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The latest publication of Cambridge sociologist Patrick Baert, The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual, is not a book about philosophy as such. It concerns the institutional, social, and cultural contexts of the functioning and perception of philosophy (231). But it can nevertheless be a fascinating read for historians of ideas and philosophers alike, as it suggests a different look at strictly philosophical questions. It is not the first work offering this perspective—Baert cites the example of Randall Collins's monumental work Sociology of Philosophies—but it does promote a new theoretical attitude towards, and a new conceptualization of, the functioning of philosophy, or rather of philosophers, in society.Footnote ¹ Hence its key category is the public intellectual; that is, an intellectual active in the public arena.

In Baert's view, Sartre's popularity and significance in French culture increased rapidly in the mid-1940s, in the short period between 1944 and 1947—and especially in the autumn of 1945 (1). While the thesis referring to his crucial role in 1945 is not controversial and has been broadly discussed in the literature on existentialism and Sartre (e.g. by Tony Judt or Anna Boschetti), Baert's questions, full of reserve and doubt, as to how it was possible for somebody who was not widely known and popular, even in France itself, to become a key figure of intellectual life, are justified.Footnote ² He puts the matter in two different ways: how was it possible for Sartre and the philosophical school he represented to become so popular among artistic and intellectual circles in the mid-1940s that they could enter the public arena? In other words, why did it happen at that precise moment and not earlier or later? And why in 1945 did Sartre achieve sudden and enormous success in the public realm, given that existentialism was of no importance in France before 1944 (2)? This is a question analogical to that posed earlier by Michèle Lamont concerning the success of Jacques Derrida.Footnote ³

The entirety of Baert's book seeks to answer these questions. Yet its main thesis can be briefly summarized. Broadly speaking, the reason for Sartre's success had to do with the sociopolitical conditions at the end of the war and during the postwar period (2). During the war, French intellectuals became involved in struggles between different forces, taking one side or another (4). The victory in this fight belonged to those who supported the Resistance. The others—those who had collaborated with the Nazis and the Vichy government—experienced a kind of purgatory after World War II, although the matter is not unequivocal.Footnote ⁴ For Baert, this issue gains another dimension because the cultural and political controversies dividing French society during and after the war had a formative impact on the shape of intellectual and public life in the postwar period and a significant influence on the development and popularity of Sartre's existentialist philosophy. For Baert, Sartre played a key role “in the repairing of severed social ties and the remaking of French nationhood” (2). The necessity of rebuilding a sense of national unity resulted not only from the division between those engaged in the Resistance and those who collaborated with the Nazis, and the polarization of French society, but also from the cultural trauma the French experienced during the war. Crucially, Sartre was at that time telling a certain narrative about war trauma, which resonated with a broad French public. This positioning, says Baert, was key to his public prominence as an intellectual (3). It is evident that the attention concentrated in the book on Sartre himself makes this narrative indispensable, but as we look at the broader context—as presented, for instance, by Judt—this thesis requires a certain “mollification” and the assigning of a greater role to other intellectuals, like Louis Aragon, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Mounier.

Baert's work should be viewed alongside other such publications that identify a significant change in post-1945 European culture as a result of the war. These include books of international scope, like Ian Buruma's Year Zero: A History of 1945 or Keith Lowe's Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II, and also books within the field of intellectual history, most notably Tony Judt's Past Imperfect.Footnote ⁵ This period is also prominent in works on the history of the humanities and social sciences.Footnote ⁶ All these books have a common political denominator, for example analysing the period up to the Cold War and, above all, an American perspective on the period of interest to us.Footnote ⁷ In Baert's book, these are replaced by a focus on the immediate postwar period and France itself. The above books differ in seriousness and scope, and view their reader and research area in different ways. What they have in common, however, is the fact that they are symptomatic of a transdisciplinary change in the humanities and should be understood in the context of this paradigmatic shift. Nearly all of them encountered a strong, though varied, public response because they focused on a significant but neglected moment in our common history. Until recently, the year 1968 was seen as crucial for the birth of a new civilization in the scientific, political, and social sense, and thereby a new intellectual; at present, 1945 is thought to have been the year that dramatically altered Euro-American perceptions of the world. This is not, or rather should not be, surprising, as intuitively the break of World War II had already been recognized, along with the Holocaust and the changes resulting from it, particularly in European and global artistic culture and intellectual life. These were, doubtless, facts. Recent years, however, have brought a change of perspective and new conceptualizations of what—putting aside the question of its consequences—really happened in 1945. This is an important shift in recent intellectual history. It is not only the interbellum or swinging sixties that are crucial for modern intellectual world formation; the postwar period seems also to provide important momentum for global change.

