Jean-Paul Sartre is best known as the pre-eminent philosopher of individual freedom. He is the one who told us that we are totally free. Robert Bernasconi shows how the early existentialist Sartre became in stages the political champion of the oppressed. Extracts are drawn from the full range of Sartre's writings including the novel Nausea, and the major philosophical text Being and Nothingness. They show why of all major twentieth-century philosophers Sartre was the one who most easily passed beyond the confines of the academy to a general readership.

Robert Bernasconi is Moss Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. His books include The Question of Language in Heidegger's History of Being and Heidegger in Question. He has edited anthologies on race and collections of essays on Levinas and Derrida.