Sartre's Conception of Freedom: Consciousness, the Practico-Inert, and Distributive Answerability

Sartre's Conception of Freedom examines Jean-Paul Sartre's theory of freedom across his early ontology and later social philosophy. Beginning with consciousness, nothingness, nihilation, facticity, and the for-itself, the book argues that Sartre's conception of freedom becomes more coherent when freedom as the ontological structure of consciousness is distinguished from freedom as practical efficacy.

The study follows this distinction from Being and Nothingness into the Critique of Dialectical Reason, where individual agency confronts scarcity, worked matter, institutions, collective action, and the practico-inert. Rather than treating the later Sartre as simply abandoning his earlier commitment to radical freedom, the book develops a continuity thesis that recognizes both ontological openness and materially conditioned action.

The book also engages major objections to Sartrean freedom and develops the concepts of situated and distributive answerability to examine how responsibility should be allocated under conditions of unequal knowledge, power, control, and practical possibility. The result is both an interpretation of Sartre and a contribution to contemporary debates concerning agency, moral responsibility, structural injustice, and institutional accountability.