The Existentialist Moment develops particular threads in chapters arranged chronologically and by order of problem. At the beginning Baert discusses the period preceding the main narrative line (1940–44), identifying the German occupation as a key factor that deepened the split in French society (already evident in the Dreyfus affair, but also during the French Third Republic) (18–19), leading to a polarization of social positions and the division of people into two camps: those who collaborated with the enemy and those who supported the Resistance. The next chapter concentrates on 1944–5, in particular on the trials of collaborators and the social “purgatory” that awaited intellectuals who had sided with the Germans and the Vichy government. Afterwards Baert tells the story of Sartre's entry into public debate, which was made possible by his stepping out of the closed intellectual arena. Sartre was also successful because he abandoned his strictly intellectual status and took up journalism, which created new possibilities for popularizing his own ideas. Moreover, his position was strengthened by his involvement in the purge of French society, the process of recovery from war trauma, and the resulting social split. Chapter 4 is devoted to the defining moment of Sartre's career—what Simone de Beauvoir calls the “existentialist offensive”—in the autumn of 1945. This consisted in the founding of the magazine Les temps modernes, and Sartre's public lecture, Existentialisme est un humanisme. This offensive was the crucial element that brought Sartre into the centre of French public debate and turned him into a public intellectual. His roots in the Resistance, which gave him moral authority and made his voice audible, were an added bonus. One should not forget, however, the various doubts over his involvement in the Resistance movement. Then Baert focuses on the 1946–7 period and the publication of two important works: Qu'est-ce que la littérature? and Réflexions sur la question juive. The former evokes the image and attitude of a committed intellectual, writing from the wider perspective of literature and literary theory. The latter is regarded as the first systematic outline of existentialism. While the first book is theoretical, the second propounds solutions to a particular sociopolitical problem—anti-Semitism—which had divided society (not only France's) since at least the Dreyfus affair and peaked in the Holocaust. It is during this period that Sartre truly established his position as a public intellectual and attained something of a celebrity status in French society. Then Baert offers a multilevelled and comprehensive summary of the factors that contributed to Sartre's success. The part concerning the future is an interesting portrayal of the reasons which led to the gradual demise of existentialism and of Sartre himself in the 1960s.

The last chapter, ‘Explaining Intellectuals: A Proposal’, is distinct from the rest of the book. It goes beyond the narrow framework of discussing Sartre and provides an outline of a social theory for describing, analysing, and interpreting intellectual life within the framework of certain categories. One issue worth examining before we turn to Baert's theoretical proposal and its application in other research areas, such as the history of ideas and intellectual history, is that unlike many other works of social science, where the theoretical and methodological considerations are explained in an often overwhelming introduction, here the theory is placed at the end of the book. This is ingenious and makes the book more accessible to a nonspecialist reader who might want only to get a different perspective on Sartre's story. We therefore get a good study of the particular case and an interesting narrative, similar to popular academic or nonfiction books.

