Most philosophy gets written by professional philosophers, for other professional philosophers, and the writing tends to suffer for it. Then occasionally somebody who isn't part of the academic guild picks up the same texts and writes about them like they're alive — like the people who wrote them were real human beings who lived in real apartments and had real digestive problems and real love affairs. Sarah Bakewell is one of those people. And the result is some of the best writing about philosophy you can read in English right now.
She was born in Bournemouth, England, in 1963. Spent her early childhood in Australia, where her family lived for a few years. Came back to England, went to Essex University to study philosophy, didn't pursue an academic career. She worked instead as a curator and librarian — including a long stint at the Wellcome Library in London, which holds an enormous collection of historical medical and scientific manuscripts. She read constantly. She wrote on the side.
Her first book, The Smart, came out in 2002, about an 18th-century jewel thief. It got modest attention. Then in 2010 she published How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, and everything changed.
Michel de Montaigne was a 16th-century French nobleman who basically invented the personal essay. He wrote about himself — his digestion, his fears, his sex life, his thoughts on death — in a way that was scandalous at the time and is now the literary genre most blogs unconsciously imitate. Bakewell's book is structured as twenty answers Montaigne gave to the question "How to live?" through his life and writing. It's part biography, part philosophy, part self-help, all written with this incredibly warm, curious, slightly-amused voice that makes you feel like Montaigne could be your friend.
The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award and basically launched her into being a major writer. People who'd never picked up Montaigne started reading him. People who'd given up on philosophy after college reading lists started reading philosophy again. She'd cracked the code on how to write about thinkers in a way that didn't feel like homework.
In 2016 she published At the Existentialist Café, which is the book to read if you want to actually understand existentialism as a movement rather than just as a list of names. The whole book is structured around the cafe scene in Paris in the 30s and 40s — Sartre and Beauvoir at the Café de Flore, Camus around the corner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty across the street, Heidegger lurking in the German background, the whole interconnected social-intellectual web of people arguing with each other and sleeping with each other and inventing a philosophy.
What Bakewell does so well in that book is show how the ideas grew out of the actual lives. Sartre's writing on freedom is harder to understand if you don't know about his miserable childhood and his POW experience and his complicated relationship with Beauvoir. Heidegger's philosophy of Being is darker once you understand his Nazi affiliation. The texts make different sense once the people who wrote them are restored to full humanity, and Bakewell is one of the great restorers.
If you can't get rid of the skeleton in your closet, you'd best teach it to dance.
That line is from the book — about how each of the existentialists, in different ways, had to figure out what to do with the parts of themselves they couldn't change. Sartre couldn't change his cross-eyed appearance. Beauvoir couldn't change being a woman in a sexist world. Camus couldn't change his colonial Algerian background. Heidegger couldn't change his complicity with Nazism. They all had to make something of what they'd been given and what they'd done. The making is the philosophy.
Her latest book, Humanly Possible (2023), is a sweeping 700-year history of humanism — the intellectual tradition that says human beings, with all our flaws and contradictions, are worth taking seriously as the source of meaning and value. She traces it from Italian Renaissance scholars through the Enlightenment through 20th-century thinkers and into our present moment. It's a quiet manifesto for a way of thinking that's currently under attack from multiple directions, and it's the kind of book you finish feeling slightly more hopeful about being a person.
We are all of us walking around in the company of our dead, and we should treat them well.
Bakewell isn't pushing a system. She's not an existentialist herself, exactly. She's a humanist with deep sympathy for the existentialist project but also clear-eyed about its limits. She's interested in how philosophical ideas survive contact with messy human lives, how they help or fail to help when things get hard, and how the writers we read shape who we become.
The reason Sarah Bakewell still matters — really matters — is that she's the bridge. She makes philosophy accessible without dumbing it down. If you've been wanting to read existentialism but every time you pick up Sartre or Heidegger you bounce off the prose, Bakewell is the on-ramp. She'll get you to the ideas through the stories. And the ideas, once you're there, are the same ideas that have been keeping people sane for centuries.
If you're feeling lost af and you want a friendly hand into a body of thought that has helped a lot of people work through exactly what you're working through — start with her. She'll introduce you to all the people you should meet. The grumpy Germans and the chain-smoking French and the witty 16th-century Frenchman in the tower with his books. They all turn out to have been working on your same questions. She'll show you how.