1. The Conversion to Marxism

As we have seen, Sartre's first attempt at a theory of history sought to preserve his radical concept of freedom.[1] His political activity from 1944 to 1957 was also an intense effort to preserve the individual project in the face of history.  As he wrote in his private notes:

All my political efforts are directed toward finding a group that
will give a meaning to my transcendence, that will prove by its
existence . . . that my contradictory position was the true one. . . . If I am
wrong . . . I must renounce the optimistic idea that one can be a man in
any situation, an idea inspired by the Resistance: even under torture one
could be a man.[2]

In the Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre wrote "against himself,"[3] becoming ill and driving himself almost to a heart attack.  It was a dramatic moment in his life.  Over fifty years old, he compelled himself to alter his most cherished positions in order to account for his own experience.  Although the Critique conserved much of Being and Nothingness

 1 J. P. Sartre, "Itinerary of a Thought," New Left Review, 58 (Nov.-Dec., 1969) 43-66.
  2 De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 148.
  3 Ibid., 451-452.

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it was also a change in which he called his own past into question.  In Sartre's own terms, the Critique was a conversion, a reconstituting of his original project by which he threw himself into the anxiety of nothingness, enacting his own concept of freedom.  In 1960 he formulated his second existential Marxism, which was, as the dialectic prescribes, a richer and more concrete synthesis.

The large book that appeared in 1960 [4] was only part one of the projected study of the

4 Simone de Beauvoir complained that the Critique was reviewed badly by the political Right (ibid., 498), the Communists, and the structuralists.  For the right see, Raymond Aron, "La Lecture existentialiste de Marx," reprinted in D'Une Sainte famille à l'autre (Paris, 1969) 29-67 and Julien Freund, "Note sur la Critique de la raison dialectique de J. P. Sartre," Archives de philosophie du droit, 46 (July, 1961) 219-236; for the center see, Georges Gurvitch, Dialectique et sociologie, op. cit., 157-176; for the Communists see, Lucien Sève "L'Existentialisme, peut-il etre l' "anthropologie du marxisme,'" La Pensée, 92 (July-Aug., 1960) 34-68, and Roger Garaudy, Lettre ouverte à J. P. Sartre (Paris, 1960).  For reviews by independent Marxists see, Henri Lefebvre, "Critique de la critique non-critique," Nouvelle revue marxiste, I (July, 1961) 57-79; Nicos Poulantzas, "La Critique de la raison dialectique de Sartre et le droit," Archives de philosophie du droit, 10 (1965) 83-106; André Gorz, "Sartre and Marx," New Left Review, 37 (May-June, 1966) 33-52; Georges Lapassade, "La Dialectique des groupes dans la Critique de la raison dialectique," Bulletin de psychologie (Paris, 1961); and Dick Howard, "A Marxist Ontology?" Cultural Hermeneutics, I:3.

There were some interesting reviews by British and American Marxists: G. Lichtheim, "Sartre, Marxism, and History," History and Theory, 3:2 (1963) 222-246; Lionel Abel, "Metaphysical Stalinism," Dissent (Spring, 1961) 137-152; Raya Dunayevskaya, "Sartre's Search for a Method to Undermine Marxism," News and Letters, 7 (Oct., 1963) and William Ash, "Existentialism and Revisionism," Monthly Review (1965) 81-89.

For translations of the Critique  see, Search for a Method, trans. by Hazel Barnes (N.Y., 1963) and for selections from the main body of the Critique, The Philosophy of J. P. Sartre ed. by R. D. Cumming (N.Y., 1965) 415-483.

There are two summaries of the Critique: Wilfred Desan, The Marxism of J. P. Sartre (N.Y., 1965) and R. D. Laing and D. G. Cooper, Reason and Violence: A Decade of Sartre's Philosophy: 1950-1960 (London, 1964; N.Y., 1971).  Also Pietro Chiodi, Sartre e il marxismo (Milan, 1965) and Adam Schaff, the Polish Marxist Humanist, Marx oder Sartre? (Frankfurt, 1966).  I found most helpful, Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form: Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories

265

limits of dialectical reason.  It contained the first philosophical espousal of Marxism by Sartre, although it came at a time when Marxism no longer appeared to be an obvious key to understanding history.  The Critique consisted of a short section called question de  méthode and a long section called théorie des ensembles pratiques.  The first part, translated as Search for a Method, was an elaboration of an article Sartre wrote for a Polish review in 1957, assessing the "situation of existentialism," [5] a companion piece to Lefebvre's review of current trends in Marxism.  Their accidental collaboration coincided with their intellectual rapprochement.

The preface to the entire work stated Sartre's purpose, which mirrored the goals of the Arguments group: "Do we have the means to constitute a structural, historical anthropology?" [6] This problem was first enunciated by Sartre in a 1945 article in Les Temps Modernes, where he called for the project of a "synthetic anthropology."[7] The Critique would explore the limits of Marxism as a dialectical mode of thought and free it from Stalinism.  This mode-of thought would establish an "historical anthropology," a view of history intended to reveal the traces of man in the world and the traces of the world in man.[8]

of Literature (Princeton, 1971), Ch. 4, "Sartre and History, 206-305.

Also, Klaus Hartmann's Sartres Sozialphilosophie: Eine untersuchung zur "Critique de la raison dialectique I" (Berlin, 1966), which treats the Critique as a "transcendental social philosophy" and argues with subtlety that it is congenial with Marxism.  Theodor Schwarz, in J. P. Sartre's "Kritik der dialektischen Vernunft" (Berlin, 1967), sees only idealism and pessimism, which does not unite Marxism and existentialism.
 5 Sartre's existentialism had great popularity in Poland after 1956.  Cf. N. Hagger, ed., "Marxism and Existentialism in Poland," Gemini, 3 (Jan., 1960) 33-36.  Includes remarks by Adam Schaff.
  6 Search for a Method, xxxiv; CRD, 10.  I will give the English reference where I have used the translation in my  text.  CRD stands for Critique de la raison dialectique.  Trans. in preparation.
  7 G.  Lapassade, "Sartre et Rousseau," Etudes philosophiques, 17:4 (Winter, 1962) 511.  An interesting comparison of the two men.
  8 Jameson, op. cit., 208 for a statement of the general compatibility of Marxism and existentialism.

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The first part of Search for a Method was called, appropriately enough, "Marxism and Existentialism." As in "Materialism and Revolution" of 1946, Sartre rejected "dialectical materialism." This was as far as the similarities of the two pieces went.  "Marxism and Existentialism" drew a totally new balance sheet between the two philosophies.  Marxism was now "the philosophy of our time," [9] whereas existentialism was only a peripheral "ideology" that was useful only because of the failure of Marxism to develop properly as an intellectual system.  Philosophies were now "totalizations of contemporary knowledge," [10] not ahistorical speculations, and Marxism, given its class basis, provided the best schema for comprehending the present.  The role of existentialism was minor, but pivotal nonetheless, for it alone could resuscitate Marxism.  For the first time, Sartre was attempting to situate his own thought in the context of historical developments.

Sartre criticized contemporary Marxism in two parts: first, as historical materialism in the second and third sections of Search for a Method; second, as dialectical materialism in the beginning section of the théorie des ensembles pratiques.  In Search for a Method, his aim was to develop a new method of historical analysis; in the théorie des ensembles pratiques it was to define the limits of dialectical reason and show that it alone made history intelligible.  Both parts of Sartre's critique of Marxism paralleled the position of the Arguments group, although he far outdistanced them in philosophical rigor and penetration.

"To reconquer man within Marxism" was the battle cry of Sartre's new existential Marxism." Contemporary Marxism was to him little more than an abstract formula that

 9 Search, 30; CRD, 29.               10 Search, 4; CRD, 15.
  11 Some CP theorists had begun to struggle with the dogmatism of a historical materialism that was wedded to dialectical materialism, but they did not go very far.  See Jean T. Desanti, Introduction à l'histoire de la philosophie (Paris, 1956), where for all his subtlety the Marxist continued to set the whole history of philosophy in the Procrustean bed of the idealism-materialism duality, 52.

267

III.  Toward an Existential Marxisrn

that overlooked the crucial mediations connecting economic determinants with concrete action.  Like the Arguments group, he wanted Marxism to open itself up to other, "bourgeois" disciplines, like psychoanalysis, which he had earlier rejected.  "Today's Marxists are concerned only with adults," he stated, whereas men first lived their alienation as children in the family.  The way the "child lives his family relations inside a society," [12] must be elucidated before analyzing the adult's economic activity.  Each level of experience had its own force, its differing weight, in different societies at different times.  Marxist history must study these structures in their particularity before it could reduce them to the formula of base and superstructure.

