SOURCE: Langer, Monika. “Sartre and Marxist Existentialism.” In Sartre Alive, edited by Ronald Aronson and Adrian van den Hoven, pp. 160-82. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Langer contends that Jean Paul Sartre's ideas about the freedom of human spirit supply the philosophical foundation that Marxism seems to lack.

A recurrent theme in the philosophical literature of the last quarter-century has been the relationship between Sartrean existentialism and Marxism. Much of the discussion has centered on the unorthodox nature of Sartre's Marxism as presented in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, and on the connection between that work and his earlier Being and Nothingness. Thomas Flynn's book Sartre and Marxist Existentialism constitutes one of the most interesting recent contributions to the debate. Flynn contends that “Sartre's is an authentic, though ‘revisionist,’ Marxism” which, in combining “salient features” of existentialism and Marxism, incorporates “the morally responsible individual...