Kevin Gray
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JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND NEO-MARXISM
Mémoire présentéà la Faculté des études supérieures de !'Université Laval dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en philosophie
pour l’obtention du grade de maître ès arts (MA.)
FACULTÉ DE PHILOSOPHIE UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL
QUÉBEC
AVRIL 2005
© Kevin Gray, 2005
Summary
Between his first philosophical works and his last, Jean-Paul Sartre radically changed his
philosophical outlook. The reasons for this change can be found in European history and
Sartre’s detailed study of twentieth-century protest movements. Between the end of the
Second World War and the 1960s, French intellectuals began an intensive period of
introspection, examining the complex relationship between History and social justice.
Sartre and the group of intellectuals associated with him combined to fight against
Stalinism while searching for a new theory of political action.
This thesis discusses the abrupt termination of the ethical project that Sartre
proposed to base on his original phenomenological examinations, and discusses his and
Simone de Beauvoir’s first attempts to construct an Existentialist ethic.
After this formative period, Sartre continued to work with other young French
intellectuals, notably Albert Camus. An ex-Marxist, Camus would become a liberal,
eventually attacking Sartre later in life. In fact, Camus’s last work of philosophy, The
Rebel, was a vicious attack against any philosophy that claimed the right to kill in the
search for truth or justice. This thesis examines the evolution of Camus’s philosophy and
his influence on Sartre’s reformulation of Marxism.
Before his death, Merleau-Ponty, another young French philosopher, a graduate
of the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) and a friend of Sartre, changed from being a
supporter, albeit non-aligned, of Marxism to a philosopher in search of an alternative
beyond Marxism and capitalism. Ultimately, he would famously reject Marxism and
Existential phenomenology. He would, like Camus, also attack Sartre, doing so in his
book The Adventures of the Dialectic. This thesis will discuss Merleau-Ponty’s young
3
efforts to justify Marxism and his mature discontentment with Communism and with
Sartre’s philosophy. Understanding Merleau-Ponty’s critique is important to understand
Sartre’s later philosophy.
For his part, Sartre changed from being an Existentialist to a Marxist to finally,
late in life, abandoning Marxism in favour of a never well-defined philosophy. But in the
Critique of Dialectical Reason, the last of his serious philosophical works, he responded
to his ex-friends’s critiques in the light of his study of Eastern European history,
particularly, the Revolution in Hungary.
The last sections of this thesis discuss Sartre’s philosophy and the influence of
Camus and Merleau-Ponty on it. I will argue that the writings of the two volumes of the
Critique need to be understood in light of these three things. Finally, I will discuss the
relationship between the Critique and Sartre’s incomplete final work, including his final
interviews, published before his death.
4
Résumé
Jean-Paul Sartre a changé de cap entre ses premières et ses dernières œuvres
philosophiques. Les raisons de ce changement résident dans Γhistoire de ΓEurope du
vingtième siècle. Entre la fin de la Deuxième guerre mondiale et les années soixante, les
intellectuels en France ont commencé à examiner la relation entre la justice et la
compréhension de l’Histoire. Sartre et le groupe d’intellectuels associés à lui ont lutté
contre le stalinisme afin de trouver une nouvelle politique.
Ce mémoire discute de la première ontologie et phénoménologie de Sartre et de
l’incapacité de celui-ci à construire une éthique. Il traite des premières tentatives de
Sartre et de Beauvoir d’établir une éthique existentialiste.
Après cette période formatrice, Sartre a travaillé avec d’autres jeunes penseurs
français, comme Albert Camus. Ex-marxiste, Camus devient libéral et attaque Sartre et
les marxistes dans sa dernière oeuvre philosophique, L’Homme révolté. Il a rejeté toute
philosophie qui réclame le droit de tuer au nom de ses objectifs politiques. Ce mémoire
examine l’évolution philosophique de Camus et discute ensuite de son influence sur la
philosophie marxiste de Sartre.
Avant sa mort, Merleau-Ponty, autre jeune penseur français et ami de Sartre, a
quitté le marxisme et est devenu le partisan d’une troisième voie. Il a rejeté le scientisme
marxiste et la phénoménologie existentialiste. Il a aussi attaqué Sartre dans Les aventures
de la dialectique. Ce travail traite des premières tentatives de Merleau-Ponty de justifier
le stalinisme et de son mécontentement avec les marxistes et avec la philosophie de
Sartre.
5
Pour sa part, Sartre est passé d’existentialiste à marxiste. Il a toutefois fini par
abandonner le marxisme. Mais dans la Critique de la raison dialectique, Sartre a répondu
aux deux critiques ci-dessus à la lumière des événements qui sont survenus en Europe de
l’Est, notamment la Révolution en Hongrie.
Les dernières sections de ce travail discutent donc de la première philosophie de
Sartre, de l’influence de Camus et de Merleau-Ponty sur cette philosophie et de
l’importance des événements survenus en Europe de l’Est. Je démontrerai l’importance
de ces amitiés et de la Révolution en Hongrie sur la composition des deux tomes de la
Critique de la raison dialectique. Pour terminer, je discute de la relation entre les idées
dans la Critique et les derniers entretiens de Sartre sur la politique.
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Table of Contents
Summary 3
Résumé 5
Foreword 8
Introduction 11The Early Sartre 15An Existentialist Ethic 17
Chapter 1 - Albert Camus 25Camus in Algeria 27Camus during the Second World War 29The Rebel 33The Argument Continues 39
Chapter 2 - Maurice Merleau-Ponty 42Humanism and Terror 44The Communists and the Peace 55The Adventures of the Dialectic 59
Chapter 3 - The Hungarian Revolution and Sartre’s Reaction 67Sartre’s Reaction 71By What Right? 73Was This the Right Moment? 78
Chapter 4 - The Critique (Volume 1) 81Materialism and Revolution 82Search for a Method 86Praxis and Need 91Relationships Amongst Individuals 93Matter 95The Series 96Collectives 97From Groups to History 99The Pledge/Oath 100The Organization and the Institution 102At the Level of the Concrete 104
Chapter 5 - The Critique (Volume 2) 106The Boxing Match 110Anti-Labour and Contradiction 111Socialism in One Country 113
Conclusion 120
Bibliography 131
7
Foreword
Even before his death, the time of Sartre had passed. Sick, paralysed, on the verge of
death for many years, Jean-Paul Sartre never completed the second volume of the
Critique of Dialectical Reason. He continued his biography of Gustave Flaubert but
never returned to the Critique; the manuscript he left behind was not published until well
after his death. He was never short of disciples but it seemed to those who still read his
work that these young acolytes were less interested in his philosophy than in using his
name for their own ends. Several of his friends were shocked by the series of interviews
between Sartre and Benny Levy (which I discuss later) that were published the last year
of his life, and disassociated themselves totally from Sartre’s last project.
Sartre certainly was not helped by the continued repression in Eastern Europe.
Beyond the Iron Curtain, the tyranny caused by Stalinism had not ended with the death of
the dictator. The Hungarian Revolution demonstrated that the death of Stalin and the
minimal reforms undertaken by his successors would not be enough to resolve the serious
structural problems that remained. And even after Budapest in 1956, the opponents of
Communism could cite the Prague Spring of 1968, the movement Charter 77, the often
violent rebellions in Poland in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally the Solidarity Movement
in Poland in 1980 - coincidentally the year of Sartre’s death. Sartre may have condemned
Stalinism, but did he not take too long to do so?
Yet within recent years, a large number of works dealing with Sartre (and not
only dealing with his early work) have been published - several of which have been
widely translated. In France, Bernard-Henri Lévy, the leftist radical turned public
intellectual, has given us, for example, his work The Century of Sartre. Several
8
discussions of Sartre’s ethics have either been published or are forth-coming in the next
several years. If I had the space and the compunction, I could have written a thesis five
times as long - discussing the application of Sartre’s thought to the fight against
globalization, or to the efforts to create a new Left. The themes common to Sartre’s work
— the radical liberty of the individual, the role of the proletariat, the responsibilities of the
intellectual, the role of literature and art in the public sphere, morality (particularly the
question of revolutionaries and ethics), the intelligibility of History, not to mention
philosophical questions such as discussions of materialism and structuralism — continue
to be important today.
This thesis discusses only a specific part of Sartre’s work: his reaction to Marxist-
Leninism and the protest movement in Eastern Europe. I shall try to show that the two
volumes of the Critique are formed by these events and by the critiques offered by his
sometime-collaborators Albert Camus and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
There are a number of people who I have to thank for their patience and support.
Juliette Simont took the time to patiently explain Sartre’s argument in the Critique. She
welcomed me as an unknown student in Brussels and for that I am grateful. Ronald
Aronson let me sit in on his lectures on Sartre and Camus in Chicago, and beguiled me
with stories and anecdotes. My supervisor at Laval University, Philip Knee, overlooked
the fact that I was never in Quebec and let me do my research wherever I could. These
three professors diligently corrected my work. Naturally any mistakes that remain are
mine alone. I also owe an enormous debt to Francine Roy who has tried to explain to me
the rules and regulations of the Faculty of Philosophy; I will miss her in her retirement
(not that I begrudge her her new-found freedom).
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Honoré Bernier, professor emeritus at Laval University, read the entire text at an
early point and patiently corrected my mistakes. Bill Martin, professor at DePaul
University in Chicago, has earned my eternal loyalty by being the only person to explain
to me the concept of “totalisation without a totaliser.” Lambros Calibaritis, professor at
the Free University of Brussels, aided me during my séjour in Belgium.
I also have to thank my friends and family for their support, particularly Dave
Savard and Emanuel da Silva who gave me their comments on sections of the text when
it was in an early stage of preparation. My mother checked all of the citations to make
sure that the bibliography was properly assembled.
Nothing is possible without Debra.
10
Introduction
After the death of Palmiro Togliatti, the head of the Communist Party of Italy (CPI), in
1964, Sartre wrote a long and passionate article on his friendship with the Italian
intellectual. In it, Sartre pays homage to Togliatti’s wisdom, his ease with words and
clarity of vision.1 But he also praises something else: the traditions of polycentrism and
rational discussion that were common to the CPI.2
One can say with no uncertainty that had Sartre lived in Italy, he would have been
a partisan of that country’s Communist tradition, and not only for its strength as a
political force. He might even have become a member of the party. The CPI was fiercely
independent from Moscow and refused to tow the party-line - this was after all the party
of Antonio Gramsci and Carlo Rosselli, Communist thinkers who owed no debt to
Marxist-Leninism or Stalinism.3
Sadly, Sartre lived in France. His relations with the Communist Party of France
(CPF) were never good and were often uncivil. The Party attacked him after the Second
World War, and called him a Nazi and (apparently at the same time) a spy from the
United States. Sartre had profound philosophical differences with the Party. He had
refused membership in the 1930s on account of the hierarchical structure of the Party’s
leadership, the orthodoxy of its thought and its support for the USSR after the Soviets
signed a peace treaty with Hitler.
Sartre’s friend Paul Nizan would become a member, but only briefly. Sartre may
have considered becoming a member, but his hopes were repeatedly dashed by the
1 Sartre (1972), p. 138.2 Sartre (1972), p. 144.3 The history of Italian Communism is substantially more complicated than this. Sartre was no doubt also influenced to support it by its strong anarchist tendencies (which fit well with the general tenor of the Critique), derived at least in part from the influence of Mikhail Bakunin. See, for example, Ravindranathan, or for Italian Socialism generally, Romano.
12
Party’s policies. This is not to say that Sartre never supported the CPF; he was an active
supporter from 1944 until 1956, when he broke away, ever gradually, as a result of the
Hungarian Revolution.
The Hungarian Revolution put to the test his relationship with the CPF. As Sartre
would say later:
Socialism fell into the long darkness of middle-age. I can remember my
Soviet friends telling me: “Have patience, these things take time. But, you
will see, the process is irreversible.” Yet I often feel that nothing is
irreversible except the continuous decay of Soviet Socialism.4
These events taught him one thing: “Whatever the reasons given for a Socialist
revolution, what is important is that the people of that country construct Socialism with
their own hands.”5
This idea informs the Critique and is possibly Sartre’s most radical and lasting
contribution to historical materialism. The essential point of this work, one that must be
understood in order to understand Sartre’s construction of the two volumes, is that
Socialism, and thus revolution, must necessarily be the result of local action, action that
is the result of free individuals freely associating with one another, action that is the result
of their sovereign praxis. My argument is that it took the events in Hungary to make
Sartre realize this.
With this in mind, it is easy to see why Sartre was so hopeful when he saw the
1968 protests against De Gaulle in France. The Revolution in 1968 was for Sartre an
example of the power of small groups against the organised and ossified state.
.Sartre (1972), p. 227״5 Sartre (1972), p. 231.
13
After these failed revolutions, Sartre began a period of introspection which is
apparent in the series of interviews he gave in the early 1970s. In these interviews, Sartre
applies for the first time the ideas developed in the Critique (particularly in the second
volume) to contemporaneous political events in France. He says that in his study of
Stalinism and capitalism, he has come to believe that, in the presence of inert political or
revolutionary structures, all effort, however noble, will gradually deviate from their
original principles.
In this tiny book of interviews, On a raison de se révolter, never published in
English, Sartre and two of his young companions, Pierre Victor (the pseudonym of
Benny Lévy, his secretary) and Philippe Gavi, Sartre summarises all that he has learned
in his fight against the capitalist system.6 In a sentence, all political action, even Marxist
political action, must be based on, and rooted profoundly in, the free and voluntary
actions of the individual. He cannot accept, he says, parties that have abandoned, even for
reasons of efficacy, this principle.
After Prague in 1968, the rupture was definitive. As Sartre says:
I had thought that from 1950 to 1952, the USSR sincerely wanted to be at
peace with the West. But after 1956, I began to understand that they had
enslaved militarily, politically and economically the countries of Central
Europe.7
Echoing the program he began in the second volume of the Critique, he analyses the role
of institutions during the abortive 1968 uprisings in Czechoslovakia. In the USSR and in
France, the respective Communist parties had become so institutionalized that they have
become paranoid. They were unable to see in these events the desire of the people for
61 would suggest We Must Rebel as a good translation of the title.7 Gavi, p. 38
14
meaningful change. The atrocities that followed, particularly those that followed the
invasion of Czechoslovakia, can be explained only by the ossification that had occurred.
But of course one asks: where did these new ideas come from? How did Sartre
arrive at this conclusion? The Critique is Sartre’s effort to respond to the liberal critique
of Albert Camus, to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre’s individualism, and to
the events in Eastern Europe. I will discuss these events in order and then show how they
influenced the writing of the Critique.
