Why is Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism Philosophically Elegant but Politically Reductionist?

“Existence Precedes Essence”

Existence Precedes Essence is a core principle of existentialist philosophy - suggesting that human beings are not born with a predefined purpose or nature, instead, they first exist, and only later define themselves through their actions and choices. For most objects, essence precedes existence - for instance, a knife is designed to cut before it is made. Its purpose (essence) therefore comes first. For human beings, life does not possess any inherent identity or value. That identity or value must be created by posing the acts that constitute them, and thus make human existence significant. 

The idea originates from a speech by F.W.J. Schelling in December 1841, later can be found in some of Soren Kierkegaard’s work in the 19th century, but was explicitly formulated and articulated by French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in the 20th century through his 1945 lecture “Existentialism is a Humanism”. For Sartre, “existence precedes essence” not only defines and determines his own existential thinking or interpretation of existentialism, but also any thinking or philosophising that declares itself to be existential. Despite Sartre’s later efforts to distance himself and his thinking from this remark and its consequences, it has become the most quoted, repeated, and cited description of existentialism and any non-theistic existentialist thought. 

A radical conception of freedom

Nothing fixes our purpose but we ourselves, our projects have no weight or inertia except for our endorsement of them. Humans are radically free and with freedom comes total responsibility, you cannot blame neither God, nor biology, nor society. A condition Sartre called “anguish” - the anxiety of knowing that your choices define not only you, but implicitly set examples for others. For Sartre, many people try to escape this burden through “Bad Faith” (mauvaise foi) by treating social roles (“I’m just a student” or “I’m just following orders”) as fixed essences, and acting as if one’s identity were predetermined. Existentialist ideas obviously contrast with other views such as Plato and Aristotle essentialism which states that humans are defined by a fixed set of attributes/fundamental nature, or religious views where God defines human existence and purposes. 

However, this idea is philosophically elegant but socially reductionist. 

The whole, pure radical freedom of existentialism did not acknowledge biological, psychological and social constraints on how freedom is situated - we are all free, but not equally free, as later crucially refined by Simone de Beauvoir. For de Beauvoir, a person’s freedom is always embedded in a “situation” which includes material conditions (poverty, wealth, access to education), social structures (gender, race, class, colonial power), historical context (war, patriarchy, capitalism) and bodily realities (health, disability, age). One does not choose or have power over these circumstances, but the liberating individual choices that constitute existentialist practice must be made within those circumstances. Sartre famously insisted that we are “condemned to be free” and that excuses based on circumstances are forms of bad faith. Although de Beauvoir agreed with most of Sartre’s ideas and was regarded as an existentialist philosopher, she rejected the idea that all individuals face the same field of choice. For example, a factory worker, a colonised subject, and an affluent intellectual do not confront the same possibilities - even if they are all “free”. 

To challenge neoliberals’ “equal opportunity” and meritocracy narratives

To correct the reductionist nature of Sartre’s pure, radical existentialism, de Beauvoir uses gender as a paradigmatic example. “One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” Situated freedom applies because a woman may be existentially free in principle, but social reality narrows her options long before choice begins. For instance, society constructs femininity through norms, education and expectations, and women are taught to internalise limits on ambition and autonomy. Simone de Beauvoir’s idea thus carries critical moral and political implications: firstly, responsibility is shared. Although individuals are responsible for their actions, societies are responsible for the conditions they impose on free individuals - and if freedom is systematically constrained, injustice exists. Thus, we cannot talk about freedom without talking about power. This is the reason why de Beauvoir’s idea is so important in the sense that it acts as the foundation to challenge neoliberal ideas of “equal opportunity”, where everyone can make it if they try hard enough. Meritocracy narratives are built upon the ignorance of oppression and disadvantages. 

Shared idea between de Beauvoir’s feminism and Marxism

In many ways, de Beauvoir and Marxism agree that human action is shaped by material and social conditions, and that inequality is structural rather than merely personal failures. They are similar in the sense that philosophy must take real social relations seriously. Where they differ is how much room they leave for individual agency, and where they locate the source of constraint. For Marx, the material economic structures are the foundation of social life - the mode of production (capitalism, feudalism, etc) determines class relations, legal system, ideology and even consciousness itself. Individuals act, but within the material condition not of their choosing - as famously formulated “Men make their own history, but not under circumstances chosen by themselves.” The implication of this idea is that agency exists, but is class-based. Freedom is an illusion under capitalism because workers must sell their labour to survive, thus true freedom requires structural transformation via abolishing exploitative relations. 

Moving to de Beauvoir's, the acknowledged material reality shifts from economic structure to gender, social roles and cultural norms. Particularly, she focused on internalised limitations. Oppression works not just by external force, but by shaping what people believe is possible. The oppression of women is most effective when it becomes internalised, and appears as natural, inevitable or freely chosen. Throughout history, earlier understanding of oppression focused on external barriers such as legal exclusion (no voting rights or property rights), economic dependence or other forms of formal discrimination. For feminism, external barriers are necessary but insufficient in understanding oppression. Girls are socialised into limitation long before adulthood, during the time their mind is still susceptible to mass and irreversible changes - and during this time ambition or autonomy are subtly discouraged. Internalised patriarchy is when a woman learn to police her own behaviour and anticipate social punishment.

Conclusion

Sartre’s existentialism achieves a striking philosophical elegance by grounding human dignity in radical freedom and responsibility. Yet this same elegance becomes politically reductionist when translated into social reality. By abstracting freedom from its material, historical, and embodied conditions, Sartre’s framework risks collapsing structural injustice into individual failure, thereby echoing - however unintentionally, the moral logic of neoliberal meritocracy.

Simone de Beauvoir’s intervention exposes this limitation without abandoning existentialism itself. In doing so, she reconnects existentialism to politics, ethics, and power. Ultimately, her ideas insist that a genuine humanist existentialism must therefore move beyond the solitary chooser and reckon with the conditions that make some choices unthinkable in the first place. Only then can existential freedom function as a critical tool for diagnosing and resisting injustice.