sartre and the figure of the committed intellectual

The death of Jean-Paul Sartre in 1980 marked the end of a period and a unique outlook on intellectual life. The exceptional interdependence between his life and his thinking is what makes him so close and so fascinating, and turns him into the absolute intellectual of his time. The floundering of communism led to an irreversible crisis of the relation between intellectuals and politics. This disenchantment of communism had a deep impact in the theoretical field and produced a mutation in the intellectual landscape that caused the end of Sartrian supremacy in the intellectual field. In spite of the negative appreciations voiced in France after his disappearance, Sartre remained the most famous French intellectual abroad. Jean-Paul Sartre, in effect, is not only the symbol of political error that many will always retain as their image of him - he is also the author of a monumental body of work still clearly fertile, and he undoubtedly remains the emblem of the engaged intellectual and philosopher of liberty par excellence.