Sartre’s Marxism, ontological (and thus ostensibly theoretical) in nature, is based
on a study of History. Yet while many commentators have focused on the French
Revolution, the Commune of 1870 and the Bolshevik Revolution to explain Sartre’s
sociology, I will argue that he was equally influenced by the Hungarian Revolution. In
Hungary, Sartre saw the price of revolution, a price that had to be paid in the blood of
workers. This would remain too high a price.
*
The Early Sartre:
Sartre’s early writings are extremely apolitical. Even where one can find passages that
deal with morality specifically, they deal almost exclusively with binary relations, or treat
morality principally as the domain of the individual. Even in the trilogy Roads to
Freedom, historical and social events are merely an inert backdrop against which the
individual acts. If there is a moral theme to Sartre’s early writings, it is not that of
traditional morality (in the sense of morality amongst individuals, ruled by axioms), but
that of an examination of liberty.8
8 Sartre’s moral philosophy at this point was a form of essentialism based on his concept of radical liberty.
15
After his period of university studies in Paris, Sartre became a professor at a
variety of lycées outside the Ile de France. It was a period of continued learning and
study, during which he wrote several short phenomenological studies as well as a
collection of fiction, The Wall, and a novel, Nausea.9 Though he had published three
other books during a ten-year period following his graduation, his name only became
well-known to the closed world of French philosophy and to the public following the
publication of Nausea.
Nevertheless, if one wants to understand Sartre’s philosophical growth, this
period of introspection, during which time Sartre was outside the walls of the Academy,
is profoundly important. Even if his traditional education had ended, he was only
beginning to study contemporary philosophy in general and phenomenology in particular.
Modem German philosophy, the ultimate origin of Sartre’s philosophy, was almost
entirely absent from the curriculum at the ENS and the Sorbonne.
Sartre’s friend Raymond Aron, a member of his class at the ENS who would
eventually become Sartre’ bitter adversary during the rancorous French debates of the
1950s and 60s, had won a scholarship to study in Berlin. Sartre followed him, and with
Aron’s help, began a study of Husserlian and Heidegger!an phenomenology at the
Maison française in Berlin.10 This introduction to phenomenology offered Sartre a
method and a framework to explore the issues in psychology that he found of interest.
Following Bergson and Husserl, he began a study of sensory perception.
In these books, Sartre presents a philosophy and an aesthetic that are profoundly
individualistic. It is this similarity to Camus’s philosophy which led the public to believe
9 Le Mur was originally translated as Intimacy in English. I prefer its later title, The Wall.10 Raymond Aron tells of Sartre’s infatuation with phenomenology as soon as Aron introduced him to its modem variants (Hartmann, p. xv).
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that the two thinkers were collaborators when in fact there were important differences in
their thinking, mostly centred on their respective conceptions of freedom.
The emphasis that Camus places on the social is strongly motivated by his desire
to overcome social norms. His is a measured freedom, one that knows its own limits. For
Sartre, liberty is the sine qua non of human existence, it is the only essential fact about
man (freedom would become the essence of his Marxism).
*
An Existentialist Ethic:
Written during the end of the 1930s and during the beginning of the Second World War,
Being and Nothingness was published in 1943, a year after The Outsider by Albert
Camus. A massive volume, Being and Nothingness immediately became the bible of the
Existentialist movement; everyone seemed to own a copy even if no one had actually
read it. One can find in Being and Nothingness a recapitulation and an expansion of the
ideas Sartre expressed in his literature, this time only in a more rigorous, philosophical
form.
A detailed analysis of Being and Nothingness is beyond the scope of this thesis.
Nevertheless, I want to draw out some of the themes that themselves will become
important in Sartre’s later work. The text itself, while certainly not overtly political, in no
small way laid the ground-work for a new Leftist politic on both sides of the Atlantic.
And even if it is close to one thousand pages, it never explicitly takes up ethical
questions. As a reader in 1940s France might expect, the book closes with a promise to
the reader: Sartre would write an ethic - an ethic which was never to appear.
17
The book is a fundamental effort, conceived along similar lines as Husserl’s
Cartesian Meditations or Heidegger’s Being and Time, to describe the ontological
structure of existence. The book tries to formalize the Husserlian analysis Sartre began a
decade prior in Germany.
Twentieth-century phenomenology traces its roots back to two German thinkers:
Friedrich Hegel and Edmund Husserl. We know from Sartre’s own memoirs and from
course records at the ENS that Husserl was not studied there at that time, and that the
students’s sole encounter with Hegel was under the influence of Alexandre Kojève, one
of Hegel’s first expositors in France.11 Sartre’s phenomenology is principally that of
Martin Heidegger, adapted from the first section of Being and Time, which Sartre took as
one of the first Existential discussions of phenomenology.
Sartre continues his phenomenological analysis, formalizing its Cartesian nature.
Sartre is a radical dualist who divides the world into two: Being-for-itself and Being-in-
itself. Being-for-itself represents roughly human consciousness, though not perhaps as we
would understand consciousness today. Consciousness for Sartre is an entity entirely
distinct from the material world, an entity that stands behind emotion and perception. It is
a void that separates itself from the material world. It must be understood as pure
intentionality.
Consciousness is a project, which projects itself into the world, acting
intentionally on matter, whereas Being-in-itself is inert. Being-in-itself is matter and
noumena. Whereas Being-in-itself is the traditional subject matter of philosophy (so
claims Sartre), Being-for-itself is the subject of Sartre’s investigation. Being-for-itself is
at heart a lack, an absence (and hence the word nothingness in the title).
11 See, principally, An Introduction to Hegel.
18
I want to stress three things. First, Sartre’s phenomenology (and that of all
Existentialists during the 1930s and 40s) does not allow for any mediation between
objects and consciousness.12 (Sartre is certainly not a phenomenologist in the English
sense of the word; Sartre believes that objects are presented as they are; there is no
possibility that they are illusory.) The consequence of the elimination of appearance is
that Sartre has more or less made impossible the radical dominance of signs or
signification over human conscience. (This second consequence is very important.
Merleau-Ponty would object in The Adventures of the Dialectic that this prevented the
sort of detailed analysis of the social that would have been necessary for an
understanding of History).
Second, following his analysis of consciousness as a radical lack or absence from
the world, Sartre claims that Being-in-itself is completely free and radically un-
determined. It is thus in possession of no qualities that could cause it to be determined -
thus rendering impossible the existence of the unconscious, for example.13
Third, Sartre introduces in the book the concept that would be dominant in all
subsequent attempts (by his exegetes) to reconstruct an Existentialist ethic. In the first
sections of the book, Sartre speaks of bad faith - undoubtedly the Existential condition
that is the best known by those who have only a passing knowledge of his work.14
Someone who does not recognize this negativity at the heart of her being (negativity
understood as a lack of determination), who does not acknowledge her radical liberty, is
living in a state of bad faith. Were I to believe in the existence of a force controlling my
12 Hartmann, p. 3.13 Hartmann, p. 50.14 Sartre (1943), p. 85 et passim . This is not a very salutarious usage of the word faith, with its obvious theological implications.
19
conscience or controlling my actions, I would be living in a state of bad faith. Modem
philosophy, with its emphasis on essential characteristics, is ultimately founded in bad
faith. The only possible definition of the human being is one of a being who is radically
free. Sartre claims that one would be living a lie if one were to refuse to acknowledge this
point.
This third point, a consequence of the first two, was quickly interpreted as the
potential starting point for an Existentialist ethic. Sartre would return to these questions
again in Being and Nothingness, when he titles a chapter The First Condition of Action is
Liberty. Liberty is thus conceived as the necessary origin of any ethic, producing the
result that ethics must be rooted in action and not states of mind. Yet even Sartre himself
admits that he is not certain if his ideas are strong enough to produce an ethic in their
present form. Thus he writes: “Ontology itself does not give us moral axioms. It is merely
an investigation of what is and not an investigation that could give us moral
imperatives.”15 Rather, Sartre believes that ontology merely demonstrates where an ethic
can begin and shows us that there exist no transcendental values. Those who would argue
otherwise live in a state of bad faith.
Sartre’s other literary works, in particular his early theatre, give us reason to hope
that an Existentialist ethic might be possible. At the end of The Flies, a piece undoubtedly
written with a moral in mind (even if it was obscured to avoid the Nazi censors), one of
the characters remarks: “They [humans] are free and life begins on the other side of
15 Sartre (1943), p. 720. It is perhaps useful to compare Sartre’s thought with the “ls/Ought” debate that took place in analytic philosophy during the twentieth-century. Sartre is fighting with essentially the same problem, all be it using very different language. In the absence of religious and tradition, how can one pass, he asks, from descriptive sentences to moral axioms?
20
despair.”16 In No Exit, a character remarks: “You are nothing other than your life.”17 The
only understanding of life can be that of a series of events and actions played out in
situation not abstraction.18 Moreover, in the absence of God, Sartre believes that our
values must be founded in the world, through, and justified by, action.19
There is no shortage of people claiming to be students of Sartre; to make matters
worse, they all seem to have written an Existentialist ethics, using as their inspiration the
books by Sartre I just discussed. Fortunately, however, we do have other manuscripts
available if we want to carry out a more detailed and historically accurate analysis.
Unfortunately, the manuscript is terribly incomplete. Sartre’s posthumous writings do
give us some sense of the direction he was headed in and the line of thought he was
pursuing, but little else. First, Sartre left us his Notebooks for an Ethic, in which he
begins to elaborate on what he had planned to become his large ethical work. While of
interest to scholars, the work borders on impenetrable. Sartre weaves a path throughout
the history of Western philosophy, covering or at least naming every major philosopher
since Kant. Sartre continues to reject any absolute moral or any moral that finds its origin
in religion.
Sartre may have planned the Notebooks for an Ethic to be an important ethical
work. But from what we know before he abandoned it, he had taken a very different
approach. Sartre may say that “the ultimate origin of ethical life must be in spontaneity;
that is to say in immediacy,” but in reality Sartre devotes the two largest parts of the book
to two things: developing his position towards Marxism (a position that he never
16 Sartre (1947), p. 102.17 Sartre (1947), p. 165.18 Linsenbard, p. 101.Catalano (1996), p. 121״
21
examined in any great detail before the Critique) and the moral consequences of the
master-slave dialectic in Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit.20
A better examination of Sartre’s plans for an Existentialist ethic can be found in
De Beauvoir’s An Ethics of Ambiguity. In this book, Simone de Beauvoir continues the
task here that Sartre had proposed at the end of Being and Nothingness and acknowledges
as much.21 De Beauvoir here tries to develop the ethical consequences of Existentialism.
First, De Beauvoir argues that morality finds its origin in failure. As Hegel said, morality
finds its raison d’être in the disagreement between nature and the desire of the spirit.
Second, De Beauvoir claims that one’s passion has no goal other than itself. To be
human, as we saw, is to search for justification, even though we know at the outset that
this justification does not exist a priori in the external world. This absence of constraint
leads human beings to value the only thing that they are allowed to hold on to: freedom
itself. Third, De Beauvoir addresses one of the traditional concerns of all students of
Existentialism. It cannot help but to seem to the casual reader that in the absence of
traditional constraints everything is permissible. To the contrary, says De Beauvoir, this
very absence imposes radical obligations on human beings: every action must be justified
not merely as according to a rule, but as the result of introspection and examination. This
absence of God means that we will be judged sooner, in this world rather than in the next.
20 Sartre (1983a), p. 1221 This essay is normally published with a second, titled Pyrrus and Cinéas, which explores several of the other ideas Sartre would later develop. De Beauvoir examines in particular the importance of Marxism and the study of exploitation for contemporary ethics. First, De Beauvoir argues that the very use of machines in factories eliminates the humanity of the workers. Only through revolt can the oppressed overcome the conditions that prevent them from becoming human. De Beauvoir (1974), p. 126.
Second, she critiques the Marxism of the CPF, and in doing so gives us some idea of the future direction of Sartre’s thought. The Marxism of the CPF is irreconcilable with Existentialism. The CPF’s Marxism is the apotheosis of subjectivism, she argues. She rejects its emphasis of determinism and the destiny of the proletariat. How can Marxism represent the salvation of the individual when it demands his subordination to the collective? (Her response is that this version of Marxism cannot.)
22
Every actor is responsible for the world she makes for herself. “I must assume all
responsibility for my actions.”22 Not only that, but since we value our own liberty, we are
led to value the liberty of all others, wherever they may be. Freedom is the cause of
everyone, everywhere.23 The choice of being ethical is therefore the choice to examine
life in the light of liberty.24 To live in bad faith would be to reject at its very core any
attempt to live ethically.
Yet there remain questions for De Beauvoir to answer, perhaps even to ask. De
Beauvoir has painted in broad swaths the outline for an Existentialist ethics: she has
clearly shown the role of liberty and she has argued that ethical essentialism must be
abandoned. But of course, this represents only a very small fraction of what would have
been necessary. The rejection of essentialism and of all axiomatic ethics creates a type of
radical situationalism — made more radical by Sartre and De Beauvoir’s insistence that
the only moral rules are ones created through action.
Sartre seems to have begun to realise that perhaps the situation constrains action
and ethics in a stronger way than he previously thought, a conclusion which he seems to
have come to while writing The Notebooks from the False War. Written both during the
period that has come to be known as the Phony War, and during the period of Sartre’s
captivity after France’s surrender, the notebooks talk at length about the actor in different
situations.25 He speaks of himself as Sartre the soldier; Sartre the lover; and, later in the
book, Sartre the prisoner.26 He refers more formally to “Being-at-war” and “Being-in-
22 De Beauvoir (1974), p. 36.2j De Beauvoir (1974), p. 125. See also Anderson, p. 70. Anderson argues for the same conclusion as De Beauvoir.24 Barnes, p. 53.25 Sartre was after all the author of the famous line: “We were never so free as during the Occupation,” which was the first line of the essay Republic of Silence (See Situations III).26 Simont (2001), p. 115
23
Paris.”27 This understanding of situational liberty, whereby one ceases to realize her
freedom, either through oppression or ignorance, would undoubtedly and very
importantly lead Sartre to Marxism.
27 Sartre (1947), p. 239 et passim. Sartre emphasizes as well the ideas of conflict and violence (also introduced in Being and Nothingness). But the most important idea is that of need (specifically of hunger). Globally, these would become the building blocks for ethics. He also for the first time begins to discuss revolutionary violence. Because of this, Barnes writes that only after these ideas have been hashed out in the Critique would it have been possible for Sartre to write a complete ethics (Barnes, p. vii).
24
Chapter 1
Albert Camus
25
In thinking of the French Left, and particularly of intellectuals involved in the efforts to
recreate French society on broadly Marxist or Existential swaths, a number of names
appear. For philosophers and non-specialists alike, Albert Camus’s name would appear at
the head of any list of those who were guiding lights during the tortuous years that
followed the war, during the reconstruction of France. Camus and others like him fought
a battle against French conservatism, against Catholicism and against the new
government of Charles De Gaulle. Yet while Camus was involved in debates with the
conservatives (one need only think of his painful enmity with François Mauriac, the
Catholic writer), he focused more on remaking the Left in France, a movement that had
collapsed following the defeat of Léon Blum and the Popular Front. Camus represented a
French Left that was sympathetic to the Communists yet harboured deep suspicions about
the CPF.
