This article will offer an alternative understanding of managerial decision-making drawing from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason rather than simply Being and Nothingness. I will begin with a brief explanation of Sartre’s account of freedom in Being and Nothingness. I will then show in the second section how Andrew West uses Sartre’s conception of radical freedom from Being and Nothingness for a managerial decision-making model. In the third section, I will explore a more robust account of freedom from Sartre’s Critique (...) of Dialectical Reason. I will attempt to show that freedom is not simply a matter of choosing (or not choosing) to perform an action, but entails external constraints—including other people. Finally, I will provide the implications of this account of freedom for managerial decision-making. I will show that it’s unreasonable to place full responsibility and/or blame on managers given their constraints. This does not absolve them from responsibility, but better accounts for the way in which we ought to hold them responsible. (shrink)

In this paper, the author presents Fanon’s analysis of decolonization in order to present an explicit conception of resistance based upon Fanon’s concept of decolonization, which is aligned with the lived experience of the colonized: their racial, sociopolitical, and economic condition as well as their existential condition. The author contrasts Fanon’s analysis with Sartre’s critique of colonialism as it appears in The Critique. Ultimately, through the presentation of Sartre’s and Fanon’s theories, the author attempts to show a feminist analysis of (...) French colonial resistance as a criticism of Sartre’s and Fanon’s theories and of the analysis their male contemporaries within the field of Post/Colonial Theories. (shrink)

Despite being the work of one of the 20th-century’s most famous philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason has never been fully integrated into our collective philosophical consciousness. None of the book’s key concepts, from seriality to the group, have come to play an important role in other philosophers’, sociologists’, or political theorists’ work. Amongst Sartre scholars, while work on the Critique has increased steadily in recent years, in particular in France and Belgium, no critical consensus exists about the book’s (...) overall meaning or value. On the occasion of the Critique’s 60th birthday, in this article I provide a summary of its main aims and concepts with a view to establishing a new basis for reading and discussing the book. I will argue that the Critique is a coherent and unique work of social theory that speaks to a world suffering an overwhelming wave of what Sartre calls ‘counter-finality’ in the form of climate change. (shrink)

In the light of a renewed interest today in forms of direct political participation, this paper explores the contributions of Sartre and Arendt to defending direct political action as an intrinsically valuable form of human freedom. Both thinkers note, however, that such forms of action and the ‘spaces of freedom’ in which they become possible are always fleeting and transitory. The paper argues that Sartre's account of the ways in which human action is always mediated and alienated by materiality is (...) important in accounting for this phenomenon. (shrink)

The study discusses the political in Jean-Paul Sartre's work, focusing principally on the conceptual constructions through which the agent acting in a political action situation can be interpreted from the texts. Sartre's conception of the political agent is discussed against the background of the operational concepts and the limit-situation as an ideal type action situation construed as conceptual devices in the work for showing both Sartre's fashion of using and of construing concepts. In addition certain metaphors such as theater, play (...) and mask are used for highlighting the political reading of the texts. The theme of the agent, in one form or another, runs through Sartre's entire work. It is a theme which largely gathers together the different conceptual devices and different perspectives he takes in his work. In this study, through concepts and figures interpreted from the texts, especially from Critique de la raison dialectique, itis shown that Sartre's construction of the agent forms a challenging attempt of a revised view into the classical concept of subject. It is also shown that his agent is both a political and a moral actor which cannot be reduced to a subject or to a person, but can be described as an actor, as a player of the political condition, and as a user of political action strategies through the concepts of limit, change and non-identity. Sartre's central point of view of action is that of the agent acting in an interior space of action in a construed world. This forwards a view within which the perspective of production forms a framework for the argumentation where the main themes through which the portrait of the agent can be drawn are temporality, interiority, exteriority and subjectivity. The agent of the Critique as a non-identifiable actor acting in a temporally and dimensionally produced action situation is produced in the process of internalization and externalization of the historical and inherently political condition of being condemned to freedom. In the study it is shown that it is this agent through whom the political comes to the world and who is condemned also to politics. It is also shown that this agent forms a perspective of interpretation as well to Sartre's plays as to the central concepts of his morals. (shrink)

According to a recent and prominent view, a ‘we-perspective’ arises out of a dyadic I-you relation involving a special form of reciprocity in which I relate to another as a you – as somebody who is also attending and addressing me. As important as this argument might be, one obvious limitation lies in that it typically applies to dyadic forms of ‘we’ which are bound to the here and now of face-to-face interactions between ‘ad hoc pairs of individuals’. Drawing inspiration (...) from Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Freud’s Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, I will argue that in order to trace a way out of this impasse, one needs to shift the theoretical focus from dyadic face-to-face (immediate) relations of reciprocity between I and You, self and other to ternary relations of ‘mediated reciprocity’ involving the figure and the functions of a third party (le tiers). (shrink)