy
Even those most appreciative of Sartre's life and writings are
constrained to admit the fallibility of some of his political judgments. His
commitment to political engagement, which he assumed in the mid-1940s,
was sometimes expressed in dubious fashion, for example, his degree of
identification with the Soviet bloc and the French Communist Party in the
early 1950s, and his embrace of the French Maoists in the late 1960s and
early 1970s. Nevertheless, even when he was wrong, Sartre was, as the
phrase has it, "right to be wrong". If he chose highly contentious allies
with politically disreputable connections, he did so from the position that
it was necessary to decide between the available alternatives as they
actually existed, rather than to paralyse one's action on the pretext that an
imaginary perfection was not to be had. Sartre's primary and fundamental
commitment was to a project of emancipation: it is the thread that runs
through all his work from the early 1930s to the early 1970s.
From the mid-1940s, he correctly identified the principal threat to an
emancipatory programme as capitalism, and in particular American
capitalism and the imperial ambitions it generated in the US state system
(though never failing to appreciate the cultural attainments of American
society). In the context of the early twenty-first century, that insight
appears particularly prescient and well-founded, the more so when the
imperial project's ideological wrapping takes the form of market fundamentalism
and the kind of parliamentarianism that Sartre despised. No less
relevant is his intransigent denunciation of colonialism, a condemnation
which he expressed both in writing and in action, putting himself on the
line in both respects during the Algerian War. Once again, the relevance is