Going Private

We live today in a far more conservative world than the world Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were striving for. These are censorious times; it would be harder today to publish the kind of things they wrote. These are puritanical times; we look askance at sexual adventuring. These are anti-intellectual times; the notion of the public intellectual has all but disappeared. These are shallow times; even the mainstream press stoops to sensationalism in its desperation to sell newspapers and magazines. In these times it is fashionable to trivialise Beauvoir and Sartre, to diminish their life and work, and denounce everything they stood for.