However, before we go into the details, let us take a short look at the state of the art. Baert concentrates first on two works in the sociology of philosophy (and not in the history of ideas), and second on other approaches seen as models. He begins with a critical review of Anna Boschetti's work Sartre et ‘Les temps modernes’, which adopts a largely Bourdieusian approach.Footnote ⁸ Boschetti views her subject as a system of social relations with its own internal logic (5). She therefore discusses factors that had a significant impact on Sartre's career, especially his habitus and life trajectory, turning readers’ attention to his privileged position, starting with his education (5). For Boschetti, Sartre's position resulted not only from his ability to transition between, and unify, various fields—creative, literary, academic, and philosophical—but also from his adding to them a third element: journalism. In this way, the philosopher Sartre became a total, complete intellectual (6).

By contrast, Collins's approach is built on tensions and rivalry between individuals and intellectual schools, whose number he estimates—in accordance with the “law of small numbers”—to have been between three and six at the same time.Footnote ⁹ Existentialism, like many other intellectual movements of that period, derived from a synergy between individuals prepared perfectly by the French educational system. Here Collins cites Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Paul Nizan, Georges Canguilhem, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He emphasizes the role of personal relations, cultural capital, and the publishing market. This last element is especially important, as it was the Gallimard publishing house which, together with Sartre, proved crucial for the public development of intellectuals, bringing together innovative thinkers, incorporating new German ideas into the French intellectual market, and finally revolutionizing the French publishing industry by introducing cheap philosophy and literature paperbacks in which existentialism and its themes predominated. The problem with Collins's explanation is that it does not explain the success of Sartre and existentialism in the mid-1940s (9)—a result of Collins's conviction that the intellectual field operates largely autonomously vis-à-vis other social fields and the more general cultural background (10).

The problem of Sartre's public presence does not end with these two explanations. We find other accounts in historical and literary discussions. Baert presents a number of alternative possibilities from papers discussing these questions, dividing them into four basic explanatory groups. The first kind of explanation focuses on Sartre's individual traits and the excellence of his output, and is often embraced by literary scholars (11). The second approach focuses exclusively upon the events of autumn 1945 and the “existentialist offensive,” without placing it in a broader context (11–12). A third perspective evidences the integration of existentialism with the prevailing social climate, with philosophy treated as a kind of antidote to the oppression of the Vichy regime (12). Finally, the fourth explanatory category centres on generational considerations: the strength of French intellectuals in general, and shared wartime experience (12–13). Baert takes all these approaches into account, although each somewhat simplifies the phenomenon of Sartre's popularity.

In the light of his own research programme and theoretical framework, Baert presents a number of tentative hypotheses and clarifies several categories and concepts, for instance the distinction between intellectuals, who “tend to produce relatively innovative intellectual goods, like plays, novels or philosophical treatises” (13; 18–21), and critics, who discuss and comment on these intellectual goods in newspapers and journals (13–14). In some instances, this is not a precise division, as in the context of the “intra-intellectual arena” as opposed to that of the “public intellectual arena” (13–16), where the first refers to the area of exchange between intellectuals, while the second includes both consumers and producers of cultural goods. Without examining these distinctions in detail, we can point out their theoretical consequences. Baert needs them to distinguish his project from other studies concerning intellectual life, which are text-based and focus on the study of the “motives and strategies of individual thinkers,” frequently excluding contemporaneous external factors (16). The diffusion of ideas from the “intra-intellectual” domain to the “public intellectual” domain becomes the purpose of publishing, which requires work in a wider context and, as Baert says, referring to Bruno Latour, the aim is to “make an effort not to exclude a priori any factors that might have been constitutive of the making of the existentialist movement” (16).Footnote ¹⁰

