Sartre and Contemporary Political Theory

Kristian Klockars is Senior University Lecturer in Practical Philosophy at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Finland. He specializes in contemporary political philosophy, critical theory and continental philosophy. He is the author of Sartre’s Anthropology as a Hermeneutics of Praxis (1998).Mattias Lehtinen is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Politics Unit at Tampere University, Finland. He specializes in contemporary political theory with a focus on the continental tradition and democratic theory. He has published articles on contemporary issues related for example to political imagination, polarization and climate politics. Austin Hayden Smidt is an Honorary Research Fellow in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, Australia. He works across critical political economy, philosophy, and monetary theory. His research examines finance, value, liquidity, commensuration, and the institutional forms through which capitalism organizes social and political possibility. He is the author of Sartre, Imagination and Dialectical Reason: Creating Society as a Work of Art (2019) and has completed a forthcoming monograph on time and financial power.

• 1. Introduction: Why Sartre, Why Now? Part 1: The Political Philosophy of the Later Sartre 2. Sartre’s Politics of Invention 3. Bridging Marx and Sartre: Seriality, Alienation, and the Critique of Political Economy 4. Trust and Social Transformation in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason 5. From Institutions to Freedom: Sartre’s Critical Theory of Power 6. The Cultural Logic of Early Capitalism: On the Concepts of Ideology and Objective Spirit in The Family Idiot Part 2: The Later Sartre and Contemporary Issues 7. Democracy Disrupted? Thinking the Impurity of Constituting Power with Sartre 8. Thinking Populist Embodiment with Sartre: A Materialist Approach 9. Becoming Human: Sartre’s Late Ethics and the Politics of Disability Justice 10. Existentialist Anti-colonialism: Returning to Mudimbe’s Reading of Sartre 11. From Economic Degrowth to Ecological Liberation: Political Ecology’s Sartrean Past and Future 12. Elements of a Sartrean Political Geology