Camus is deeply emblematic of all twentieth-century writers: he was a
Communist during the 1930s, when the deep ennui with the imperial system after World
War I had not yet dissipated, at a time when the other two choices open to the intellectual
seemed to be liberal imperialism or fascism. Bom into poverty in French North Africa, he
was an ideal recruit for the CPF. Yet he would leave the party after several years,
convinced that there was another progressive alternative; many other intellectuals would
follow him though none would retain his distinctive voice.
Camus’s Marxism was never the result of serious philosophical reflection - it was
simply the position of someone who witnessed poverty and the excesses of colonialism.
The CPF enabled Camus to fight against imperialism at a time when mainstream French
parties had other preoccupations. Marxism, in its unsophisticated form, gave Camus a
26
tool to use in his fight for the liberty of the oppressed and downtrodden.28 29 As to Marxist
metaphysics and economics, it seems that Camus was entirely disinterested. Even if these
questions were important to the intelligentsia in Paris, they were unimportant to those
fighting in the trenches.
%
Camus in Algeria:
Camus was bom in Algeria in 1913, almost a decade Sartre’s junior. As a poor Pied-noir,
the French term for the colonialists that had heeded their motherlands’s call to immigrate
to Algeria, he knew misery from a young age. He was educated in French North Africa
and worked there during the 1930s. From a young age he was politically active, working
to improve the living standards of the local Muslim population.
For a very brief period, Camus was a member of the Communist party. He was
charged with organising a Communist cell in a suburb of Algiers and was also the editor
of a Communist-funded newspaper, La Nouvelle Journée?9 But virtually as soon as he
joined the party, he began to grow frustrated with the Communists and their refusal to
tolerate debate within the ranks of the party. Following the defence pact signed between
Stalin and the French government, the CPF was obliged to cease its overtly anti-colonial
practices. In some places, recruitment of Arabs into the party, which was never very
strong, stopped. For someone whose primary motivation was fighting imperialism, the
situation was fast becoming intolerable.
Camus would nonetheless continue to work for the party. He helped organize a
theatre associated with the party, and would himself adapt several works for the stage
28 Ellison, p. 117.29 Lottman, p. 81.
27
during the two years he was at the heart of CPF activities. Eventually, however, the urge
to speak out grew too strong; Camus was expelled from the party.30
The importance of his time in the CPF can not be overstressed. Camus had joined
not out of concern for the proletariat or the condition of men working in factories. In
Algeria, these concerns were far from the forefront of activity. He had joined because of
his intimate knowledge of the situation of the natives, confined to poor living conditions,
pushed from the richest land, and deprived of the French citizenship offered to non-
Muslims. Under the influence of his friend and former teacher Jean Grenier, Camus had
joined the party; under Grenier’s influence, Camus had questioned its policies. Grenier
had come to question the logic of revolution, and the party’s commitment to anything
beyond Stalinism.31 He believed, as Camus would later, that in the choice between
materialism and the rights of the downtrodden, abstract philosophical systems needed to
be abandoned.32
Yet it was not merely the contradiction between the situation on the ground and
the diktats of the party that lead Camus to abandon the CPF, nor was it its dogmatic
adherence to the Comintern.33 Camus began to question the claims of Socialist utopia that
were put forth by the Soviet government.34 If the Soviet Union continued to suffer from
the same crippling violence as the Western Imperial powers, why should one choose
orthodox Marxism, Camus was lead to ask? Given the choice between Communist
j0 Lottman, p. 158.31 Lottman, p. 100.32 Grenier, p. 34.33 No two authors give an identical account of Camus’ leaving the party nor does it help that Camus doesn’t discuss it in any detail in his journals (Lottman, p. 161). A reasonable supposition would be that Camus was expelled after abandoning the party in some way (whether or not he was expelled after openly quilting the party, as happened sometimes, is an open question, but it seems unlikely - by all accounts he was profoundly unhappy at being expelled).34 Tarrow, p. 18.
28
violence and Camus’s more measured revolt, the choice was clear. Camus would take up
this critique later in a way that forced first Merleau-Ponty and then Sartre to examine
their own convictions.
The early works of both Sartre and Camus share similarities other than their
mutual emphasis of liberty. Camus’s early work, as did Sartre’s, treated issues of revolt
and rebellion as issues fundamentally of the individual reacting against an inert social
backdrop.35 The Myth of Sisyphus discusses the question not of revolt but of suicide. The
Outsider examines questions of the individual’s conformation to social norms and his
efforts to escape from the oppression of expectation. Yet rather than attempt to change
these rules, Meursault, Camus’s anti-hero, acts within a very narrow confines to create a
space for himself. Rules are to be skirted, perhaps, but never fundamentally altered.
*
Camus during the Second World War:
The outbreak of the war emptied Paris of her men. The sudden defeat of France plunged
the whole nation into mourning. Gradually, faced with the collaborationist Vichy
government and the Nazi atrocities, some, but by no means many, joined the Resistance.
During the war, Camus travelled between Africa and France, passing relatively
easily through the various zones.36 Following the Allied invasion of North Africa, he was
left isolated in France. A journalist, he was quickly drawn to the group of Resistance
fighters associated with the journal Combat - originally published anonymously - it
became a signed daily with the arrival of Allied troops in Paris.37 Camus’s articles written
during the period reflect new preoccupations: he speaks not only of the need to construct
35 The most compelling of these, though there are others, are The Myth of Sisyphus and The Outsider.36 Bronner, p. 55 et passim.37 Camus (1970), p. 26.
29
a new French society, but also of justice - justice for collaborators and justice as a
universal right, due each person accused of a crime. Reading his writings of the time, one
can see that while he was by no means still a Communist, he was politically well to the
left of the other major leftist newspaper, L’Humanité. When he spoke of justice, it was
not of a justice that would erase everything that came before it. His was a measured
justice — decent and devoid of revenge. He could not continence a French society that
took on the worst traits of her German occupiers.38
In the articles in the period immediately following the end of the Second World
War, Camus began to talk less of the fascist and the collaborators; he would turn his
attention to Communism. In a series of articles titled Neither Victims nor Executioners,
Camus began to outline what would become his mature political position: one that
rejected organized Revolution and spoke of the dangers of fanaticism in the pursuit of
justice. This change in journalistic preoccupation would spill over into Camus’s
philosophical writings. As he would write in the introduction to The Rebel, whereas The
Myth of Sisyphus spoke of suicide, he would now discuss murder.39
In Neither Victims nor Executioners, which appeared in 1946, Camus continued
his analysis of modem history: “The twentieth-century is the century of fear.”40 What one
notices, he writes, is that the vast majority of Frenchmen live in a world deprived of
hope. This mass of humanity is the breeding ground for those who would advocate the
radical transformation of society. Speaking directly of Marxism in an article entitled
Mystified Socialism, he writes that the danger of Marxism is that it would give priority to
the ends over the means.
38 Camus (1970), p. 128.39 Camus (1959), p. V.
40 Camus (1965), p.331.
30
The articles, while not properly works of philosophy, illustrate the new direction
of Camus’s thought. He is not willing to accept that post-war French society would be
left largely unchanged. Yet he also repudiates radicalism. And for the first time, Camus
would no longer write of fascism and capitalism, but of Communism. He would examine
the Cold War and the coming debates that would rent the French Left asunder.
During this period, Camus was no doubt largely influenced by his new friends, as
for the first time, following the successes of The Outsider, he was welcomed into French
intellectual circles. He would become a close friend of Arthur Koestler (whose work and
influence on Merleau-Ponty I discuss below). Camus seems to accept the criticism of
Sartre’s Existentialism: in a Pascaban moment he writes that when one believes in
nothing, everything is permitted. He argues in the articles that men have replaced their
belief in God with a belief in History. They have become enslaved to the dialectic, their
new master. And it is not merely that this end allows them to believe in a different future,
it encourages them to act in destructive ways - wars and violence become necessary for
the construction of heaven on earth.41 The new world will be divided not between the old
masters and slaves, but between the new Brahmins and their opponents.
Not surprisingly, Camus’s new opposition to Communism pushed him away from
Sartre. The two were still on speaking terms in 1948, when they were approached by a
mutual friend to describe their political positions for a special issue of the review
Caliban. These articles were the opening salvo in what was to become an intensely
personal and vicious debate.
Camus (1972), p. 164-5.
31
Camus, in his articles, attacks the Communists who had labelled him a lackey of
capitalists and a counsellor of ethical quietism.42 He argues that the positive qualities of
Western democracies were being overlooked by the vitriol of the French Communists.
The liberalism Camus offers in these articles is the liberalism that his friends would call
nuanced, his enemies hesitant and contradictory.
For his part, Sartre attacks the idea that democracy can serve an emancipatory role
in its current form; rather, he argues that the emphasis on rights in Western society serves
to empower the bourgeoisie and emasculate the proletariat. Sartre claims that if rights are
to be taken seriously, they can not be considered as atomistic propositions. Rights cannot
merely be the rights of individuals to be free from government interference. Rights must
instead include references to social conditions, notably the desire to be free from material
need.
Sartre argues in the beginning of the article that the idea of liberty has become
thoroughly discredited.43 He argues therefore that if society and politics are to be
reinvigorated a new idea of liberty must be found. These two critiques are related:
bourgeois rights include an odd form of liberty.
Also, for the first time, he begins to write using Marxist terminology. Liberty in
democracies is little more than a mystification, he claims. We all have the same liberty,
he argues, making oblique reference to his earlier work. But of what use is this liberty if
we continue to suffer from unemployment, from poverty, from forced labour? He
concludes by remarking that the need to satiate oneself is not merely the need to eat or to
42 Camus (2001), p. 1243 Sartre (2001), p. 8.
32
rest but also the desire to have enough, to be free from need and, ultimately, the desire to
be human.
In the articles, Camus demonstrates that he has become more a democrat and less
a radical with time. For him, democracy is merely the least terrible of the political
systems. He accepts democracy because he rejects two extremes: the philosophy
according to which we can do nothing (conservatism) and thus must remain silent, and
the philosophy that says we can change everything, including human nature.
These articles are important because for the first time they demonstrate the
different direction Camus’s thought had taken. And we can see clearly the origin of the
future conflict between Camus and Sartre. Camus believes that society must change, but
that our values will remain essentially the same, even if they must be restored. The
conflict would explode with the publication of Camus’s next philosophical work.
*
The Rebel:
With one well-placed blow, Camus angered all of modem France: Christians, Surrealists,
Marxists, and of course Existentialists. The Rebel became, for all its flaws, one of the
most talked about texts in France.44
The book begins with what seems like a fairly straightforward premise: man
occupies a personal and central place in the world. Yet while it seems unexceptional, it is
a targeted criticism of Communism - taking exception to a philosophy that treats people
as mere epiphenomena of the physical world. It was an idea that ran contrary to the
ideological currents of post-war France.
44 Ellison, p. 118.
33
In the first few pages, Camus sets forth his ambitious task: to analyse the history
of revolutions, be they artistic or political. It will be his goal to examine their outcomes -
have they stayed loyal to the original aims or did they deviate from their fundamental
values? If this is his question, his conclusion rapidly becomes evident: “Even though I
understand the importance of revolution [based on logic], I don’t have enough confidence
in reason to enter into such a philosophical system.”45
He continues thus:
The purpose of this essay is to once more examine the reality of the
moment, and to once and for all examine the justifications given to the
crimes committed in the name of logic. It is ultimately an effort to
understand the times in which we live.46
The text of The Rebel is divided into three sections. The first examines the history
of revolutions, the history of attempts to overthrow the social order. The second discusses
artistic revolt - it was this section that particularly angered the Surrealists. The third and
final section examines political ethics - particularly, political ethics during a time of
revolt. The actual argument in the text makes one question why Camus bothered to
include the middle section at all, and I do not plan to study it in any great detail. The text
is not about art in any meaningful way, but this is only one of many questions about the
composition of text. The Rebel is without a doubt a very badly written book. Camus’s
arguments are often little more than propositions cobbled together with the word thus. In
fact, it is quite surprising that its extreme dogmatism was overlooked by the early
reviewers - but then they, who often represented the right, were intent on using Camus’s
work for different reasons.
45 Camus, cited in Lévy-Valensi, p. 131.4*Camus(1951), p. 13-14.
34
The first section is ultimately a discussion of universalist politics and the belief
that reason can overcome, through its very exercise, the contradictions of established
political systems. Camus’s point is that any such desire for equality begins with the
assumption that each life is inherently valuable. As such, as soon as a revolution becomes
murderous, as soon as revolutionaries begin to kill, the whole enterprise has abandoned
its roots and has descended into the realm of the illogical.
In as much as the revolutionary or the artist wants to abolish the injustices of
traditional morality, they search for a universal logic, one that eliminates the inequalities
that exist amongst people. But although logic is bom of the actions of individuals, this
logic soon becomes all-consuming. Revolution forgets that what gave rise to it; soon the
dignity of the individual can become forgotten, left by the wayside in the rush towards
change.
Revolution begins as an exaltation of life. We start by trying to eliminate the
absurdities of modem life, but we finish only by reproducing others.47 Some positive
changes occur, old methods of repression are eliminated, but too often new ones are
created.
Camus’s desire is to see a new morality replace the old. Yet Camus wants to
reassure us (and himself) that zeal can never again overcome justice. To that end, Camus
demands a different type of justice which he calls Mediterranean; Mediterranean justice
is pragmatic and moderate, opposed to the excesses of (presumably Northern European)
revolution. Mediterranean justice emphasizes the modem while refusing to subordinate
the individual to the collective.
How can a revolution be just if it begins to kill en masse, asks Camus?
47 Bronner, p. 81 et passim.
35
Let us recall that what unites us is life, not death. The logic of the human
condition is not that of destruction, but of creation. If we want to remain
authentically human, we must not abandon this in the fight against
contradiction.48
This is the challenge that Camus proposes: remain loyal to revolution and to our values,
avoid the argument that the end justifies the means. Politics is not a religion, he argues in
an attack certainly aimed at the Marxists.
In the last two chapters of the book, Camus challenges Sartre, without naming
him, to defend his new politics. “A century ago, we fought against religious constraints.
Delivered from them, we have invented a new and tolerable religion for ourselves.”49
Justify this new religion, he demands, justify this new terror.
*
For six months after Camus’s attack, Les Temps Modernes refrained from responding.
