Of Sartre, race, and rabies: “Anti-Americanism” and the transatlantic politics of intellectual engagement

Abstract

Jean-Paul Sartre has been called “the most prominent anti-American” in France, and his critiques of US society and foreign policy have been attributed to his ingrained anti-Americanism. This article questions the utility of this concept in understanding Sartre's political engagements, for he does not fit into standard definitions of anti-Americanism that emphasize special hostility and general resentment toward the United States. Instead, Sartre's writings about the United States reveal an enthusiastic embrace of contemporary American culture, while his sharpest critiques focused on two issues that were lifelong concerns of his, regardless of national context: racial discrimination and the arbitrary exercise of power. Despite his period of fellow traveling that made him sympathetic to the Soviet Union in the early 1950s, Sartre's political biography shows that he was much more interested in the deficiencies of French society and foreign policy than he was in America's failings. The article concludes that Sartre can be better understood as a member of a multiracial, transatlantic community of engaged intellectuals who struggled, and sometimes failed, to find an activist Marxism that was compatible with individual integrity.