Tolstoys character, Andrei Bolkonsky, says: I said such women should be forgiven. Not that I could forgive one. Now where does that leave one? Obviously, it will not do. How about Kafkas Trial? The countryman who seeks admission to the Law. The doorman who stops him. The man waits and waits. Then he asks the doorman: Everyone strives to attain the Law, how does it come about then, that, in all these years, no one has come seeking admittance but me. The doorman replies: No one but you could gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for you. I am now going to shut it. The question is why one mans probity is subject to anothers judgement? A girl is engaged to one but, then, tries to elope with another, a rascal, but does not. The first sees her impulsive attempt as a slur upon his own character, though how is that so, is not quite clear. Here her freedom is circumscribed by his freedom, or rather the lack of it. In the case of Kafkas character, the countryman is free sitting outside the Law. It is the doorman, denying entry to him, who is not free. But this whole discussion is about bourgeois freedom, whose basis is so mundane, so ordinary. A man enters the market with a commodity - a good or his own capacity to work or his ownership of capital, which, in its material form of a means of production, is a commodity. He meets another person similarly equipped. The two are free to exchange commodities or not. There is no compulsion. That is the base on which the whole structure of bourgeois freedom is built. All the Rousseaus are really glorifying this freedom of two owners of commodities to make a deal or not. True, but is not that freedom precious? The freedom to choose between going to the park. Or sitting in ones verandah, watching the evening clouds change colours. Or reading Herbert Marcuse. But no In the capitalist market, the owner of the means of production can wait, if a deal is not struck on the first day. Can the owner of the capacity to labour wait similarly? He loses all bargaining power without the prospect of the next wage. The bourgeois freedom to go to the park or not, described above, is built upon the unfreedom of the labouring man to wait one more day to make a deal. Does the foregoing sound like a crude attempt at reasoning like Sartre? Well maybe. And whats wrong with the attempt? Qurratulain Hyder refers to some Pakistanis mispronouncing Sartres name as Sart-ray. Dont the French mispronounce our names? Sartre was, no doubt, a very honest thinker, though, as our French language teacher used to say, he could do with some economy of words. However, our admiration for him need not cover all his writings. Being and Nothingness is a great work, as is the Problem of Method. His political comments are superb, e.g. his cold analysis and condemnation of the Soviet military intervention in Hungary in 1956, wherein he likened the Hungarian workers councils, which led the uprising against Rakosis rule, to the Petrograd Soviets that made the October Revolution. Or his pithy comment on our crisis of 1971 that the talk of freedom and human rights in East Pakistan ultimately revealed itself concretely as Indian tanks and dive-bombers. I like his first novel, Les Mouches, which retells the story of Orestes. However, in contrast to Euripides, the inner conflict in the hero about killing his mother is more pronounced. And the author underplays the question of retribution itself. But Sartres refusal to choose on the subject of materialism or rather his coyness in rejecting outright the Marxist concept of materialism, with which he obviously does not agree, leaves the subject hanging in the air. Anyway, I would any day read Sartre, rather than Marcuse. We began with the subject of freedom. We agree with Sartre that it is ultimately a matter of the individuals responsibility in the successive moments of his social existence. But then Sartre was standing on the high pedestal created by the French Revolution, while we are stalled in our pre-1789 stage. The writer is a retired ambassador.