 Jean-Paul Sartre, working outside the University system, had no personal influence on Foucault. But, as the French master-thinker of the previous generation, he is always in the background. Similar to Sartre, Foucault’s work is characterized by deep antipathy for bourgeois society and culture and sympathy for marginalized groups such as the mad, homosexuals, and prisoners. They both also had strong interests in literature and psychology as well as philosophy, and both, after an early relative lack of political interest, became committed activists. But in the end, Foucault seemed to insist on defining himself in contradiction to Sartre. Philosophically, he rejected what he saw as Sartre’s privileging of the individual subject as the starting point of all his analyses (which Foucault mocked as “transcendental narcissism”). Personally and politically, Foucault rejected Sartre’s role as what he called a “universal intellectual,” judging society by appeals to universal moral principles, such as the inviolability of individual freedom. There is, however, more than a hint of protesting too much in Foucault’s rejection of Sartre, and the question of the relation of their work remains a fertile one.