Ronald Aronson

Camus & Sartre : the story of a friendship and the quarrel that ended it

Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre first met in 1943, during the German occupation of France. Intellectual as well as political allies, they grew famous overnight after Paris was liberated. But East West tensions began to strain their friendship as they evolved in opposing directions, disagreeing over philosophy, the responsibilities of intellectuals, and what sorts of political changes were necessary or possible. And while Sartre embraced violence as a path to change, Camus sharply opposed it, leading to a bitter and very public falling out in 1952, after which they never spoke again. Ronald Aronson chronicles this riveting story while demonstrating how Camus and Sartre developed first in connection with and then against each other, each keeping the other in his sights long after their break. Combining biography and intellectual history, philosophical and political passion, Camus and Sartre will fascinate anyone interested in these great writers or the world-historical issues that tore them apart.

Communism's Posthumous Trial

Books reviewed in this article: Stephane Courtois et al.,The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression Francois Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century Tony Judt, The Burden of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French Twentieth Century Michel Dreyfus et al., Le Siecle des communismes

L'Idiot de la famille: The Ultimate Sartre?

For virtually his entire career Jean-Paul Sartre has been an activist writer. His very first book, Imagination (1936), has a tone of aggressive combat as Sartre attacks past theorists for their faulty views of imagination. Throughout his early writings Sartre passionately opposes false claimants to the truth—such as Freud in The Emotions, or Husserl in The Transcendence of the Ego—and “at long last” sets forth the correct approach. His little essay “Une Idee” presents Sartres discovery of intentionality in a spirit of exultation. Even Sartres early literary criticism—I am thinking of his affirmative articles on Dos Passos and Faulkner and his criticism of Mauriac—has a driving, impassioned quality.

Sartre's Individualist Social Theory

Followers of Jean-Paul Sartre will be puzzled, at the least, by the most recent turns of his thought. On the one hand he gives us the anti-intellectual radicalism which wants to operate “merely” as a sort of mediator between the workers of Grenoble and Billancourt. He asserts that the “status of the intellectual has changed,” that he must smash his privileges “through direct action.” He urges us into a mindless activism which takes itself wherever the action is, in which we use our technical skills—not our theoretical understanding or analytic ability—to help the masses express themselves. On the other hand, Sartres Flaubert, the most enormous of his four magnum opii, is his most remote, unreal, wordy, self-indulgent work yet.

Interpreting Husserl and Heidegger: The Root of Sartre's Thought

Any reader of Sartre knows that there are serious problems in his thought. Standing, say, in 1947 and looking back at the early Sartre we find him reducing human problems to ontological conditions (“hell is other people”, “man is a useless passion”): we find him defending a freedom which is as untenable as it is ineffectual; we find him erasing all the structures of consciousness (emotional, cognitive, and social) which make the world intelligible and making consciousness into a “nothing”, “clear as a great wind”; and we find frustration and alienation built into lifes structure and resolvable only in art.

THE STRENGTHS OF THE DIASPORA

This is a time of renewal in the Jewish calender, the end of one year and the beginning of another. Yet there is a feeling—and it is no more than that—that beginning anew may this year relate to Israel-Diaspora relations, particularly in the shadow of the intifada. Are Diaspora Jews distancing themselves from Israel while, paradoxically, identifying with it? Is the post-Shoah generation of Jews as mesmerized by the existence of a Jewish state as the fading 1948 one? What is the place of America in the Jewish world? A secondary role to Israel or a symbiotic one? And what of all those independent and critical voices which continually pierce the ordered uniformity of communal organizations. Are we witnessing the emergence of a new Diaspora identity? THE JEWISH QUARTERLY asked a number of writers to air their views on the vexed question of the future of Diaspora Jewry.

The Master Thinkers

Cynicism, confusion and despair have been among the responses to the collapse of the various New Left movements and the disastrous aftermath of the war in Indochina. To many former true believers, God failed when the ugly side appeared of countries and movements once claimed as liberating. As one of the French “New Philosophers” expressing the disillusionment of one strand of the generation of 1960s and 1970s activists, André Glucksmann accordingly rejects not only socialisms worst consequences, but also its history, its achievements, and its very intellectual premises. In a book that manages to combine arrogance with a celebration of ignorance, literary elegance with a refusal to carefully argue his points.