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A Response to Hannah Arendt's Critique of Sartre's Views on Violence

Author(s): Rivca Gordon
Source: Sartre Studies International, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2001), pp. 69-80
Published by: Berghahn Books
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 A Response to Hannah
Arendt's Critique of Sartre's
Views on Violence

Rivca Gordon

Over and over again, we had used all the nonviolent in our arsenal -
weapons
speeches, deputations, threats, marches, strikes, stay-aways, voluntary
- all to no
imprisonments avail, for whatever we did was met by an iron hand. A
freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature
of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that
mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.
Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

In her essay On Violence (1970), Hannah Arendt criticizes what she

calls Sartre's 'new faith' of violence.1 She argues that his call to the
oppressed peoples to turn to a violent struggle to achieve freedom
from colonialisation is an idea that was not known in the history of
revolutions.In addition, Sartre's glorification of violence is totally
opposed to the Hegelian and Marxian tradition, and to any 'leftist
humanism'. Therefore, Sartre should be included, she holds, among
'the new militants' or 'the new preachers of violence' of the New Left.

To support her views, Arendt criticizes passages in Sartre's Critique

of Dialectical Reason and in his preface to Frantz Fanon's The
Wretched of the Earth.
In this article, I show that Arendt's sweeping criticism of Sartre's
thinking on violence is wrong, and that in the passages mentioned by
Arendt he did not glorify violence, nor did he glorify violence in any
other texts. I also demonstrate that Arendt seems to have purposely
refused either to fully understand Sartre's ideas or to learn from him.
This is unfortunate, given that Sartre's thinking is broad, profound
and very often enlightening; hence, Arendt's rejection of that
thinking leads to a surprising superficiality. Paradoxically, it also leads
her to a limited understanding of the political realm in contemporary
life, a realm that was granted high status in Hannah Arendt's thinking.
I base my rejection of Arendt's criticism on Sartre's ontology.
According to Sartre, every attempt of one freedom to negate or to

destroy another freedom is evil. Therefore, every situation of

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 Rivca Gordon

continuous of freedom, or of a systematic destruction of

oppression
freedom, is evil. In many instances of oppression and of systematic

destruction of freedom, Sartre holds, the only way open to the

oppressed who decide to regain their freedom, is struggle. At times,
as articulated by Nelson Mandela in the opening citation, they must
engage in a violent struggle.
Consider two citations that Arendt takes from Sartre's preface to
The Wretched of the Earth which, in her mind, prove that Sartre
glorifies violence.

'Irrepressible violence ... is man recreating himselP, that it is through 'mad fitry'
that 'the wretched of the earth can become men'. (OV 12)

'To shoot down a European is to kill two birds with one stone . . . there remain a
dead man and a free man.' (OV 13)

Arendt explains that these citations show that Sartre, by 'his great
felicity with words', and with the inspiration of Fanon, gives
'
expression here to a new faith. "Violence", he now believes . . . "like
Achilles' lance, can heal the wounds it has inflicted".' (OV 20) Her
response: 'If this were true, revenge would be the cure-all for most

of our ills'.
Arendt explains that these ideas are alien to Hegel's and Marx's

thought. For Hegel, a person creates herself or himself through

thinking, while for Marx labour fulfils this function. These are two
'peaceful activities' by which persons create themselves. It is true that
Marx understood the State as an instrument of violence used by the
dominant class. However, the power of this class was not created by
violence but by its role in society, and by the productive process. Even
when Marx suggested the dictatorship of the proletariat as an

oppressive and violent means, he viewed it as a necessary evil that was

destined to rule for a limited period. Thus, for Marx, violence had a
secondary role in history.
Arendt adds that Sartre's approach to violence is even more

extreme than that of Georges Sorel, who expressed the class struggle
in military terms. Sorel, however, finally proposed the nonviolent idea
of the general strike (OV 12). Moreover, she states, Sartre goes even
further than Fanon, when he suggests violence only in military terms.
Fanon, at least, knew that if the total brutality of violence is not

halted, it necessarily brings about the defeat of the rebellion.

