Patrick Baert

Patrick Baert (born 23 January 1961 in Brussels) is a Belgian sociologist and social theorist, based in Britain. He is Professor of Social Theory at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Selwyn College, Cambridge.

Baert studied at the Free University of Brussels and at Oxford University where he obtained his D.Phil. in 1990. In Oxford he studied with Rom Harré and wrote his dissertation on George Herbert Mead's notion of time and its relevance for social theory, subsequently published as Time, Self and Social Being. He carried out postdoctoral work with Claude Javeau in Brussels and Anthony Giddens in Cambridge before taking up a teaching position at Cambridge. He has held various visiting positions, including Brown University, the University of Cape Town, the CNRS/EHESS and the University of British Columbia. His most recent books include The Existentialist Moment; The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual and (co-written with Marcus Morgan) Conflict in the Academy; A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals. He also published Social Theory in the Twentieth Century and Beyond. and Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Towards Pragmatism. Since January 2013, he is the Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society.

Baert's recent work lies at the intersection between the sociology of intellectuals and intellectual history. The Existentialist Moment explains the sudden rise of Sartre as a public intellectual in the mid-1940s. In this book Baert describes the reshaping of the intellectual and cultural field in France during WWII and he shows how Sartre was able to present a neat vocabulary to make sense of and come to terms with the trauma of the war. Baert pays particular attention to the trials of French collaborationist intellectuals in which the notion of responsibility loomed large - a notion which also became central in the broader cultural realm at the time. During this period, Sartre redefined his philosophy, making it simpler and more digestable, centring it around this notion of responsibility of the intellectual. Hence his idea of the engaged intellectual which also became a guiding principle of the journal Les Temps modernes.

...
Wikipedia