Several other hostile responses to Camus’s book were published. Several groups of
artists, particularly the surrealists, excoriated him as soon as excerpts from the book were
published in the revue Les Cahiers du Sud.50 At each meeting of the editorial board of
Les Temps Modernes, the subject of an appropriate response was mooted. At each
meeting, Sartre asked for a volunteer to review Camus’s new work. As De Beauvoir tells
it, “friendship forced everyone not to say anything bad about the book, even though no
one had anything nice to say about it.”51 No one responded, even though the general
opinion towards the book was one of hostility. Most of the intellectuals associated with
Sartre’s circle, including Sartre himself, thought that Camus had radically misinterpreted
4* Camus (1951), p.352.49 Camus (1951), p.345.50 Todd, p. 766.51 Todd, p. 770.
36
the philosophers he examined in the book; several thought that the book had been entirely
written from secondary sources.52
According to De Beauvoir, Sartre asked during these meetings for a firm yet
cordial response. Finally at the end of 1951, Francis Jeanson, a young exegete of Sartre,
offered to write the review. His review was a violent, often ad hominem, attack against
Camus.53 Under the title Albert Camus or the Soul in Revolt, the article was published in
Les Temps Modernes in May of 1952. Again, according to De Beauvoir, Sartre had
dulled down the text - the original had been substantially more vitriolic.54
Jeanson begins his article with a résumé of the great amount of praise Camus’s
book had received; twisting the knife, he emphasizes the positive reviews Camus
received in the conservative press. He calls Camus a voice of humanity and a voice full
of pain. It is only after the first few pages of mocking praise that the real attack begins.
Jeanson’s argument is that the whole book is irretrievably tainted by the fact that
Camus has constructed a pseudo-philosophy based on pseudo-philosophy, neither his
analysis of the philosophies he proposes to examine nor his conclusions themselves are
sufficiently rigorous to create a real work of philosophy. Rather, Jeanson argues that
Camus’s emphasis on uncertainty has led him to advocate a sort of ethical quietism.55
Jeanson’s critique of Camus follows more or less the traditional critique of liberals - that
they countenance tyranny while pushing for gradual social change.
At first, Camus hesitated and wondered what to do in the face of Jeanson’s
withering attack. In the end, he felt he had to respond and he wrote a reply, sending it to
52 Lottman, p. 500.53 Todd, p. 772.54 De Beauvoir, cited in Lottman, p. 501.55 Aronson (2004), p. 141.
37
Les Temps Modernes in June. Sartre himself (and Jeanson as well, though this is often
overlooked) responded to Camus, and the three letters were published in August 1952.
Camus seems to have been taken aback by the extremity of Jeanson’s attack.
Camus points out, quite rightly, that Jeanson seems to have ignored the mere possibility
that revolutionary traditions other than Marxism have existed and that they continue to
have importance in some parts of the world.56 If Camus was willing to overlook
capitalism’s excesses, Jeanson was too myopic to understand Camus’s global criticism of
Marxism. Even more personally, Camus refuses to identify Jeanson by name - calling
him Sartre’s young collaborator and reproaching Sartre for not responding in person.
Camus is particularly bothered by Jeanson’s criticism that he was an intellectual
living above the actual plains of battle - not that it was particularly unusual that a Marxist
would attack an opponent in that manner. How could one accuse him of not
understanding poverty and misery, he asks? All of his thought, he argues, is directed
towards engagement and the solidarity (read autonomy) of the individual.57
If Jeanson’s articles were ad hominem, Camus returns the favour. Sartre felt
particularly inclined to respond - no doubt to the accusation that he hadn’t had the
decency to review Camus’s book himself in the first place.
Sartre’s reply begins with these famous words: “Our friendship has never been
easy, which I regret. Yet if it ends today, it will be because you have chosen to end it.”58
His open letter to Camus is brutal. He attacks Camus’s solemnity, which he calls an
excuse to avoid speaking of the real issues at heart.59 Sartre preaches at Camus for
56 Lottman, p. 504.57 Aronson (2004), p. 143.58 Sartre (1964a), p. 90.59 Aronson (2004), p. 147-151
38
another thirty pages - yet curiously never asks the moral questions that would seem to be
at the heart of the matter. He acknowledges the existence of the Gulags in the USSR, yet
never examines the question: can a revolution be accomplished without violence?
It’s our loss, because we don’t know at this point what Sartre’s response would
have been. And the question itself is central to this discussion and it’s one that Sartre’s
subsequent philosophy is directed towards. As we shall see, in the Critique, Sartre
constructs an Existential sociology which he hopes to use to examine the origins of
revolution and the excessive violence that seems to accompany every revolution. And in
the Critique itself, Sartre seems to decide that violence is often necessary, purgative and
cathartic. Yet as to the question of whether violence can ever create a just society, Sartre
remained perplexed until his death.
There is also another philosophical question that Camus poses that Sartre ignores:
can an absolute morality exist? Camus seems to think that the answer is yes, provided
that this morality is not founded on logic but on the autonomy of the individual. Camus
rejects method (i.e. logic, as we saw in The Rebel) in favour of fundamental rights. Sartre,
for his part, seems to hesitate. Whereas in his early writing he would definitely have said
no, now there seems to be some question of its possibility. In the Critique we shall see
why - Sartre will accept only action that encourages social autonomy.
*
The Argument Continues:
After The Rebel, Camus continued to write and develop his philosophy, even as his
literary output suffered. He penned a long article on capital punishment, published with a
similar article by Arthur Koestler as Reflections on Capital Punishment. The work is
39
important because it illustrates another example not only of Camus’s lifelong opposition
to capital punishment, but also of his opposition to any entity claiming the right to take
permanent and irreversible measures. The last lines of the book speak his fear of the
excess that so-often accompany the use of power: “There can be no peace in society nor
in the hearts of man so long as the state retains the power to put a man to death.”60
He would also begin to write for the daily L’Express in May of 1955, a job he
would keep for only a year. His voice would remain liberal, decent and against all
excesses. In October of that year he spoke out against the exclusion of Algerians from the
debate on their future. In November he spoke out against the terrorist violence that was
taking place against civilians by all sides in the war in Algeria. He would defend the
rights of Algerians, but could never accept violence against innocents.61
During the same period, Camus would continue to examine the role of the
proletariat in modem French society. He would argue for the integration of the proletariat
into the French state.
So long as the working class is not reincorporated into the State, it will
continue to constitute, against its will, a state within the State. The
proletariat will be forced... to take by force what belongs to it. If you want
France to remain standing, do not starve and humiliate its members!62
The goal would remain to integrate the proletariat. For these reasons, Camus would
welcome the victory of French workers during the strikes in the late 50s. Camus would
argue that the French had no idea about the workers’s conditions in the factory.63
60 Koestler (1957), p. 180.61 Quilliot, p. 296.62 Camus (1987), p. 109.63 Camus (1987), p. 126.
40
Camus’s central argument continued to be that the central problem of our time
was that of liberty.64 But of course Camus and Sartre had very different ideas about
liberty. For Camus, liberty was only a secondary value; it grew from the self-worth of
every individual. Liberty was deeply rooted in each individual’s more fundamental rights.
Liberty was an assertion of value without being a fundamental value itself. Ultimately,
this distinction is important because it can help explain the origin of the conflict between
Camus and Sartre. This thesis will discuss the differences that result from this in my
analysis of the Critique.
Camus never accepted revolution, he was always in favour of revolt - a limited
and moderate revolt. His conception of revolt was always limited by his humanism; to the
end he would prefer anarchy to an organized revolution.65 Progress was a word that
worried him; never would he accept it without hesitation.66
64 Camus (1987), p. 114.65 Camus (1965), p. 1921. Tarrow, p. 19.66 Camus, cited in Tarrow, p. 21.
41
Chapter 2
Merleau-Ponty
Sartre first met Maurice Merleau-Ponty when the two men were students at the ENS in
Paris.67 The two discovered Husserl’s phenomenology at practically the same time. For a
number of years they did not see each other and worked separately, until the Second
World War united them in Paris. In 1941, they founded the short-lived resistance cell
Socialism or Liberty. Late in the war, they would work together in another resistance cell.
After the war, they founded the journal Les Temps Modernes together. Sartre was
the managing editor; Merleau-Ponty was the political editor until 1950 and sat on the
editorial committee until 1952.68 At the time, Sartre was the public face of the journal;
Merleau-Ponty’s name was unknown outside the academy.
In order to understand the forces acting on Sartre as he wrote the Critique, one has
to understand the dialogue that was ongoing between the two philosophers - both before
and even to some extent after their split. Sartre himself called Merleau-Ponty his political
professor and credited him with the creation of his political consciousness. During the
period from the end of the Second World War, the two intellectuals broadly aligned
themselves with the desires of the CPF, even if they disagreed with its specific policies.
After the Korean War, Merleau-Ponty renounced Marxism and removed himself
from the public debates between the Communists and the other French political parties.
As Merleau-Ponty strove to find a more nuanced political philosophy, Sartre would
continue to align himself closer with the Communists and often sought to defend their
actions, particularly after the riots in Paris in 1952. To that end, Sartre published a series
of articles in Les Temps Modernes defending the actions of the Communists. The conflict
67 Rabil, p. 116.68 De Beauvoir and Sartre claim in Adieta that they were never particularly close to Merleau-Ponty. See De Beauvoir (1981), p. 345-6. This is undoubtedly an exaggeration. The story Bair tells in her biography of De Beauvoir is certainly closer. Merleau-Ponty was certainly close to De Beauvoir and her friends while they were students at the ENS. See Bair, p. 122 et passim.
43
that followed caused Merleau-Ponty to attack Sartre in The Adventures of the Dialectic.
That book challenged Sartre to defend his Marxism - Sartre would take up this challenge
in the Critique.
*
Humanism and Terror:
During his early period, Merleau-Ponty undertook to defend the Communists in one
principle place, Humanism and Terror, though he did address Marxism in other places.
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology never became as intimately tied up with political
questions as did Sartre’s. Humanism and Terror is notable for the fact that Merleau-Ponty
seems uncomfortable applying his formidable phenomenological talents to the subject at
hand.69 Marxism for Merleau-Ponty gave him a framework with which to criticize
modem society, yet it was never the result of the detailed phenomenological introspection
that informed Sartre’s conversion.
As we have partially seen, the debate between the intellectuals on the left and the
right intensified after the war. For the first time, intellectuals from Eastern Europe were
traveling to the West with stories of repression and violence. They gave voice to the
atrocities that some, but by no means all, of the intellectuals to visit USSR had described.
Arthur Koestler was one such émigré writer. Born in Hungary, he had travelled
extensively and would eventually make England his home. He was a journalist in Spain
during the Spanish Civil War and at one point was almost executed by the fascist forces.
During the 40s, he would publish several important books and articles in France,
including a translation of Darkness at Noon. Darkness at Noon is a roman à clef that tells
the story of an imprisoned revolutionary in Eastern Europe. The book is actually a thinly-
69 Spurling, p. 92.
44
veiled account of the Moscow Trials and the arrest of Bukharin that draws sections of its
narrative from Koestler’s critique of Marxism and from his imprisonment in Spain.
Even though he first attained renown as a writer, he also contributed pieces to a
series of magazines outlining his opposition to Marxism. The book eventually published
as The Yogi and the Commissioner contains a cross-section of these articles, written
between 1941 and 1945. In the book, Koestler attacks the European Left, particularly the
Marxist Left in a style that reminds the reader of Camus. In Humanism and Terror,
Merleau-Ponty responds to Koestler.
It is never an easy task to read Koestler’s non-fiction. He oscillates freely between
religion, philosophy and politics; he never makes it entirely clear to the reader which it is
he chooses. Beyond a doubt Koestler is well-read, but more often than not his erudition is
a curse. It allows him to avoid the sort of detailed argumentation one would expect and
demand in a work of philosophy. Since Merleau-Ponty uses his articles as a base for his
book, I am going to try to give the reader a sense of Koestler’s argument.
One of Koestler’s goals is to offer the reader an analysis of day-to-day life in the
USSR, a goal which, in my opinion, he doesn’t reach. Another goal is to criticize the
philosophical attitude of the intellectual and artistic classes in Europe since the eighteenth
century, arguing that they have failed in their obligation to transform society for the
better.
In an article entitled The Intelligentsia, Koestler elaborates on this second
critique. He argues that intellectuals have completely failed in their obligation to
ameliorate society. This failure is, for Koestler, rooted in the quasi-scientism of the
Socialist theories that were dominant in Europe. His argument is essentially that the
45
efforts to develop a scientific formulation of Socialism had given the theories an
undeserved air of authority. He argues that if one were to see beyond these theories, one
would find that Marxism is insufficiently precise to create the kind of social change for
which it argues.70 Not only have revolutionaries fallen victim to a false sense of certainty,
this false certainty has led them to extremism and intolerance.
Ultimately, what is important for Koestler is that these theories admit no possible
criticism or refutation - neither theoretically nor practically. Like Camus, he refuses to
accept absolutism and the absence of discussion. Communism has become, Koestler
argues, ossified; dissent has been suppressed.
In another article, Koestler addresses the first argument. Entitled Soviet Myth and
Reality, he lists off what he considers to be the four principal myths of the USSR: the
myth that the government enjoys broad support of the proletariat, the camouflaging or
open altering of facts, the use of propaganda, and the myth that there is no distinction
between Socialist theory and the pragmatic politics adopted by the Soviet government.
To this he adds two more complaints: that the Soviet government has adopted an “ends
justifies the means” approach to governing and that the Soviet government claims that all
crimes can be forgiven in the name of Socialism. 71
The conclusion he draws from these two articles is that, taken together, the Soviet
Union is not only a very different place from what one was lead to believe by Soviet
propaganda, but that it is necessarily so. The false arguments of the Socialists have given
rise to this Communist dystopia. By placing the two articles together, the reader can see
70 Koestler, p. 73 et passim.71 Koestler, p. 122-123.
46
that Koestler is trying to argue that intellectuals in Europe, while being too willing to
accept the power of theory, have blindly accepted the Socialist monster that is the USSR.
It is to these principal critiques that Merleau-Ponty replies in Humanism and
Terror. Merleau-Ponty’s argument is that the Soviet project can be defended even if one
is uncomfortable with the knowledge of the work camps and the repression ongoing in
Stalinist Russia. He tries to show that arriving at an absolute judgement as to the morality
of the revolution before the revolutionary project is complete is impossible.
First, Merleau-Ponty tries to level somewhat the terrain between the capitalists,
who claim to be on the moral high ground, and those who would be, at least partially,
apologists for the USSR.
We often discuss Communism by opposing lies or deception to truth,
violence to respect to the law, propaganda to the actual freedom of
conscience in Communist countries, political realism to the actual respect
of liberal values. The Communists respond that, under cover of liberal
values, deception, violence, propaganda, unprincipled realism exist in
democracies, in foreign policy, in colonial policy or even in social policy.
