Politics and the writing of history in the works of Sartre and Arendt: the case of the French Revolution

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The subject of my thesis will be the relationship between history and politics through the prism of the French Revolution in the works of Sartre andArendt. Both authors produced an original understanding of our political modernity and accorded a central role to freedom. It led them to analyse theFrench Revolution as a turning point for freedom in world history, and I want to analyse this intellectual move. For that purpose, I will focus on the"Critique of Dialectical Reason", that Sartre started to publish in 1960, and "On Revolution", an essay Arendt published in 1963. There are severaltheses I want to examine, and among them stands the relationship between freedom and social science in the writing of history. That relationship beingillustrated by the French Revolution in the works of both authors, I also want to study the concept of revolution itself. The latter will then raise the issueof violence, which I will examine as an opposition point between Sartre and Arendt. Finally, this work implies to note that phenomenology links the twothinkers together. Consequently, part of my work will be devoted to an analyse of their shared phenomenological framework in their understanding ofpolitics, tracing it back to earlier texts ("Being and Nothingness" for Sartre, "The Human Condition" for Arendt). My aim will be to show that their workspresent phenomenological convergences that have to be unveiled in order to seize the meaning of their use of history for politics.