ABSTRACT
Jean-Paul Sartre was never “simply” a Marxist. His earliest serious coming to grips in print with Marxism occurred in an article that is referenced, although somewhat obliquely, on the same last page of Part I of Search for a Method, namely, “Materialism and Revolution”. If the expression “œuvre de circonstance” is applicable to any of Sartre’s essays, as it surely is to several of them, Search for a Method may well be the purest such instance. A few years after the publication of Search for a Method, the Yugoslav Marxist philosophers who, although coming from several different philosophical perspectives, were united in rejecting the “orthodox” version of Marxism, founded a journal that took the name Praxis. If there was a single event that represented the culmination of Sartre’s honeymoon with the Communist Party, it was his participation in a Soviet-sponsored peace congress in Vienna in December 1952, which was, significantly, attended by no other well-known non-Communist French intellectual.