The problem of mediations led Sartre to advocate Lefebvre's method of socio-historical analysis.  In two articles on rural Sociology,[13] Lefebvre expounded a method that would capture social experience in its multidimensionality through historical and structural analysis.  Accepting Lefebvre's schema, Sartre added an existentialist touch by grounding the method in his concept of the project.  The progressive-regressive method, he thought, was suitable to dialectical reason only because its object, social-historical experience, was formed through projects.  Human projects carried within them the same backward and forward movement of temporality that Lefebvre ascribed to objective, social phenomena.[14]  The theory of the project in Being and Nothingness had been incomplete; full comprehension of projects required a method that would grasp them in terms of the total movement of history.  If existentialism had omitted the relation of the project to the historical totality, Marxism needed the concept of the project to reveal the

  12 Search, 61; CRD, 47.
  13 "Problèmes de sociologie rurale," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 6:4 (1949) 78-100 and "Perspectives de la sociologie rurale," Cahiers internationaux de sociologie, 14 (1953) 122-140.  It was the second article that Sartre referred to in the Critique.  Cf., Search, 51n-52n; CRD, 41n-42n.
  14 "Perspectives de sociologie rurale," op. cit., 134-135.

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subjective level of social experience.

Only the project, as a mediation between two moments of objectivity,
can account for history; that is, for human creativity.  It is necessary to
choose.  In effect; either we reduce everything to identity (which amounts
to substituting a mechanistic materialism for dialectical materialism)and
we make of the dialectic a celestial law which imposes itself on the Universe,
a metaphysical force which by itself engenders the historical process . . .- or
we restore to the individual man his power to go beyond his situation by
means of work and action.  This solution alone enables us to base the
movement of totalization upon the real.[15]

In Search for a Method, Sartre infused Marxism with his concern for subjectivity, for the way men endure their history and their society, for the way they interiorize their situation and totalize their action.  Epistemologically, false objectivism would be avoided and, ontologically, the outlines of man's creative capacity for revolution would be drawn.

It is inside  the movement of Marxist thought that we discover
a flaw of such a sort that despite itself Marxism tends to eliminate
the questioner from his investigation and to make of the questioned, the
object of absolute Knowledge.  The very notions which Marxist research
employs to describe our historical society-exploitation, alienation, fetishism,
reification, etc.-are precisely those which most immediately refer to existential
structures . . . In view of this default . . . existentialism, at the heart of Marxism
and taking the same givens, the same Knowledge, as its point of departure,
must attempt in its turn . . . the dialectical interpretation of History.[16]

269
 

Sartre's hand was open wide to the Marxists: the lessons he had to teach them were actually at the core of their own doctrine.  Yet this facile "taking the same givens" as Marxism permitted him to avoid a rigorous analysis of Marx's concept of the means of production.

2. The Dialectic and Its Limits

For Sartre, the pressing philosophical question was the status of the dialectic because it was the heart of Marx's historical theory.  He presented the dialectic in the Hegelian-Marxist version as both the method of thought and the structure of reality.[17] Both reason and the object of knowledge were in motion, with each dependent on the other.  Although the dialectic was located in the world, it was constituted only through man in the process of totalizing his experience.  To Sartre, the dialectic was always being renewed, collapsing and being reformed, always open to the future and never closed in a final totality.

Sartre took great pains to argue this conception of the dialectic against the predominant Marxist view which located the dialectic in nature.[18] For many years he had inveighed against the position that a dialectic could be found in physico-chemical processes.  Stalinists, Trotskyists, and many independent Marxists relied on the notion of an autonomous dialectic of nature as support for the dialectic of history.  Both Kojève and Hyppolite, in their interpretations of the dialectic, had decisively rejected the notion of a dialectic of nature.[19] Merleau-Ponty had also agreed with Sartre's position.[20]  To

 17 CRD, 119.
  18 For an intelligent representation of the official Marxist position on the dialectic of nature, see Maurice Caveing, "Marx et la dialectique de la nature," La Nouvelle critique, 67 (July-Aug., 1955) 1029; and Roger Garaudy, Questions à J. P. Sartre précédées d'une lettre ouverte (Paris, 1960), where Garaudy, now friendly to Sartre, continued to harp on Sartre's ontology as the misguided basis of his rejection of the dialectic of nature.
  19 Kojève, Introduction, op. cit., 217; Hyppolite, Genèse et structure, op. cit., 35, 235, 246
and Studies on Marx and Hegel, op. cit.,13; and Marxisme et existentialisme (Paris, 1962) 46.
  20 Sense and Non-Sense, op. cit., 126.

270
 

To these thinkers the whole question originated in the split between Descartes and Vico on the first principle of intelligibility: did it reside in nature, as Descartes argued, or in human, historical reality, as Vico claimed? [21]

Sartre's staunch objection to a dialectic of nature was first presented in 1946 in "Materialism and Revolution."[22] He returned to it in passing many times over the next fifteen years, finally to make it a central concern in the Critique.  He faced it again in a public debate with Garaudy, Hyppolite, and a Marxist scientist, Jean Vigier, on December 7, 1961, in La Mutualité.  There was enough interest in this recondite matter to fill the hall, with its capacity of 6,000. [24]

In the Critique and in the public debate Sartre pounded away at his position: those who took scientific evidence as proof of a dialectic of nature--that quantity turns into quality, that the law of opposites applies to matter, etc.--were naive.  Man's knowledge of nature was a human construct that never revealed nature to the same degree as man knew his own reality. [25] Even if the scientific paradigm of nature was dialectical, this demonstrated further that only human reason was dialectical, not nature-in-itself.  The great danger of resorting to the claim of a dialectic of nature was that it made human reality dependent upon the laws of an exterior world. [26] Sartre did not deny that man was within nature and that the processes of nature were preconditions of human life.  What he denied, however, was that human knowledge could reduce itself to the model of matter; he affirmed instead that human reality was different enough from physico-
 

  21 Lowith, Karl, Nature, History and Existentialism,
   22 "Materialism and Revolution," op. cit., 203-212; De Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance, op. cit., 44.
  23 CRD, 115-162, 169ff.
  24 A stenographic transcript was published in 1962 under the title Marxisme et existentialisme: controverse sur la dialectique.
  25 Ibid., 9-10, 15; CRD, 149.
26 CRD, 124.

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 III.  Toward an Existential Marxism

chemical reality to warrant its own principle of intelligibility.  Ultimately, the proponents of a dialectic of nature imposed human ideas on nature (scientific knowledge) and then wanted to impose this knowledge upon human reality as if it originated in nature.  These Marxists, who termed themselves materialists, were, Sartre reasoned, in fact idealists who dogmatically regarded their ideas about nature as existing superhumanly. [27] The stakes were high to him because be believed that if a dialectic of nature were kept, the very revolution that the Marxists sought would be ruled out.  With a dialectic of nature as an epistemological principle, the kind of thinking and consciousness necessary for a socialist society was impossible.

Although Sartre's position against the materialists was strong--later Marxist schools, like Althusser's, gave up the dialectic of nature--he overlooked certain aspects of the question that would probably have aided his position.  The dialectic is normally understood as a way of grasping the totality, and nature is within the totality.  Sartre's concern to specify the autonomy of human reality need not exclude the recognition of the place where nature impinged upon the human scene, nor where humanity imposes itself upon nature.  Hence natural reality must be regarded as dialectical to the extent that it is within the totality.  Furthermore, the points at which nature enters the totality change through human history.  In societies with primitive technologies, nature had a different, more pressing place than in advanced societies, where human action begins to disrupt the normal functioning of nature's cycles.  In fact, one could say that in advanced societies technology enables man to penetrate nature to the extent that previous boundaries between man and nature are obscured.  Existential Marxism relies upon this alteration in the relationship of man to nature, and it is necessary for it to articulate this new, dialectical relationship, or new totality.  The rejection by both Marx and Sartre of a

  27 Ibid., 125.

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human nature is intelligible only in terms of the new interpenetration of man and nature.  Metaphysical conceptions that hypostasize "matter" and "spirit" are no longer consonant with the new Lebenswelt.  Unfortunately, Sartre's existential Marxism sorely lacked a new concept of nature.