Consequently, what Arendt calls Sartre's grandiose and irresponsible
utterances on violence are, for her, 'on a par with Fanon's worst

rhetorical excesses'. (OV 20)

In addition, Arendt states that when Sartre calls the oppressed

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 A Response to Hannah Arendt

peoples to use violence in order to set themselves up in the place of

their wealthy oppressors, he is proposing a myth. His call to them to

become the persecutors, in order to change their situation, is
suggesting a dream that has never been realised in human history. On
those few occasions in history when slave rebellions did occur, 'it was
precisely "mad fury" [Sartre] that turned dreams into nightmares for
everybody. In no case as far as I know, was the force of these
"volcanic" outbursts, in Sartre's words, "equal to that of the pressure

put on them".' (OV 21) Therefore, she explains, when Sartre

identifies the national liberation movements with such outbursts of
rage, he predicts their failure. Sartre also suggests a false illusion to
the oppressed by his new slogan: 'Unity of the Third World', or
'Natives of all underdeveloped countries unite!' For Arendt, the third
world is not a reality but an ideology. Thus, Sartre's call to the
oppressed to unify in order to end colonialism by violence is to adhere
to a doctrine that has been repeatedly refuted by the facts of history.
Is Arendt's critique of Sartre's thinking correct? - No! It needs to
be pointed out that her critique relies primarily on his preface to The
Wretched of the Earth, and only on the citations that were given above.
Anyone who carefully reads Sartre's preface will see that she selects

only those citations which could suggest that Sartre glorifies violence.
Moreover, she detaches these citations from the detailed context in
which they are presented. Consider the following crucial example.
Sartre clearly declares that his preface is a demand to the Europeans,

mainly to the liberals among them, to read Fanon's book, and to take
a courageous stand in relation to the truth that it reveals: the violent

struggle of the Algerians is the consequence of the continuous violence

practised by French colonialism. It is a struggle against the French

policy of oppression, of economic impoverishment, and of social,
cultural and political destruction of the Algerian people. Sartre, as a
citizen of the oppressive state, chose to say Yes to the violent struggle
of the oppressed, and No to the French violence. He explains that the
aim of French violence is not only:

the keeping of these enslaved men at arm's length; it seeks to dehumanize them.

Everything will be done to wipe out their traditions, to substitute our language for
theirs and to destroy their culture without giving them ours. Sheer physical fatigue
will stupefy them. Starved and ill, if they have any spirit left, fear will finish the job;

guns are levelled at the peasant; civilians come to take over his land and force him,
by dint of flogging, to till the land for them. If he shows fight, the soldiers fire and
he is no longer a man at all.2

Thus, the were forced to choose between two

Algerians

possibilities: slavery or freedom. They chose to fight for freedom. In

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 Rivca Gordon

order to regain their personal and national freedom, and in order to

annihilate French oppression, they were compelled, indeed with
'volcanic fury', to struggle violently. The French response was eight

years of cruel war whose aim was to end this struggle. In this

colonialist war, more than a million Algerians lost their lives.

However, in stark contrast to Arendt's historical forecast that such

violent rebellions always fail, the freedom fighters finally won; Algeria
became an independent state.

Arendt blatantly ignores the significance of the struggle for

freedom that is central to Sartre's message. She seems to be

confronted with a basic problem stemming from his support of the

violent struggle of the oppressed, especially the oppressed Algerians.
For her, violence is an antipoliticai act. It is a destruction of the
political realm, which was dear to Arendt.
Arendt's discussion of Sartre is even less tenable when she relates
it to the Critique of Dialectical Reason. She doubtless recognized that
the Critique is Sartre's major study of political and social ensembles.
As far as I am aware, it is the only study he published in which the
question of violence is discussed in detail. In her essay On Violence,
Arendt refers to the Critique merely in a note in the appendix. In this
note one finds many quotations that are drawn from R.D. Laing and
D.G. Cooper's book, Reason and Violence. A Decade of Sartre's
Philosophy, 1950-60 (OV 91). Arendt argues that basing her criticism
of Sartre on this secondary source is legitimate because Sartre warmly
blessed this book. Did Arendt, in fact, ever read the Critique of
Dialectical Reason? I am not sure. If she had read Sartre's lengthy and
profound study carefully, she would probably have seen that Laing
and Cooper's book is quite superficial, skims many topics, and is often
inaccurate.

