Inventing the New: History and Politics in Jean-Paul Sartre

The red thread of the book is constructed through the relation between singularity, both of the subject and the political event with respect to one comprehensive schema, and the universality of history, on the basis of an attempt to grasp the meaning of the latter starting from the reference to praxis. The first part of the book investigates the problem by beginning with what Sartre sees as the decisive moments of modernity, from a critical but also constitutive reference to Descartes on the freedom of the subject, passing through the eighteenth century, particularly Rousseau, and the epochal event of the French Revolution, before finally arriving at Sartre’s interaction (better understood with the passage of time) with Marx and Marxism, which is simultaneously marked by a criticism of certain of its limits and an attempt at its ‘relaunching’. Moreover, the legacies of the French Revolution – and its slogans liberté, egalité, fraternité – are crucial along the path Sartre forged. In the second part of the book, by developing the question of group institutionalisation, this problem is treated by starting from an analysis of ‘the short twentieth century’, and above all the Soviet Union as an incarnation of Marxism, which however also constitutes a deviation, or even a ‘monster’, in its ambivalent status with respect to the traditional Marxist schema.