In addition, there are even some hints in scientific studies that the view of man called for by the existential Marxists is in fact grounded in the full biological development of the human, species. [28] Sartre feared that a. focus on physico-chemical processes distorted human possibilities; it turns out that biology might provide norms for a higher, ecologically sound, social organization. [29] He feared that the dialectic of nature led to a positivist concept of man as a passive object, as just another mechanism ruled by blind forces.  Quite to the contrary, in the newer biology species are adaptive, not determined, and they operate on feedback principles rather than on unilinear laws.

Having rejected the notion of a dialectic of nature, Sartre was ready to test the validity of the dialectic for the human sciences.  The advertised purpose of the Critique was "to establish a priori the heuristic value of the dialectical method when it is applied to the human sciences." [39] Sartre intended to see if the dialectic could establish the conditions for the possibility of the comprehension of history.[31] The question that Dilthey had raised long ago--was only thinkable, to Sartre, in the aftermath of Stalinism: ". . . the critical experience could not take place in our history before Stalinist idealism had rigidified both epistemological practices and epistemological methods." [32] Feeling the same exhilarating mood of an intellectual ouverture  as the Arguments group, Sartre

 28 Ibid., 129.  Sartre claimed they were inconclusive about the dialectic of nature.  Cf.  Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (N.Y., 1972) passim.
  29 For a French biologist's view of the dialectic of nature, see the non-Marxist, Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity, trans.  A. Wainhouse (N.Y., 1971).
  30 CRD, 153.
  3l Ibid., 135.
32 Cumming, 425; CRD, 141.

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would now establish the value of the dialectic through what he called "critical experience."  In other words, he was asking, first, was there a certain region of being (ontology) that could become intelligible only through the dialectic, and, second, what were the limits of this knowledge (epistemology).[33] Marx's concept of historical materialism lacked a discussion of these questions, which required, Sartre thought, a critical or Kantian mode of investigation. [34] In Chatelet's eyes, Sartre's Critique successfully realized the theoretical transcendence of philosophy that the Arguments group wanted. [35]

Sartre endeavored to clarify dialectical rationality by testing its claim of comprehending the socio-historical totality.  If it had any validity at all, the dialectic would have to illuminate the relation of praxis to the totality; individual action could be known only within the historical movement of society.  The 1960 volume of the Critique started with individual action and ended with social groups or collective totalizations.[36] Sartre was concerned only with possible structural relationships of the individual and society.  A promised second volume would complete the foundation of dialectical reason by tracing these possible structures in history. [37]

Volume one argued that human action could be grasped only in terms of its totalizations.  Totalization differs from totality in that a totality is "inert" or static, like a finished table, while a totalization indicates a living process.  Every action delineates "a practical field" of meanings.  The dialectic captured the meaning of the individual's act through its connections with the larger field of society.  While the individual totalized his act, for example, his act in turn was totalized by others. Sartre tried to show that dia-

 33 CRD, 139.
34 CRD, 134.                  
35 Logos et praxis, op. cit., 198-199.
36 CRD, 134.
  37 CRD, 156.  For further comments on volume 2 see "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 58ff.

274
 

lectical reason alone could comprehend totalizations.  Analytical reason, on the other hand, could be used to study totalities.

For Sartre,, analytical reason could not capture the living interrelatedness of a totalization since it always fragmented its object.  This form of thought could study "anti-dialectical," phenomena in which men and institutions appeared as mechanical things.  The conclusions of analytical reason, however, always had to be integrated into a more comprehensive dialectic.  For social phenomena were never, in their ontological root, merely things, regardless of how inert they seemed to the observer or to the historical participant.[38]  While, at any given moment, human actions appeared to be isolated and unrelated, within the intentionality of each action was an opposite movement toward synthesizing the totality, and this is what Sartre termed totalization.  The dialectic uncovered the field of everyday life as a subjective network of intersecting, intentional actions. [39] Sartre's concept of totalization deepened the concept of the situation in Being and Nothingness.  The choice of the individual now pointed toward and included the social field as a necessary aspect of its own intelligibility.

The concept of totalization also overcame the relativism of the project in Being and Nothingness, where even a fascist might be authentic.  Since the project was a totalization, its meaning was bound up with history, which arranged the multiplicity of projects into a hierarchy and presented the possibility of their global unification into a single historical direction of events. [40] Human projects were ultimately connected in a single totalization which had yet to be achieved, but which was the immanent tendency of history.  This meant that those totalizations which furthered the planetary process of totalization were better than those which did not.  Planetary totalization required communism as well as existentialist authenticity.  The Critique thus prepared the ground

38 Cumming, 422; CRD, 139.
39 CRD, 156.
40 Jameson, op. cit., 731.

275

for an axiology of projects, which Sartre had promised in Being and Nothingness.

Sartre insisted that the observer bad to implicate himself in the act of comprehension.    All forms of "de-situated" knowledge (value-free sociology, objective science, etc.) were ruled out.  In order for dialectical reason to be effective, the knower had to totalize his own investigating purposes.  Engaged in the "totalization in process," the knower had to grasp the totalization from within history, or else and this was Sartre's repeated caveat--there could be no intelligibility of human action.[41] The social scientist could not remain a remote, disinterested observer.

With the concept of totalization, Sartre achieved considerable success in overcoming his previous individualism.  For dialectical reason implied totalizing the self-contained, isolated character of the thinker.  In Sartre's words,"? the investigator must, if the unity of history exists, grasp his own life as the Whole and the Part, as the link between the Parts and the Whole, and as the relation of the Parts among themselves, in the dialectical movement of Unification.  He must be able to make the leap from his own singular life to History." [42] Some critics still maintained that Sartre had not escaped the cogito because be still spoke of "subjects" and still focused on individuals.  Yet his response to this objection would be that the Critique was primarily concerned with the mediations between the individual and the social world.  Sartre states, " . . . the critical experience will start out from the immediate, that is, from the individual attaining himself in his abstract praxis, to rediscover, through deeper and deeper conditionings, the totality of his practical links with others, and thereby the structures of the diverse practical multiplicities and through the contradictions and struggles among these, the concrete absolute: historical man." [43]

 41 CRD, 140, 129.
  42 Cumming, 427; CDR, 143.
43 Ibid.

276
 

3. Praxis and Nature

The concept of totalization was only the first principle of Sartre's Critique.  It was made more concrete by a series of concepts that began with the relations of the individual to nature.  The dialectical principle governing all these relations was that " . . . man is 'mediated' by things to the extent that things are 'mediated' by man." [44] The undefined practical field of men and things received its first totalization when a need arose in man, which he acted upon.  Need replaced the "lack" from Being and Nothingness as the primary interior spring of action.  Human need filled the passive field of matter with meaning; specifically, it appeared as inert resistance.  In the first totalization, man made himself a tool in order to act on matter, and matter made man into an inorganic instrument, whose survival was in question.

Human relations hence found their first level of intelligibility in the practical field of solitary individuals acting upon nature to satisfy needs.  For example, separated by a wall, a road-mender and a gardener were working and were both seen by Sartre, the vacationing philosopher, from his window.  Each unified his practical field in isolation, while Sartre, a third person, unified both of their fields into a single totalization.  Their actions were integrated only from the distant vantage point of the society or from its representative.  The third man totalized the actions of both men, grasping the intentionality of their work from within and organizing the field into a coherent whole.  The two workers became a group for the third person.  Each worker was recognized as human not through his objectification, as for Hegel, but in his action.  This nexus of men working upon nature, unified by a third underlay all other social relations for Sartre.[45] The reciprocity of the two workers was one of negative, mechanical exteriority. Hence

 44 Cumming, 428; CRD, 165.
45 CRD, 191.

277

men were fundamentally dispersed into multiplicity by their action upon nature.

Sartre's use of the third to constitute the first totalization is a far cry from the hostile monads who encountered each other in Being and Nothingness.  It was an important innovation over the usual notion of the couple as the primary relationship,[46] like Hegel's master and slave.  The advance in Sartre's concept of the third is that it avoids the conception that individuals are forever alone in total privacy, since (1) privacy or isolation is a specific social relation and (2) even in privacy one's thoughts and feelings return, as if drawn by a magnet, to the social world.  In its positive sense, the notion of the third stressed the collective backdrop of individual actions, underlining their social mediation.  In the potlatch competition, for example, the judge was part of the activity of the two contenders.  The reciprocity of social interactions was always a "mediated reciprocity" that included a third party.  Once again, without losing its ontological primacy, consciousness was socialized, by Sartre, ending its ideological character as "individualism."