On the basis of quotations from Laing and Cooper's book, Arendt

argues in her appendix note that, for Sartre, violence and counter
violence are a consequence of need in a world in which human
existence is haunted by basic scarcity. As a result, violence and
counter-violence occur in a world in which the essence of all the
relations between the classes is based on antagonistic reciprocity. She
claims that from this, Sartre concludes that: 'Whether I kill, torture,
enslave . . . my aim is to suppress [the Other's] freedom - it is an alien
force, de trop' (OV 90). Arendt attacks Sartre's position in a passage
that is worth quoting in full:

'each one is one too many . . . each is redundant for the other' in a bus queue, the
members of which obviously 'take no notice of each other except as a number in a

quantitative series'. He concludes, 'They reciprocally deny any link between each

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 A Response to Hannah Arendt

of their inner worlds'. From this, it follows that praxis 'is the negation of alterity,
which is itself a negation' - a highly welcome conclusion, since the negation of a

negation is an affirmation.
The flaw in the argument seems to me obvious. There is all the difference in the
world between 'not taking notice' and 'denying', 'denying any link' with
between

somebody and 'negating' his otherness; and for a sane person there is still a
considerable distance to travel from this theoretical 'negation' to killing, torturing,
and enslaving. (OV 90)

Arendt's presentation and interpretation of what Sartre is saying is

grossly mistaken. Indeed, her entire presentation is fallacious; before
describing her mistakes, and assessing the entire passage from the
Critique to which she refers, it is important to present the context.
The passage is a summary of Sartre's lengthy discussion of scarcity,
and its many influences. In this passage, Sartre primarily describes a
dialectic of violence that occurs in a world of scarcity. His description
has moral implications, but its aim is not, as Arendt argues, to justify
violence.
Sartre explains that although material scarcity is a contingent
phenomenon, history reveals that man is a product of scarcity, that
there is not enough for everyone. Even today there are hundreds of

millions of people who are starving. At the same time, Sartre

continues, human development, until today, is revealed as a bitter
struggle against scarcity. Thus, the fear that haunts individuals and
societies should be understood neither as feelings only, nor solely as
a result of the fact that nature does not supply enough resources for

their basic needs. Scarcity is, first of all, the consequence of objective
conditions, the origin of which is the economic, social and political
oppression of one group by another group. The meaning of scarcity
is that a person experiences the Other as constantly robbing him or

her of basic needs, and even threatening annihilation.

Sartre asserts that a relation of positive reciprocity is an actual
possibility. However, he argues, scarcity means an internal relation of
between human that 'man exists for everyone as
negation beings:

nonhuman, as an alien species'.3 Scarcity is a revelation of a broken

and antagonistic reciprocity in which everyone primarily grasps
oneself and one's fellow as radically Other. Furthermore, scarcity is
experienced as an internal tension of passivity and inertia;
superfluousness and alienation not only between a person and his or
her environment, but also between one person and another person.
In order to show that scarcity is a universal phenomenon, Sartre

turns to those societies that are called primitive and without history.
Their existence is based on the biological cycle, and on simple tools,

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 Rivca Gordon

and it seems that they know nothing about each other. In these

societies, scarcity is revealed as originally connected to a space that at

once relates to everyone and to social structures; it is revealed as a

negative unity within a given society and within groups that are not
dependent on each other. At this level of human development,

scarcity is experienced as a general and objective threat for a certain

society, and as a constant possibility that destruction might come to

everyone through the praxis of the Other. The proof for this is that
the motive for the violent clashes among these societies, when they
meet each other, is not always economic in its essence. The fact that

sometimes they have the entire savannah for themselves, and that

generally they do not bother each other, shows that natural scarcity
as a cause for struggle is not always openly involved. Often scarcity
does not emerge at all. However, and this is Sartre's main point, we
always find in these societies the person of scarcity. The person who,
when confronted by the Other, perceives the Other as threatening her
or his physical existence, hence as antihuman. Sartre describes the
constant and renewed aggressiveness between these societies, and the
fear that is awakened with every appearance of an alien group, thus:
'what the adversaries try to destroy in each other is not the simple
threat of scarcity, but praxis itself in so far as it is a betrayal of man in

favour of the antihuman.' (CDR 133)

Thus, a broken reciprocity emerges, when, in the context of scarcity,
every person internalises and externalises the praxis of the other as

antihuman. Sartre describes this broken reciprocity as 'the first

movement of ethics . . . the constitution of radical evil and

Manichaeism' (CDR 132). He emphasises, however, that this

movement of ethics does not mean that radical evil and Manichaeism

are a subjective condition of an individual. The existence of scarcity

means that everyone objectively becomes antihuman; this
nonhumanity is revealed in practice through the Other as radically evil.
Consider now the entire passage from the Critique of Dialectical
Reason to which Arendt refers via her reading of the book by Laing
and Cooper.

