Les Temps modernes
Temps modernes, Les. Monthly interdisciplinary journal founded by Sartre, first published in 1945, with an editorial board which included Beauvoir, Leiris, Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. Its ‘Présentation’ by Sartre in the first issue situated it as part of an attempt to construct a left-wing postwar ethics and ideology compatible with Marxism and conscious of its place in contemporary history. Its project was revolutionary in the sense of aiming to transform society in a radical fashion, and it welcomed young writers and thinkers who had not yet established their reputations, as well as fostering new movements and disciplines.
The review's primary interests were initially literature and politics, with a considerable place for the human sciences and the other arts, but politics took over increasingly from literature. It was the focus of several significant intellectual battles: between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty over philosophy and politics; around psychoanalysis and anthropology with Lévi-Strauss, Leiris, and Pontalis; and later about Structuralism. The journal survived Sartre's death in 1980, though it has lost the place at the centre of controversy and contemporary intellectual debate which it held in the 1940s and 1950s.
[Christina Howells]
