No other feature of French existentialism has achieved so much notoriety as its social philosophy.1 The climactic line from Jean-Paul Sartre’s play Huis clos, “Hell is other people,” serves as the favorite butt for horrified comment. Without question, existentialism is brutally frank about the infernal aspects of social relations. But French existentialism is not all of one piece. Even Sartre’s views have shifted so far that one is tempted to speak of two Sartres: the Sartre of the infernal Huis clos, reflecting mostly the social philosophy of his L’être et le néant, and the Sartre of the purgatorial Le diable et le bon Dieu, the counterpart of his L’existentialisme est un humanisme, whose hero, Goetz, eventually chooses to live and fight united with his fellow men in a free society. Furthermore, there is the social philosophy of a Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in which human existence is engaged in the dubious but by no means hopeless struggle indicated by the title Humanisme et terreur.
None of these social philosophies is fully developed, and yet they are important because of the position that French existentialism holds in the intellectual pattern of western Europe, and especially of France. True, the existentialists are intellectual minorities. But they are “creative minorities,” which hold the balance between the two ideological blocks of Communism and clericalism and which now fill the vacuum left by the vanished free-thinkers of earlier days. Recent personal observations in France have intensified the writer’s apprehensions that our misunderstandings, our misinterpretations, and our misrepresentations are contributing factors in driving these non-Communist groups into the Communist camp.2
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