All leaders know that anguish. It does not prevent their acting, on the contrary it is the very condition of their action, for the action presupposes that there is a plurality of possibilities, and in choosing one of these, they realize that it has value only because it is chosen.
(Sartre, 1946, 1973: 32)
The final phrase of this quotation makes it clear that, for Sartre, the freedom of individuals extends beyond choosing their own values out of a pre-existent set, and, in some cases at least, it includes the freedom to create value, to make things valuable. To see whether this radical version of existentialism is plausible, consider the following example. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the famous eighteenth-century literary critic and conversationalist, had some very odd physical habits.