Though the Critique did not include a table of contents to clarify its overall plan, it had a remarkably coherent internal structure.  Tracing the intelligible structure of need, Sartre began with the individual and ended with social relations, all encompassed in a magisterially enunciated dialectical network.  He also began the dialectic with matter, to show how it totalized the practical field.  Viewed from the side of matter, the dyad individual-nature led to the inexorable fact of scarcity--there was not enough for everyone.  Like need, scarcity unified the practical field of the multiplicity of men, in negative, antagonistic relations of reciprocity. [47] In the context of scarcity, each individual, when he consumed an object, implicitly consumed that object against every-

46 Jameson's discussion of the third is excellent, op. cit., 241--944.  He failed to notice that Sartre had begun using this notion before the Critique in The Ghost of Stalin.
  47 CRD, 744.

278
 

one else.  The gratification of the individual's need was at the same time and unintentionally a threat to everyone else.[48] Sartre's vision of scarcity served as a re- minder that hunger was a constant fact for many and that relative deprivation was ubiquitous.  Scarcity meant that some of the group would be determined--by whatever standard was used, all of them being relative--as "expendables," while, between groups, each would see the other as a threat to its survival or satisfaction.  Sartre recalled that scarcity was not purely a matter of consumption, since consumption was dialectically related to production.  Not only was there an unequal division of toil, but toil itself represented man's burdened condition.  Scarcity would be eliminated only when goods would be shared equitably and when toil would be reduced to a marginal fact of life through automation.[49] In all of these ways scarcity created an "inert structure" in social relations by which the Other existed as "inhuman" for the individual or the group, as a possible expendable.  The first alienation emerged when the praxis of the individual satisfying his need "turns back against him and reaches him as Other through the social environment," [50] since it defined the others as expendable.

For Sartre, scarcity was "the abstract and fundamental matrix of all the reifications of human relations." [51] The mediation of scarce matter in human affairs was the original source of exploitation and violence, of all "evil." [52] There were several sides to this issue.  First, with scarcity the meaning of individual praxis was distorted since each "person is objectively dangerous to the Other." More profoundly still, the labor that people effected on things lost its intended meaning and forced men to appear like things.  "Alterity"' was the name Sartre gave to the process by which the praxis of the individual was "stolen" by

48 CRD, 207.
49 Saint Genet, op. cit., 225, 390-391.
50 Cumming, 438; CRD, 206.
5l Cumming, 440; CRD, 208.
52 CRD, 691.

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the Other and its meaning modified or altered.  When an individual worked on wax, making it into a seal, his action was inscribed on matter.  This seal emerged in the practical field as a signifier and the next person who came upon it found its meaning already there.  He found himself a passive object signified by the seal.  In another example, Sartre mentioned the process of deforestation in China, wherein each peasant cleared his land in order to farm it, but in doing so created dangerous flood conditions.  In this case, the peasant's praxis, engraved in matter, came back to him as a threat, with an "altered," foreign meaning.  Or again, the machine, in capitalist society, worked a similar effect: ". . .  the machine, as passive materiality, realizes itself as negation of human interdependence, interposing itself between the workers, to the exact extent that it is the indispensable means of their work; the living solidarity of the group is destroyed before it has even been able to form."[53]

The effects of scarcity on human relations created the possibility of history; it was the collective project of transcending scarcity that actually inaugurated history.[54] History, for Sartre, began and ended in the deliberate social effort to overcome scarcity.  With all history permeated by the negative effects of scarcity, happy myths of a remote Golden Age were dispelled.  Ethnocentrically, Sartre discovered peoples without history.  The primitives, who did not struggle against scarcity with weapons of science and technology but stagnated in a balance with nature, had "different" dialectical structures.  For the West and more recently for other parts of the world, industrialization created the conditions for the reign of abundance, although Sartre did not anticipate the end of scarcity in the near future.  He refused to explore the dialectical structures of abundance, in order to test the degree to which abundance might set the conditions for relations not inscribed with scarcity.
 
53 Cumming, 455; CRD, 253.
54 CRD, 201.

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Although many Marxists sneered at the concept of scarcity, Sartre insisted that it was compatible with Marxism.[55] The emphasis in Marx on surplus-value, on the existence of exploitation even at primitive levels of technical development, occurred, for Sartre, within a more extensive framework of scarcity.  Within the broad condition of undernourishment, it was quite possible that an elite could flourish, causing the mass of peasants to suffer a deeper level of undernourishment than they would with equal distribution.  Sartre's concept of scarcity paralleled Marx's notion in Capital [56] of the reign of necessity as opposed to the reign of freedom.  It referred to the relation of society to nature before automation, one in which human labor did not produce enough goods to satisfy the existing level of needs.

The Hobbesian tone of Sartre's discussion of history as scarcity did not end in any conservative or authoritarian political philosophy.  In fact, it defined the rationality of history precisely as the revolutionary transcendence of scarcity along with the relationships that had been constituted within its horizon.  One of the evils of capitalism, for Sartre, was that it produced new, unjustifiable scarcities, like the scarcity of consumers during periods of overproduction that led to depressions. [57] One of his chief aims was to show that material scarcity did not simply result in objective exploitation, as Marx and Engels indicated, but that it was also interiorized by people living in its midst and took on elaborate forms of alienation as a consequence.  The working class itself could hardly be brothers and sisters to one another in societies based on scarcity.  "What we are showing is this: the possibility that these social relations become contradictory itself proceeds from an inert and material negation, which is re-interiorized by man."[58] Sartre's thesis was that alienation was grounded on human interactions in a practical field of scarcity, that its extent could not be measured simply

  55CRD, 224, 214, 218.  Many reviewers disagreed; cf. Aimé Patri in the liberal journal, Preuves.
 56 Volume III, 820 (N.Y., International Pub.).
 57 CRD, 214.
58 Cumming, 449; CRD, 224.

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in the objective existence of quantitative insufficiency but that it derived as well from the positive reciprocity of individuals.  Only because men lived their relations with each other, with the recognition of their mutual humanity, could the painful Otherness, exteriority, and inertness of their relations be interiorized by them.  Sartre's tableau of the human scene here reached a pinnacle of pathos.  There was a quality almost of beauty in the way his vision encompassed so much tragedy and so much hope in one majestic picture.  In history men endured the practical consequences of their inability to satisfy their needs by at once recognizing the humanity of the Other and not being able to maintain that recognition.

The meaning of human labor is that man reduces himself to inorganic
materiality, in order to act materially upon matter and to change his
material life.  Through transubstantiation, the project that our bodies
engrave in the thing assumes the substantial characteristics of that
thing, without entirely losing its original qualities.  Thus it comes to
possess an inert future, within which we shall have to determine our
own future.  The future comes to man through things, to the extent that
it has come to things through man.[59]

Scarce matter also structured individuals into groups in which men were defined by matter.  With his usual novelistic touch, Sartre gave stunning examples of these groups which he called "series." At a Saint-Germain bus stop people are standing in line.  What is their mode of relationship? They have a common aim, the bus, through which they are

59 Cumming, 452; CRD, 246.

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united.  Yet they are essentially in solitude.  Their reciprocity is almost totally negative; they do not care about one another.  With respect to one another they are identical, interchangeable: each one is simply another person waiting for the bus.  Many modes of behavior in the everyday life of cities were similarly defined: people buying a newspaper or listening to their radios.  In each case, the thing--which was not raw matter, but the product of human labor--defined the relations of individuals as external, interchangeable isolation.  People formed groups that bad little human content, only an anonymity in togetherness that accounted for the statistical aspect of social-relations that so intrigued Merleau-Ponty.

Sartre offered a compelling reformulation of Marx's proposition that under capitalism relations of men take on the appearance of relations of things and relations of things take on the appearance of relations among men.  In his words: "If truly . . . as Marx often said, everything is Other in capitalist society, this is because atomization--origin and result of the process--makes social man an Other than himself, conditioned by Others in so far as they are Other than themselves."[60] As the time for the arrival of the bus approached, the people formed themselves into a line.  The scarcity of seats determined that each was simply another human-object for the rest.  The unity of these people was one of maximum separation.  The "scandal" of it was that in these groups each person accepted and interiorized the impossibility of recognizing each of the others for his intrinsic, personal qualities. [61] People endured the cutting inhumanity of matter in the very heart of their reciprocal relations.  Like a child's toys in a dollhouse, men in series were infinitely separate from one another, regardless of physical proximity. Such phenomena as prices and public opinion polls are further examples of the same separation through processed matter or, another of Sartre's terms, the "practico-inert."

