ABSTRACT
This chapter examines J. P. Sartre’s 1964 Rome Lecture whose companion in his “second ethics” is the 1965 Cornell lectures, which he titled Morality and History. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, Sartre tries to make history intelligible as preparation for Rome and Cornell, in which he then tries to show how history can be made. Sartre’s description as such teaches us more than dozens of confirmed “positivist” social science hypotheses ever could. Sartre’s humanism helped France free itself from its torture regime in Algeria and significantly influenced 1968’s global uprisings. Colonial praxis demonstrates that the unconditioned positing of humanity can condition itself by enclosing its unconditional end within systems. Denying the humanity of the indigenous, the colonizer sees only violence, ignorance, illiteracy, and laziness, and takes the effects of the system of racism for its justification. Colonial praxis posits humanity in the person of the colonizers themselves conditionally as products of the colonial system.
