Sartre's Conception of Freedom

A revised account of Sartrean freedom

Few doctrines in twentieth-century philosophy are as famous, or as contested, as Sartre's claim that human beings are condemned to be free. This revised and expanded second edition follows that claim from the ontology of Being and Nothingness into the social and material world of the Critique of Dialectical Reason.

It argues that the apparent conflict between absolute freedom and conditioned praxis becomes clearer once two registers are distinguished: freedom as the non-coincidence of consciousness with any complete factual description, and practical efficacy as the situated power to make a project effective in the world. The book then develops a theory of situated and distributive answerability, asking how institutions allocate knowledge, authority, alternatives, costs, and remedial power, and how those distributions should shape judgments of responsibility.

What the second edition changes

The first edition, published in 2012, remained almost entirely within the horizon of Sartre's early philosophy. It ended with the solitary for-itself of Being and Nothingness, as though Sartre's analysis of freedom ended there as well. It did not.

The revision proceeds from three reasons. The first concerns scope: the Critique of Dialectical Reason brings the earlier ontology into contact with history, scarcity, worked matter, institutions, and the resistant presence of other people, and any account that omits it omits a substantial part of Sartre's position. The second is argumentative: the first edition made too little contact with the strongest objections, and Merleau-Ponty's charge that an absolute freedom is empty, together with the determinist's suspicion that a freedom unconditioned by the past explains nothing, cannot be dismissed in passing. The third supplies the organizing thesis, the distinction between the two registers.

The expanded material does not attach an unrelated moral theory to the interpretation. It tests whether the interpretation yields a defensible account of answerability in cases that do not depend upon Sartre's own examples: many hands, manipulation, culpable ignorance, structural injustice, and standing to blame.

What the book is not

It is not a biography, and it does not appeal to episodes in Sartre's life as explanations or excuses for his arguments. Nor is it a general introduction to existentialism, a label whose popular associations often obscure the specificity of Sartre's philosophy. The question is narrower: what conception of freedom emerges from Sartre's ontology and social theory, and how much of that conception remains defensible.