Respect for law has served to justify policy repression following strikes in
America. It serves even today to justify the military occupation of
Indochina or Palestine or the development of the American in the Middle
East. Britain’s civilization depends on the exploitation of her colonies.
[Western] morality not only tolerates but requires this violence.72
Communism does not acknowledge the existence of liberal values, argues Merleau-
Ponty, nor should it. Moreover, the Communists argue that Marxism has shown that
values are little more than the superstructure of a given capitalist system. Merleau-Ponty
sees no particular reason to believe that so-called liberal regimes are in principle any less
72 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. ix.
47
prone to abuse. Rather, the actual people oppressed or the structure of oppression may
change from system to system, but as he has argued, there are several instances of actual
atrocities within the capitalist system of countries.
Marx demanded that all men examine the morality to which they subscribe and to
find the origin of these values.
In order to understand and to judge society, one must arrive at its depth,
at the human relationships that form it and on whom depend its system
of justice. But one must also examine the labour system, the way in
which its workers love, live and die.73
Beginning thus, Merleau-Ponty starts his attack on the author of Darkness at
Noon. His argument is that, if we disregard certain traditional liberal principles, the
Moscow trials do in fact follow a certain type of morality, and that Bukharin’s conduct
should in fact be condemned, not because he committed the exact acts of which he was
accused, but that during a time of crisis, “disagreements...compromise, even betray, the
advances made in October 1917.”74 When Bukharin spoke out against forced
collectivization, not only did he make public his disagreement with the party, but he
endangered the whole revolution.
As Merleau-Ponty points out, there are similarities between the years immediately
following the revolution in the Soviet Union and the occupation of France by the Nazis.
When one is either so unlucky, or perhaps so lucky, to live in a time when
the traditions of a nation are broken apart and by his own free will, one
7j Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. x.74 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. xii
48
must himself reconstruct human relationships, one man’s liberty can
threaten to kill that of others and violence may reappear.75
The argument, then, is that from time to time, violence, however brutal, is
necessary. As Marx rejected atomistic ethics, there is no particular reason to be
concerned that Bukharin’s trial did not conform to traditional Western jurisprudence.
Marxism argues, according to Merleau-Ponty, that in a Communist system, free from the
confines of capitalism that give rise to our atomistic objections to Bukharin’s trial,
violence would gradually abate.76
Moreover, to continue Merleau-Ponty’s line of argument, during that time period
in the Soviet Union, the most pressing issue for the Communists would have been the
overthrow of the czarist social hierarchy. Until that point, the proletariat had played only
a minor political role. The policies of the Communist Party, if they were designed to
eliminate this hierarchy and to enfranchise the workers, were justified.
Intellectuals like Merleau-Ponty are placed in an impossible situation, he argues at
the end of the introduction:
We find ourselves in an inextricable bind. The Marxist critique of
capitalism is still viable. Moreover, it is clear that all the attacks on the
Soviet Union today resemble in their brutality, contempt, vertigo and
anguish the emotions that found their expression in fascism. But on the
other hand, the revolution has become immobilized: it has created the
conditions of dictatorship while renouncing the power of the
proletariat....One cannot be anti-Communist; one cannot be a
Communist.77
75 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. xiii.76 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. xiv.77 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. xvii.
49
The book Humanism and Terror itself is composed of a series of articles that Merleau-
Ponty had written principally for Les Temps Modernes. The first, fourth and fifth of these
are principally refutations of Koestler. The second discusses Bukharin’s trial and the third
Trotsky’s critique of the USSR.
In the second article, Merleau-Ponty examines the Moscow Trials of 1937. He has
no difficulty accepting the criticism, he says, that the trials did not follow the traditional
rules of Western jurisprudence. Yet he is still willing to defend the trials, at least
tentatively, against Koestler’s criticism.
Political crimes constitute a separate category of offence Merleau-Ponty argues.
The crimes themselves have consequences that last long into the future; it is often hard to
tell how they will be viewed by those who will be charged with leading the country.
The trial remains deeply subjective and never approaches what we would
call ‘true’ justice, objective and inter-temporal, because the crimes
themselves will affect facts far into the future, which are not yet
established and which do not yet have a clear character. Who knows how
politicians in the future will view these actions?78
When Merleau-Ponty speaks of justice in this passage, he is speaking principally of
revolutionary justice. He maintains that the truth of all revolutions can be judged only by
future generations. As such, what is important is not the intentions of the accused, but the
long term consequences of their actions. “The Moscow Trials cannot be understood
except by revolutionary, which is to say, by men convinced that they see beyond the
present and for whom traitors are those who hesitate.”79 To look for atemporal truth in
78 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. 29-30.79 Merleau-Ponty ( 1947), p. 31.
50
Russia, truth that could be understood outside the context of the Soviet Revolution would
be to radically misunderstand the project undertaken by the Bolsheviks.
Rather, as he said in the introduction to Humanism and Terror, Merleau-Ponty
argues that opposition to Stalin amounted to opposition to collectivisation, which itself
amounted to betraying the revolution in a time of great weakness. In a passage that
probably helped to inspire Camus, he cites Saint-Just: “A patriot is someone who
supports all of the Republic’s actions; whoever fights her detail by detail is a traitor.”80
There is an analogy to be made, he argues, between the Bolshevik Revolution and
the trials of Premier Laval and Marshall Petain after the war. The French condemned
these two men, Merleau-Ponty says with the memory still fresh, because of their wartime
actions even if they undertook them to aid the state.
In confronting the collaborator before he was shown to be wrong...this
process shows the subjective battle that is waged before us under the name
History.81
This argument continues a line of reasoning used by Marxist thinkers in France to defend
the Russian Revolution, but also to attack the Right’s monopoly on justice. Darkness at
Noon had become a very important tool for the anti-Communists and Merleau-Ponty tries
to attack capitalist morals and their suppositions. Morality, particularly political morality,
does not exist in vacuo.
In the later chapters in the book, the importance of Marxist phenomenology is
elaborated for the first time. The roots of Marxism do not lie solely in the economy, even
though economics are of first-order importance. Moreover, what is important in Marx’s
80 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. 36.81 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. 44.
51
study of the economy is that he used economics to explore the fundamental nature of
man, something that Sartre will do through the modified lens of praxis}2
“What Marxism proposes,” he writes, “is to resolve radically the problem of
human coexistence, to rise beyond radical subjectivity, radical objectivity and the
pseudo-solution of liberalism.”82 83 Nonetheless, the question of violence is important,
Merleau-Ponty writes as he returns to the theme of the book. If the world were composed
of autonomous individuals, the question of violence would never arise: it would never be
acceptable. But individual autonomy does not exist; our actions affect the other in deep,
important ways.
This is a problem with which the revolutionary is faced. We do not have the
choice between purity and violence, but between violence and violence. Capitalism is
itself a form of violence: it is violence against the proletariat; it is violence against its
workers. The Right cannot in good faith condemn the abuses of Stalinism. The distinction
between ends and means is foreign to Marxism. The society of the future will judge us,
whether we act or sit still.
In the fifth chapter, Merleau-Ponty attacks Koestler directly, asking: can the
revolution survive the terror that has been unleashed? Trotsky, after all, argued shortly
before he was murdered that to try to avoid terror was not necessarily to be an ally of the
Capitalists.
Merleau-Ponty wants to continue the exposition of a point that is central to
Humanism and Terror through an attack on Koestler. Koestler has misunderstood, in his
original article, that every argument is situated relative to History. Writing almost twenty
821 discuss praxis in much greater detail below. For the moment, the reader should consider praxis to be the equivalent of Sartre’s idea of free action, undertaken to modify the material world.83 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. 111.
52
pages on every paragraph he wants to analyse, Merleau-Ponty points out that Koestler
either has to accept this or defend many unsavoury positions. After all, Koestler
advocates British-style Socialism yet does not condemn the British Left’s support for
colonialism. Were we to accept Koestler’s radical pacifism, we would also have to
condemn the actions of the United States and many other Western countries. To that end,
Merleau-Ponty proposes a political program. He believes that:
Any critique of Communism or of the USSR that focuses on isolated facts,
taken out of context, any apology that, for the Western democracies,
ignores their violent intervention throughout the world, or, any philosophy
that plays with words rather than tries to understand rival societies in their
totality can only serve to mask the problem.84
This series of articles represents Merleau-Ponty’s last public defence of Marxism, and
they show that he was beginning to be concerned with serious epistemological questions
in political philosophy. With the outbreak of war in Korea, Merleau-Ponty began to
separate himself from Communism, blaming the Marxists for the outbreak of war.85 Yet
he could not bring himself to condemn the Communist block for the war. Les Temps
Modernes took no public position during the Korean War.
*
The break between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty was fuelled by three specific events.
Firstly, the Korean War. Secondly, Sartre’s support for the CPF during the Duelos affair
(discussed below). The final and decisive fact seems almost childish in comparison: it
began with a disagreement over an article written by a Marxist friend of Sartre’s.
84 Merleau-Ponty (1947), p. 196-203.85 Sartre cited in Stewart (1998b), p. 328.
53
Merleau-Ponty, in editing the article, thought that it was unjust and added a few
words of introduction to the article, meant to soften it. Sartre, without consulting
Merleau-Ponty, changed Merleau-Ponty’s introduction without telling him. Merleau-
Ponty threatened to resign and following a series of letters between the two (Sartre was at
the time vacationing in Rome) and a telephone call, Merleau-Ponty resigned.
While the letters may deal predominately with personal matters, they do contain a
discussion of several important philosophical points that had strained the friendship
between the two intellectuals.
In the first letter, Sartre reproaches Merleau-Ponty for having become disengaged
from politics.86 Sartre also takes exception to the contents of a seminar Merleau-Ponty
gave at the College de France, wherein he said that philosophy should not take political
positions on specific issues. Sartre asks Merleau-Ponty how he or anyone else could be
expected to remain neutral in a time of such great turmoil. How could he ignore the war
in Indochina, the treatment of Henri Martin by the French army or the execution of the
Rosenbergs?
In his reply, Merleau-Ponty argues that the journal should not be expected to take
positions on specific political issues. Rather, he argues that philosophy should be used to
provide a theoretical framework; to take several specific positions would be to risk being
discredited.87
Sartre’s response in his second letter was substantially friendlier and he proposed
a meeting when he returned to Paris; however the issues were not resolved and Merleau-
Ponty resigned.
86 All of the letters between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are reproduced in Stewart (1998a)." Stewart (1998b), p. 338-9.
54
At the heart of these petty feuds lay fundamental philosophical issues. From 1952
onward, Sartre would publicly declare his support for the Communists (following the line
taken up by Merleau-Ponty in Humanism and Terror). Merleau-Ponty had already begun
to search for a third way.
*
The Communists and the Peace:
Paris, 1951. Pinay’s government began an austerity program designed to bring an end to
the inflation plaguing the French economy.88 At the same time, the CPF began to feel that
it’s dominance of leftist politics in postwar France was coming to an end. There had been
a significant drop in the number of members of the Party. The ranks of the CPF, counting
900,000 members in 1947, had been reduced to 500,000 by 1952. The party’s director,
Maurice Thorez had been badly injured in an attack and had been sent to the Soviet
Union for treatment.
In his absence, Jacques Duelos had assumed the role of party leader. In order to
demonstrate that the CPF was still relevant to French society, the party’s directors
decided to stage a massive illegal demonstration in Paris to protest against the new
austerity measures.
In May of 1952, following massive protests, the police and various protestors
clashed in the streets of Paris; scores of Communists, including Duelos himself, were
arrested. The gendarmes claimed to have found not only messenger pigeons in his car,
but also weapons. Never mind that the messenger pigeons were already dead (destined
for the pot) and that the guns belonged to Duelos’s body guards.89 To make matters worse
88 Elgey, p. 64 et passim.89 Werth, p. 420.
55
for the Communists, the police, perhaps overzealously, announced that other conspirators
had been found.
In response to this, the Communists called for a general strike, set for June 4th. In
spite of the events that preceded it, the strike itself was mostly unsuccessful. The
conservative press practically cried out with joy, arguing that not only was the CPF
vanquished but that workers were better off having abandoned the Communists.
Against this backdrop, Sartre published a series of articles, The Communists and
the Peace, in Les Temps Modernes, in order to explain the events and to show his support
for the CPF. 90 Even if Merleau-Ponty had abandoned Marxism, Sartre would continue to
defend it.
In the first section of the article, Sartre discusses the events that took place during
the first strike on the 28th of May in 1952. The newspapers, particularly the rightist
papers, wrote that the workers were tired of being Moscow’s playthings. The Right had
argued that Moscow wanted war, was trying to provoke crises in the West, and that the
workers had finally tired of that.
Sartre argues against this interpretation. The workers had not become inured to
political struggle; rather they had come to reject the division between economics and
politics. The workers had not given up on politics or on the CPF; they were overcome by
a sense of futility created by the crisis in the French economy.91
In his analysis of the second strike, Sartre continues this thesis. The failure of the
strike can only be seen as an expression of the general malaise of the workers - to them
90 The reader today often finds it difficult to understand this work. What is important to remember is that it was written for a certain historical context. The Cold War had begun and the red scare was beginning to change international politics.91 Sartre (1964b), p. 120-121
56
there was almost no reason left to fight. This could hardly be blamed on the CPF, but on
the fact that the coalition between the government and business had strangled all other
opportunities for political expression. This is an important observation for Sartre’s
subsequent work: the workers are not always free to organize or even to think of a better
world. “[Active] unity amongst the workers is not automatically created by their common
interests or by their conditions of labour.”92 The bourgeoisie had succeeded in isolating
the proletariat from French society and each worker from his brethren. The only option
for change lay in a more active policy adopted by the party.
A class manifests itself through action and common intention; it can never
be separated by the concrete desire for change that animates its members.
The proletariat makes itself through its daily actions. It is nothing but an
act. Were it to cease to act, it would disintegrate.93
Sartre’s conclusion is therefore that: “[Active] unity can not be produced
spontaneously.”94
Sartre argues therefore that the workers’s apathy can be explained by several
things: the economic situation in France, their repression by the bourgeoisie and the fact
that the proletariat is a complex entity with many different values and interests.
Exasperating all of this, Sartre argues, was the giant gulf that had emerged between the
militants for the CPF and the workers themselves. The idea was that often workers need
to be united by the party; often workers, when left alone by the party’s cadres, feel
isolated.
