summary of At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails by Sarah Bakewell:

Sarah Bakewell’s At the Existentialist Café is a lively, accessible intellectual history of existentialism and phenomenology, told through the intertwined lives, ideas, and passions of the thinkers who made these movements central to twentieth-century thought. Beginning with a fabled 1932 meeting in a Paris café where Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Raymond Aron first encountered phenomenology—described by Aron as a philosophy that could allow one to see the world as if each object were infused with meaning—Bakewell traces how this encounter blossomed into existentialism, a philosophy of radical freedom, responsibility, and authenticity. Through vivid biographical portraits of figures such as Sartre, Beauvoir, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Albert Camus, and Emmanuel Levinas, she shows how their ideas emerged not only from abstract reflection but also from their lived experiences of war, occupation, love, politics, and artistic creativity. The book emphasizes the movement’s central themes: human freedom and responsibility, the confrontation with absurdity, the tension between individuality and social commitment, and the search for authenticity in an often indifferent or hostile world. Bakewell also explores existentialism’s cultural impact, from literature and theater to student politics and café culture, highlighting how it shaped mid-century debates on colonialism, feminism, and human rights. Written with wit and clarity, the book makes complex philosophical ideas engaging and concrete, while also acknowledging the contradictions, flaws, and disagreements among its protagonists. Ultimately, At the Existentialist Café is both a history of a philosophical movement and a meditation on how philosophy itself can become a way of living—an exploration of how existentialist ideas, born in a particular time and place, continue to inspire reflections on freedom, responsibility, and what it means to live authentically today.