Sartre and the Liberal Class

Writing after the "death of god," Sartre attempted to anchor personal responsibility in ontology (since theology was not an option for him as it had been for Dostoevsky).

His subsequent eclipse among Liberal Class intellectuals is due to their discovery that this ontological anchoring of responsibility placed strenuous moral and political claims upon them--not what they had initially expected from the man who had promoted a philosophy of freedom (a concept that they had interpreted to mean "license").

As Dostoevsky explained in an edition of A Writer's Diary:

In the present shape of the world people think of freedom as license, whereas genuine freedom consists only in overcoming the self and one's will so as in the end to achieve a moral state such that always, at every moment, one is the real master of oneself...

Real mastery of the self consists, for both Sartre and Dostoevsky, in negation (Sartre would say, "in nothingness"); in both cases, in the ability to say "No."

"Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre" is a form of askesis. A hard sell in the era of Neo-Liberal consumerism and capitalistic commodification.