Sartre and Terror
by Ian Birchall
It is one of Sartre’s greatest strengths that his declared aim was ’to write for his own time’. From the 1940s onward he became ever less interested in ’timeless’ questions, and ever more concerned to explore the concrete realities of his own age. Yet paradoxically this engagement with the contemporary makes it particularly tempting to speculate about what would have been Sartre’s response to the events of our own age. Ever since his death in 1980 those of us who have drawn insight and inspiration from Sartre’s works have tended to ask how Sartre might have judged particular political developments. And because of the central place given to violence in Sartre’s thought, as well as his detailed reflections on the Second World War and the wars in Algeria and Vietnam, it is only too natural to ask how Sartre would have responded to the appalling events of 11 September 2001 and the subsequent ’war on terror’.
a) Sartre and the Twenty-First Century
To raise the question of what Sartre might have thought of the events of 11 September provokes the response that, if he had been able to comment on them, he would have been ninety-six years old. I was present in 1966 at the meeting where the 94-year-old Bertrand Russell launched the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign, and I have no ageist prejudice against nonagenarian philosophers. But the point is not a flippant one. Sartre was deeply rooted in the history of his own age, and to apply Sartre to a later period necessarily implies an appreciation of how Sartre’s thought was formed in the context of his own age. The period 1939-1962, in which most of Sartre’s major work was produced, was a period of almost uninterrupted violent conflict for his native land. The German Occupation gave way almost immediately to national liberation struggles, first in Indochina, then in Algeria. The centrality of violence in Sartre’s work cannot be detached from this context.
Sartre reacted to and learnt from the events of his own age; his was a mind in constant evolution, perpetually trying to make more concrete his central notion of freedom, permanently negating and transcending his own earlier positions. It is unwise to seek total consistency in an intellectual figure from the past. [As one who has admired and defended Sartre over nearly fifty years, I feel very uncomfortable with the label ’Sartrean’; it implies taking on rather more baggage than I am prepared to accept responsibility for.] The tangled and self contradictory narrative of Sartre’s various stances on the Middle East should be a clear warning that, while there are important insights and contentions that can be explained by Sartre’s own experience, there is no coherent Sartrean position.
This does not mean that there is no consistency at all. Sartre’s whole adult development involves a dialogue with various currents of the French left. And it is certainly no coincidence that the vast majority of those devoted to the study of Sartre whom I encounter are in one way or another are actively opposed to the current Bush Blair ’war on terror’.
b) The French Revolution
What did the term ’Terror’ mean to Sartre? There can be little doubt that for the schoolchild his first acquaintance with the term (other than in the primary sense of ’fear’) would have been in the context of the French Revolution... Read more at
