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Existentialism, the Welfare State & 1968

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Meaning after the catastrophe

Europe emerged from 1945 with the Enlightenment confidence of the nineteenth century badly damaged: the most scientifically advanced societies had produced industrialized killing. Existentialism answered by refusing to look for meaning outside the individual. Jean-Paul Sartre held that existence precedes essence — there is no given human nature, so people are "condemned to be free" and wholly responsible for what they make of themselves. Albert Camus posed the absurd: the collision between our demand for meaning and a silent universe, to be met with lucid revolt rather than despair. Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) applied the framework to gender, arguing that one is not born but rather becomes a woman — the foundational text of postwar feminism.

The postwar settlement

Politically, the postwar decades produced a broad consensus across left and right: full employment as a policy goal, nationalized key industries, and a welfare state providing health care, pensions, unemployment insurance and free education. Britain’s National Health Service (1948) is the emblem; France, West Germany and Scandinavia built comparable systems on different models. Two motives ran together — the wartime promise that sacrifice would be repaid, and the Cold War calculation that prosperous, secure workers would not vote communist. Funded by the long boom of roughly 1950–73, it held until the oil shocks and stagflation of the 1970s broke its assumptions.

1968

The protests of 1968 were remarkably synchronized and locally distinct. In Paris, student demonstrations over university conditions escalated until roughly nine million workers joined a general strike that nearly ended the Fifth Republic — before de Gaulle called elections and won a large majority. In Prague, Dubček’s "socialism with a human face" was crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion in August, ending serious hope of reforming the eastern bloc from within and driving many Western communists to break with Moscow. In West Germany and Italy, student movements confronted a parental generation over its wartime past. The immediate political results were slight; the cultural results — in gender relations, sexual mores, authority in universities and families, and the environmental movement — were substantial and lasting.

Tip

The clean way to state 1968: a political failure and a cultural success. No government fell in the west and reform was crushed in the east, yet the decade after it looks different in law and in daily life — divorce and contraception reform, the women’s movement, environmentalism, and a permanent loss of deference to institutional authority.

Worked example

Briefly explain ONE reason existentialism appealed to postwar Europeans, and explain ONE lasting effect of the protests of 1968.

  1. 1.Connect the philosophy to the specific historical experience rather than describing it abstractly.
  2. 2.After occupation, collaboration, resistance and the Holocaust, existentialism spoke directly to individual responsibility for choices made under pressure, and refused consoling appeals to progress or providence.
  3. 3.Choose an effect of 1968 that can be evidenced, and be honest that the political effects were limited.
  4. 4.De Beauvoir’s framework and the movements of 1968 fed the women’s movement, and the following decade brought reform of divorce, contraception and abortion law across Western Europe.
Answer: Existentialism appealed because it addressed the experience Europeans had just had. After occupation, collaboration and resistance, and after the Holocaust, Sartre’s claim that there is no given human nature and that individuals are wholly responsible for their choices spoke to people who had made such choices under extreme pressure, and it offered no consoling appeal to progress or providence of the kind the war had discredited. A lasting effect of 1968 was cultural rather than governmental: no Western government fell and the Prague Spring was crushed, but the movements of that year, drawing on de Beauvoir’s analysis, fed a women’s movement and a broader rejection of institutional authority, and the following decade saw divorce, contraception and abortion law reformed across much of Western Europe.
Checkpoint

Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence” means that —

Checkpoint

The suppression of the Prague Spring in August 1968 was significant because it —

Answer the 2 checkpoints as you read.

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