Jean-Paul Sartre’s most celebrated line has achieved the peculiar distinction, shared by almost no other philosophical observation of the twentieth century, of being universally quoted in direct contradiction to its meaning for longer than anyone alive can remember, a feat that suggests either a monumental failure of reading comprehension across several generations of educated people, or a collective determination that the actual argument is less satisfying than the misreading, which would itself be a fairly Sartrean conclusion and saves everyone the inconvenience of engaging with what he actually said.

The line belongs to the play No Exit, published in nineteen forty-four, and is spoken by Garcin when he and two other dead souls discover that their hell contains no fire, no demons, and no physical torture, only a closed room with three sofas and eyelids that do not blink, where they will spend eternity as each other’s audience. What Sartre described was not the general unpleasantness of human company, a thesis that would have found a captive market in any century, but something far more........

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