Two points should now be made. First, the reference to Latour is, of course, important and stimulating when it comes to intellectual history, and requires serious consideration. It tells us to “follow the actors” without deciding if they are important or not and without focusing on the supposed agency—as in classical conceptions—of human actors (non-human actors could not act, but actor-network theory or more general social studies of science prove that they can). It must not be forgotten, however, that in Latour—who quotes Rem Koolhaas—we find the slogan “context stinks” treated seriously, a clear indication that the research is to be based first and foremost on “following the actors” (all of them, human and non-human) and not on an empirical depiction of the vast sociocultural background.Footnote ¹¹ In this sense, Baert does not use Latour's guidelines in an orthodox way: the broad context is significant, and in his suggested approach he indicates elements of reality which have not until recently been taken into account in different variants of intellectual history. As such, I would argue that this is the first benefit of the application of the sociology of intellectuals to the study of intellectual history in both its versions—either strictly Latourian, or indirect Baertian. Hence it is important for intellectual history not to focus only on the abstract dissemination of ideas, not on the text itself, and not simply to concern itself with explaining intertextual connections. That could be the approach of the late Quentin Skinner, which is something more than classical intellectual history, but still remains text-centric.Footnote ¹² Hence this version of intellectual history emphasizes the real and practical dimensions of spreading particular concepts, e.g. through intellectuals’ cooperation with the publishing industry and their use of other social communication channels (like open lectures, radio and television speeches, and today probably the Internet), which helps to rapidly disseminate an intellectual product. Going beyond a text-centric perspective in intellectual history is one of the benefits for this discipline from the implementation of the sociology of intellectuals into its theoretical background and research methodologies.Footnote ¹³

At the core of Baert's analysis are three basic propositions: first, ideas migrate from an internal intellectual domain to the public one if they are coherent and consistent, clearly defined, and suitable for certain labels; second, their success depends not only on the charisma of the main proponent of a particular opinion, but also on his position—in intellectual life, vis-à-vis the establishment, critics, the publishing market, etc.; and finally, for a doctrine to achieve public prominence it must respond to the social experience of recent history—and thereby resonate more strongly with the public than other intellectual currents, past or present. The presence of these could cause the success of particular trends or intellectuals in the public arena (16–17).

The second point concerns context itself. Baert appears to excessively fetishize its absence in studies of intellectuals, thereby simplifying the arena of intellectual history for rhetorical purposes in support of his own argument. He is right when he characterizes the varied sociological approaches to (the history of) intellectual life as one-dimensional and monocausal. However, he is not completely right with regard to contemporary intellectual history.Footnote ¹⁴ And what is more, Baert is conscious of this fact when he states that his own theory “is in line with Pocock and Skinner's view that it is vital to study the ‘intellectual milieus’ of the authors” (160). As for France in the period under discussion, it is enough to quote—earlier than Baert's work—Judt again, and beyond this context it suffices to cite two volumes presenting new reconceptualizations of the history of ideas.Footnote ¹⁵ In all those works, the authors display a deep engagement with, and wide understanding of, broader social context. Whilst intellectual history gains thanks to books like Baert's, the reverse is also true: sociology could profit substantially by expanding—as intellectual history has done—its inter- or transdisciplinarity when analysing the history of ideas.

Patrick Baert's own programme is carefully developed and clearly presented. He propounds a sociological theory of intellectuals, based on the notions of positioning, networks, and conflict. He begins with the observation that the prevailing approach in studies of intellectuals—whether from the perspective of literary studies, sociology, or history—usually suffers from five problems or biases. These are: an empiricist bias (“referring to the way in which studies of intellectuals are often insufficiently theorized” (158–9)), a motivational bias (“referring to motivations or intentions behind intellectual interventions” (159–60)), a structural fallacy (authors “explain individual decisions by sociological determinants,” where the social background influences individual intellectuals’ trajectories (161)), an authenticity bias (the conviction “that intellectuals have a clear sense of their identity and values” (162)) and a stability bias (the “assumption that early formation makes for fixity of somebody's subsequent intellectual trajectory” (163)). The remedy Baert proposes for all of these problems is positioning theory.Footnote ¹⁶

