How to Read Sartre

“I can want only the freedom of others.”―Jean–Paul Sartre

The How to Read series provides a context and an explanation that will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. These books use excerpts from the major texts to explain essential topics, such as Jean-Paul Sartre's pioneering thoughts on individual freedom, which served as a foundation for his role as the political champion of the oppressed.

Jean–Paul Sartre is best known as the pre-eminent philosopher of individual freedom. He is the one who told us that we are totally free. Robert Bernasconi shows how the early existentialist Sartre became in stages the political champion of the oppressed. Extracts are drawn from the full range of Sartre’s writings including the novel Nausea, and the major philosophical text Being and Nothingness. They show why of all major twentieth-century philosophers Sartre was the one who most easily passed beyond the confines of the academy to a general readership.