ABSTRACT
The term, ‘existentialism’, has been used to cover the work of a wide array of nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers, ranging from Kierkegaard to Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and many others. While American behaviourism and its methodological-individualist assumptions were successfully imported into some areas of both British and French sociology and political science in the late 1950s and early 1960s, there has since been a reverse geographical movement, particularly from France. Structuralism, with its frequently proclaimed mission of eliminating ‘man’, or ‘the human subject’, such as John Rawls’s ‘free and rational person’, from the framework of all social analysis, has established itself since the late 1970s as a counter-orthodoxy to behaviourism within several of the Anglo-American social sciences. The chapter discusses a selective history of that strand of existentialism which has most pervasively concerned itself with the relation of subjectivity to society and history. It focuses on the work of four thinkers: Gabriel Marcel, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