For this reason I believe that, at the level of need and through it, scarcity is

experienced in practice through Manichaean action, and that the ethical takes the
form of the destructive imperative: evil must be destroyed. And at this level, too,
violence must be defined as a structure of human action under the sway of
Manichaeism and in a context of scarcity. Violence always presents itself as counter
violence, that is to say, as a retaliation against the violence of the Other. But this
violence of the Other is not an objective reality except in the sense that it exists in all
men as the universal motivation of counter-violence; it is nothing but the
unbearable fact of broken reciprocity and of the systematic exploitation of man's

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 A Response to Hannah Arendt

humanity for the destruction of the human. Counter-violence is exactly the same

thing, but as a process of restoration, as a response to provocation: if I destroy the

nonhumanity of the antihuman in my adversary, I cannot help destroying the

humanity of man in him, and realising his nonhumanity in myself. I may try to kill,
to torture, to enslave, or simply to mystify, but in any case my aim will be to
eliminate alien freedom as a hostile force, a force which can expel me from the
practical field and make me into 'a surplus man' condemned to death. In other
words, it is undeniable that what I attack is a man as man, that is, as the free praxis
of an organic being. It is man, and nothing else, that I hate in the enemy, that is,
in myself as Other; and it is myself that I try to destroy in him, so as to prevent him

destroying me in my own body. (CDR 133)

Thus, violence is a human action which, under the sway of

Manichaeism and in the context of scarcity, is aimed to destroy a
specific evil. Often, such a destroying is counter-violence, it is an act
performed against the evil that prevails, against an initial violence
practised by the Other. Consequently, despite the fact that most
people, including Arendt, judge the violence of the oppressed as the
initial violence, the truth is the opposite. The initial violence is always
that of the oppressor. With the establishment of an oppressive system,
violence has already begun.
Counter-violence, Sartre emphasizes, is often the only way open
for the oppressed to struggle against the broken reciprocity, and also
against the terrible oppression and exploitation, accompanied by
passivity, alienation and alterity, that were imposed on them from
without. In this situation the contra-person must sometimes kill and
torture. The oppressed, in order to live, must adopt the violent

means, like killing and torturing, that were initially practised against
them by the oppressor, the Other, the enemy. What the oppressed
hate in the enemy, in the oppressor, is human being as human being;
what they try to kill is the human freedom of the oppressor. Killing
is the oppressed's 'non-human' way to prevent their adversaries from

annihilating them in their body. Sartre concludes that counter

violence is sometimes the only true "way of the oppressed to realise

themselves as human beings, to regain their freedom, and their

humanity.
I can now state four reasons why Arendt's criticism of Sartre's
approach to violence is mistaken. First, Sartre presents the idea of
people waiting in a queue for a bus as an example of a quantative series
in which each of them is superfluous for the Other. Arendt is wrong
to claim that he presents this example in order to justify violence. He
clearly writes that it is only a simple and limited example from
everyday life. It is an example by which he describes the ontological
characteristics of the series in society; through this example he

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 Riven Gordon

illuminates the alienation,

alterity and seriality that characterise
modern everyday life, mainly in the city. The example has nothing to
do with violence.
Secondly, the counter-violence of the person of scarcity that Sartre
describes is not, as Arendt concludes, a theoretical negation. On the
contrary, it is a negation whose aim is to actually negate, if necessary
by violence, the real everyday violence of the oppressor.
Thirdly, Arendt is wrong to claim that Sartre concludes that
negation of the negation is affirmation, a conclusion which she
ironically calls 'highly welcome'. According to Sartre, the negation of
the negation, the violence of the oppressed against the violence of the
oppressor, does not necessarily end with affirmation; it may often
bring forth a new negation, that is, new, much more cruel acts of

violence (of the oppressor). As a result, there comes into being a cycle
of violence, counter-violence, and renewed violence.

