Talking with Sartre: Conversations and Debates Book

I just finished the most enjoyable book I've read in some time. Political scientist John Gerassi's father, Fernando, was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's closest friends, and Gerassi grew up as a member of what Simone de Beauvoir referred to as "the family."

At the end of Sartre's life, Gerassi, by then an American, had an extended series of conversations with Sartre that form the body of this book. It's a wonderful reflection on the intellectual, cultural, and historical issues that were central to the 20th century. Or should I say that were to the left of the center of the 20th century?

In this wide-ranging sequence, Sartre is completely honest in his self-criticism, criticisms of others, and of history itself. Gerassi, who taught at Queens College in New York, displays a range and subtlety of understanding that to me, at least, makes me think he must have held back most of what he knew from his students. He was exceptionally informed and engaged. It's hard to imagine the average undergraduate being able to follow him . . . or, of course, Sartre.

Sartre by now is more or less a name. In his heyday, he was the most famous intellectual in France, Europe and the world. He wrote serious plays, novels, and philosophy. He commented on all the major issues of the day. He wasn't a communist, but he appreciated communism. Toward the end of his life he spurred on what became a kind of fashion in France, anarchistic Maoism. His issue from the beginning was freedom. First man accepts that he is free. Then he must commit to the action that his freedom suggests to him. In a nutshell, that's Sartre's philosophy.

He felt that all of history, to the present day, represented a class struggle that kept the lower class unaware of its freedom, and he also felt that as the prime capitalist nation, the United States bore great responsibility for the persistence of classes in modern society. He was no ingenue. He understood the power of capital. But he was something of a Quixote, dreaming of a spontaneous revolution that would disallow and disobey the controlling regimes of finance, trade, labor, currency values, and the like.

I hesitate to go on about Sartre's thoughts because they are so much more clearly and simply represented in this remarkable book. Sartre rightly held Gerassi as a valid interlocutor, someone with whom he could debate, be frank, laugh, and ask important questions.

Part of the vitality of this book comes from the intellectual vitality of Europe from the 30s through the 70s. We have nothing similar in the U.S. today. The crudeness of sound bite politics here is dreadful. This is why it's so important to be reminded that there are alternatives.

In Europe one can have private conversations on this level, but European politics aren't much better than North American politics. At best we all have begun to focus on one central issue: income inequality. It's a valid and important issue. Why should a CEO make 400 times more than a plant manager or assembly-line worker? Why should five percent of Americans control over twenty-five percent of the wealth (much more)? At a point in time, around 1960, Sartre accepted the fact, philosophically, that everything is politics, and he made his case incessantly on behalf of limitless freedom. He considered himself a realist, but in fact he was more of an idealist. A more realistic critique comes from economists like Paul Krugman, who points out that in America, at least, the less the income inequality, the better the overall economy performs. It literally grows faster for obvious reasons: more people have more money to spend. (The rich don't much like Krugman; even Obama keeps his distance,but like Sartre, Krugman won a Nobel Prize, too.)


Anyone interested in the history of the 20th century, World War II, the Cold War, and/or France will find this an exceptionally engaging book.