"In this well-documented, provocative work, Professor Santoni uncovers
and examines the ambivalences of Sartre's treatments of violence
throughout his writings. In the process he interestingly resurrects
the intellectual atmosphere of mid-twentieth-century France, paying
special attention to one of the most famous polemics of the time,
the Sartre-Camus clash over the latter's The Rebel. The timeliness
of Santoni's contribution, at a moment when the word 'terrorism'
has captured everyone's attention but the idea of it often appears
murky and unclear, hardly needs to be underscored." —William L.
McBride, Purdue University
"I do not know of anyone who has undertaken as thorough a study
of both the early and later Sartre's 'curiously ambivalent' views
on violence. One of the book's special strengths is that it makes
significant use of Sartre's unpublished 1964 Rome Lecture as well
as interviews he gave shortly before his death."—Thomas C. Anderson,
Marquette University
From Materialism and Revolution (1946) through Hope Now
(1980), Jean-Paul Sartre was deeply engaged with questions about
the meaning and justifiability of violence. In the first comprehensive
treatment of Sartre's views on the subject, Ronald Santoni begins
by tracing the full trajectory of Sartre's evolving thought on violence
and shows how the "curious ambiguity" of freedom affirming itself
against freedom in his earliest writings about violence developed
into his "curiously ambivalent" position through his later writings.
In the second part of the book, Santoni provides a detailed analysis
of Sartre's debate with Camus in 1952 and his Rome Lecture in 1964.
Santoni criticizes Sartre for scoffing at Camus's "limits" on violence
while failing to articulate his own. And in the Rome Lecture, Santoni
argues, Sartre still held a two-sided position: while acknowledging
conditions for any legitimate use of terror, Sartre failed to show
persuasively how revolutionary killing could be a vehicle for overcoming
mass alienation or effecting the "new" humanity he sought.
