Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason

by Flynn, Thomas R.

• ISBN13: 9780226254678
• ISBN10: 0226254674
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies 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. But 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. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two.

Author Biography

Thomas R. Flynn is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is author of Sartre and Marxist Existentialism, published by the University of Chicago Press, and co-editor of Dialectic and Narrative.

Table of Contents

Preface: The Diary and the Map	ix	(4)
Acknowledgements	xiii	(2)
Works Frequently Cited	xv
PART ONE	3	(96)
1. Living History: The Risk of Choice and the Pinch of the Real	3	(20)
2. The Dawning of a Theory of History	23	(22)
3. Dialectic of Historical Understanding	45	(22)
4. History as Fact and as Value	67	(25)
Conclusion to Part One	92	(7)
PART TWO	99	(114)
5. History Has Its Reasons	99	(19)
6. The Sens of History: Discovery and Decision	118	(31)
7. History and Biography: Critique 2	149	(30)
8. Biography and History: The Family Idiot	179	(29)
Conclusion to Part Two	208	(5)
PART THREE	213	(49)
9. Sartre and the Poetics of History: The Historian as Dramaturge	213	(24)
10. History and Structure: Sartre and Foucault	237	(25)
Conclusion to Volume One	262	(3)
Notes	265	(64)
Index	329