Sartre and Contemporary Political Theory

Does Jean-Paul Sartre's political theory have anything to offer to us today? Are Sartre's ways of reflecting on ethics, praxis, society and political philosophy in terms of hope for a better world, a better future, of interest today? This edited volume brings together Sartre scholars to address the later Sartre’s relevance for political theory and philosophy, with a focus on the contemporary world. Using Critique of Dialectical Reason and Sartre’s later engagements with politics, morality, colonialism, integral humanity and reflections on Marxism as starting points, the book is divided into two sections. The first part develops and expands on the core Sartrean themes of the later Sartre relevant for political thinkers. It deals among other things with the tensions between freedom and compulsion in social human action, with the intelligibility of human action in relation to historical circumstances and with how to understand material conditions and social institutions in congruence with the political world of action. The second part of the book directly poses issues concerning how a Sartrean approach may be developed to fit the contemporary world in order to tackle currently relevant topics such as democracy, populism, colonialism, disability justice and the climate crises.

Kristian Klockars is Senior University Lecturer in Practical Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in contemporary political philosophy, critical theory and continental philosophy. He is the author of Sartre’s Anthropology as a Hermeneutics of Praxis (1998).

Mattias Lehtinen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Politics Unit at Tampere University, Finland. He specializes in contemporary political theory with a focus on the continental tradition and democratic theory. He has published articles on contemporary issues related for example to political imagination, polarization and climate politics.

Austin Hayden Smidt is an Honorary Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He works across critical political economy, philosophy, and monetary theory. His research examines finance, value, liquidity, commensuration, and the institutional forms through which capitalism organizes social and political possibility. He is the author of Sartre, Imagination and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art (2019) and has completed a forthcoming monograph on time and financial power.