Sartre's play Les Mouches (The Flies), first performed in 1943 under German occupation, has long been controversial. While intended to encourage resistance against the Nazis, its approval by the censor indicates that the regime did not recognize the play as a threat. Further, its apparently violent and solitary themes have been read as irresponsible or apolitical. For these reasons, the play has been characterized as ambiguous or worse. Sartre himself later saw it as overemphasizing individual autonomy, and in the view of one critic, it conveys an “existentialist fascism.” In response to this reading, it is necessary to attend to the elements of the play that already emphasize duty to society. From this perspective, the play can be seen as anticipating the concern with collective responsibility usually associated with the later Sartre of the 1960s. More than this, the play's apparent “ambiguity” can be found to exemplify a didacticism that is much more complex than sometimes attributed to Sartre. It is not only an exhortation about ethical responsibility, but also a performance of the difficulties attendant to that duty.
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Sartre's Theater of Resistance: Les Mouches and the Deadlock of Collective Responsibility
Andrew Ryder
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2009
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 78–95 (18 total)
A Malady of the Left and an Ethics of Communism
Badiouian Diagnosis, Lacanian Cure, Sartrean Responsibility
Andrey Gordienko
political choices in the absence of the evental caesura. As Thomas Flynn argues, Sartre's attempt to reconcile Marxism and existentialism prompted him to recognise two modes of collective responsibility. On the one hand, the Marxist-causal conception of
In Sartre Studies International
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2021
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 99–128 (30 total)
Editorial
The Societal Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic Explained via Three Frameworks
Harry G. J. Nijhuis and Laurent J.G. van der Maesen
primacy of personal rights over collective responsibility and solidarity. More than half of US states have introduced new laws to restrict public health measures, including policies requiring quarantine and mandating vaccines and/or masks. In the case of
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Editorial
- Pages:
- v–xx
Miller's Models and their Applicability to Nations
Luke Ulaş
This paper argues that the two models of collective responsibility David Miller presents in National Responsibility and Global Justice do not apply to nations. I first consider the 'like-minded group' model, paying attention to three scenarios in which Miller employs it. I argue that the feasibility of the model decreases as we expand outwards from the smallest group to the largest, since it increasingly fails to capture all members of the group adequately, and the locus of any like-mindedness becomes too abstract and vague to have the causal force the model requires. I thereafter focus on the 'cooperative practice' model, examining various ways in which the analogy Miller draws between an employee-led business and a nation breaks down. In concluding I address the concern that my arguments have worrying consequences and suggest that, on the contrary, the rejection of the idea of national responsibility is a positive move.
Agenda 2010: Redefining German Social Democracy
Pamela Camerra-Rowe
In March 2003, Social Democratic Chancellor Gerhard Schröder
announced a series of reforms that his government plans to undertake
in order to deal with Germany’s pressing economic problems.
These reform proposals, known as Agenda 2010, include cutting
unemployment benefits, making it easier to hire and fire workers,
reducing health insurance coverage, and raising the retirement age.
The reforms mark a change in the direction of the German Social
Democratic Party’s (SPD) economic policy. Rather than promoting
traditional social democratic values such as collective responsibility,
workers’ rights, and the expansion of state benefits, Schröder declared
that “We will have to curtail the work of the state, encourage more
individual responsibility, and require greater individual performance
from each person. Every group in the society will have to contribute
its share.”1 Despite opposition to these reforms by labor unions and
leftist members of the party, Agenda 2010 was approved by nearly 90
percent of SPD party delegates at a special party conference in June
2003.2 Several of the reforms, including health care and job protection
reforms, were passed by the legislature at the end of 2003 and
took effect on 1 January 2004.
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Mar 2004
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 1–30 (29 total)
Editorial
Theorizing the Social
According to Leisering in his editorial in this journal, the idea of the “social” not only concerns social services as found in textbooks on social policy, it also “reflects a culturally entrenched notion of the relationship between state and society – a recognition of the tension between the ideal of political equality and socio-economic inequality, and of a collective responsibility by the state for identifying and redressing social problems” (Leisering 2013: 12). Theorizing “social quality” began in Europe at the end of the 1990s, in reaction to the increasing tendency to reduce the European Union’s operation to an “economic project.” In an ideological sense this reduction was legitimated by decoupling the economic dimension from the socio-political and sociocultural dimensions and leaving the latter two to the authority of the EU member states. The presupposition on the part of neoclassical economics and mainstream political and sociological studies of a duality between “the economic” and “the social” paved the way for this move. Therefore social quality scholars started to theorise ‘the social’ anew to go beyond the duality of the economic and the social In practice, nation-based policies became subordinated to the European-oriented financial and economic politics and policies that were being used to address the globalization of production and reproduction relationships (Beck et al. 1997). This shift became seriously strengthened by the revolutionary development and application of new communication technologies.
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2015
- Article Type:
- Editorial
- Pages:
- 1–7 (7 total)
Agricultural Fire or Arson?
Rural Denizens, Forest Administration, and the Colonial Situation in Algeria (1850–1900)
Antonin Plarier
onward. 44 Besides this chronological gap relating to individual sanctions, the use of collective sanctions most fully reveals a colonial specificity. Collective punishment: A colonial specificity Collective responsibility consisted of the whole
In Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2020
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 9–24 (16 total)
Abstracts
including birth incentives and marriage loans. All French citizens were obligated to join the FFO, thereby making the colony’s French children a collective responsibility. Those who lacked sufficient numbers of qualifying French children were required to pay
In French Politics, Culture & Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2016
- Article Type:
- Abstract
- Pages:
- 155–158 (4 total)
Editorial
John Gillespie and Katherine Morris
’. Gordienko responds by arguing that Badiou actually needs Sartre's notion of collective responsibility: he needs the Sartrean ethics encapsulated in his famous phrase ‘One and one make one’, and that requires that the ‘militant’ heed the demands of the new
Editorial Introduction
The Cases of India, South Africa, and Brazil
Harry G. J. Nijhuis and Laurent J.G. van der Maesen
countries, as well as from China and Russia. The Declaration, among other things, states: We emphasize that the international community has a collective responsibility to work together against the COVID-19 pandemic in the true spirit of partnership
In The International Journal of Social Quality
- Published (Print):
- 01 Dec 2021
- Article Type:
- Introduction
- Pages:
- 59–62 (4 total)