The Early Sartre and Ideology

Abstract

As Paul Ricœur notes in L’Idéologie et l’utopie, the ascription of the characteristic of being ‘ideological’ to a set of ideas has traditionally had pejorative implications. One’s own ideas are not ideological, only those of one’s adversaries.1 The philosophical and critical writings of the early Sartre do not offer an explicit discussion of the concept of ideology. Even in Cahiers pour une morale, notable for the evidence they provide of Sartre’s increasing rapprochement with Marxism, ideology per se is never Sartre’s centre of interest.