{"id":119,"date":"2015-08-11T19:49:39","date_gmt":"2015-08-11T19:49:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/philosophy\/?p=119"},"modified":"2024-10-02T08:42:59","modified_gmt":"2024-10-02T08:42:59","slug":"french-existentialism-and-the-fight-against-paternalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.history.qmul.ac.uk\/philosophy\/2015\/08\/11\/french-existentialism-and-the-fight-against-paternalism\/","title":{"rendered":"French existentialism and the fight against paternalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Rosie<\/a>Dr. Rosie Germain lectures in modern history at Cambridge University, the University of North Carolina, and Liverpool Hope University.\u00a0 She\u00a0gained her BA in history from Oxford University, her MA in history from King\u2019s College London, and her PhD in history from Cambridge University.\u00a0 Rosie is interested in how and why moral systems change.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this blog post,\u00a0Rosie argues that French existentialism had an impact in England and America that went beyond intellectual circles, and was used by various interest groups in the 1960s to publicly reject the paternalistic morality of the past.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

In 1966, the American Civil Rights Movement fragmented.\u00a0 Before this year, civil rights activists were united, in public at least, in their support of a policy of peaceful integration of white and black people.\u00a0 One of the first black activists to publicly declare the death of integration was Stokely Carmichael.\u00a0 Carmichael was the leader of a prominent civil rights organisation that had been ‘integrationist’ in the early 1960s: the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).\u00a0 But in 1966, Carmichael called for black activists in the SNCC to achieve freedom through separatism, and to withdraw from mixed-race institutions.\u00a0 In doing so, he quoted from the famous French existentialist, Jean-Paul Sartre. Carmichael said that by becoming a black separatist, one was becoming what Sartre had called \u2018an anti-racist racist’.[1]<\/a> \u00a0Sartre had coined this term in 1948, and Carmichael believed that \u2018anti-racist racism\u2019 \u2013 or exclusion of whites from black organisations – would allow African-Americans to recover from the sense of inferiority created by white cultural and social dominance. [2]<\/a><\/p>\n

\"Carmichael\"<\/a>

Stokely Carmichael, the head of the largest Civil Rights organisation in 1966, the Student Non-violent Co-ordinating Committee, (SNCC), lectures about black separatism.\u00a0 Carmichael used Sartre\u2019s term, \u2018anti-racist racism\u2019, to label a way of being which embraced black difference. Image:\u00a0https:\/\/celebrityscope.net<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

For historians, Carmichael’s use of Sartre’s terminology is interesting.\u00a0 It indicates the impact that public intellectuals, such as the French existentialists, can have on cultural and social change.\u00a0 In this case, Sartre provided a new term and idea that changed a reference point in public debate.\u00a0 Sartre reinforced black separatist aspiration by providing a language through which to express it.\u00a0 In this blog post, I discuss some of the ways in which French existentialism was used by social groups to call for change in post-war Britain and America. \u00a0The examples demonstrate how French existentialism was used by activists to make a public rupture with the social relations of the past.\u00a0 Before WWII, social relations were often paternalistic. \u00a0Paternalism was an ideology which aimed to reduce social anxiety by keeping different social\u00a0groups segregated, allotting them distinct and separate\u00a0roles.\u00a0A range of groups were perceived to be free under paternalism because they were protected \u2013 women were protected by men, students by academics, and blacks by whites. \u00a0Paternalism had actually eroded in the inter war period \u2013 for instance all adult women got the vote in Britain in 1928, thereby challenging ideas they needed political \u2018protection\u2019 from men.\u00a0 Nevertheless, paternalist thought patterns persisted into the post-war period, and were only pointedly attacked, with the help of French existentialism and the legacy of Nazism, in the 1960s.<\/p>\n

But firstly, what was French existentialism, and how did these French ideas enter usage in America and Britain in the 1960s?\u00a0 French existentialism rose to prominence in France, England and America in 1945, after France was liberated from German Occupation. Two of its adherents who I look at here, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, were part of the resistance to the Nazi Occupation.<\/p>\n

