Jean-Paul Sartre wrote several significant essays dealing with and criticizing colonialism and neocolonialism, the most enduringly famous being no doubt his provocative preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961 when the French government was still asserting its sovereignty over Fanon's adopted land of Algeria. Sartre accepted his invitation and wrote a forthright tour dʾhorizon, taking as its initial focus what Continental European philosophers sometimes call "philosophical anthropology": the question, treated by Sartre as a methodological one, of how to understand human behavior in a social context. Seriality is characteristic not only of early human societies, however, but is to be found in many contemporary situations as well: Sartre gives us, for example, some unforgettable descriptions of commuters queuing for a bus; of citizens listening impotently, in millions of homes, to a government-controlled radio station; of the functioning of the stock market; and the like.