*
92 Sartre (1964b), p. 19793 Sartre (1964b), p. 20794 Sartre (1964b), p. 211
57
Claude Lefort, a former student of Merleau-Ponty, responded to Sartre in Les Temps
Modernes in April 1953. In Sartre and Marxism, he attacks Sartre’s analysis of the role
of the CPF and Sartre’s understanding of Marxism. With sarcasm, Lefort calls Sartre’s
Marxism “Marxism claiming to be orthodox.”95 Without a doubt, what Lefort says about
Sartre is an exaggeration, yet there can be no question that there are important difference
between Sartre’s position and Merleau-Ponty’s, as we shall see, even if Sartre was
unlikely to call his Marxism orthodox. During this time Merleau-Ponty was beginning to
reconsider his Marxism and to move closer to structuralism and to a social philosophy
less compatible with Existentialism.
In his article, Lefort attacks what he calls Sartre’s voluntarism and Sartre’s
conception of the role of the party; he instead emphasizes the inevitability of Marxist
revolution and the necessity of revolution.
Now these are not merely two different sides of the same coin. Lefort argues,
incorrectly I think, that Sartre believes the proletariat to be nothing without the party.
Sartre believes, Lefort claims, that the CPF’s essential role is to create the sense of
cohesion that would otherwise be completely lacking amongst the workers. I insert the
word completely here because it is on this point the argument will turn.
Lefort’s attack is focussed on two exact points. First, he wants to know how
Sartre would define the proletariat if it is not by the concrete relations of individuals
united by production. Or, is unity by action, he asks, sufficient to constitute a class?
Second, Lefort attacks the separation between the Party and the proletariat. How can the
party have an important and distinct role from the proletariat if it is the proletariat that
makes history?
95 Lefort (1953), p. 1541.
58
Sartre, in his response, argues that he never believed that the Party ought to be
distinct from the worker or that the party alone bears the responsibility of organising the
proletariat. Yet he argues that the party has an important role to play.96 Part of the
problem seems to be that Sartre uses the word action, and eventually praxis, to represent
two separate things. One is the rote labour of the proletariat, which leaves individuals
isolated, while nonetheless creating a class in Lefort’s sense; the other is active labour,
whereby workers work with other workers to create a movement for social change.
Sartre dedicates the rest of the article to an attack on Lefort, in a way that makes
sense after understanding this distinction. Lefort has denied, Sartre claims, the
importance of action and believes that revolution and (by implication) social change to be
inevitable. In fact, the idea of inevitablism would become important in the debate
between the Existentialists and the structuralists. Sartre offers the rather extravagant
claim: “Your proletariat has the right to move ever forward. It doesn’t have the right to
make mistakes, to be ignorant or to fail.”97
*
The Adventure of the Dialectic:
It is not particularly easy to classify Merleau-Ponty’s political vision at the end of his life.
Beyond a doubt we can say that the Korean War caused a profound shift in Merleau-
Ponty’s thinking and that he felt he could no longer support the USSR. In The Adventures
of the Dialectic, Merleau-Ponty re-examines his Marxism and tries to define his
disagreements with Sartre. The work highlights publicly for the first time Merleau-
Ponty’s dissatisfaction with Marxism. * 99
96 Sartre (1965), p. 7.99 Sartre (1965), p. 35.
59
In the preface to the work, he outlines his objection to all systematic philosophy.
Merleau-Ponty prefers to examine the works of the philosophers he dubs ‘Western
Marxists.’ Western Marxism teaches that philosophy is the product of our experience.
Merleau-Ponty wants to go one step further; he argues that the very idea that Marxist
philosophy can be anything but the result of our experiences itself must be abandoned.98 99
After all, if philosophy is based on experience, Marxist philosophy must be as well.
Based on this observation, he rejects any pretence to absolutism that philosophy might
enjoy, particularly the absolutism one might find in the writings of the first
phenomenologists. “This idea that we can purify History, make a regime that does not
hold on to the past, without chance and without risk, is a reflection of our current
anguish.”99 Our desire to find a logic purged of its history amounts to little more than one
of our modem obsessions.
Furthermore, contrary to whatever one might say, Merleau-Ponty believes that
political philosophy can never understand History fully or completely: “Political
philosophy sees only the partial objects [of history].”100 As a result, the application of
philosophy to morality can never amount to morality in its pure form, even were we able
to understand all of History.
It’s this difference between understanding and engagement that Merleau-Ponty
wants to examine. The first chapter of the work, titled The Crisis in Understanding,
examines the discontentment with reason and exactitude that began at the end of 19th
century. Using the example of Max Weber, Merleau-Ponty argues that Weber became a
liberal as a result of his inability to embrace the pretensions to certainty found in more
98 Merleau-Ponty ( 1977), p. 9.99 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 12.100 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 10.
60
extreme philosophical positions. Weber’s liberalism, adopted after a period of historical
study, was a philosophy that knew its limits, that was rooted not only in knowledge but in
uncertainty. Weber’s many students held on to this position; throughout their studies of
history they could find no evidence to support the historicist hypothesis.
After Weber, several Marxists working in the Western tradition tried to find a way
to surpass relativism. Weber had shown that we introduce into our study of History ideas
and models from the present.101 In effect, Weber had shown that the study of history is
impregnated with our emotion and our own culture. The only way to overcome relativism
would be to show that our own ideas create a subjective truth that we need to investigate.
Lukács’s study of philosophy, as a student of Weber, introduced to Marxism the
study of history as a living breathing entity, where even our system of classification can
be subsumed to history; it was in this framework Lukács thought Marxism should situate
itself. We cannot understand History merely as a condition, but also a set of ideas, to be
overcome. When we look at the past, we see the present and thus the future.
Yet History cannot be understood as being static; the essence of history risks
becoming changed at each moment of examination.102 His historian must base the study
of History in a study of society. Contrary to his interpretation of Sartre’s philosophy,
Merleau-Ponty argues that History must be understood in its relationship to the
entremonde, the space between people made up of society, history, language, etc.103 The
dialectic is a subjective and circular enterprise, composed of contradictory facts and
ideas. Like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty cannot accept that History can be assimilated to
materialism.
101 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 48.102 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 61.103 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 78.
The last chapter of the book is the most important for our discussion. Titled Sartre
and Ultra-bolshevism, Merleau-Ponty attacks Sartre in a somewhat surprising way. We
have seen that both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre reject materialism and have embraced
historical, rather than dialectical, materialism. Yet Sartre’s philosophy does not take into
account what Merleau-Ponty has called the entremonde, the interpersonal space created
by culture, history, technology, etc. The work Merleau-Ponty will draw on to criticise is
The Communists and the Peace, not a work overtly theoretical but the only one available
to him at the time.
The last chapter summarizes what Merleau-Ponty has written so far. He discusses
how orthodox Marxism has become indifferentiable from Stalinism and again criticizes
the subversion of Marxism by Soviet scientism. In so far as Stalinism has abandoned the
individual, it has no difficulty in exercising violence.
Marxist philosophy does not believe it can explain the social except by
situating the dialectic entirely in the object....Thus the dialectic responds
to adversity by exercising violence in the name of some unknown truth or
merely because it is opportunistic to do so.104
Taking up the theme of violence that he previously discussed in Humanism and Terror,
this time Merleau-Ponty comes down on the other side. Whereas in the 1940s he could
defend revolutionary violence in Russia, by 1952 his position had changed.
In the first section of this chapter, Merleau-Ponty attacks the fatalistic acceptance
of the dialectic in Communist countries. The dialectic remains something that will
happen in the future, it never concretely affects the present. Thus, he praises the idea
behind Sartre’s book, arguing that for the first time:
104 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 142.
62
The cover is pulled back, revealing the dialectic. The actions of the
Communists are considered as they are, as they could be by someone who
has forgotten history.105
Yet if he praises the effort, he condemns the result. Sartre’s philosophy, he says,
sees History as the result of the sovereign actions of individuals. The world of things and
ideas remains opaque (this is an observation I made earlier about Sartre’s early
phenomenology). For Sartre, the idea of the truth of History is a fraud and the role of the
Party ceremonial.106
In the first chapters of the book, Merleau-Ponty had traced the efforts of
philosophers in the first half of the twentieth-century to take into account the all-
pervading role of History. In Weber and Lukács, we find an effort to decompose ideas to
understand the influence of social structures on them; each idea is seen to represent social
forces. In some cases, ideas strengthen social movements, in others, social movements
give rise to ideas. In either case, ideas are not independent of society but exist in a
complex interplay with it.
Lenin and Stalin rejected this theory; Lukács’ version of Marxism was never
accepted. They adopted scientific materialism, situating the dialectic entirely in the
object.
Merleau-Ponty argues that Sartre’s radical dualism, which I discussed in the first
section, caused him to make a similar mistake. The dialectic, being situated in the
subjective, cannot take into account the importance of history. None of the complex
interplay that one would suspect between history, culture and theory can take place.
105 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 144.106 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 146.
63
Sartre has surpassed Bolshevism by becoming an ultra-Bolshevik: he has let the
pendulum swing too far in the other direction. In fact, if Sartre were correct in situating
the dialectic so firmly in the individual, the dialectic would cease to have any meaning.
“At its limit, if Sartre were right, Sartre would be wrong,” Merleau-Ponty claims.107
At heart, Merleau-Ponty maintains three things. First, Sartre’s understanding of
Marxism rejects historicism and the dialectic. Second, his philosophy is under-
determined. Third, it lacks the necessary criteria to make it rigorous.
Merleau-Ponty elaborates on his criticism of Sartre. First, Sartre separates himself
from Marx in that he believes all facts to be ambiguous.108 Sartre never opposes Marxist
theory to actual fact and as such it would be impossible to verify the theory. “Sartre
describes a Communism that is based purely in action, that does not believe in truth, nor
[the doctrine of] revolution, nor in Flistory.”109
This leads into Merleau-Ponty’s second criticism. He questions the lack of
mediation amongst individuals, arguing that Sartre’s radical subjectivism prevents not
only an understanding of history and society, but also the determinism that separates the
Marxist doctrine of revolution from that of all others. Moreover, Sartre’s use of
terminology differs profoundly from Marx’s and compounds this problem. According to
Merleau-Ponty, Sartre infuses into praxis his own ideas. “Praxis, according to him, is
vertiginous liberty, the power to do whatever it is we want.”110
Third, Merleau-Ponty returns to the question of mediation between individuals.
Sartre does not believe, he argues, in the importance of signs or social system, the
107 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 147-8.108 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 168.109 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 193.110 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 194. The italics are mine, added for consistency.
64
implicit argument being that Sartre’s radical liberty prevents an important part of
understanding the social.
The social never shows itself clearly, sometimes it is a trap, sometimes a
mark, sometimes a threat, sometimes a promise, sometimes it haunts us as
remorse, sometimes it is a project.111
Finally, Merleau-Ponty reproaches Sartre for adopting the same position as that of his
adversaries. To read Sartre today is to ignore what Sartre said ten years prior; what
happened to the Sartre who questioned the viability of revolution?112 To a large extent,
these four criticisms continue those originally put forward by Lefort in Sartre and
Marxism.
In the epilogue, Merleau-Ponty challenges Sartre to show that his philosophy is
not hopelessly utopian, that Sartre has not given up on the true sense of the dialectic.113
Merleau-Ponty himself has not given up on the dialectic. He still sees it as a
necessary tool to understanding man, who is anchored inseparably in the world. In a
lecture delivered at the Collège de France, titled Material for a Theory of History, he
would argue again that only through understanding our values in the light of history, and
through rejecting the binary approach to philosophy that pits the external and the internal,
would we overcome our theoretical problems.114 For Merleau-Ponty, History is at the
centre of our life, it’s the space where we work and live, and the space where the debate
between theory and practice is played out.
In one of his last works before his sudden death, Merleau-Ponty wrote:
111 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 227.112 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 241.113 Merleau-Ponty (1977), p. 297.114 Merleau-Ponty (1968), p. 43.
65
We can no longer have a classical Marxist theory of the proletariat,
because it does not mesh with reality. Our only recourse is to study the
present as carefully as possible, without prejudice, and recognize that
chaos and nonsense are part of it all.115
*
In a reply published in Les Temps Modernes in July of 1955, entitled Merleau-Ponty and
Psuedo-Sartreanism, Simone De Beauvoir examined Merleau-Ponty’s critique of Sartre.
She attacks Merleau-Ponty’s new work, but in writing the reply, she showed that Sartre
would take Merleau-Ponty’s critique seriously. De Beauvoir accuses Merleau-Ponty of
having oversimplified Sartre’s philosophy. She argues that Sartre’s philosophy is
sufficiently malleable to explain social structures and their effect on the individual by
beginning with the individual.
The dialogue had begun with Humanism and Terror and with Sartre’s
introduction to politics by Merleau-Ponty. In the Critique, Sartre takes up the challenge
to construct this new sociology.
115 Merleau-Ponty (1966), p. 299.
66
Chapter 3
The Revolution in Hungary and Sartre’s Reaction
67
The events that gave rise to the Hungarian Revolution are relatively simple. The
proximate cause was a protest by journalists against their workings conditions,
principally the restrictions imposed by the government censors. Yet these protests arrived
at key moment in Hungary’s history. The country was in the midst of a severe recession,
experiencing the sort of conditions that could easily give rise to revolt. The ideas offered
by the journalists took off, catching fire amongst students and dissatisfied workers,
particularly those in the industrials towns outside of Budapest.
Ultimately, the revolution was a consequence not only of this but also of the
gradual thawing that took place following the death of Stalin. As often happens, the
revolution itself was made possible by the gradual loosening of previous repressive
conditions. At the same time as the economic crisis, groups of young Communist
intellectuals in Hungary, such as the group known as the Petofi Circle, began to start
discussing ways of reinvigorating the Marxist project in Hungary.
After the revolution started, the protestors began to concentrate on alleviating the
heavy restrictions imposed by the government’s bureaucratic and heavy-handed
management of society and the economy. They focused not only on resolving these broad
complaints, but on receiving a satisfactory response to several specific complaints,
particularly the collectivization of farms. This particular demand had a long history in
Hungarian politics; upon Stalin’s death collectivization in Hungary was partially reversed
only to be tightened several years later.
The protestors were emboldened by events in Poland and had seen that popular
action could even force the resignation of the leadership in Communist countries. Yet
though they demanded resignations, the revolution never took on openly anti-Communist
68
overtones. Rather, the editorials that began to appear in the reform-minded media,
particularly in student journals, called for the re-energization and re-vitalization of
Hungarian Marxism.116 They claimed to be opposed to an overthrow of the Communist
system, preferring reforms that they argued would bring Socialism back to its original
intent. 117 This feature was of critical importance to leftist intellectuals in the Western
World. It allowed them to argue that the people of Eastern Europe were not opposed to
Communism per se, but to the abuses of Stalinism.
The workers who joined the strike asked that industrial work quotas be reduced,
that some modest private industry be permitted in certain sectors and that unions be given
more control over their factories.118 Particularly, the unions wanted greater control over
hiring and firing, over promotion and salaries, over contracts, and the workers wanted the
right to elect workers’s councils separate from the party apparatus.119 These demands
were finally integrated into the student program for reform, promulgated by MEFESZ,
the League of Hungarian University and College Students.