 60 CRD, 351.
61 CRD, 312.

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These totalizations of man and matter presented a dark canvas of human society.  One might ask what has become of the radical concept of freedom from Being and Nothingness confronted by the influence of the practico-inert.  In fact, Sartre gave up little of his concept of freedom, but enriched it by elaborating the active side of matter in the social field.  If everywhere we discover that the individual finds his "reality in the material object," this is possible only because he is free to do so.[62] Sartre gave a splendid exposition of the dialectic of freedom and alienation which needs to be quoted at length:

To be alienated or simply altered [made Other], the individual
must be an organism susceptible of dialectical action; and it is through
the free praxis that necessity s revealed as a transformation of his product
and himself by his product in the Other.  The constraints of need, the
requirements of the processed Thing, the imperatives of the Other, his own
powerlessness --his praxis reveals all these to him and interiorizes them.
His free activity, in its freedom, takes upon itself everything that crushes him: ex-
hausting work, exploitation, oppression, rising prices.  This is tantamount to
saying that his freedom is the means chosen by the Thing and the Other to
crush him, and to transform him into a processed Thing. . . . Certainly [the
worker] has no other out; the choice is impossible. . . . And yet, after all, a
praxis is involved . . . in other words, the ineluctable destiny that is over-
whelming him goes through him . . . freedom, here, does not mean the possi-
bility of choice, but the necessity of living the constraint, in the form of a
requirement to be fulfilled by a praxis . . .[63]

  62 CRD, 360.
  63 Cumming, 461-463; CRD, 364-366. Emphasis added.

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tures of everyday life and presented a constant threat to those structures.  Revolution was not some future hope, some external deus ex machina: it lived within society at all times.  The serialized structures did not determine the individual in the way a moving billiard ball determined the motion of the ball it hit.  Instead, the series presented a dialectical necessity that the individual interiorize them.  Further, although Sartre did not mention it in this context, the practico-inert of capitalism contained within itself the technical possibility of liberating man from toil (the final contradiction of capitalism), and this aspect of the practico-inert was itself continually thrust at the individuals, adding a second dimension of freedom to the practical field, one that derived from matter as past praxis.

To Sartre, Marxists had suppressed the moment of individual praxis, through which alone the dialectical nature of alienation was intelligible.[64] Existential Marxism was thus a way of seeing the individual in the act of living his alienation.  It also made intelligible those modes of alienation which came from matter.  Sartre sought to overcome one of the basic difficulties of a phenomenological social theory which was limited to the intentionality of individual consciousness.  Now there was an intentionality of processed matter.  In Being and Nothingness matter had little signifying force of its own.  In the Critique, on the contrary, the concept of the practico-inert enabled matter to come alive with full signifying and alienating powers.  Sartre insisted that the basis of alienation was not simply human relationships in their various modes, like the capitalist organization of labor.  It lay instead in the profound penetration of human relationships by scarce, processed matter.

To what extent could the ontological freedom of man he realized, given the force of processed matter?  In short, to what extent could alienation he abolished?  Sartre's an-

 64 CRD, 373.

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swer emerges clearly, in comparison to Hegel and Marx.  In the Phenomenology Hegel located alienation in the process of objectification, [65] suggesting that the need of the self for relationships with other objects, its lack of final unity in itself, was the basis of alienation.  Disagreeing, Marx fixed the point of alienation not in the dispersal of the self in the world, but only in those structures of relationship in which the produced object lost its original source and meaning.  In both cases, however, alienation was primarily an aspect of human reality.  For Sartre, in opposition to both Hegel and Marx, alienation plagued man only through the mediation of matter, a much more radical conception.  In the Critique men always at some level recognized one another as men.  This provided a much stronger basis for the re-appropriation of that recognition than was found in Marx.

With scarce matter as the foundation of alienation, Sartre distinguished different types of separation and alteration in the practical field.  A degree of alienation accompanied the process of objectification since things inscribed by praxis then confronted men with signifying power.[66] The process of labor itself contained a form of alienation, since nature required the individual to make himself into a tool, a quasi-inert instrument, in order to act upon it.  Then too, scarcity led praxis to turn against itself.  In all these ways, objectification, Sartre maintained in agreement with Hegel but for different reasons, was not distinct from alienation.  Another phenomenon akin to alienation was alterity or otherness.  The practical field constituted by scarce matter dispersed men into solitude, in which they appeared to one another in varying degrees of otherness.  This otherness was a distance between people by which each lost, in part, his human character in relation to the other.  Alienation, objectification, alterity--were these eternal social pathologies?

  65 Cf. Jameson's summary of Pietro Chiodi's excellent comparison of alienation in Hegel, Marx and Sartre from Sartre e il marxismo (Milan, 1965) op. cit., 237-238.
 66 CRD, 285.

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Since Sartre affirmed the possibility of a post-scarcity society, he would have to admit that all of these modes of alienation were historical and not immutable.  Every aspect of alienation he described was limited to the history of scarcity and would not necessarily apply to any other condition.  The dialectical structures of a non-scarcity history were beyond the scope of his project. [67]  Everything would change when the relation between an ontologically free human species and an ontologically inert nature would change.  In fact, dialectical reason could not possibly decide the question in advance because it was limited to the intelligibility of constituted historical structures. [68]

4. Groups and Freedom

The last section of the théorie des ensembles pratiques tested the dialectic where group relations rather than matter were primary.  Sartre's dialectic of groups, moving from the spontaneous group-in-fusion to the highly structured institution, resembled Hegel's dialectic in that part of the Phenomenology which described the dissolution of "old groups" and the revolutionary irruption of freedom. [69] As we shall see, throughout the Critique the project of the individual was never the final organizing principle of dialectical reason, even though it was a moment of every totalization.

Sartre distinguished the series from the more intensive mutuality of the group.  If relations in the series resembled the inertness of matter, the group had the vitality of free

  67 While in the Critique Sartre was adamant about the unqualified nature of scarcity in present society, he became ambivalent later.  In 1965, be still spoke out against talk of an "affluent society," asserting that 50 percent of France was at a subsistence level ("Interview," Playboy, May, 1965, 74).  Later, in 1969, be reversed himself, stating that advanced capitalism, "despite disparities" in income "manages to satisfy the elementary needs of the majority of the working class" ("Masses, Spontaneity, Party," Socialist Register: 1970, London, 238).
 68 Cf.  Jameson, op. cit., 328 for a discussion of Chiodi's differing view and Gorz, op. cit., 43 for a continuation of this argument.
 69 Lapassade, op. cit., 515.

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projects.  Groups were always constituted from the background of the series, replacing mechanical solidarity with organic solidarity--the same distinction he made earlier in The Communists and the Peace.  The pressure toward forming the more integrated group structure derived from the "impossibility" of free beings to live in the inert structures of the series. [70]   For an actual group to be constituted, however, there was an additional requirement: external danger.  Sartre considered, in passing, groups that were not formed out of "the menace of mortal danger," like elderly women's library clubs, [71] but these voluntary associations were not dominant in society.  Although be acknowledged the possibility of these groups which lacked the antagonistic impetus of scarce matter, he reserved their significance for a future stage of history.

Sartre discussed the group through an example.  In July, 1789, the people of Paris felt themselves threatened by the king's decision to encircle the city with his troops.  In the passion of this new situation they suddenly shed their serial inertia and recognized themselves in the other person as possible victims.  The series was negated in an explosion of fraternal reciprocity, an abrupt alteration of consciousness in which "each person continues to see himself in the Other," like the people at the bus stop, only now "he sees himself there as himself." [72] The group was formed through an absolute reciprocity of praxis where each saw in the Other the same project as his own.  This was the case for the people in the Saint-Antoine district who decided to storm the Bastille.  The result was nothing less than an apocalypse: "Each individual reacts in a new fashion: not as individual or as Other, but as singular incarnation of the common person."[73] Impersonality, isolation, atomization--these traits of the series were washed away when the intensely personal relations of the "group-in-fusion" were constituted.  In fact, Sartre

 70 CRD, 384.
71 CRD, 385n.
72 Cumming, 467; CRD, 388.
73 Cumming, 470; CRD, 391.

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relations of the "group-in-fusion" were constituted.  In fact, Sartre said, the group was "the beginning of humanity," where men have "recuperated their lost being," their suppressed freedom.  A structure of relations has been constituted by men themselves providing a total transparency of the self to others, substantiating the freedom of each to choose his destiny, and embodying the full potentials of humanness.  Revolutionary action became the "extreme situation" of existential Marxism.

