Abstract

The goal of this dissertation is to explore a much overlooked resource in thinking the relationship between history and politics, the social theory of Simone de Beauvoir and the later work of Sartre. The dissertation begins with reference to multiple diagnoses of a crisis in historical reflection from social and political philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, aesthetics, cultural studies, and discourses on the politics of difference. These many and varied inquiries into the status of contemporary social and historical experience insist that we need a new articulation of our bond to the past. This need arises, in social and political philosophy, from the lack of a basis for making concrete political judgments. In chapter one I examine de Beauvoir's Pyrrhus et Cineas and The Ethics of Ambiguity. De Beauvoir departs from Sartre's earlier account of sociality in Being and Nothingness and reorients existential phenomenology toward a concept of history grounded in the Heideggerean project . In my second chapter I examine Sartre's thinking of history and sociality in his Notebooks for an Ethics. The Notebooks is a highly diagnostic work that understands the contemporary social and political problematic in terms of a failure of judgment. In my third chapter I examine Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. Here Sartre identifies a tension between our relationship to the past and our relationship to the future, one that lies within the structure of response to the force of the past within the present. In reexamining agency dialectically as a responsive moment, Sartre opens a dimension of subjectivity that can provide the basis of a theory of the accountability for and the legitimacy of political actions, projects, and judgments. In conclusion, I examine Sartre's concept of justice from the seventies as grounded within his understanding of social and historical binding. Sartre articulates an originary concept of justice as the site of inheritance and political responsibility