Finally, Arendt ignores what was already hinted at, that for Sartre
there is an ontological or dialectical link between freedom and
violence.This is probably her most serious mistake. Is it by chance
that she ignores this link between freedom and violence? Is it by
chance that in On Violence, in contrast to many, if not most, of her
other writings, freedom is not discussed at all?
I have already indicated that, according to Sartre, frequently the
only way open to the oppressed to regain their freedom is by a
struggle, which may be violent: 'It is precisely this that we have called
violence, for the only conceivable violence is that of freedom against
freedom through the mediation of inorganic matter. . . Thus violence
is always both reciprocal recognition of freedom and a negation . . .
of this freedom through the intermediary of the inertia of
exteriority'(CDR 736). Thus, only human freedom, and not matter,
can force another human freedom to live under the sway of
oppression. Oppression and violence occur only after the freedom of
the Other is already recognized. Consequently, Sartre explains,
oppression leads to a profound metamorphosis in human existence,
as freedom has to realise itself as a contradiction.
How is this contradiction manifested? The oppressed must choose
to become a being-for-the-other, a being who is conditioned by the
oppressor as a free being. The oppressed must freely yield to the
Other who is trying to destroy his or her freedom, and, at the same
time, to be linked to this Other by an internal and reciprocal
relationship. In order to live, the oppressed people or classes have to
agree to become an object or a means for the oppressing Other, and
to act for the sake of ends which are not their own. For instance, the

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 A Response to Hannah Arendt

oppressed proletariat agree to sell their labour in order to produce the

oppressor's wealth. The freedom of the oppressed, therefore, must,
in such a situation, realise itself by objective characteristics of
impotence and passivity, characteristics which it constantly has to
internalise and externalise. In such situations, the oppressed are
forced to choose to live daily with no hope, with no rights, in
inferiority. Sartre suggests that this contradiction reveals the most
radical otherness and cruel alienation to which freedom can be
condemned. He adds:
As for oppression, it consists, rather, in treating the Other as animal . . . the slave

acquires his animality, through the master, only after his humanity has been

recognised . . . This is the contradiction of racism, colonialism, and all forms of

tyranny: in order to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognise him as a man.
(CDR 110-111)

Hence, an oppressor, in order to be an oppressor, must also realize

herself or himself as a contradiction. He or she must simultaneously

recognise the oppressed as free, and force these free persons to reduce
their freedom to the level of servility, passivity, and impotence. Put
differently, the oppressors have to create a system based on
Manichaeism and scarcity, and to force the oppressed to choose to

become inferior and poor. They have to decide that the oppressed will
freely give up their freedom, and obediently and efficiently serve only
the interests of the oppressors. In order to preserve the oppressive
system, the oppressor must act with the knowledge that it is forbidden
to physically destroy the freedom of the oppressed.
Nevertheless, Sartre adds, oppression might lead to the elimination

of the oppressed, for example, if they rebel. This is why the oppressor,
in order to preserve the system of oppression, must, in most cases,
create various supports for the oppressive system; such supports may
include a strong loyal military or a Malthusian ideology. However, the
contradiction remains. The oppressor also has to recognise the

oppressed and exploited classes as constituted of free persons, even

while he or she forces them to yield to a system in which their freedom
will become passive and impotent. Also, in order to prevent a
rebellion, the oppressor will often have to act violently.
At this limit point, in which one freedom assumes the exclusive
right to practise violence against other freedoms, counter-violence
emerges. To annihilate the contradiction of their existence, and to
regain their personal and collective freedom, the oppressed have to
decide to adopt the violent means of the oppressor. A collective of

weak and poor people attains solidarity, and decides to struggle to

eliminate its existential fatalism and its being-oppressed. Enslaved

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 Riven Gordon

freedoms merge and unite so as to become a struggle group whose

aim is to negate the negation of their freedom. Their violence is the

spontaneous revelation of a common project which is directed, in the

present, toward a hope, toward the future. Here, solidarity and
violence are revelations of freedom as a shared praxis. Sartre

concludes that, in a situation of oppression, the sole content of

counter-violence is a struggle by the oppressed, whose aim is a return

to freedom and to an affirmation of freedom as a new relation among

persons.
These truths are poignantly articulated by Sartre in his preface to
The Wretched of the Earth, in-which he refers specifically to the
Algerian struggle for freedom against French colonialism. As pointed
out, Arendt ignored these truths. In the Critique of Dialectical
Reason Sartre develops this theme. In that lengthy study, Sartre
explains that, for the Algerians, who lived on that limit point between
life and death,

the only possible way out was to confront total negation with total negation,
violence with equal violence; to negate dispersal and atomisation by an initially
negative unity whose content would be defined in struggle: the Algerian nation.
Thus the Algerian rebellion, through being desperate violence, was simply an
adoption of the despair in which the colonialists maintained the natives; its violence
was simply a negation of the impossible, and impossibility of life was the immediate
result of oppression. Algerians had to live, because colonialists needed a sub

proletariat, but they had to live at the frontier of the impossibility of life because
wages had to be as close as possible to zero. The violence of the rebel was the
violence of the colonialist; there was never any other. (CDR 733)

