Hugo, a Communist Party member, is assigned the task of working for a 'deviationist' Party leader, and shooting him. But has he camouflaged a political assassination as a crime passionnel? On his release from prison two years later, he tries to explain to a former comrade exactly what his motives were.

This text was originally published in France, in 1940, under the title of L'Imaginaire. It was designed as an essay in phenomenology and it constitutes an attempt to introduce Husserl's work into French culture, and from there to the English speaking world. Published three years before Being and Nothingness, it reveals Sartre's extended examination of such concepts as nothingness and freedom, both derived here from the consciousness's ability to imagine objects not only as they are but as they are not, and to imagine objects not in existence.

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophical and political thinkers of the 20th century. His writings had a potency that was irresistible to the intellectual scene that swept post-war Europe, and have left a vital inheritance to contemporary thought. The central tenet of the Existentialist movement which he helped to found, whereby God is replaced by an ethical self, proved hugely attractive to a generation that had seen the horrors of Nazism, and provoked a revolution in post-war thought and literature. In this work, Sartre the novelist and Sartre the philosopher combine to...

One of Sartre's most important pieces of writing, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions not only anticipates but argues many of the ideas to be found in his famous Being and Nothingness.

First published in France in 1936 as a journal article, The Transcendence of the Ego was one of Jean-Paul Sartre's earliest philosophical publications. When it appeared, Sartre was still largely unknown, working as a school teacher in provincial France and struggling to find a publisher for his most famous fictional work, Nausea.
The Transcendence of the Ego is the outcome of Sartre's intense engagement with the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Here, as in many subsequent writings, Sartre embraces Husserl's vision of phenomenology as...

First published in France in 1937, in The Transcendence of the Ego marks a profound shift in Sartre's philosophy towards existentialism and contains important themes later taken up in his masterpiece Being and Nothingness. Essential reading for

"Geschlossene Gesellschaft": Drei Personen, die im Leben einander nie begegnet sind, werden nach ihrem Tod für alle Ewigkeit in einem Hotelzimmer zusammensein. Das ist die Hölle. "Wenn meine Beziehungen schlecht sind, begebe ich mich in die totale Abhängigkeit von anderen. Und dann bin ich tatsächlich in der Hölle. Und es gibt eine Menge Leute auf der Welt, die in der Hölle sind, weil sie zu sehr vom Urteil anderer abhängen." (Jean-Paul Sartre)

The first volume in his Roads to Freedom trilogy, Jean-Paul Sartre's The Age of Reason is a philosophical novel exploring existentialist notions of freedom, translated by Eric Sutton with an introduction by David Caute in Penguin Modern Classics. Set in the volatile Paris summer of 1938, The Age of Reason follows two days in the life of Mathieu Delarue, a philosophy teacher, and his circle in the cafes and bars of Montparnasse. Mathieu has so far managed to contain sex and personal freedom in conveniently separate compartments. But now he is in trouble, urgently trying to raise 4,000 francs...

June 1940 was the summer of defeat for the French soldiers, deserted by their officers, utterly demoralized, awaiting the Armistice. Day by day, hour by hour, Iron in the Soul unfolds what men thought and felt and did as France fell. Men who shrugged, men who ran, men who fought and tragic men like Mathieu, who had dedicated his life to finding personal freedom, now overwhelmed by remorse and bitterness, who must learn to kill. Iron in the Soul, the third volume of Sartre's Roads to Freedom Trilogy, is a harrowing depiction of war and what it means to lose.