This book provides a reconstructive and critical interpretation of Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. Taken together, as Sartre intended, the posthumously published key texts demonstrate that the ultimate goal of praxis is “integral humanity” and that “making the human” is always possible because the means to humanity can always be invented.

In Reading Sartre’s Second Ethics, Elizabeth A. Bowman and Robert V. Stone provide a comprehensive, reconstructive, and critical interpretation of Jean-Paul Sartre’s mature dialectical ethics. The key Sartrean texts are two posthumously published lectures, one delivered at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1964, the other scheduled to be delivered at Cornell University in 1965 but cancelled by Sartre in protest of U.S. foreign policy. Though different in content, method, and intended audience, Sartre gave both lectures the shared title “Morality and History.” As Bowman and Stone argue, these texts comprise a single, systematic ethic in two parts. The Cornell lecture focuses primarily on a regressive and phenomenological analysis of normativity and its ambiguous place in lived moral experience; the Rome lecture focuses primarily on a progressive and dialectical synthesis of the ends or goals of historical conduct. Taken together, the two texts demonstrate that “integral humanity” is always possible because the means to it can always be freely invented.

Introduction: Reading Sartre’s Later Ethical Writings Today

Abbreviations

Part I: The Second Ethics: A Heuristic and Critical Prospectus

Chapter 1: Unveiling Socialism’s “Ethical Structure”

Part II: The Phenomenological Moment: What Morality is Made of

Chapter 2: The Everyday Experience of Morality

Chapter 3: The Types of Norms and What they Share

Part III: The Regressive Moment: How Morality is Lived

Chapter 4: The Livability of Norms I: Casuistry and Moral Comfort

Chapter 5: The Livability of Norms II: Morality Is Impossible Today

Chapter 6: Invention I: The Moral Moment in Historical Action

Chapter 7: Invention II: The Vocation of Praxis for the Ethical Unconditional

Part IV: The Progressive Moment: The Paradox of Ethos and the Means Beyond It

Chapter 8: The Paradox of Ethos I: The Two Sides of Norms

Chapter 9: The Paradox of Ethos II: The Actuality and Historicity of Norms

Chapter 10: The Root of Ethics I: Colonist Morality as Alienated Humanity

Chapter 11: The Root of Ethics II: Colonized Morality as Incipient Humanity

Part V: Humanity is Always Possible

Chapter 12: "Socialist Morality" and the Conduct of Revolution

Conclusion: Inventing Humanity