Sartre and anarchism

“If you reread all my books," says Sartre after the rebellion of May 1968 in Paris, "you will realize that I have not changed profoundly, and that I have always remained an anarchist.”

Interviewed again in 1975, he says that he was "an anarchist without knowing it" when he wrote La Nausée, and I think of Roquentin walking the length of the Salon Bordurin, turning round, looking at the pictures of the great and good on the wall, and bidding them goodbye. 'Farewell, you beautiful lilies, our pride and raison d'être, farewell, you bastards'.

"Then, by way of philosophy," he says, "I discovered the anarchist being in me. But when I discovered it I did not call it that, because today’s anarchy no longer has anything to do with the anarchy of 1890".

In the heart of being, he argues in L'Être et le Néant, there is nothing, no hierarchy, we are free to choose. Mathieu Delarue, in Les Chemins de la Liberté, will not, like Brunet, in the end, swallow the Party line, and Sartre will break with the French Communists over Hungary in 1956.

He is, for most of his life, very far from the anarchist movement. "But," he says, "I have never accepted any power over me, and I have always thought that anarchy, which is to say a society without powers, must be brought about."

His struggle with political engagement, in, for example, Les Mains Sales, and Qu'est-ce que la Littérature, and with Marxism, which possibly culminates in the Critique de la Raison Dialectique in 1960, is a long one.

But, as he writes in his autobiography Les Mots, he is basically, I think, always a "traveller without a ticket", an unassimilable individual, neither use nor ornament to business, or the state.

And he is worth reading, and rereading, I suggest, for that reason.