Sartre had discovered that the recovery of freedom was possible only in a group structure. [74] The hesitations in Being and Nothingness about the ontological status of the we-subject, now the group-in-fusion, vanished completely.  With the concept of the group, existential Marxism found its central concept and its solution to the difficulties that plagued it through the 1950s in the writings of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.  Traces of bourgeois individualism were decisively diminished.  Man found his freedom in a common act that was directed against the structures that atomized him.  The autonomy of the self that was a primary goal of bourgeois social thought since Locke had been rejected by Sartre.

In the Critique, Sartre was not "the last of the Cartesians," as some have claimed, [75] but fully an existential Marxist.  He still based the group on individual actions; any other basis would legitimate a superhuman realm of being and diminish human freedom.  For Descartes and the individualist tradition, however, autonomous creation was fixed rigidly in the individual.  Natural rights, for example, pertained to each individual as a pre-social being.  On the other hand, the Critique argued that human realization was not centered on the self.  It required a democratic group structure, in which each person would be recognized as a free being.

The singular accomplishment of the Critique' s existential Marxism was to synthesize Marx's concept of man as a social being and Sartre's early concept of freedom more

 74 CRD, 567, 580.
75 Desan, op. cit., 260ff.

289
 

forcefully and coherently than ever before in the traditions of social thought.  It was now clear that the freedom that was actualized in serial relations was insufficient.  Alone in a room, or in a subway, the individual could not recognize and confirm the freedom of the other because individuals were too indifferent, antagonistic, and separate from one another.  Furthermore, free action within seriality was not directed against alienation, and only by pursuing this project could group structures he constituted in which freedom was recognized and affirmed.  In 1789, for example, the revolt of Paris was directed against a hierarchical feudal society that had been constituted within scarcity.  The concept of freedom in the Critique required that it become objectified as the common project of everyone.  In the group-in-fusion, freedom became an objective social structure; it constituted the world as a human, free world.  To Sartre the cogito could never be the basis of a social theory grounded on freedom, because freedom there was always an asocial act.  It was "private." At the very most, the public realm could guarantee freedom to the individual.  Sartre's existential Marxism combined the subjective freedom of the individual to make himself and the objective freedom of the society (the group) to recognize the individual as free.  "The group is the beginning of humanity," he proclaimed.  A complete existential Marxism would also require the concept of the material basis for this freedom in the automation of toil and integration of technology with nature.  Without a proper material base, the group-in-fusion had to remain, Sartre realized, a fleeting and unstable structure.  In a hopeful vein, the most Sartre was able to claim was that the movement toward attaining the material level for a free society would utilize the group-in-fusion.  In short, the democratic group-in-fusion, not the elite Leninist party, was the proper revolutionary organization.

For Sartre, liberal  social  theory characterized the ideal group as a  discussion  group

290
 

that attained consensus, agreement through open debate, with complete toleration for verbal self-expression.  Such a group fit well with the rationalist humanism of the bourgeoisie: when each member of the group could exercise his reason autonomously, without constraint, freedom was preserved.  Sartre rejected this notion since ultimately it was based on detached contemplation.  Experience in the group-in-fusion, to the contrary, was total, engaging the full, concrete existence of the individual, not just his rationality.

Sartre could now address himself to the question of the status of the group.  Nominalist social theories denied any being to the group, and realist social theories, like Durkheim's, substantialized the group into a thing.  Sartre was at pains to avoid both positions, especially the latter, which he felt was endemic in Marxist thought.  Time and again, he rejected what he called "hyper-organicism." [76] He would not grant any separate existence to the group beyond the action of the individuals.  The unity of the group never transcended the common praxis of its members.  If it did, if it had an ontological status of its own, it would severely diminish the freedom of the individuals.  The group was continually reconstituted and retotalized in the actions of its members, and that was all there was to the group.  At most, the group was the situation in which men carried out their ontological destiny.  The fact that the group did not have ontological status did not, in the Critique, lessen its significance for human freedom, because the group was now an essential aspect of the totalization of praxis.

Still anxious to avoid the pitfalls of hyper-organicism, Sartre dismissed the "binary" image in which society was constituted against the individual.  To show the full valence of the mediating quality of the group, he claimed that its unity was based on a tertiary model. For the group the third was internal; for the series it was external.  Each other
 
76 CRD, 507-508, 528.

291
 

member of the group was a third to the individual.  Through his recognition by the third, and not by some group substance, the individual interiorized his group membership.  The fundamental relation of the group-in-fusion was that of third to third, not of the individual to the group as a whole.  Hence reciprocity of recognition--the common praxis by which each could see himself confirmed in the other-was the vital core of the group.

Sartre's notion of the movement from group to series had affinities with the concepts of social organization of the classical sociologists.  For Durkheim, European society had moved from mechanical to organic forms of solidarity, and for Weber modern history revealed a trend toward bureaucracy.  The prospects each imagined for the future of Europe were indeed bleak.  What made Sartre's theory revolutionary was that the negation of seriality came through the impulse toward free mutual recognition.  Admittedly, all examples of industrial society, socialist Russia as well as capitalist America, manifested bureaucratic forms of social relations that Marx had not conceptualized.  In Europe, Marxist movements simply did not consider the form of social relations as a major issue.  Until Sartre's Critique, Marxism had no adequate critique of bureaucracy.  The importance of Sartre's theory of the series rested with its accounting for bureaucratized social relations while maintaining the possibility, however remote, of their progressive transformation.  When the students and workers of the New Left raised their banner in the late 1960s, existential Marxism had already theorized the conditions of their action.

Yet, for Sartre, the group-in-fusion was no more than an island of humanity in a sea of inert series, and it eternally faced dispersion into mechanical unity.  As the members became more conscious of themselves as parts of a group, the necessity for some sign of commitment against seriality was noticed.  In an effort to preserve the group against dispersion, each member took some sort of oath of allegiance to the group.  To achieve stability, however, the group would have to have what it could not obtain: ontological

292
 

status.  For it was threatened not only by the series, but more seriously by the freedom of the individual, who could always withdraw from it.  The same free praxis by which the group was formed now became its mortal enemy.  Claiming an impossible ontological status, the group-in-fusion inaugurated a reign of terror in order to suppress its possible internal destruction.  If a Parisian in 1789 went over to the king's camp, the life of the group might have been in question.  In the last analysis, Sartre wrote, "Terror . . . arises out of opposition to seriality, not to freedom." [77] Thus the ultimate threat to the group's existence came from scarcity, which is only an historical condition.

Yet the destruction of the group was inexorable.  The group required a degree of job specialization.  Evolving in structure, the group now became an 'Organization," with well-defined functions.  Although some spontaneity of action was lost, the separation of tasks did not destroy the common unity of the group.  The common goal still overshadowed the differentiation.  Yet, in its very efforts to preserve its unity through specialization, the group slowly slid into the very condition that it was created to negate.  When it later became an "institution," it betrayed more and more signs of the practico-inert and began to resemble the dreaded series all over again.  The institution exemplified the same trait that was observed earlier in the relations of men and matter.  The action of men began to turn against them, producing a result that was unintended, even intentionally rejected.  The transformation of the organization into the institution took the following pattern.  First, there was a petrification of functions in which the common purpose became subordinated, for the individual, to his narrow obligation to perform his tasks.  Praxis now became "exteriorized" as the free goal of each member appeared to him more and more like an alien obligation.  People became identified with their roles, and interactions carried greater alterity and external reciprocity. Second, au-

77 CRD, 578.

293
 

thority developed to insure that each member performed his task.  The serial quality of the institution manifested the powerlessness of the individual, who could no longer recognize himself in the organized division of labor.  Sartre emphasized that only on the basis of the lost power of participation did hierarchical authority emerge.  The leader sustained the unity of the group only because democracy had been destroyed.  There was no ontological basis for the sovereignty of leaders or elites,[78] no eternal necessity for a division of society into rulers and ruled.  To the extent that it denied the legitimacy of constituted authority, existential Marxism preserved and revitalized revolutionary social philosophy.  Moreover, Sartre asserted that the legitimate and necessary functions performed by leaders were a direct source of the alienation of reciprocity: "This alienation of the individual from the individual-totality represents a most profound degradation of the group as common praxis; at the same time it revives the structural bond under a stupefying form."[79] Loosely defined groups could not survive in the practical field pervaded by the series, since it was too easy for the individual to become separated from the group.  So the group began defining itself more and more rigidly.  The individual lost his sense of the spontaneity of the gathering, so that clear authority was needed to assure the individual of the group's cohesiveness.  Ironically, these measures taken by the group to insure its unity destroyed the spontaneity of the common praxis for each member and reconstituted the external reciprocity of the series.  We are faced with a circle.

