Why do artists, poets, philosophers, writers, and others who are usually classified as intellectuals leave the ivory tower to "dirty their hands" in the political arena? In an effort to illuminate the intellectual's struggle to come to grips with the issues raised by political involvement, David Schalk examines the life and thought of five intellectuels engagés in France during the period between 1920 and 1945. From communist to fascist, these figures—Paul Nizan, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier, Julien Benda, and Robert (...) class='Hi'>Brasillach—cover the full political spectrum, and Professor Schalk studies their diverse reactions to the social, political, and economic tensions of the interwar period. Broadly defining "engagement" as political involvement that is voluntary, conscious, and freely chosen, usually by intellectuals, the author poses the intellectual's dilemma in the following terms: "When we are engagé," he writes, "we fear that we are debasing our highest values; when we are not, we worry that we have become, in Paul Nizan's trenchant phrase, mere chiens de garde [watchdogs]." He then investigates the origins and the popularization of the concept of engagement in the early 1930s, the arguments used to denounce it and to defend it, its different manifestations, and finally its effects on the socio-political actuality of the world. Originally published in 1979. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

This article compares Hannah Arendt's famous essay on Adolf Eichmann's trial in Israel in 1961 to Simone de Beauvoir's little studied piece, "An Eye for an Eye," on the trial of Robert Brasillach in France in 1945. Arendt and Beauvoir each determine the complicity of individuals acting within a political order that seeks to eliminate certain forms of otherness and difference, but come to differing conclusions about the significance of the crimes. I explain Beauvoir's account of ambiguity, on which (...) she draws in her judgment of Brasillach and elaborates in her 1948 Ethics of Ambiguity, ana measure it against Arendt's account of Eichmann's thoughtlessness and its effects on the destruction of conditions of worldly plurality. Linking the failure of ethical judgment on the part of individuals to prior systemic political conditions, Beauvoir helps us recognize struggles over the meaning of bodies and conditions of inequality as central to politics. (shrink)

In _Politics with Beauvoir_ Lori Jo Marso treats Simone de Beauvoir's feminist theory and practice as part of her political theory, arguing that freedom is Beauvoir's central concern and that this is best apprehended through Marso's notion of the encounter. Starting with Beauvoir's political encounters with several of her key contemporaries including Hannah Arendt, Robert Brasillach, Richard Wright, Frantz Fanon, and Violette Leduc, Marso also moves beyond historical context to stage encounters between Beauvoir and others such as Chantal Akerman, (...) Lars von Trier, Rahel Varnhagen, Alison Bechdel, the Marquis de Sade, and Margarethe von Trotta. From intimate to historical, always affective though often fraught and divisive, Beauvoir's encounters, Marso shows, exemplify freedom as a shared, relational, collective practice. _Politics with Beauvoir_ gives us a new Beauvoir and a new way of thinking about politics—as embodied and coalitional. (shrink)

In this article, I bring together Hannah Arendt’s and Simone de Beauvoir’s respective theories of political judgment to evaluate the problems that arise from their accounts of judgment in praxis. To do so, I compare Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil on Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Israel and Beauvoir’s “An Eye for an Eye” on Robert Brasillach’s trial in France. In approaching the dilemmas of judgment in theory, both share a commitment to preserving freedom (...) by virtue of our human plurality. In practice, however, both respectively demand the death penalty for Eichmann and Brasillach. I identify three distinct failures of political judgment in praxis: from the accused, the courts, and Arendt and Beauvoir, respectively. I contend that Arendt and Beauvoir fail to appropriately judge Eichmann and Brasillach by arguing for their execution, because it constitutes a form of political violence that undermines their theoretical accounts of judgment. (shrink)

Beauvoir's writings index the politics of ontological, structural, instrumental, and affective instances of violence. In all cases, she sees violence as a result of political practices. Rather than simply deploring or condemning violence, however, Beauvoir demonstrates that we have to understand that it delineates and is manifest in all our relationships and representations. Nevertheless, we need not accept violence, and indeed, we must struggle against it. Oppressive human relationships situate us as systematically and unequally exposed to violent injury and premature (...) death, and as unequally able to nourish a creative and flourishing life. These conditions are never justified. Beauvoir insists that we must affirm ambiguity and freedom against structural conditions of oppression, and act politically to minimize violence and its tragic effects. (shrink)