"It takes about two full intellectual generations (that is, two-thirds of a century) to establish who has an enduring reputation. Patrick Baert's The Existentialist Moment displays the insight that comes with sufficient distance from the factions of the time and their immediate followers downstream. Jean-Paul Sartre can now be seen as the 'public intellectual' par excellence - a concept that did not exist when Sartre broke out of a narrow Parisian circle into world-wide prominence at the end of the Second World War. This high-level debate between Simon Susen and Patrick Baert deepens the significance of social discontinuities in generating public intellectuals and, in addition, casts in perspective the conditions fostering the repudiation of public intellectuals today." (Randall Collins, Professor of Sociology Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania, USA) "Focused on the theoretical model deployed in Patrick Baert's superb book on Jean-Paul Sartre, this splendid little volume opens up crucial issues for the lively and growing field of the sociology of intellectual production and reception. Together with Baert's very substantial work on intellectual life in the UK, Japan and elsewhere, and Simon Susen's masterly studies of Jürgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Luc Boltanski and postmodernism, it constitutes a major contribution to the field." (William Outhwaite, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, Newcastle University, UK).