Moscow’s response early in the conflict was to appease the protestors. The USSR
forced the President of Hungary to resign and installed Imre Nagy, a favourite of the
protestors, as new leader. Nagy has been a member of the Communist Party of Hungary
(CPH) since its founding, and had worked as a minister in the government and as chief of
the CPH.
Nagy responded immediately to the protestors’s demands, immediately conceding
most of their demands: he granted pay reforms, a diminution of quotas, an augmentation
116 As an example, see the editorial from SzabadNep cited in Zinner, p. 233.117 The exception to this was that in the countryside, far from the press, the revolution was sometimes anti- Communist. Zinner, p. 261.118 Lomax, p. 37.119 With regard to this last demand, see Zinner, p. 262.
69
of familial allowances and changed the pension structure. In the countryside, he
encouraged the de-collectivization of farms, allowing farms to withdraw from the all-
powerful collectives. Curiously, this last position was a return to the policy that Nagy had
implemented when he was a minister in 1953. Finally, Nagy announced an end to the
hated system of compulsory deliveries that had tormented farmers.
Nagy was an astute student and knew that there were risks in not acting. He had
seen the recent riots in Czechoslovakia and in East Germany, as well as in several of the
industrial towns in Hungary and was afraid of losing the situation if he didn’t act.
Nevertheless, the protests didn’t stop. To make matters worse, the middle class
joined in. The Provisional Committee of the Hungarian Socialist Workers Party published
a list of further declarations, ratcheting up the rhetoric. It argued that the Rakosi-Gero
clique, the previous leadership, had fundamentally deviated from the original Socialist
project. Even Nagy was forced to admit that during the building of the Socialist state, the
founders had forgotten that the society they were building was destined to be lived in by
real people. The committee demanded that the leadership crack down on the arbitrary
diktats of the bureaucracy and that it encourage the advent of Socialist democracy in
Hungary.120 Nagy saw that the situation had deteriorated so dramatically that the workers
were too afraid to negotiate even with the vestiges of the old system.121
The end result was that the Soviets invaded, crushed the revolutionaries and
executed the leaders, bundling in with them Nagy himself. Yet to this day no one really
knows why the Soviet Union first tried to appease the revolutionaries and why so quickly
it changed its course.
120 Kiraly, p. 13-14.121 Cited in Kiraly, p. 13-14.
70
But what actually were the demands of the workers? They were first and foremost
in favour of local control of places of work, be they farms or factories. They wanted to
organize a political system that rendered impossible the exercise of absolute power and
one where power was derived ultimately from the base of society.122 Economically and
socially, they wanted to end the abuses of Stalinism and wanted the Hungarian Socialist
experiment to be free to run its course.123
Yet if leadership issues roiled the situation inside Hungary, the Soviet Union’s
presence menaced the workers from the outside, causing the Revolution to radicalize. To
give but one example, it seems unlikely that Hungary would ever have withdrawn from
the Eastern Block if not for the actions of the Soviet Army in violating her borders.
For the purposes of this thesis, it is important to recognize two things. First, the
Soviet Union was still suffering from the vestiges of Stalinism. Stalinist institutions had
never been entirely overcome and the party still did not welcome debate. Second and
perhaps more importantly, the Soviet Union felt encircled by the countries of Western
Europe. The actions of the Hungarian workers aroused the suspicions of the Soviet
leadership, who could still remember the foreign intervention in the civil war. In his
reaction, Sartre would emphasize these two points.
*
Sartre’s Reaction:
The central feature of the Revolution in Hungary was the complete and total absence of
dialogue between the various groups: between the workers and the party, and between the
Hungarians and the Soviets. We know, furthermore, that Sartre knew most of the details
122 Kemény, p. 9.:22 Kiraly, p. 34.
71
of the Revolution by the time he composed his response to the Soviet Invasion, an article
entitled The Phantom of Stalin.124 An article discussing in great detail the Soviet action
was published in the same edition of Les Temps Modernes by one of Sartre’s young
collaborators.
Sartre knew of course that this was not the first time the Soviets had taken it upon
themselves to force leadership changes; he could remember Slansky in Czechoslovakia
and Rajk and Rostov earlier in Hungary. Yet Hungary was of central importance to
Sartre. It came at a time when he was deeply involved in his attempt to reformulate
Marxism, a period of intensive study that began in the late forties. Sartre was also
familiar with the Soviet Union, having traveled there several times; even if he had
refused to align himself with the CPF, he certainly supported the Soviet Union and spoke
of the miracle he had seen there.
But of course, Sartre’s philosophy was completely incompatible with Stalinism.
Merleau-Ponty, as we saw, had underlined this, by contrasting Soviet Stalinism and
Sartrean subjectivism. The primacy of the individual in Sartre’s phenomenology
precluded any reconciliation with Soviet Marxism. The invasion underlined all of that,
and forced Sartre to choose sides in the dispute. It seems that for the first time Sartre saw
the importance and perhaps more importantly the difficulty of social interaction in the
fight against oppression. Sartre would address this in the Critique.
Following the invasion, Sartre received a series of letters from readers curious to
know his position. In The Phantom of Stalin, Sartre will respond to two questions: by
what right did the Soviets invade? And, why had they chosen that particular moment?
124 This article has been translated only once, in a translation that it is difficult to recommend. In the English literature it is referred to under a variety of titles. I prefer The Phantom of Stalin and will refer to it ׳ as such.
72
*
By What Right?
The year 1956 marked a turning point in the history of Eastern Europe. In both Poland
and Hungary there were anti-government riots. Yet further afield, 1956 was also the year
of the Suez Crisis, when Nasser tried to nationalize the Suez Canal and in doing so
provoked an international crisis. French soldiers (along with those of many other
countries) were dispatched and the world readied itself for war. The crisis pitted Arab
nationalism against Western interests.
In France, the conservative parties condemned the Soviet Invasion of Hungary.
The Left opposed the intervention in Egypt.125 In the first pages of the article, Sartre tries
to discredit the political position of the French right, arguing that the same people who
would do nothing to alleviate the Civil War in Algeria or the housing crisis in France had
no right to complain about the treatment of foreigners. Furthermore, he argued that the
conservative Western press had done little to help the matter: Radio Free Europe had
exacerbated the situation when it exhorted the Hungarians to rebel.
Sartre will adopt a quasi-traditional Marxist approach to ethics. He argues that
politics is little more than the sovereign praxis of man against man. In as much as
through action one establishes his own morality, Sartre wants to reject traditional
morality. Rather, he argues that praxis, as political action, creates its own values;
criticism of revolutionary political action must situate itself within the situation, with an
understanding of the perspective of the revolutionary (Sartre will do this through the
progresso-regressive method; see below). Socialism is the only political system that
recognizes this (because it is dialectical, he will argue in the Critique). “In order to
125 Sartre (1965), p. 146.
73
understand any political action, Socialism must be an absolute frame reference.”126 Yet
praxis and Socialism cannot be entirely separated from individualism. “True Socialism is
not separable from the sovereign praxis of men fighting together.”127
To defend Socialism, Sartre argues that:
For more than a century, under various forms that have changed
throughout History, one movement has worked to help the exploited, to
claim for them and for all the possibility to be men fully and
completely.128
And yet, while Sartre embraces Socialism, Sartre is more than willing to criticize
the CPF and its blind support of the Soviet Union. According to Sartre’s interpretation of
History, Communists have had to assume the task of leading the concrete battles taking
place throughout the world and have not had the time to reflect properly on what needs to
be done to nurture Socialism through its adolescence to its final stages. Sartre argues that
Socialists have not yet realized that “during this phase, when Socialist societies are being
constructed, violent contradictions continue to tear apart the USSR and the other people’s
republics.129 There are in fact several other contradictions that continue to wrench apart
the countries behind the Iron Curtain. Sartre would argue that questions of social
organization and integration give rise to contradictions that need to be resolved before the
Socialist project can continue.
Yet Sartre refuses to criticize the project of Socialism in Russia. As he writes,
“the USSR defines Socialism by its own acts.”130 While somewhat obscure in meaning,
126 Sartre (1965), p. 149127 Sartre (1965), p. 275.'=* Sartre (1965), p. 148.129 Sartre (1965), p. 150-1130 Sartre (1965), p. 157.
74
Sartre is arguing that what is important is that the Soviet experiment, at least practically,
began as the concrete labour of free individuals. Moreover, Sartre is comfortable
recognizing that while the Soviet Union may have made mistakes, it is still an example of
free individuals working together.
Sartre believes that the Hungarian government’s own policies led to the
insurrection. The Hungarian government had committed immoral acts; Sartre calls the
industrialization undertaken in Hungary and the forced collectivization criminal acts.131
Those who would argue that the Revolution in Hungary was inevitable missed half the
equation: it was only as a result of Rakosi’s policies that the seeds for revolt were sown.
Rather, Sartre argues “if, in 1955, Nagy had been allowed to assume power, insurrection
could have been averted.”132 If Gero had been a better leader, for example, or if Rakosi
had not relied on violence, any number of other things might have happened.
Sartre accepts the argument, proffered by the groups of Hungarian intellectuals,
that Hungarian nationalists should have themselves been permitted into the ranks of the
Communist Party of Hungary (CPH), which would then be able to negotiate with the
Soviet Union.133 He continues to believe that the Communists in Hungary will and should
continue to play a large role in the affairs of the state, provided that they were to be duly
elected by the people. Moreover, the ascendance of Nagy represented the triumph of the
popular will. The fact that such a situation would even arise indicated that the CPH had
failed to meet even its most basic duties to the population.
Sartre continues the analysis and tries to understand what lead the workers to
unite. As we have seen, the strike started as a protest by journalists. But Sartre is
131 Sartre (1965), p. 162.132 Sartre (1965), p. 162.133 Sartre (1965), p. 180.
75
unwilling to see this as the principal cause of the Revolution and focuses on the details of
the revolution I highlighted above. The workers rebelled against the contradictions that
existed in Hungary. The fact that necessary industrial reforms had been stymied, and the
fact that the growth of the cities had continued unchecked (Budapest had grown 40% in
six years) created this atmosphere. The workers were malnourished, poorly paid and
essentially driven to rebel.
The important theoretical lesson to draw from the Revolution focuses on the role
mediating groups should play. I discussed above the formation of workers councils,
designed to give voice to the workers’s demands.134 These groups allow for the
meaningful coordination of the activity.
There is also a lesser discovery. During a time of Revolution, one idea or one fear
can become so powerful that it unites people and renders compromise difficult. The
revolutionaries in Hungary became united in their fear of Russia; Russia became
obsessed with the fear of encirclement. In a prescient passage, Sartre writes:
In subordinating the person to the group, the Soviets had avoided the
absurdities of bourgeois personalism. But their ceaseless need to maintain
and reinforce unity led them to banish all form of individual reality; in
spite of the Constitution, people were deprived of their status as
individuals and became merely an appendage to the crowd. This became
the source of disunion and latent contempt for the system.135
The actions of the leaders showed, he argues, that the leadership of the CPR was still
principally populated by the intelligentsia.
Sartre (1965), p. 181.Sartre (1965), p. 231.
76
Sartre also wants to extract from the revolution information about the USSR. He
argues that the CPR had failed to completely destroy the cult of Stalin, left behind from
the death of the dictator.136 Sartre argues that ideas like the cult of personality are useful
in so far as they encourage unity in a time of strife, loyalty in a time of danger. Yet often
they remain after the original moment of crisis has passed as ossified structures in the
new social system.
Sartre devotes a large section of the article to a discussion of Soviet history. Of
course Russia is a Socialist country, he claims, but it has become frozen in a primitive
state of Socialism. The war scared it. The United States continues to threaten it. The
Bolsheviks remained obsessed with outdated ideas - embracing five year plans. The
country became drunk on statistics, yet paradoxically the lack of adequate information
had made governing even more difficult.
Yet Sartre is not willing to condemn only the Soviet Union, he argues that the
United States must share a large portion of the blame. The Marshall Plan had been
structured to rent the Soviet Union from its satellites. Sartre argues that the postwar
actions of the United States were seen as provocations by a still wary Soviet Union.137
He concludes this discussion with a call to arms: “Should we call this blood-
thirsty monster, bent on tearing itself apart, Socialism? Yes, certainly.”138 Even if a
Socialist country is riddled with errors, even if its history contains missteps, it is still a
part to the great Socialist experiment. The decision to invade was a mistake, but it was
nonetheless a mistake undertaken by a Socialist country.
*
136 Sartre (1965), p. 231 et passim.137 Sartre (1965), p. 237 et passim.'3* Sartre (1965), p. 236
77
For one last time, Sartre speaks of Merleau-Ponty. Merleau-Ponty had written an article
for L’Express where he had written: “The only just way to examine Communism,” he
continues, “is to see that it is a relative system, possessing not great privilege, that will
also become enmeshed in contradiction and eventually surpass itself.”139
This time, Sartre agrees with his ex-collaborator. He also accepts that the
contradictions in Marxism will eventually create a new system. Nonetheless, Marxism
remains that noble enterprise that wants to give to each man “justice and liberty.”140 For
Sartre, the challenge will be to integrate the lessons from this historical analysis into his
discussion of the sociology of revolutions. He must show that, even though the Soviet
Revolution has lost its way, revolution in general can better the lives of its participants in
a way compatible with justice and liberty.
*
Was This the Right Moment?
The second section of the piece is deceptive. Sartre does not want to examine the timing
of the Soviet invasion. Rather, in the second part of The Phantom of Stalin, he wants to
examine the actions of the CPF. This time, Sartre seems to have become exasperated with
the party’s actions. He rejects the idea that one cannot criticize the specific actions of the
French Communists. This is after all not a contradiction with The Communists and the
Peace׳, there, Sartre defended the role of the Party while not questioning the timing of its
calls to action. Sartre points out that the CPI had no difficulty in condemning the Soviet
invasion.
Sartre (1965), p. 279.140 Sartre (1965), p. 279.
78
What follows is a long polemic against the specific actions of the CPF. Calling it
a broken left, Sartre argues that the 150 deputies of the CPF were deaf to anything but
Moscow’s orders. They ceased to see the path of history or the material poverty of the
Hungarian workers.
Sartre wants the party to do two things. First, that the CPF speak honestly of the
situation in Hungary and that it offer French workers reasonable opportunities to
influence its policies (hoping no doubt that French workers will recognize the plight of
their brethren), even though it would be absurd to expect the party to break with Moscow.
“It would be absurd for the Party to cut itself off from the Soviet Union, yet it is equally
absurd to continue to submit itself without question to Moscow.”141 Furthermore, “the
CPF must remember that The Communist Party is responsible only to the workers of its
country.”142 Secondly, moving forward the Party must undertake to reorganize itself so
that it aids its revolutionaries working with the workers and to prevent factionalisation. In
sum, Sartre wants the déstalinisation of the CPF.
