Sartre’s existential legacy: Theory as a weapon, not an excuse

By Harsh Thakor* 

When Jean-Paul Sartre died in Paris on April 15, 1980, the left lost one of its most uncompromising voices. He was a French existentialist philosopher, playwright, novelist and anti‑imperialist militant – but above all, a thinker who refused to let theory sit apart from revolutionary action. Decades later, in a world still healing from colonial wars and capitalist alienation, Sartre’s example endures. The mid‑century meeting between Marxism and existentialism, which he did more than anyone to forge, remains vital today. Far from being a relic, Sartre’s insistence that we can always choose to act – even under crushing structures – keeps his work a beacon for the left.

Sartre’s early work, particularly "Being and Nothingness" (1943), explored the alienation of the individual under modernity – a condition of radical freedom burdened by total responsibility. But this existentialism was never a retreat into despair; it was a philosophy of action forged in the Nazi occupation of France. Unlike the detached “public intellectual” of liberal imagination, Sartre weaponised his platform for the colonised and dispossessed.

His political evolution was inseparable from his stance against French colonialism. Sartre signed the Manifesto of the 121 in 1960, supporting French soldiers who refused to fight in the Algerian war – a treasonable act that led to right‑wing riots calling for his execution. His preface to Frantz Fanon’s "The Wretched of the Earth" remains a profound text of decolonisation, framing colonial humanism as a lie and justifying counter‑violence as a necessary purgative. Stokely Carmichael drew on this preface in his “Black Power” address in 1966.

In the 1960s Sartre joined Bertrand Russell to convene the International War Crimes Tribunal (the Russell Tribunal), putting the United States on trial for genocide and aggression in Vietnam. His radicalism intensified in his final years: he defied state censorship by selling banned leftist newspapers like La Cause du Peuple on Paris streets, and refused the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964 as a repudiation of the capitalist cultural apparatus.

Sartre’s early existentialism emphasised absurdity, freedom and responsibility – an individualism that left little room for social analysis or collective action. Not until the mid‑1940s, through contact with Albert Camus and Marxist ideas, did he begin to find his social bearings. While his postwar stature grew, he recognised that bourgeois individualism and abstract freedom were insufficient to combat capitalism.

In "The Critique of Dialectical Reason" (1960), Sartre attempted a synthesis of existentialist subjectivity with Marxist materialism. He famously argued that Marxism remained “the unsurpassable philosophy of our time” – a yardstick that must be merged with human praxis to remain a living instrument of liberation. It was his discovery of political commitment and socialism that enabled him to rupture the twin impasses of “Hell is other people” and “Man is a useless passion.”

Glimpses of this turn appear in Sartre’s 1945 newspaper articles on the United States, where he first applied a Marxist lens to analyse American workers as “not yet proletarians” because they were “imprisoned” by individualism. In "Search for a Method" (1957), he explicitly declared himself a Marxist but argued that official Marxism had become paralysed. It needed existentialism’s emphasis on human praxis: men make history on the basis of prior conditions, but it is men who make it – not inhuman forces.

Sartre’s interest in the relationship between agency and determinism was captured in the title of his essay collection "Situations" (1947). To be “in situation” means our actions are bound by history and social reality – class, race, gender, upbringing – but we are never wholly determined. Freedom is meaningless outside concrete situations, however oppressive.

French Maoists in the early 1970s viewed Sartre as a valuable ally against state repression rather than an orthodox theoretician. The Gauche Prolétarienne welcomed him as a “friend of the people” who used his fame to protect militants. They valued his break with electoral politics – his support for popular tribunals and banned newspapers. Maoists recognised that Sartre’s reputation helped wedge open radical politics to the wider public. Yet some maintained distance from his existentialist roots, seeing his philosophy as still focused on individual freedom rather than collective discipline. Sartre, in turn, sought to learn from Maoists how to be a better revolutionary, considering their approach the most radical alternative to both Soviet communism and capitalist democracy.

Sartre’s legacy is debated, but his synthesis of Marxism and existentialism forges a dialectical weapon against both right‑wing reaction and left‑wing fatalism. In an era where the working class is often told to accept its obsolescence, Sartre’s insistence on the unity of theory and practice provides a corrective. He showed that one can acknowledge the structural constraints of the “practico‑inert” – the material weight of capital and state – while still generating the revolutionary potential of collective will.

What we gain from existential Marxism is a refreshed conception of freedom – one that helps us appreciate how individuals come together to create hope where there was none. Sartre insists that we can always choose, regardless of the situation, and that even not to choose is a choice. We are always responsible for ourselves, even when oppressed.

As we commemorate his death, we honour a figure who stood relentlessly with the wretched of the earth – a living testament that a life committed to liberation, from the streets of the Latin Quarter in May ’68 to the villages of occupied Vietnam, is a life worth living. His work proves that we are not merely products of history but its makers.

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*Freelance journalist