Born June 21, 1905, in Paris. French writer, philosopher, and publicist.

The son of a naval officer, Sartre graduated from the Ecole Normale Supérieure in 1929, after which he taught philosophy at various lycées. During the fascist German occupation of France (1940–44) he contributed to the patriotic press of the Resistance Movement. In 1945 he founded the journal Les Temps modernes.

The development of Sartre’s political and ideological views, which may be traced in the nine books of his publicistic writings (Situations, 1947–72), has been marked by sharp vacillations between liberal democratism and left-wing radical extremism. During the Cold War he vainly sought an intermediate path between liberal democratism and left-wing radicalism for the leftist, noncommunist intelligentsia of the West. In 1952 he joined the peace movement, attacking colonialism and racism. He expressed his support for the socialist countries, which he visited several times before 1968. Influenced by the student revolts during the General Strike of 1968 in France and other events of that year, he took the side of left-wing rebellion, expressing his point of view in the book On a raison de se révolter (1974). For his autobiographical novella about his childhood, The Words (1964; Russian translation, 1966), Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize, which he rejected, pointing out the award committee’s neglect of the contributions of 20th-century revolutionary writers.

Sartre’s idealist philosophy is a form of atheistic existentialism that concentrates on the analysis of human existence as it is experienced and understood by the individual and as it develops through a series of the individual’s arbitrary choices, which are not predetermined by any established laws of being or any known, given essence. Existence, equated by Sartre in Being and Nothingness (1943) with the individual’s self-consciousness, which finds support only in itself, continually comes into conflict with other, equally self-determined existences and with the entire historically determined condition of things as manifested in a particular situation. However, the concrete situation is subject to spiritual “repeal” in the realization of any “free project,” since the situation is presumed to be unstable—subject to revision, and therefore, in effect, to change. According to Sartre, man and the world do not constitute a unity. Rather, the thinking individual, hopelessly lost in the universe but burdened with metaphysical responsibility for its fate, is completely divorced from nature and society. This condition is manifested in the chaotic, unstructured, crumbling zone of “alienation.” In the book Critique de la raison dialectique (1960), all of Sartre’s attempts to overcome the gulf between spiritualized man and the material world yield only his own simple combination of reworked psychoanalysis, empirical group sociology, and cultural anthropology, revealing the flimsiness of Sartre’s claims to have “built onto” Marxism, which he recognized as the most fruitful philosophy of the 20th century, with his doctrine of individuality.

In his theory of engagement, Sartre argues that the writer is personally responsible for all of contemporary history, sometimes indulging in vulgarly sectarian exaggerations (the essays on aesthetics, as well as works on literary history, including What Is Literature? 1947; Baudelaire, 1947; Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, 1952; and The Family Idiot, vols. 1–3, 1971–72).

Sartre combines a contemplative, philosophical approach with naturalistic genre sketches, myth with reportage, and subtle psychological analysis with direct polemics in his prose works, including the novel Nausea (1938), the short-story collection The Wall (1939), and the uncompleted tetralogy Paths of Freedom (1945–49), as well as in his plays (The Flies, 1943; No Exit, 1945; The Devil and the Good Lord, 1951; and The Condemned of Altona, 1960). In his works, Sartre chronicles the tribulations of the member of the intelligentsia in his search for freedom and his encounters with crossroads and dead ends that reveal the difficulties of attaining freedom, its genuine and false content, the ease with which one may slip into anarchic willfulness and its responsibility to others, and the differences between the individualistic and moral and civic interpretations of freedom.

The work of Sartre, the leader of the French existentialists, has influenced the intellectual life of France and other countries and has had repercussions in philosophy and politics, aesthetics, literature, dramaturgy, and the cinema. His work has been repeatedly criticized by Marxists.