Baert sees a starting point in John L. Austin's speech-act theory (as did Skinner in the late 1960s), according to which utterances are neither true nor false, but act in the world in some way. For this reason, Baert's theory may be said to fit into the performative turn in the study of intellectuals. As the author states, “a performative perspective explores what intellectual interventions do and achieve rather than what they represent” (164, original emphasis). More importantly, in this approach we move beyond the problematic conceptualization of intellectual life as stable and static, seeing it rather as changeable, dynamic, fluid. If we agree—in Austin's terms—that text in Skinner's classical conception constitutes an illocutionary act (in other words, intellectual history or the history of ideas should focus on the intentions of a particular author in a wider cultural context), then in Baert's proposal, text—as well as the other activities of intellectuals in the public domain—is always a perlocution; that is, it has a performative character: an intellectual intervention does something in the world with words.Footnote ¹⁷ This shift from illocution to perlocution, from intention to performativity, is a crucial change for intellectual history. However, it is impossible to introduce this change into the research field of intellectual history without at least pragmatic application of social theory. Moreover, even if Skinner in his late work is also writing about performativity, he still remains in the realm of the text itself (it is performativity of text), whereas Baert leads us beyond this text-centric perspective to the real social one.Footnote ¹⁸

Baert is interested in the following issues: placing intellectuals in a broader social arena beyond the intellectual sphere (not only to provide context, but also to emphasize a field of intellectuals’ activity); the real mechanisms of positioning (by intellectuals themselves); the impact of individual activity and an intellectual's social milieu on the process of positioning; and, finally, studying the history of intellectuals and the “diffusion of the ideas articulated” (165). This last action—of paramount importance when it comes to public intellectuals—is performed via intellectual interventions. Baert defines the term as “any contribution to the intellectual realm, whether it is in the form of a book, an article, a blog, a speech or indeed part of any of these” (165–6). Each such intervention positions the author in the intellectual realm, creates supporters or enemies, and builds his reputation. Intervention effects can be of a double nature: positioning of oneself or popularizing certain ideas. “Positioning, obviously, always involves on the one hand an ‘agent’, making the intervention and doing the positioning, and on the other hand a ‘positioned party’, being attributed certain features” (167, original emphasis). And although an agent is typically a single person, they can also be a group of individuals, akin to a positioned party, which can consist of an individual, a group, or all of society, but also, for example, “an intellectual school, an academic discipline or a political phenomenon” (167). The synergy of group and individual seems to be the most effective in the intellectual world. Positioning consists of the whole series of activities taken up by intellectuals, including writing (manifestos or opinion journalism pieces to make their public presence more visible and their position stronger), editorial initiatives (e.g. new periodicals, literary series, etc.), meta-theoretical texts and methodological papers, and definitions and formal labelling (in Sartre's case it was “existentialism,” Charles Pierce chose “pragmaticism” instead of the already-used “pragmatism,” etc. (168–9)).

Baert distinguishes two types of positioning: “intellectual positioning,” taking place in the intellectual realm, and “politico-ethical positioning,” which “refers to a broader political or ethical stance which surpasses the narrow confines of the intellectual sphere” (169). However, intellectual practice, particularly in the case of committed intellectuals like Sartre, shows that these two types of positioning overlap and intertwine. In Sartre's case, his philosophical project found literary and journalistic expression, and moreover responded to the political challenges and moral dilemmas of postwar France.

It should be emphasized, however, that not all kinds of intellectual activity lead to significant interventions or positioning; their effects depend on the performative tools used, for example the material and symbolic elements that enable intervention. These include different factors, like the prestige and marketing strategy of a publishing house as well as the rhetorical skills of a person. In the case of Sartre, these performative tools were efficiently used and contributed to his success, in conjunction with Sartre's resources, his belonging to different worlds, and so forth. According to Baert, the narrations used are highly significant; for Sartre they enabled his entry into the public realm. This encompasses all of what Sartre wrote and said, but also what he did; moreover, what he did not say and write is not to be neglected (in this case, the “complicity of the French in the deportation of the Jews” (172)). Baert's preliminary criticism of other concepts in studies of intellectuals or in the history of ideas has to do with their text-centric character, which was to be balanced by the theory of positioning. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, he himself ends up referring constantly to rhetorical and narrative questions. The strength of his arguments and their originality vis-à-vis earlier conceptualizations lies in the fact that he does not analyse them within linguistic or philosophical systems, but in sociological terms, in reference to social life. This is the point of positioning via particular rhetorical terms and narrative strategies.

