Reviews for Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking

The average rating for Simone de Beauvoir's Political Thinking based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-07-28 00:00:00 Kenneth Saito If Sartre is the first philosopher we read, must he also be the first we forget? Giving another gander at his belligerent Marxist masterpiece Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vol 1: Theory of Practical Ensembles (which received a flurry of praiseful books such as this one, and was then totally abandoned in favor of his more peevish descendants' works), one finds plenty -- forgotten or not, compelling or merely wistful -- that engages: Sartre's sweeping argument finds a "region of reality" for every discourse, yet he finds nothing whatsoever to say about Heidegger anymore; he lays down Marxism as the unequivocal "horizon" of thought, but without much more justification than his claim to have felt the working class' group feeling for it; communism informed by existentialist understanding of individual particularity still promises to be rather particular about how it will crush individual esophagi. Troubles like these sift down to today. The noted anti-psychiatrists Laing and Cooper capably gloss this period of Sartre's thought in this volume -- for one thing, they save you from actually having to read the aforementioned masterpiece. What ever use they make of Sartre's work for psychoanalysis is undeveloped here.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-01-31 00:00:00 Jeffrey Hull I read this upon returning from one year's absence from Grinnell College during the course of which I'd become very interested in psychology, particularly Laing's branch of existential psychology and Jung's analytical psychology. Although I'd read one book of essays about Sartre and psychoanalysis, I had not read enough Sartre to truly appreciate this book. Indeed, I've never much liked Sartre, particularly after reading his Being and Nothingness and trying to read his Nausea.