In the Critique, Sartre emphasizes the political aspect of the

ontological link between freedom and violence. He believes that if
every conquest, oppression, and exploitation is political in its essence,
then the solution is also political in its essence. As long as an
oppressive system rejects, and does not recognise, the personal and
national freedom of the oppressed, there will necessarily occur a cycle
of violence. To prevent the end of an oppressive regime, the
oppressors will constantly strive to create an atmosphere in which

people believe that the origin of the problem is social, not political.
To avoid any political recognition of the freedom of the oppressed,
and of their national independence, the oppressors will appeal to the
status quo.

Yet the colonialist prefers to evoke possibilities of social improvement because he

knows that the demands of the natives are primarily political. And they are primarily

political because the natives are aware that 'polities', in the colonies, is quite simply
the installation and the regular functioning of an enormous repressive apparatus
which alone permits super-exploitation. (CDR note 721)

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 A Response to Hannah Arendt

Arendt does not mention Sartre's political approach. It seems that

she views the violent struggle of the national liberation movements

as an antipolitical act, a destruction of the political realm, which she

called the only true public realm. She repeatedly explains that the
public realm is created by an exchange of opinions and dialogue
between people, and by constituting laws that ensure stability and
permanence. Violence does not belong in this realm. Hence, the

problems of the oppressed, such as discrimination, poverty, hunger

and lack of education, belong either to the private realm or to the
social realm. Does not this stance provide implicit political support to
oppressive regimes?
From this unlaudable stance we learn that a major problem in

Arendt's thinking on violence is the chasm that she establishes

between the political realm and the social realm. The result is a
political realm in which the possibility of positive reciprocity is
reserved for those who have rights and power. She does not relate to

all the weak and oppressed, to whom the violent oppressor denies the
political realm. In contrast, Sartre's political thinking repeatedly
emphasises the sad plight of the oppressed; he views the plight of the
wretched of the earth as a political problem that we dare not and
should never ignore.
If violence is not permitted, what are the oppressed to do so as to

enter the political realm? Arendt gives no answer, nor does she ever
raise the question. Consequently, by denying the possibility of the
oppressed to turn to counter-violence, and by excluding their

problems from the political realm, Arendt is hardly a supporter of

freedom.
To recapitulate, Arendt's sweeping statement that Sartre glorified
violence and preached violence is not only false, it also exposes a basic
failure of Arendt's criticism. Sartre was a prolific author, playwright,
philosopher, critic, and commentator on politics. In none of these

writings did he glorify or preach violence. Almost all of his writings

seem to have been ignored by Arendt. If she had read more of Sartre's
writings, I believe that Arendt would have been less prone to spread
such glaring untruths as appear in her critique of Sartre in On
Violence. Furthermore, Arendt was wrong to conclude that Sartre's

support of the violent struggle of the oppressed peoples is opposed

to any 'leftist humanism'. Rather, as Sartre testified to Simone de
Beauvoir: 'Whenever I committed myself in one way or another to
politics, and carried out an action, I never abandoned the idea of
freedom',4 nor did Sartre ever abandon the poor and the needy, the

and the the wretched of the earth. How can one

oppressed exploited,

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 Rivca Gordon

be opposed to a 'leftist humanism' with such a fine record of struggle

against widespread capitalist injustices?
It is fitting, therefore, to conclude my rejection of Arendt's
criticism of Sartre with a statement by one of Sartre's biographers,
John Gerassi:
From 1945 on, Sartre did more than any other intellectual in the world to
denounce injustice and to support the wretched of the earth. And he did so taking
more risks than any other intellectual, risks to his person, to his reputation, to his

immortality.5

Notes

1. Hannah Arendt, On Violence, (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970);

Subsequent references to this text take the form of OV followed by page number.
2. Jean-Paul Sartre, preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans.
Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 15.
3. Jean-Paul Sartre, of Dialectical
Critique Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith
(London: Verso, 1982) p. 130. Subsequent references to this text take the form of
CDR followed by page number.
4. Simone de Beauvoir, Adieux: A Earewell to Sartre, trans. Patrick O'Brian (New
York: Pantheon, 1984), p. 367.
5. John Gerassi, Jean-Paul Sartre: Hated Conscience of His Century, Vol.1, (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 187.

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