Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
In this major new reading of Sartre’s life and work, Paige Arthur traces the relationship between the philosopher’s decades-long commitment to decolonization and his intellectual positions. Where other commentators have focused on the tensions between Sartre’s Marxism and his account of existential freedom, usually to denigrate one in favor of the other, Arthur shows how Sartre’s political engagement with global liberation movements and his philosophical framework developed alongside one another.
Closely following the postwar movements for decolonization, and then supporting the war of independence in Algeria, Sartre proposed an influential and uncompromising view of imperialism. Analyzing the Western attitude to the ‘subhuman’ colonial subject, he offered an account of the social constraints that applied to both ruler and ruled, and came to argue that political violence—on both sides—was a systematic consequence of the colonial order. Arthur’s rich and nuanced book locates Sartre within the political discussions of his time, whilst also looking forward to contemporary debates about new forms of imperialism and resistance.
Paperback, 256 pages
ISBN: 9781844673995
March 2010
$24.95 / £14.99
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Other Editions
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Hardback, 256 pages
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ISBN: 9781844673988
March 2010
$110.00 / £60.00
Reviews
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In this innovative and exciting book, Paige Arthur recasts the story of twentiethcentury intellectual life by retrieving its global contexts and shattering convenient myths… Sartre’s anticolonialism proves in Arthur’s sophisticated rendition far richer and more complex than snide dismissals of his ‘totalitarian’ impulses have allowed.
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Arthur’s insightful and careful exposition of Sartre’s anti-colonial trajectory from 1945 constitutes a powerful corrective to revisionist interpretation of his 'Third Worldism.'
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In this fine book Paige Arthur systematically examines from a fresh perspective a second political engagement of Sartre’s: as a critic of colonialism and neo-colonialism and as a supporter of Third World liberation struggles.
Blog
New Left Review—new issue out now
The July/ August issue of the New Left Review has been released, featuring, amongst others, the following essays:
Malcolm Bull: Levelling Out
Beyond existing articles about equality, might the praxes of permanent and passive revolution offer a way to conceptualise a more expansionary levelling? Drawing on motifs from Nietzsche, Babeuf, Marx and Gramsci, Malcolm Bull traces the contours and consequences of extra-egalitarianism.
Malcolm Bull is the author of the forthcoming Verso book, Anti-Nietzsche.
New Political Science on Paige Arthur on Sartre on Iraq and Afghanistan (and perhaps Libya?)
Just prior to NATO’s military intervention in Libya, Joseph Peschek reviewed Paige Arthur’s Unfinished Projects for the journal New Political Science. Peschek first applauded Arthur for exploring an aspect of Jean-Paul Sartre seldom examined:
Among the vast array of Sartre studies, topics such as Sartre’s standpoints on Stalinism and the Soviet Union, and his related debates with Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on morality, violence, and history, have been prominent. In this fine book Paige Arthur systematically examines from a fresh perspective a second political engagement of Sartre’s: as a critic of colonialism and neo-colonialism and as a supporter of Third World liberation struggles.
From there, Peschek summarized Arthur’s “four phases in the development of Sartre’s understanding of decolonization,” which spanned from 1945 to Sartre’s death in 1980.
However, Peschek didn’t end there. He hoped to deduce from Arthur what Sartre would say about current Western military interventions.