"The Ingredients of a Philosophical Schism"

"Sartre and Camus’s love-hate relationship was played out and reflected in their on-off romance with America. As Camus put it, 'It is necessary to fall in love … if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.' Above all the two thinkers emphasize that America is always balanced precariously, like a tight-rope walker, on the thread of a philosophical dialectic."

Andy Martin in The New York Times contrasts the experiences of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in New York.

You Ain't Going to Make It with Anyone Anyhow

"The Maoist temptation was part radical chic, part revolutionary tourism, part orientalism. It drew upon a deep-seated discontent with the corruption of Western society as well as the illusion of a radiant utopian future. It was also heavily infused with bourgeois self-hatred. By placing the emphasis on culture—the Great Helmsman was after all a poet as well as a revolutionary—Maoism offered intellectuals in Paris (if not Beijing) the opportunity to act out the role of revolutionary vanguard. So, too, it appealed to those enamoured of the invigorating and moralising qualities of popular violence. Robespierre's ghost was much in evidence."

Jeremy Jennings in Standpoint reviews Richard Wolin's The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s.

"Women, You Have Her to Thank for Everything!"

"And yet even Beauvoir sensed that there was something not quite right about her revolutionary thesis, 'one is not born a woman, one becomes one.'
"Twenty years after 'The Second Sex' was first published, author Suzanne Lilar wrote a brilliant critique of this groundbreaking work of modern feminism, an article that at least persuaded Beauvoir to admit to the genetic, hormonal and anatomical differences between the sexes. Nevertheless, she remained steadfast, and rightfully so, in her conviction that culture shapes our perception of femininity, a perception that constantly fluctuates between idealization and demonization."

One hundred years after Simone de Beauvoir's birth, Romain Leick in Spiegel Online looks back on the life of the French writer and philosopher.