"Renders accessible what is complicated and opens a window into the mind of a brilliant man. Highly recommended."

Choice

"This book focuses on Jean-Paul Sartre’s late work to explore what the author sees as a shift in the philosopher’s earlier ideas. According to Pinkard, Sartre’s late reappraisal of collective action as fundamentally free—a position that is absent from the philosopher’s early writings—is predicated on what Pinkard defines as Sartre’s critical appropriation of classical German philosophy. In particular, Pinkard claims that Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason is better understood through the lens of Sartre’s original reappropriation of Hegelian ideas in a Marxist key, alongside a new reading of the later Heidegger. This move, argues Pinkard, allows Sartre to modify his early conceptions of meaning, practice, spontaneity, inertia, and the dialectics between individual and collectivity."

Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal

“Pinkard has written a pathbreaking and compelling work that shows the importance of Sartre’s extensive rethinking of his understanding of Hegel and Marx and the role of Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism in his later thought. Key concepts such as subjectivity, agency, reciprocity, dialectic, materiality, and sociality are given original and philosophically rich interpretations, all presented with striking lucidity. Practice, Power, and Forms of Life is an extraordinary tour de force, both as interpretation and as philosophy, and it should lead to a major reassessment of the later Sartre.”

Robert Pippin, University of Chicago

“In the extensive bibliography about Sartre’s work, his connection to classical German philosophy is seldom taken as a guideline. Focusing in particular on the Critique of Dialectical Reason and Sartre’s late writings, Pinkard’s book fills this gap by luminously considering Sartre’s creative ‘appropriation’ of Hegel and Marx. It shows how this mediation, as well as Sartre’s response to Heidegger’s criticism of humanism, reveals a striking proximity to Wittgenstein’s theme of the forms of life.”

Jean-François Kervegan, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne