Existentialism

The Routledge Dictionary of Politics, Third Edition

The existentialist tradition has influenced European political thinkers in various ways since at least the 18th century. Its most recent significant manifestation is in French political thought, with the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80) and Albert Camus (1913–60). It is unclear whether there are any specific doctrines in existentialism that actually have a direct political consequence, and the philosophy is, in any case, one that Anglo-American culture always found difficult and obscure. Most probably, the political influence of existentialism has more to do with the milieu of left-wing café society, or, as in Camus’s case, radical anti-colonialism, in which it was espoused than with such logical connections as one might find normally between a philosophical tradition and a political doctrine. Sartre himself was for some time a follower of Marxism as well as existentialism, and his political positions derived rather more obviously from this. The nearest one could safely come to describing the politics of existentialism is to suggest that the philosophy speaks to those who see modern societies as dominated by bureaucrats, characterized by alienation and dehumanization, and to those who would wish to destroy these aspects of state power.

Indeed a general distaste for organized power, an opposition to being forced to choose between limited alternatives in terms of organized left-and right-wing parties, and a feeling that individual autonomy and creativity are being destroyed by politicians runs through Sartre’s work. Especially in his famous four-volume novel of French life from the Spanish Civil War to the fall of France in 1940, The Roads to Freedom (1945–49), Sartre certainly paints a perceptive emotional analysis of the corruption of the French Third Republic, and it may well be that it is in the not strictly philosophical literature that the political theory is to be found. This would apply equally to other modern existentialists, especially Camus, who had grown up in French Algeria and developed a hatred for the colonial mentality. In the end there is little more than a politics of despair and a fear of power to be found as theoretical doctrine in the existentialist works. One might well link this political reaction to the politics of Kafka’s The Trial. This is not to deny the genuine influence on many in political circles, especially among fringe left-wing groups and militant students, and many serious critics of political theory might well wish to claim a more clear-cut political consequence for existentialism. What would probably not be denied is that its days of influence have been, at least temporarily, over since the 1960s, largely to be replaced by more recent French radical philosophy in the guise of various versions of post-modernism.