Description
In seeking to understand the extraordinary public celebrity of French writer Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), Baert does not focus on his frequent forays into politics, but on the period in France when he rose from relative obscurity to public prominence. The existential moment, he calls the period, because it was a short time during which not just Sartre but also his philosophy caught the public's imagination. Many people associate Sartre with the political turmoil of the 1960s, but he shows that Sartre came to public attention during the middle 1940s, was extremely popular from 1944 to 1947, and by the 1960s had already slipped far from the public mind. Distributed in the US by Wiley. Annotation ©2015 Ringgold, Inc., Portland, OR (protoview.com)
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Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2015Jean-Paul Sartre is often seen as the quintessential public intellectual, but this was not always the case. Until the mid-1940s he was not so well-known, even in France. Then suddenly, in a very short period of time, Sartre became an intellectual celebrity. How can we explain this remarkable transformation? The Existentialist Moment retraces Sartre?s career and provides a compelling new explanation of his meteoric rise to fame. Baert takes the reader back to the confusing and traumatic period of the Second World War and its immediate aftermath and shows how the unique political and intellectual landscape in France at this time helped to propel Sartre and existentialist philosophy to the fore. The book also explores why, from the early 1960s onwards, in France and elsewhere, the interest in Sartre and existentialism eventually waned. The Existentialist Moment ends with a bold new theory for the study of intellectuals and a provocative challenge to the widespread belief that the public intellectual is a species now on the brink of extinction.
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