Larger collectivities, like social classes, states, and whole societies, became intelligible in relation to the smaller units of everyday life.  Collectives were not groups themselves but groups of groups or, better, series of series.  Sartre reversed the normal trend of social theory by having the relatively small units as the central structures of human interaction. Collectivities were the "matrices" of groups, "moving ensembles of groups

 78 CRD, 588.
79 CRD, 599.

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and series." The unity of the collectivity was far less defined than that of the group: social classes and the state were thus not the primary structures of society.  The "being-in-common-of-class" was far less immediate than that of the series or the group.  Sartre's notion of the class-subject in The Communists and the Peace was now a loosely connected conglomeration of small units that could not become an active political subject." Size alone was not the decisive question, because Sartre pictured the whole city of Paris as a group-in-fusion in 1789.  Rather, the lack of unity in the social class was determined by its relation to totalizing praxis.  The working class, for example, was defined through processed matter (the mode of production) and equally through the praxis of workers.  Taking both totalizations together, the obstacles for the working class in becoming a direct agent of historical change were enormous: "As a synchronic determination, we are thus led to consider the working class . . . both as institutionalized group organization (the "cadres"), as a grouping in fusion or in oath . . . and as inert seriality. . . ."[81] With this concept of social class, Sartre avoided the mistake that he attributed to official Marxists--one that he had made in The Communists and the Peace--of jumping too quickly to a unitary view of the Proletariat.  The role of classes in the social field could not simply be assumed; it would have to be determined through careful analysis, by studying the concrete factors of specific series and groups.  To assess the political situation at any given time, a realistic appraisal of the working class would have to replace the mythic assumption of its constant and unitary readiness for revolution.  As an example of the way social classes could be more differentiated than unified, Sartre mentioned the syndicalists of the early twentieth century, whose social relations and politics were so distinct from the rest of the workers that working-class unity was a chimera.  A similar

 80 "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit., 237.
 81 CRD, 647.

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unity was a chimera.  A similar analysis of the working class in the 1960s would reveal new sectors, like technicians and engineers, and new discontented social layers, like students, women, and the young.

The Party was another collective.  Rejecting his view of 1952 that the Party was the historical subject of the working class, Sartre now treated it merely as another institution. [82] The Party could no longer become the agent of the class because it systematically distorted the intentions of the class.  The pressing political problem became one of constituting a new type of revolutionary group that surpassed the inherent alienation effects of the institution, while rejecting the anarchist notion of total spontaneity.  Due to Sartre's overly strong concept of scarcity, the theoretical groundwork for the new group was not developed in the Critique.  After 1968, he accepted the relative affluence of advanced capitalism.  He could then assert that elementary, material needs were by and large satisfied and no longer constituted revolutionary demands upon the ruling class.  Only the need to overcome alienation could be a basis for a new revolutionary struggles.[83] To unite a social class on the basis of the control over production was more difficult, but at least it focused on the creative side of revolutionary action.  Once Sartre adopted alienation rather than exploitation as a central critical concept, his existential Marxism became a possible philosophical explanation of and guide for New Left politics.

The state was a large-scale institution that approached the unity of the group, even though its composition was in a constant state of flux.  In fact, the state positioned itself above the other collectivities of society in an effort to control them just through their lack of unity.  The state "takes as its aim the manipulation of collectives without rescuing

  82 "Masses, Spontaneity, Party," op. cit., 233-239.  It might be worth mentioning that this interview was given to Rossana Rossanda of the Il Manifesto group on August 27, 1969.
  83 Ibid., 238.

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them from seriality, establishing its own power on the heterogeneity between its being and serial being." [84] Like Marx, Sartre ascribed the central contradiction of the state to its pretention to "sovereign unity" over the whole society and its reliance on a "class apparatus."

The concreteness of Sartre's dialectic allowed him to capture a "new type of praxis," one that derived from the transformation of the state into a bureaucracy and its intervention at all levels of society.  Through advertising methods and new propaganda techniques, the bureaucracy was able to manipulate the inert seriality of society to an unprecedented degree, raising the ominous possibility of total state control of society.  The principle of this bureaucracy was called "extereo-conditioning."[85] In it the alterity of praxis was pushed to an extreme limit: the individual makes himself into what the bureaucracy wants him to be.  Advanced capitalism relied heavily on extereo-conditioning, for example, in its "Management of consumption." With the concept of extereo-conditioning, the social criticism of Sartre and Lefebvre merged closely.  While Lefebvre's analysis of the new phenomenon of consumerism, which did not appear until the early 1960s, remained somewhat abstract, Sartre was able to penetrate the experience to its immediate structure:

. . . extereo-conditioning has two complementary faces: from the point
of view of the ruling group, it appears as a labor of transforming seriality
into anti-physis; from the point of view of the serial individual, it is the
illusory grasp of his being other as unifying himself in the common field of
totalization and the realization of radical alterity (and oriented from an
exterior group) in him and in all Others starting from this illusion.  In a
word, extereo-conditioning pushes alterity to an extreme since it determines
that the serial individual himself must do as the others do in order to be as
they are." 86

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For example, serialized in a department store or in front of his television, the individual interiorized the command by someone outside his group to become like other people in order to be like everyone.  The individual made this command into the totalizing principle of his praxis.  Extereo-conditioning was a far more illuminating concept than, for example, Marcuse's concept of false needs in One-Dimensional Man.  By seeing the individual in the context of the series, it avoided a moralistic view of the consumer as a dupe who moronically consumed junk.  Instead, for Sartre, manipulating capitalists and bureaucrats played upon the powerless individual's need to identify himself with the totality, which was a genuine impulse for universalization.  At the same time, the full poverty of the experience for the individual was punctuated.  The enticing lure of mutual reciprocity was bastardized into common consumption. ("Join the Pepsi-generation.") This "radical alterity" became a damning judgment on advanced capitalist society, which was defined by Sartre through its praxis of serial terrorism and extereo-conditioning.

Even though the immediate structures of society were groups and series, not classes and bureaucracies, the primary situation of individual praxis remained the class struggle.  Sartre sought to demonstrate, by intricate descriptions of the working class in Europe and Algeria and the bourgeoisie in France, that the concrete project of the individual was shaped in relation to the historical development of social classes.  The bourgeois' choice of himself as a "man of distinction" was pervaded by the class violence he inherited and sustained.  He actively participated in a social equilibrium based on oppression, alienation, alterity, and exploitation.  The man of distinction, from which Lefebvre derived his discussion of the bourgeois, sought to distinguish himself from others and over against others, by his own merit.  His self-definition was effected by splitting himself off from reciprocity: "But this immediate merit that distinguishes him must be found by him in an historical situation where being-of-class is already defined:

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defined: systematic oppression, justified by previous oppression and extermination and posing as the only means of preserving the practico-inert process of exploitation."[87]  Sartre exposed the necessary, dialectical connection of a third-generation bourgeois, a well-meaning man who wanted only to enjoy life and harm no one, with the terrible brutality of his ancestors and with the profound alienation of the contemporary structures in which he was implicated.  He denied to the bourgeois his tenuous good conscience, which was bought with minor tribute to his workers and occasional philanthropy.  The self-justification of the bourgeois, the moralism that permitted him to sleep with his deeds, turned up as a gruesome self-deception.  There was an Augustinian sternness to Sartre's use of the dialectic to reveal the sins of the ruling class.  In sum, the vision of existential Marxism firmly gripped the duality of extereo-conditioning and human reciprocity, of violence and love, of terror and fraternity.  There was for Sartre no relief from History, no palliative by which the individual could escape living, day by day, the full consequences of his totalization.

5. Toward  a Social Ontology

The Critique was not appreciated for its attempted reconciliation of Marxism and existentialism.  Considering the status of its author, it received remarkably little attention.  The book does contain many weaknesses.  It is long, torturous, obscure, as unrelenting on the reader as on its object; its concept of scarcity is flat and unhistorical, taking no account of the relative conquest of scarcity in advanced technological society; it offers no hope, no assurance about the future,[88]  adamantly refusing to foretell the imminent collapse of capitalism and bureaucracy; it leaves us hanging in mid-air, abruptly cutting off at the point of introducing history to sociology.  Yet the importance
 
 87 CRD, 719.
  88 For an example of this type of criticism cf. Arnold Metzger, Existentialismus und Sozialismus: der Dialog des Zeitalters (Pfullingen, 1968) 136-137.

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of the work remains.