\"Beauvoir<\/a>

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, the leaders of French existentialism.\u00a0 Photo taken in the early 1960s. Image credits: STF, AFP; The Guardian<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

At the core of Sartre and de Beauvoir’s writings was the idea that human consciousness was defined by an individual\u2019s ability to create their own self.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 They argued that the most moral societies were those in which humans were free to create their own identities.\u00a0 They noted that moral individuals were those who took the responsibility to choose their identities rather than unthinkingly fitting themselves into pre-conceived identities such as ‘mother’ or ‘waiter’.[4]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The existential challenge to pre-determined social roles was in tension with paternalism, although this connection would not seriously be made by readers until the 1950s.\u00a0 In the 1940s, French existentialism was seen as a philosophy of individual freedom rather than totalitarian oppression.\u00a0 This reason alone was enough for publishers and journalists from allied countries to celebrate the philosophy in 1945 as a symbol of the triumph of freedom over Nazi despotism. \u00a0Interest in France also stemmed from more long-standing reasons than the conditions of WWII.\u00a0 In both England and America, France was historically associated with cultural sophistication. Important figures in literary circles who first discussed and published the existentialists, people such as Alfred Knopf (USA) and Cyril Connolly (UK), were keen Francophiles.<\/p>\n

I. \u00a0French existentialism and black freedom <\/strong><\/p>\n

Existentialists applied their philosophy to criticise social relationships that frustrated individual freedom.\u00a0 Sartre argued that in societies that were racially mixed but where white people alone held power, black cultural difference was repressed and black freedom denied.\u00a0 Sartre\u2019s ideas of black difference settled in cultural debate in America in the 1940s and 1950s and were used in celebrations of African culture that did not cross over into political debate.[5]<\/a>\u00a0 In these decades, black civil rights activists were integrationist \u2013 calling for black people to gain access to white dominated institutions. Sartre\u2019s ideas of black difference did not fit into this political agenda geared to creating sameness between black and white people.\u00a0 However, integration looked as though it had failed by the late 1960s.\u00a0 This was partly because the slowness of the American government to make it happen made it transparent that white people were deciding when black people would become free. The value of integration was also questioned in America because African nations, such as Algeria, were pursuing an opposite policy: they were fighting for independence, and therefore separation, from their white colonizers. Leaders of civil rights organisations who had formerly supported integration used Sartre\u2019s idea to redefine integration as a paternalist policy that made black people dependent on whites.\u00a0 This is the context in which \u00a0Stokely Carmichael used Sartre\u2019s idea when speaking to a crowd of 10,000 Berkeley students in 1966:<\/p>\n

Now we maintain that we cannot have white people working in the black community, and we mean it on a psychological ground. The fact is that all black people often question whether or not they are equal to whites, because every time they start to do something, white people are around showing them how to do it. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Black people must be seen in positions of power, doing and articulating for themselves, for themselves \u2026 We must wage a psychological battle on the right for black people to define themselves as they see fit.<\/p>\n

That is not to say that one is a reverse racist; it is to say that one is moving in a healthy ground; it is to say what the philosopher Sartre says: one is becoming an “anti-racist racist.”[6]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Carmichael justified black separatism through reference to Sartre.\u00a0 Sartre didn\u2019t invent separatism, but his high profile combined with the fact that he coined a term, \u2018anti-racist racism\u2019, that could be used to visualise an alternative to integration, meant that he became central to the black separatists\u2019 rejection of old-style paternalist relations between black and white.<\/p>\n

II. French existentialism and female freedom<\/strong><\/p>\n

In The Second Sex <\/em>(first English transl. 1953), Simone de Beauvoir argued that modern societies that assumed women needed to be protected by men, and kept women in the home, upheld myths that men and women were fundamentally different because of their biology.[7]<\/a>\u00a0 She noted that this myth oppressed women because it prohibited them from entering education or work on equal terms with men.\u00a0 Betty Friedan, a journalist for women\u2019s magazines that promoted female domesticity, challenged the ideology of the magazines after reading de Beauvoir. Commissioned by the Ladies Home Journal<\/em> in 1957 to write about whether universities were suitably preparing women for their role in the home, Friedan reversed the question and asked whether the role in the home was, in fact, suitable for women with a university education.[8]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 In 1975, Betty Friedan attributed this conceptual leap from acceptance to rejection of the paternalist settlement to de Beauvoir.\u00a0 She noted that<\/p>\n

