From the late 1930s until at least the mid-1950s, the novel in France provided a crucial form of expression for the eclectic philosophy of atheistic existentialism. The existentialist novel, whose principal proponents were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, acted as a bridge between philosophy and literature to throw the individual into the world to face a metaphysical crisis which ‘reveals’ mortal existence. A quest for freedom and authenticity ensues to stave off bad faith (or the delusion of a fixed and necessary existence), the stakes often heightened by the wartime existential situation of many of these novels. With no recourse to any universal moral precepts, their characters find no neat resolutions to the problems of existence or to their responsibility to others, since the purpose of existentialist literature is not to offer metaphysical consolation but rather to engage its readers actively in the world as it appears in all its ambiguity. Similarly, the existentially committed writer must write for the current era in which they find themselves, not for some projected and idealised posterity. Despite its resolutely humanistic assumptions, the existentialist novel in its various guises sought to face the moral complexities and failures of the mid-twentieth century, resituating the human in an ever-ambiguous life-world.

Noteworthy as Rorty’s only extensive engagement with existentialism, “Philosophy as Spectatorship and Participation” reveals the influence the movement had on his thought, which hitherto only could be conjectured from the existentialist themes and references scattered throughout his other writings. Its account of philosophy’s conflicted ideals of detachment and engagement is both of general metaphilosophical value and of particular relevance now, when philosophy is chided , on the one hand, for failing to contribute sufficiently to struggles for social justice and, on the other hand, for daring to contribute to them in the first place. In the first part, Rorty suggests the philosopher is torn between two duties: being a participant and and an adventurer, risking mind and soul, and being a dry and detached kibitzer who insists on objectivity, rigor, and critical analysis. The former is a duty to the philosopher’s own humanity, while the latter, one to society. In the second part, Rorty shows existentialism as the first attempt in the history of philosophy to abandon the goal of detachment while retaining the goal of participation, highlighting existentialism’s “refusal to seek for security through the quest for objectivity.”

Seán O’Faoláin is the embodiment in twentieth-century Irish cultural life of a version of the European public intellectual. A commentator on Irish and world affairs, he responded frequently to the political directives of the mid-century decades, pushing against the pressures towards insularity and clerical nationalism and recruiting literary culture to his cause. Co-founder of the influential journal The Bell, he was also a journalist and essayist, the author of fiction, several major biographies, travel writer and literary critic. Across this eclectic oeuvre O’Faoláin advanced his sense of a world in which the writer worked to maintain connections with English and Continental culture, claiming for Ireland a European position. In the 1940s his voice was perhaps at its most impressive and diverse, culminating in the publication in 1947 of The Irish: A Character Study, his vibrant diagnosis of the emerging nation. This chapter reassesses O’Faoláin’s role as a European public intellectual in a time of global crisis, drawing new comparisons between O’Faoláin and a diverse array of contemporary commentators including Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Karl Popper and Hannah Arendt.

This chapter offers a new interpretation of Raymond Aron’s doctoral thesis, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (1938). Described by Aron as having established the basis of all his subsequent political thought, the Introduction contains a pluralist critique of Marx’s philosophy of history which doubles as a normative justification for political liberalism. Anticipating the ‘epistemology of doubt’ characteristic of later cold war liberalism, the book also served as the philosophical basis for Aron’s ethic of intellectual responsibility. Yet the extent to which the Introduction’s historical relativism undermines its ethical and normative arguments has been widely debated. Through an analysis of Aron’s previously under-explored interpretations of Dilthey and Heidegger, the chapter argues that scholarly disagreement on this issue reflects the Introduction’s ambiguous epistemological agnosticism. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the influence of the Introduction to the Philosophy of History on Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason.