Philosophy: The existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre was a philosophy of human freedom, of individuals thrown into an uncaring world with no choice but to take responsibility for their own lives. Sartre's philosophical underpinnings have been much criticised, but the force of existentialism's basic impulse is undeniable.
Life is ours to live. It's certainly a message with resonances throughout the 20th century, a period of great advances for the status of the individual human being.
But of course the 20th century was also a dark period for innumerable individuals. It was the century when the political community became more sharply defined and more violently sustained.
Individuals were widely and systematically sacrificed to the perceived needs of idealised communities.
The subtitle of Lévy's book unfolds itself as he discusses how Sartre, in addition to being a philosopher of individual freedom, was also an apologist for the brutal repression of totalitarian communism.
There were two Sartres, says Lévy. The early Sartre was suspicious of the whole idea of community, on both ontological grounds (there is no such thing as a "pure" community) and ethical grounds (even if such community could exist, it would be undesirable). Lévy shows how far the later Sartre's thinking had travelled from this starting point when he cites his justification of political killing: "A revolutionary regime must get rid of a certain number of individuals that threaten it and I see no other means for this than death; it is always possible to get out of a prison". This was the Sartre, the second Sartre, who returned from the Soviet Union declaring that citizens there had "entire freedom to criticise" and who dismissed Solzhenitsyn as "an element harmful to development". In short, and in Lévy's words, this was the Sartre of "Stalinist cretinism".
How did this profound change in Sartre's thinking come about? Lévy suggests that things changed for Sartre during the war, and the seven months he spent in the Stalag. Here, Sartre the individualist discovered "collective existence" and "the feeling of being part of a mass". The community he had previously disdained was revealed in a new light to him.
Sartre referred to his existentialism as a humanism, but Lévy disagrees. He argues, paradoxically and not entirely convincingly, that it was the later, fellow-travelling Sartre who was the humanist. In one of the book's most interesting passages, Lévy contends that humanism isn't something to be opposed to totalitarianism, because totalitarianism itself begins from a humanist tenet, namely the possibility of creating a "better-quality man" (to use Sartre's words).
"Nazism and Stalinism are hideous variants of humanism," Lévy writes, because they sought to raise or restore humanity to some putative purer, better essence. Better to be an anti-humanist, he concludes, and to adopt "a decided mistrust of all those madmen who have claimed, and will continue to claim, to tell us exactly what man is". By Lévy's definition, the early Sartre wasn't a humanist but an anti-humanist.
Existentialism was precisely a refusal to accept other people's notions about "exactly what man is".
Indeed, the early Sartre held that there was no essence of humanity to be exact about. Existence precedes essence, he would say, and each life is made up not according to some pre-determined blueprint but out of the choices each individual has to make. By contrast, says Lévy, the later Sartre decided that the communist blueprint was more important than the individual lives it governed.
Lévy's tone and style take some getting used to. He has a very French seriousness about the playfulness of language, resulting in prose that one can only assume was more enjoyable to write than it is to read. In its early stages particularly, the book is frequently and infuriatingly pretentious. Its short, clipped sentences amount again and again to less than the sum of their meagre parts. (For instance: "Sartre and his books. Sartre wrote. He never stopped writing". Or, "The longing to enter a novel. The double novel, necessarily, of literature and life. And, indeed, the double double novel since there were two of them, Sartre and Beauvoir.") But the prose finds its level and the eye learns to glide over its worst excesses. Once the preliminaries of the book's weak first part are out of the way, Lévy is seldom a less than engaging guide to the drama of the rise and fall of one of the last century's most prominent writers and thinkers. And there is something honourable about the manner of Lévy's attempt to rescue and revive the early Sartre. He could have opted to play down the less palatable phase of Sartre's career, or to draw a distinction between the essence of Sartre's thought and the contingencies of his misguided political affiliations. But he pulls no punches. Sartre mired himself thoroughly in his totalitarian error, says Lévy, but he quickly adds that for all that, we need him still. The facts of the later Sartre are terrible, but they don't change the facts of the earlier Sartre: "From the first Sartre no one, not even the second Sartre, has been able or will ever be able to take away the merit of having very early on, and in a handful of books, said the essential things".
Lévy refers movingly to Sartre's life and work as a "great ruined building site", an edifice brought low by the blind idiocy of his post-war politics. His account of Sartre's final years is an elegy to what might have been. He suggests that Sartre died on the cusp of returning with an enriched philosophy of openness and freedom. He sees the signs of a third Sartre being born, one inspired by the hopeful messianism of Emmanuel Levinas. But the philosopher died, leaving of this new incarnation only "a phantom oeuvre, forever unrealised".
In the absence of this phantom ouevre, we are left with the deeply ambiguous catalogue of Sartre's actual words and deeds. Lévy's book navigates this ambiguity admirably. He resists the temptation simply to weigh things up and decide one way or the other - which Sartre outweighs the other, the early or the late? Absorbingly, he both denounces Sartre and applauds him, files him under 20th-century mistakes and calls on us to read him for the 21st century. Lévy is not the finest writer, but here he makes for a most rewarding read.
Sartre: The Philosopher of the Twentieth Century By Bernard-Henri Lévy, translated by Andrew Brown. Polity, 536pp. £25