Without a doubt the war marked the beginning of a decisive evolution in Sartre's relationsnip lo pollies. Taken prisoner in experienced the stalag: 'What I liked about the camps was the feeling of belonging to a mass. Communication without barriers. We spoke to each other directly and equally. It taught me a lot.' From that period the relationship of the individual to the group, within the context of nistorical commitment and praxis, was a constant feature of his thought — see, for example, some very beautiful passages in The Critique of Dialectical Reason.
During the war Sartre's commitment to the resistance was base ey work or com bat and Lettres Francaises. When, agitated climate of the Liberation he threw himself into the political struggle, he found his philosophical system drawing him to explosive contradictions.
On the one hand his concept of freedom and his revulsion for all mechanical and heavily determinist thought compelled him to reject the Stalinist version of Marxism put forward in France at that time bv Garaudy, Lefebvre, Desanti, Kanapa, etc. That is the meaning of a text like Materialism and Revolution (1946) which was his first attempt to reconcile his own philosophical views with Marxism On the other hand the radical character of his thought, which was sharpened still further in the post-Liberation years, took him beyond the new, national, political and ideological compromises that were being formed around the tigurehead of De Gaulle.
Through the Rassemblement Democratique Revolutionnaire (RDR) he found that it was impossible to chart a 'third way' between the two camps in the post-Yalta period. When the Cold War erupted his political thought was naunica DI the philosophical idea of the necessity of choosing his own camp.
This explained his break with Aron, Camus and Merleau-Ponty. It must be stressed that these were not personal quarrels but marked Sartre's political trajectory. His writings bear this point out. In all his polemics, including the one with Merleau-Ponty, Sartre exhibited a confused realism that was dominated by his conscious will not to establish relations with imperialism and those who instigated the Cold War. He raged against a philosophy of abstention, against sheepish moralism. for a commitment by which people would accept arrying tell hands.