For Baert, the achieved effect of an intellectual intervention is based on three elements: individuals who have a defined status in an intellectual and/or public arena, other individuals who act in the same arena (our potential allies or opponents), and the intellectual and sociopolitical context in which all of this takes place. The problem of effectiveness is not limited to the above because success does not depend on a single intervention in the public realm and requires repetition and subsequent efforts, consisting of, inter alia, building broader intellectual networks. The position of intellectuals depends not only on “where they are acknowledged,” but also on “who precisely acknowledges them” (177). Higher effectiveness is achieved by teamwork—people cooperating with one another (178). Nevertheless, intellectual work and position have an individual character: one must distinguish oneself (I've added italics for emphasis—something to consider) to achieve a particular status in the intellectual and public realm. This can be summed up by Baert's statement that “the more secure and established one's position, the less one needs to rely on teamwork and the more likely one will press for intellectual individualization” (179).

As we bring our philosophical and methodological analysis to a close, we come to a crucial problem in profiling the theory of positioning. The point is to abandon “a vocabulary of intentions for a vocabulary of effects” (181). Baert is not interested, as is often the case in biographical and sociological perspectives, in one's will and intentions, but in what results from one's interventions in the intellectual and sociopolitical realm. The key is how effectively one has positioned oneself and popularized one's ideas. To quote Baert, “The effects speak louder than words” (184).

In summing up, there are five things we may say about Baert's book. First, it exhibits a unique clarity and transparency of reasoning and combines the popular potential of a nonfiction book with a strictly social-scientific approach. Second, following recent trends in the humanities and social sciences, it focuses on a case study, deliberately selected, because it concerns a widely known personality (Sartre), who was important from the viewpoint of a certain culture (French, but more broadly Euro-American), and problematizes his career in an interesting way. All of these elements are placed within the context of society (during the war and the postwar period). Third, the arguments are factual and well documented, and the author does not bombard the reader with digressions and unimportant details (as is very often the case in overloaded nonfiction books), but roots his discourse in studied reality. Fourth, the study, perceived in this manner, is a starting point for the creation of a new research programme—that of the sociological study of intellectuals, which can be applied to both the past and the present and go beyond local statements and contexts, being at the same time an interesting theoretical proposal, inviting application to other cases and thereby verification (or falsification) and/or, finally, modification. We have the further case of Marcus Morgan and Patrick Baert's 2015 book Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals, which charts the introduction of structuralism and de facto post-structuralism into the reading lists and classrooms of an elite institution: Cambridge University, the authors’ home university. This book is another interesting case study of—in Khunian language—paradigm shift, although it develops a research programme similar to that of The Existentialist Moment (184).

Fifth, while we have many good intellectual histories at our disposal, especially of modern Europe, we find a lack of social theories based on their insights. We have philosophical descriptions of various conceptions (intentions) set against their historical background, but less knowledge of their social implications (effects). Baert's book succeeds in addressing this deficiency—as should be pointed out—while the truth of his theory awaits verification. The epilogue to Baert's book, “Transformation of the Public Intellectual” (184–9), though succinct and general, is a look not only at the history of the social and political involvement of public intellectuals (distinguishing the following types: “authoritative,” “expert,” and “embedded” (185–8), in addition to the “dialogical public intellectual” (188–9)), but also at intellectual life today, which concerns all of us.