Although Jean-Paul Sartre, living and working outside the University system, had no personal influence on Foucault, the thought of him, as the French master-thinker preceding Foucault, is always in the background. Like Sartre, Foucault began from a relentless hatred of bourgeois society and culture and with a spontaneous sympathy for groups at the margins of the bourgeoisie (artists, homosexuals, prisoners, etc.). They were also similar in their interests in literature and psychology, as well as philosophy, and both, after an early relative lack of political interest, became strong 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 centralization of the subject (which he mocked as “transcendental narcissism”). Personally and politically, he rejected Sartre's role as what Foucault called the “universal intellectual”, judging a society in terms of transcendent principles. There is, however, a tincture of protesting too much in Foucault's separation of himself from Sartre, and the question of the relation of their work remains a fertile one.