Practice, Power, and Forms of Life: Sartre’s Appropriation of Hegel and Marx

Philosopher Terry Pinkard revisits Sartre’s later work, illuminating a pivotal stance in Sartre’s understanding of freedom and communal action.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, released to great fanfare in 1960, has since then receded in philosophical visibility. However, as Sartre’s reputation is now making a comeback, it is time for a reappraisal of his later work. In Practice, Power, and Forms of Life, philosopher Terry Pinkard interprets Sartre’s late work as a fundamental reworking of his earlier work, especially in terms of his understanding of the possibility of communal action as genuinely free, which the French philosopher had previously argued was impossible.

Pinkard reveals how Sartre was drawn back to Hegel, a move, that was itself incited by Sartre’s newfound interest in Marxism. Pinkard argues that Sartre constructed a novel position on freedom that has yet to be adequately taken up and analyzed within philosophy and political theory. Through Sartre, Pinkard advances an argument that contributes to the history of philosophy as well as contemporary and future debates on action and freedom.

About the Author :
Terry Pinkard is a University Professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of many books, including Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice.

Review :
"Renders accessible what is complicated and opens a window into the mind of a brilliant man. Highly recommended." "This book focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre’s late work to explore what the author sees as a shift in the philosopher’s earlier ideas. According to Pinkard, Sartre’s late reappraisal of collective action as fundamentally free—a position that is absent from the philosopher’s early writings—is predicated on what Pinkard defines as Sartre’s critical appropriation of classical German philosophy. In particular, Pinkard claims that Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is better understood through the lens of Sartre’s original reappropriation of Hegelian ideas in a Marxist key, alongside a new reading of the later Heidegger. This move, argues Pinkard, allows Sartre to modify his early conceptions of meaning, practice, spontaneity, inertia, and the dialectics between individual and collectivity." “Pinkard has written a pathbreaking and compelling work that shows the importance of Sartre’s extensive rethinking of his understanding of Hegel and Marx and the role of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism in his later thought. Key concepts such as subjectivity, agency, reciprocity, dialectic, materiality, and sociality are given original and philosophically rich interpretations, all presented with striking lucidity. Practice, Power, and Forms of Life is an extraordinary tour de force, both as interpretation and as philosophy, and it should lead to a major reassessment of the later Sartre.” “In the extensive bibliography about Sartre’s work, his connection to classical German philosophy is seldom taken as a guideline. Focusing in particular on the Critique of Dialectical Reason and Sartre’s late writings, Pinkard’s book fills this gap by luminously considering Sartre’s creative ‘appropriation’ of Hegel and Marx. It shows how this mediation, as well as Sartre’s response to Heidegger’s criticism of humanism, reveals a striking proximity to Wittgenstein’s theme of the forms of life.”