it was The Second Sex<\/em> that introduced me to an existential approach to reality and political responsibility \u2013 that, in effect, freed me from the rubrics of authoritative ideology and led me to whatever original analysis of women\u2019s existence I have been able to contribute to the Women\u2019s Movement and to its unique politics.[9]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Friedan launched Second Wave Feminism with a work in which she challenged the naturalness of a woman\u2019s domesticity in The Feminine Mystique<\/em> in 1963.\u00a0 Friedan also campaigned for an end to workplace discrimination against women through the National Organisation for Women (NOW), an organisation that she co-founded in 1966.<\/p>\n

\"Friedan\"<\/a>

Betty Friedan speaks in New York’s Central Park in August 1971. Image credit: AP, The Telegraph<\/a><\/p><\/div>\n

III. \u00a0French existentialism and student freedom<\/strong><\/p>\n

While French existentialism was grounded in the writings of two of the most highly trained academic philosophers in France, philosophy students in Britain weren\u2019t even taught existential philosophy at university.\u00a0 Instead, British philosophy students consumed a diet composed mainly of analytic philosophy \u2013 a tradition in which sentence construction was analysed.\u00a0 The 1960s was a time of university reform in Britain, when the government turned its attention to the function of the university in society.\u00a0 In this broader context of university reform, the contrast between the existential philosophy of freedom, and the analytic philosophy of sentences, prompted students to challenge the leadership of academics. They saw analytic philosophy as a way to perpetuate the status quo, and a way for academics to prevent their students from challenging the organisation of society.\u00a0 In 1968, one student at Oxford, Jairus Banaji, argued that analytic philosophy was a:<\/p>\n

degeneration, lacking the essential anthropological foundation, [it] is a sterile and vacuous mental gymnastics, abstract and useless except as a consolidation of existing modes of thought. In particular, linguistic philosophy intellectually justifies and corroborates the world of ordinary discourse or ‘common sense’ which Gramsci called the ‘practical wisdom’ of the ruling classes.[10]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Banaji argued that Sartre\u2019s philosophy of human action should be taught instead of analytic philosophy as:<\/p>\n

The Critique [Sartre\u2019s work] stands out as an indictment of the \u2026 structure of bourgeois- ideological indoctrination \u2026 Sartre’s critics refuse to recognise his relevance, greater now than ever before, perhaps because they are not equipped for the task ideologically \u2026 they are afraid.[11]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For students who read existentialism, just as with women and African-Americans, the philosophy exposed current relationships between adults with power and those without as damaging to freedom and as inhibiting change.\u00a0 They used existentialism to challenge paternalism and to visualise equality.<\/p>\n

IV. \u00a0The legacy of Nazism<\/strong><\/p>\n

These individuals used existentialism to imagine a positive alternative to the paternalistic settlement.\u00a0 The effectiveness of their use of existentialism to construct a new vision of the future was augmented by their deconstruction of the present by comparing it with Nazism.\u00a0 In his 1966 Berkeley speech, Stokely Carmichael argued that, as a black American, he needed to point out American racism because for white Americans to identify it, they would have to negate themselves.\u00a0 He referred to Nazis to illuminate his point, noting that most Nazis who accepted their crimes committed suicide, those who didn\u2019t accept their responsibility for mass-murder could live with themselves.\u00a0 In The Feminine Mystique<\/em>, Betty Friedan referred to suburban homes as \u2018comfortable concentration camps\u2019, and to women who entered housewifery as walking to their own deaths in the same ways as Jews who entered concentration camps.[12]<\/a> In 1968, in the Oxford University student magazine, journalists expressed fear that centralised systems that give plenary control to one group resembled those \u2018which allowed the rise of the Nazis in the early thirties\u2019.[13]<\/a>\u00a0 Such reference to Nazism fitted alongside calls to Marxist revolution[14]<\/a>, and arguments like Banaji\u2019s to motivate students to challenge the authoritarian structure of the British university.[15]<\/a><\/p>\n

