Word: marxisms
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...indication. But before he became a Marxist he had already expressed, in his novels, plays, and essays, an important existentialist philosophy. When he became disillusioned with Western capitalist society, instead of abandonning existentialism he tried to bring it along with him. As Walter Odajnyk describes it in Marxism and Existentialism...
Jean-Paul Sartre, the most thorough Existentialist critic of Marxism, oddly enough has taken it upon himself to serve as mediator between these two fundamentally opposed philosophies This role appears to have developed from the fact that Sartre is a man of action as well as a theoretician. He maintains a philosophical premise which states there is no reality except in action and that a man is only what his life is. Philosophically he believes that Existentialism provides a true intrepretation of man and reality. But practically he concedes that Existentialism has no effective social theory and therefore can have...
After a great deal of meditation, it is possible to understand what Sartre means, and then it generally becomes apparent that he could have said it far more clearly. Desan says in The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, "Sartre's book is badly constructed; indeed, it is uselessly obscure and interminable. Our author is definitely at the point where he can afford to be non-conformist to the extreme, leaving just enough intelligibility so that the conformist might attempt the struggle to understand...
...publications by Desan and Odajnyk are clear and extraordinary studies of Sartre's views on Marxism. Desan, a professor of philosophy at Georgetown, has written what is largely a guide to understanding the Critique. Odajnyk instead compares the "systems" of Marxism and existentialism and deals with the weaknesses in each...
...abandoned detachment for political passion, and stopped thinking independently. While many intellectuals saw themselves as lonely rebels, heresy became a group affair, and protest turned into a community sing. Alternately repelled and fascinated by violence, dreaming both of power and of justice, intellectuals overwhelmingly (if not unanimously) embraced Marxism as the hope of the future. They were reacting against the baffling evils of World War I and fascism; perhaps the modern intellectual's main difficulty is that he cannot really account for evil in human affairs...