ABSTRACT
If the expression “œuvre de circonstance” (as Sartre himself labeled it) is applicable to any of Sartre’s essays, as it surely is to several of them, Search for a Method may well be the purest such instance. Yet at the same time, paradoxically, it is perhaps more of a bridge essay across different moments in the evolution of Sartre’s philosophy than any other. Composed in 1956 and published in Polish translation in early 1957, it was solicited, when Sartre was visiting Poland, by one of the editors of the revue Twórczósć, who were preparing a special issue on contemporary French thought. This was the period of the famous (or should I rather say “once famous”?) “Thaw” in the Cold War that resulted from the acknowledgment by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, of some of the dire misdeeds of his predecessor, Stalin. Intellectuals and others in the countries of the Warsaw Pact, which of course included Poland as well as Hungary, took this as a signal that the rigid control of ideas exercised by the institutions of the Communist Party was being relaxed, and this journal issue was one example of the new behavior. But the ensuing workers’ uprising in Hungary was suppressed by Soviet tanks in November of 1956, and Poland barely escaped a similar fate—tanks were already massed on the border—as a result of frenzied negotiations. Sartre immediately wrote, and Les Temps Modernes almost immediately published, his condemnation of the events in Budapest, Le Fantôme de Staline (Stalin’s Ghost), but the Polish version of Search, entitled Marksizm i Egzystencjalizm, still appeared in April 1957.
