Shorter pieces on the book’s themes: chapter commentary, replies to objections, and notes on the scholarship the argument engages.
Sartre’s examples encourage the reading that self-deception is a solitary manoeuvre. The examples are misleading. Bad faith is usually scaffolded by a world that makes one form of self-misdescription easier to inhabit than another.
Read the note Bad Faith Is Not a Private FailingAn institution can centralize benefit and control while dispersing risky execution, and then point to the resulting fragmentation as proof that nobody powerful is answerable. Naming the manoeuvre is the first step in refusing it.
Read the note Responsibility LaunderingWhether an act was wrong and whether a particular person may confront the agent about it are different questions. Keeping them apart dissolves a set of false alternatives about what institutions may do.
Read the note Standing to Blame, and the Authority to Demand an AnswerThe passage in which Sartre says the mobilized man deserves his war is the point at which the doctrine of unlimited responsibility becomes indefensible. It is also the best place to see exactly which step fails.
Read the note What Sartre Got Wrong About the WarSartre found the precise location of conditioned freedom in the least dramatic place available: a line of people waiting for a bus. The example is not a joke, and the concept it carries does more work than any other in the later philosophy.
Read the note Seriality, or Why the Bus Queue Is a Political ConceptIf the later social philosophy were a break with the earlier ontology, the practico-inert is where the break would show. It is the hardest test of continuity available, which is exactly why it is the right one to run.
Read the note The Practico-Inert Is Not a MetaphorMerleau-Ponty argued that a freedom present everywhere in equal measure could nowhere gain a foothold. The objection is the deepest in the literature, and answering it requires conceding more than Sartre would have liked.
Read the note The Emptiness Objection, and What It Costs to Answer It