At the Existentialist Café

The book opens in Paris in 1933. Raymond Aron tells Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir about phenomenology over apricot cocktails, and Sartre sets about turning that German method into something of his own. Sarah Bakewell treats the scene as the start of existentialism.

From there she follows Sartre as he joins phenomenology, taken from Husserl and Heidegger, to his questions about freedom, responsibility and authenticity. The resulting movement leaves the cafés of the Left Bank and spreads across the world.

This is narrative non-fiction about philosophy, built around people. Each chapter takes up a thinker or a turning point. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche come first as precursors, and Husserl and Heidegger follow in Germany. Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Merleau-Ponty and Jaspers then carry the story through the Second World War and into the years after it.

Bakewell sets biography beside plain explanations of the ideas, so the lives and the arguments arrive together. No training in philosophy is needed.

She also traces existentialism into anti-colonial struggle, feminism and gay rights. The closing question is what the movement still has to offer readers today.