Early criticisms of Sartre's enterprise of synthesizing Marxism and existentialism were raised again in connection with the Critique.  Aron [89] and Freund [90] repeated the formula that Marxism had its origin in social concepts and that existentialism began with the individual, an antimony that allegedly prevented their reconciliation.  These critics presupposed that thought had to be a single, unified system, without internal contradictions, fissures, gaps, or breaches.  Conversely, existential Marxists, both Sartre and the Arguments group, took the objective field as an open dialectical totality which required multiple perspectives.  Only a closed totality could be approached with a linear, finite, smooth system of postulates.  Hence any point of departure could illuminate the totalization-in-process as long as it did not obscure the interrelationships of the field.  Since both Marxism and existentialism were dialectical in this sense, the charge of incompatibility because one begins here and the other there could not be sustained.

Another criticism charges Sartre with an anti-humanist glorification of violence.  This objection draws much of its force from Sartre's portrayal of Third World revolutionaries, like Fidel Castro, as heroes.  It is certainly true that the Critique legitimizes the violence of colonial peoples against their oppressors.  Like Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror, Sartre underlines the connection between human realization and violence.  I do not have the space to analyze carefully the influence of Third World struggles on Sartre's thought or the extent to which he may have gone overboard in certain cases, injudiciously sanctioning simple brutality.  But the humanist critics often forget Sartre's definition of violence in the Critique.  He defines it as the refusal 'to recognize the humanity of the other, not simply as bodily harm.'  This  definition,  far  from  glorifying

 89 Marxism and Existentialists, op. cit., 175.
  90 Op. cit., 235.

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violence for its own sake, demands a level of humane, civilized behavior that far exceeds current norms in the so-called advanced societies.

From the first description of need confronting nature to the final pages on the class struggle, Sartre unified the diverse aspects of the practical field in a spiral of totalizations, without reducing any level to another.  By proceeding through the structures of everyday life with the multiple determinations of individual, group, and nature, he produced a social theory that was singularly free of traditional assumptions and privileged regions.  The rational individual, the neutral observer, the economic substructure, the objectivity of the social fact, the social contract, the Proletariat--these misleading notions of liberal and socialist thought were dissolved.  Above all, human reality was grasped historically, situating the knower in the known, wherein the knower preserved a relative independence.  Reason and history were neither irreconcilable opposites nor a simple, unmediated unity.  The knower was enough inside history to have it appear as a "transparent object" which he could grasp empathetically, and he was enough outside history to articulate concepts critically, not simply to reflect conditions.  The Critique was neither historicist nor rationalist but existential Marxist.  Sartre went a long way toward accomplishing the two tasks he had set for the Critique: (1) the intelligibility, heuristic value, and limits of the dialectic were indicated, (2) the foundation was laid for a dialectical anthropology or a unified science of man.

Although Sartre stopped short of the historical half of his project, he did indicate the main lines of his concept of history.  Distinct historical phenomena had to be accorded their separate significances before they could be unified in the larger totalization of general history.  The historical experience of mankind could be unified into a single totalization only at an ideal vanishing point in the future: history thus far was a multiplicity of temporalizations.  If there was a pattern to history, it was infinitely more

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complex than the famous three stages of Comte, progressist straight-lines, Spenglerian circles, or even Hegelian and Marxist spirals.[91]The dialectical movement could be symbolized geometrically, Sartre announced when pressed, as "whirligigs," a somewhat unmathematical-sounding term.

Sartre's concept of history was criticized for its reliance on an ontological definition of man.  By the early 1960s, structuralists were rejecting ontological meditations as an arbitrary and dangerous mode of thought.  To Sartre, however, ontological statements signified nothing more than essential meanings (Husserl's eidetic essences) that lay within the multiplicity of appearances and not metaphysical substances that were somehow more real than the rest of reality.  Understood in this way, Sartre's Critique pioneered the route of a social ontology, a project that Lukacs was examining at the time of his death in 1971.  The social structures defined in the Critique articulated the dispersal of ontological freedoms in the practical field.  We must keep in mind that the first volume of the Critique unfolded the specific forms of a social ontology--series, groups-in-fusion, organizations, institutions, collectives-without claiming that they constituted a general theory of historical evolution, only the possible forms of human interaction within the horizon of scarcity.  Given these limits, we may conclude that Sartre's existential Marxism preserved the ultimate potential of humanity to make history, that it defined the objective and subjective limits of the major forms of alienation, that it upheld a balance between the epistemological transcendence of reason and the involvement of the knower in the historical totality, that it maintained the relative autonomy of the various levels of human experience, that it constituted a method for concrete studies in the human sciences which underlined the particularity as well as the universality of events, and that it accounted for the duality of human inten-

  91 F. Manuel, Shapes of Philosophical History (California, 1965).

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tion and structures without agents--although in this last respect it would have to be modified by structuralism, as we shall see in the next chapter.
 
6. From the Critique to Flaubert

Instead of the promised second volume of the Critique, articles on Flaubert began appearing in Les Temps Modernes in the mid-1960s.  The first volume was finally published in 1971 as L'Idiot de la famille.  Sartre had decided that a concrete example of his new method, presenting the historical totalization of a personal life and using the mediations of psychoanalysis and American sociology, was more urgent than another strictly theoretical book .[92] Saint Genet had not been historical enough; only the work on Flaubert described the mediations in their total concreteness.[93]   In an interview in 1969, Sartre attributed significant theoretical innovations and modifications to the Flaubert study, some of which had been inaugurated in the Critique.  The concept of freedom from Being and Nothingness was no longer quite so indeterminate.  Confronting the concrete socio-historical situation, the individual could only effect the world in a small way.  His choices were tragically narrow; yet he still had the burden of choosing himself.  The concept of freedom, without being fundamentally altered, was being significantly enriched by "coordinating" interior experience with exterior experience:

The individual interiorizes his social determinations: he interiorizes
the relations of production, the family of his childhood, the historical
past, the contemporary institutions, and he then re-exteriorizes these in
acts and options which necessarily refer us back to them.  None of this
existed in L'être  le néant.[94]
 

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A second major change emerged more in the Flaubert study than in the Critique.  Both Being and Nothingness and the Critique were too rationalist, relying too heavily upon the lucidity of consciousness over against the confused presence of lived experience, le vécu.  Here was an important breakthrough for Sartre.  His own phenomenological existentialism bore too many traces of Husserl's rationalism.  The idea of lived experience would account better for the non-conscious, non-intentional aspect of praxis.  The psychic fact was still an intentionality, but one that often eluded awareness and was marked by its absence of consciousness.[95] This line of thought would better prepare Sartre for combat with the structuralists, who saw the subject as de-centered and unconscious.  It would also allow existential Marxism to incorporate the insights of Freud, so much demanded by Sartre but so little practiced.  Using Freudian categories, social theory would have to underline the importance of emotional as well as material scarcity, a type of scarcity generated not directly by man's relations with matter but by his relations with others, at first in the nuclear family and later in the marketplace.

It is important to bring up these late reservations, reconsiderations, and revisions by Sartre to underscore the unfinished quality -of existential Marxism.  There is no claim here that it is a finished product that could be reduced to a few formulas.  It should be considered a developing strain of thought, nothing more. By the 1960s there were other currents associated with the New Left which had affinities with existential Marxism.  The Frankfurt School in America, with Marcuse, and in Germany, with Habermas; the Italian school of phenomenological Marxism, most notably, Enzo Paci; the Yugoslav Praxis group; the Polish Marxist Humanists; the Czech, Karel Kosik; the early New Left

  94 "Itinerary of a Thought," op. cit., 45.
 95 Ibid., 50.

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Review group in England--all of these trends were generating a radical theory for advanced industrial society much like existential Marxism and in many cases deeply influenced by the French.[96] Sartre and the Arguments group must be seen in this larger, global perspective and located at the beginning of what may prove to be a major intellectual revolution, a second Enlightenment.  Any international history of New Left social thought will have to draw special attention to French existential Marxism because it was the center of an axis that ran from the New Left Review group in England down to Italian New Leftists in and around the PCI.  Sartre's influence extended not only to England and Italy but also to Polish Marxists like Kolakowski and to the Yugoslavs of Praxis.

96 For connections between Sartre and American sociologists like Mills and B. Moore, cf. M. and D. Weinstein, "Sartre and the Humanist Tradition in Sociology," in Warnock, ed., Sartre (N.Y., 1971) 357-386.  During the 1960s there was virtually no interchange between the French existential Marxists and the German critical theorists. (One exception is an article by Axelos on Adorno in Arguments in 1959.) Now, however, Payot, under Miguel Abensour, is publishing translations of the major works of Adorno, Horkheimer, and Habermas.
 
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