The Age of Reason.

SARTRE, Jean-Paul.

Item Number: 122379

London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947.

First edition of Sartre’s classic novel. Octavo, original cloth. Near fine in a very good dust jacket with unnecessary enforcement to the rear. Jacket design by Michael Ayrton. Translated from the French by Eric Sutton. First editions are uncommon.

The Age of Reason is concerned with Sartre's conception of freedom as the ultimate aim of human existence. The work seeks to illustrate the existentialist notion of ultimate freedom through presenting a detailed account of the characters' psychologies as they are forced to make significant decisions in their lives. As the novel progresses, character narratives espouse Sartre's view of what it means to be free and how one operates within the framework of society with this philosophy. The novel is a fictional reprise of some of the main themes in his major philosophical study Being and Nothingness (1943). One of the notions is that ultimately a person's freedom is unassailable as it is fundamentally part of the nothingness that is the imagination and so cannot be taken away or destroyed.