Sartre, Foucault, and Reason in History, Volume 1

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by Thomas R. Flynn

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published July 1997, 280 pages, paper

ISBN 0226254682

Nowhere are the antithetical natures of Foucault's postmodernism and Sartre's existentialism more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. For Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. In this first volume of a two-volume work, Flynn conducts a pivotal reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in the second volume--sort of a philosophical conversation in two parts.