Surpassing the Unsurpassable: Jean-Paul Sartre’s Reinterpretation of Marxism

Abstract

After his public break with Moscow in 1956, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to renew Marxism by merging it with his own existentialism, using his philosophy to place the dialectic of history on supposedly firmer ground than that of materialism. The following article traces the development of Sartre’s thought from the existentialism of Being and Nothingness to the existential Marxism of The Critique of Dialectical Reason before using the work of Raymond Aron and Bernard-Henri Lévy to explore the reasons behind Sartre’s ultimate inability to reconcile existentialism and Marxism.