The sixties were special as this was when individuals used existentialism (as well as other philosophies) to make a public rupture with the paternalist consensus of the past. Activists of the 1960s who changed by reading existentialism, such as the African-Americans, women, and students considered here, argued that human happiness was connected with freedom to create oneself.\u00a0 The legacy of Nazism had heightened the importance of this ideal of self-creation, and French existentialists had demonstrated how such ideas of freedom could not be realised through existing social relationships.\u00a0\u00a0 Existential philosophers therefore provided some of the energy for the public\u2019s distancing from the mores of past, and the self-conscious embrace of new ideas of freedom and self-hood, which was so characteristic of the 1960s.<\/p>\n

\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a> Stokely Carmichael, \u2018Berkeley speech (1966)\u2019 in (ed.) Ethel Minor, Stokely Speaks<\/em> (1971).<\/p>\n

[2]<\/a> Jean-Paul Sartre, \u2018<\/strong>Orph\u00e9e Noir\u2019 <\/em>in (ed.) L\u00e9opold S\u00e9dar Senghor<\/a>, Anthologie de la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache de langue Fran\u00e7aise <\/em>(1948).<\/p>\n

[3]<\/a> Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and nothingness<\/em> (first published in English in 1958, page references in this blog post are taken from the University Paperback edition, 1969); Simone de Beauvoir, The second sex<\/em> (first published in English in 1953, page references in this blog post are taken from Vintage edition, 1997).<\/p>\n

[4]<\/a> Sartre, Being and nothingness<\/em>, p. 59; de Beauvoir, The second sex<\/em>, pp. 501 \u2013 542.<\/p>\n

[5]<\/a> Mercer Cook, ‘Review of Anthologie de la nouvelle po\u00e9sie n\u00e8gre et malgache de langue Fran\u00e7aise : pr\u00e9c\u00e9d\u00e9e \u00a0de Orph\u00e9e Noir <\/em>by L. S\u00e9dar Senghor\u2019, The Journal of Negro History<\/em>, 34 (1949), p. 239.<\/p>\n

[6]<\/a> Stokely Carmichael, \u2018Berkeley speech (1966)\u2019 in (ed.) Ethel Minor, Stokely Speaks<\/em> (1971).<\/p>\n

[7]<\/a> de Beauvoir, The second sex<\/em>, p. 734<\/p>\n

[8]<\/a> Betty Friedan, \u2018Up from the kitchen floor\u2019, New York Times<\/em> (Nov. 4th, 1973).<\/p>\n

[9]<\/a> Betty Friedan, \u2018No Gods, No Goddesses\u2019, The Saturday Review<\/em> (June 14th, 1975).<\/p>\n

[10]<\/a> Jairus Banaji, ‘Towards a critique of Oxford philosophy’, Oxford Left,<\/em> II, 2 (1968).<\/p>\n

[11]<\/a> Jairus Banaji, \u2018Sartre\u2019, Oxford Left,<\/em> II, 3 (1968).<\/p>\n

[12]<\/a> This has been argued in Kirsten Fermaglich, \u2018The Significance of Nazi Imagery in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique<\/em> (1963)\u2019 in American Jewish History<\/em> 91.2 (2003) 205-232.<\/p>\n

[13]<\/a> The Isis<\/em>, 29 May, 1968, p. 16.<\/p>\n

[14]<\/a> The Isis<\/em>, 16 October, 1968, p. 15.<\/p>\n

[15]<\/a> The Isis<\/em>, 29 May, 1968, p. 18.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr. Rosie Germain lectures in modern history at Cambridge University, the University of North Carolina, and Liverpool Hope University.\u00a0 She\u00a0gained her BA in history from Oxford University, her MA in history from King\u2019s College London, and her PhD in history from Cambridge University.\u00a0 Rosie is interested in how and why moral systems change.<\/em><\/p>\n

In this blog post,\u00a0Rosie argues that French existentialism had an impact in England and America that went beyond intellectual circles, and was used by various interest groups in […]
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