Sartre, Foucault, and Historical Reason, Volume One: Toward an Existentialist Theory of History (Volume 1) (Sartre, Foucault & Reason in History)

Sartre and Foucault were two of the most prominent and at times mutually antagonistic philosophical figures of the twentieth century. And nowhere are the antithetical natures of their existentialist and poststructuralist philosophies more apparent than in their disparate approaches to historical understanding. A history, thought Foucault, should be a kind of map, a comparative charting of structural transformations and displacements. But for Sartre, authentic historical understanding demanded a much more personal and committed narrative, a kind of interpretive diary of moral choices and risks compelled by critical necessity and an exacting reality. Sartre's history, a rational history of individual lives and their intrinsic social worlds, was in essence immersed in biography. In Volume One of this authoritative two-volume work, Thomas R. Flynn conducts a pivotal and comprehensive reconstruction of Sartrean historical theory, and provocatively anticipates the Foucauldian counterpoint to come in Volume Two. Library Journal Flynn (philosophy, Emory Univ.) details the development of Sartre's theory of history in this first part of a work that requires its latter, as yet unpublished, half to stand as a thoroughgoing comparative study of the titular subject. With insight and clarifying structure, he presents Sartre's theorizing toward history as a value and beyond that to an existentialist theory of history as a dialectic that is aesthetic as well as moral. Only in the final chapter does discussion turn to how Foucault's assessment of the historic event differs from Sartre's: the comparison and contrast between the two theorists' historical intelligibility is guided by Sartrean being-other [and] Foucauldian being-difference. In Volume 2, Foucault's poststructuralist approach should be fully limned, and Flynn's work will stand as a masterful interpretation of 20th-century theory of reason.Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal. V. 1. Toward An Existentialist Theory Of History -- V. 2. A Poststructuralist Mapping Of History. Thomas R. Flynn. Includes Bibliographical References And Indexes.