*
We have seen two things in this chapter. We can either see in the revolution an
opportunity for the workers to improve their own conditions of labour or we can adopt a
neo-Stalinist position and reject all revolution - making changes only after crushing the
workers. Sartre prefers naturally the first.
More importantly, Sartre realizes that the Communist Party, either in France or in
Hungary must always maintain a strong presence amongst the workers. Sartre’s re-
evaluation of Marxism has led him to reject paternalism in favour of an ethic rooted in
141 Sartre (1965), p. 303..Sartre (1965), p, 303 *י
79
praxis and the desire for a society of equals. Even were the workers to reject Marxism,
Sartre would find it personally very difficult to reject their choice. In rejecting traditional
morality, Sartre rejected paternalism as well.
Up to this point, this thesis has discussed the efforts of other intellectuals who
were close to Sartre to find a new system of ethics. Yet only Sartre undertook the
integration of Existentialism and Marxism. After Hungary, he saw the ruinous
consequences of Stalinism. In order to preserve the primacy of the individual, he was
forced to abandon the Soviet Union.
80
Chapter 4
The Critique (Volume 1): The Theory of Practical Ensembles
81
As I have discussed above, Sartre’s relationship with the CPF deteriorated badly after the
end of the Resistance. The CPF saw in him a challenger for the hearts and minds of a
generation of young French leaders, subjecting him to withering attacks. The
Communists attacked him in a series of articles, trying to discredit Existentialism.
(Notably perhaps, Pierre Naville, one of the most important Marxist intellectuals of the
period, is one of Sartre’s interrogators at the end of the text Existentialism and
Humanism.)
The problem for the Existentialist was how to reply to these attacks.
Existentialism and Humanism, given as a lecture in Paris, was one such early attempt. In
it, Sartre tries to outline what he sees his relationship with the French Left to be. Sartre
does not exclude cooperation; rather, he tries to defend his conception of human liberty
against Marxist attacks. He refuses to accept the Marxist determinist project. Repeating a
mantra from Being and Nothingness, there could be no goal to human activity, he says,
other than liberty itself. There is a lesser known text, Materialism and Revolution, that is
substantially more important for this thesis; I will discuss it in the next section.
*
Materialism and Revolution:
Sartre’s first real effort to define his relationship to Marxist theory occurs in Materialism
and Revolution, an article which appeared in Les Temps Modernes in 1946. The problem
Sartre sets for himself is to explain how one can be sympathetic to Marxism without
being a materialist. This question was often at the heart of neo-Marxist debates on both
sides of the Iron Curtain - Gyorgy Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher who would
82
become Minister of Culture in Nagy’s government, fought with the same question in his
early works.
What are the youth of today to think, Sartre asks, when confronted with the
current philosophical debates? Who should they support? “The youth of today are not at
ease,” he writes at the beginning of the article.
They no longer have the right to be young and youth appears no longer to
be part of life, by a class phenomenon, a prolonged infantile state, a
reprieve from resuming their responsibilities to the family: after all,
workers directly pass from adolescence to adulthood.143
We say today to the students, he continues, that they must choose between
materialism and idealism. Idealism is an illusion, the Communists claim, a fallacy of the
bourgeoisie. While this may be true, Sartre refuses to accept orthodox Marxist
materialism. Keeping with the theme of this article - that of reconciling himself with
non-materialist Marxism — he criticizes materialism as it has been traditionally
understood. Materialism suffers from a crisis of identity. Communists use it to deny the
existence of God, to eliminate the existence of the soul and to ward off subjectivity. Yet
at the same time, it serves as a source of motivation - the idea that all things happen for a
reason - to motivate the party’s young cadres.144
For Sartre, materialist metaphysics offers little to separate itself from positivism.
It is content to classify phenomena instead of understanding and explaining them. But
this objection is secondary. As always, Sartre wants to defend liberty. Materialism, he
argues, makes liberty, the one and only goal of Socialism, impossible.145 Now of course
143 Sartre (1949), p. 135.144 Sartre (1949), p. 169.145 Sartre (1949), p.210.
83
Sartre would not necessarily say that he is not a materialist. Rather, he objects to the
assimilation of culture and history with matter. Even if one rejects idealism, Sartre would
argue, one does not have to accept radical Marxist reductionism.
If one wants to reinvigorate Marxism, Sartre thinks that one must separate the
dialectic from physics. This is precisely what Merleau-Ponty, speaking of Sartre’s works
written after Materialism and Revolution, thought Sartre had done. The dialectic, Sartre
goes on to claim, must be separated from matter and rooted in a phenomenology of
human liberty.
The article ends after raising more questions than it answers. Yet after the
composition of this article, Sartre would announce his adherence to Marxism, without
offering his readers any idea of his resolution of the technical questions of which he had
spoken. He would only begin his project in earnest after the publication of The
Communist and the Peace.
In other places, Sartre defines pieces of his new philosophy, offering ideas that will
become important in the Critique. In a letter to Roger Garaudy, a French Orthodox-
Marxist (who would later be expelled from the CPF and would be accused of anti-
Semitism), he tries to define his position with regard to the dialectic. The only dialectic
that he himself could accept, Sartre argues, is one which abandons its root in matter and
concerns itself with human relationships.146 Sartre argues for what we today would call
historical materialism, opposing his dialectic to the dialectical materialism of Stalinism.
This switch is of vital importance for Sartre: in the Critique Sartre specifically treats
metaphysical questions and does not reduce human existence to materialist propositions.
146 The details surroundings this dialogue with Garaudy are often difficult to find. The interested reader should examine both Contât (1970) and De Beauvoir (1963), p. 369.
84
For Sartre, materialism may be true, but practically it has no bearing on the study of
History; Sartre rejects radical Marxist reductionism.
This letter preceded an attack that Sartre would make in Search for Method,
written in 1956-7, (which I examine in the next section) in which he argues that Marxists
had become terrible dialecticians. Sartre had defended the political importance of the
CPF in The Communists and the Peace, but he never defended their philosophical
outlook.
This conflict lays the theoretical groundwork of the Critique: Sartre has rejected
materialism; now he proposes to phenomenologically examine concrete human
relationships, hoping to reinvigorate Marxism while responding to his own critics.
According to his own biographers, Sartre wrote the Critique as if possessed by a
demon. Abusing drugs to replenish his energy, he did not take the time to have De
Beauvoir criticize the manuscript as he would normally have done. The Critique is so
disorganized in fact that it masks the novelty of Sartre’s approach. The book is a work of
history, sociology and philosophy, all at the same time, as well as a manual for the
revolutionary. Moreover, the Critique is also Sartre’s first book-length attempt to
reformulate the ideas contained in Being and Nothingness. Originally, Sartre had
intended that the book would begin with the individual and end with a discussion of all of
modem history (no one should say that the project was not ambitious). Sartre abandoned
the project when he realized the difficulty of achieving a Hegelian synthesis of all of
history. The Critique also contains discussions of twentieth-century revolutionary
85
movements in Europe and the French Revolution: these he uses as templates for his
discussions of previous attempts to liberate humanity from its economic shackles.147
Sartre’s political position in the Critique, due in part to his method, is different
from most other political philosophy. He does not separate the private sphere from the
social and political spheres. This is in striking contrast to Camus and is a position that
serves as a partial response to Camus’s critique.
*
Search for a Method:
The first volume of the Critique begins with an essay, Search for a Method. Search for a
Method was actually originally published separately; the text that gave rise to it was an
article describing the state of Existentialism in France during the mid-1950s,
commissioned by a Polish philosophical journal. The article appeared first in the fall of
1957, so there is every reason to think that Sartre composed at least part of it during the
Hungarian Revolution.148
Between Materialism and Revolution and the Critique, Sartre had not written a
work that could be called overtly Marxist, save for The Communists and the Peace,
which, while important, was written for a specific historical context and did not broach
difficult theoretical waters. In Search for a Method, Sartre announces his new theoretical
project: to show that Existentialism is compatible with Marxism. (The Critique,
specifically the first volume, is an effort to show that Sartre’s ontological project can be
made compatible.)
147 Sartre (1985a), p. 136. This reference is to Sartre’s second introduction to the Critique, which appears after Question of Method. This second introduction essentially summarizes the arguments I have previously examined.148 Contât, p. 311-312.
86
Sartre begins Search for a Method with a discussion of the relationship between
philosophy and society in general. “A philosophy comes into being to give expression to
a new movement in society,” he writes.149 Any class, as it begins to achieve power within
society, creates a philosophy that justifies its political desires (the oath/pledge, which I
will discuss later, is an example of this). The banking class finds its political outlook
through Cartesian philosophy. The bourgeoisie finds its interests expressed through
Kantianism.150 Philosophy itself is never something that is inert; it is always moving,
with class structure, towards the future. Sartre argues that since the 17th century there
have been three distinct philosophical periods: that of Descartes and Locke, Kant and
Hegel, and that of Marx. Sartre argues that all of the philosophical systems that preceded
Marx were united by their atomistic conceptions of rights. No philosophy recognized
both liberty and man’s social being. Marxism represents both a call to action and the
philosophy of the oppressed.151
Sartre wants to show how Existentialism has emerged since Hegel defined his
philosophy at the beginning of the 19th-century. Hegel tried to synthesise all of
philosophy, all of history and all of knowledge; he would include even us, ourselves,
inside the system. Sartre argues, as Kierkegaard before him, that Hegel had forgotten the
most important thing: the individual. The individual continued to exist and to suffer,
never assimilated into the system.
Marx’s genius, according to Sartre, was to combine the philosophy of Hegel while
at the same time including Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel’s system. As such, Sartre’s
reformulation of the ethical project begins with the early Marx, pulling together
149 Sartre (1985a), p. 19.Sartre (1985a), p. 19-20.
151 Sartre (1985a), p.21.
87
individualistic strains from Hegel. Sartre, after Being and Nothingness, began to re-
examine social relationships, arguing that relationships strongly conditioned by society
and matter must form the basis of a philosophy. Sartre’s conception of praxis became all
important.
Yet Sartre is careful to differentiate his Marxism from Stalinism. According to
Sartre, Stalin’s Marxism ended the evolution of Marxism itself. It had become so ossified
that the complex interplay between theory and practice, necessary so that Marxism’s
development would continue, became stymied by the structures that sprung up after the
Russian Revolution. The intellectual’s obligations can never be to over-simplify
experience and mask the truth (though this does beg the question as to how the word
‘truth’ is supposed to be cashed out).152 The intellectual, face-to-face with Stalinist
Russia, must tell the truth about the flawed country.
Now, in order to recreate Marxism with an existential base, Sartre introduces what
he calls the progresso-regressive method (it is the same method that emerges later in his
study of Flaubert). Sartre seizes on a line in a letter from Engels to Marx, in which Engels
wrote: “Men make history themselves, in a situation given to them.”153
The progresso-regressive method situates the individual firmly between
motivation and action. Sartre argues that every action manifests both a regressive phase
(the antecedent reasons for the action) and a progressive phase (the goal of the action).
Thus, if I go to the market, I am going, at least partially, because I am hungry (the
regressive aspect). I’m going there to buy food (progressive aspect). Now of course most
actions are substantially more complex than this and part of Sartre’s task will be to show
152 Sartre (1985a), p. 32.153 Engels, cited in Sartre (1985a), p. 72.
88
that the method can work for more complex situations. Decisions such as Flaubert’s to
become a writer will be substantially more complex, requiring much more study. Such
actions are particularly difficult to understand because they are impregnated with social
signification.
Now this example, felicitous as it is, illustrates another important aspect of
Sartre’s argument. While his ontology may not specifically depend on it, all human
action has its original need - one large component of which is hunger (as Sartre argued in
his article in the journal Caliban). All human action, Sartre argues, can ultimately be
traced back to need - need understood both as a condition and as the negativity that gives
rise to the desire to suppress need.154
Sartre’s solution to the more orthodox structuralist criticism is to become more
radical. Sartre is challenging Merleau-Ponty head on, arguing that radical liberty,
understood properly, is the correct method for understanding history (this is what is
sometimes referred to as his hermeneutics of praxis).
From the progresso-regressive method, Sartre proceeds towards another important
idea: totalisation. Since Sartre wants to emphasize the importance of the individual, he
needs to root the actions of the individual within her understanding of Flistory. Sartre
argues (as we will see in the second volume) that actions of the individual can be
explained by her internalization of social pressures. What he calls totalisation is
essentially our effort, as an actor at the centre of the world, to understand the totality of
facts to which we are exposed in order to choose the action to perform. Thus Sartre
writes: “What totalisation must discover is the pluri-dimensional unity of the act.”155 We
154 Sartre (1985a), p. 76.155 Sartre (1985a), p. 89.
89
act by examining our situation, all of the information we have available and we try to
decide the best course of action. Now, our totalisation may not always be in our best
interests (to which the worker, affected by the weight of his situation, can attest).
At its heart, the idea that there can be a ‘totalisation without a totaliser’ is Sartre’s
effort to eliminate God while preserving the idea of Truth. The idea is that the situated
individual (and eventually the group) provides a sense to History by its own praxis.
Sartre’s objective is ultimately to understand the origin of groups in society,
groups that come from the unity of individuals struggling against social forces. As such,
Sartre begins his sociological analysis with a discussion of the formation of relationships
amongst people, beginning with the most simple.
Actions amongst individuals are coordinated by groups and collectives, and by
materiality itself. Yet these groups can never be ontologically primary. (Otherwise, Sartre
would have succumbed to Merleau-Ponty’s later critique; he accuses Sartre of having
transplanted his conception of radical liberty from the individual to the group.156) Sartre
draws a parallel here to what he calls Georgi Plekhanov’s lazy Marxism.157 Marxism can
not simply be the study of groups and structures, but must understand how they arise and
how they are destroyed.
Sartre concludes this introduction to the Critique with an anthropologic comment.
Since human nature does not exist (as defined beyond the most simple of needs), our
understanding of actions must be rooted in History and its internalization by actors.
*
156 See my discussion of The Visible and the Invisible below.157 Plekhanov, cited in Sartre (1985a), p. 101.
90
Praxis and Need:
The first volume of the Critique is an attempt to revise Sartre’s phenomenology in light
of his conversion to Marxism; Sartre begins by outlining the structures that will be
important to his study. Giving us some idea of what he plans to discuss, he calls the first
section From Individual Praxis to the Practico-Inert.
Sartre structures the Critique so as to illustrate the unity between relatively
isolated actions and more coordinated social practice.158 Sartre wants to demonstrate that
not only are these actions coordinated, but that by beginning with a relatively simple
study, one can develop useful theories of complex social practices.
In general, there are two different (and not necessarily exclusive) ways of
understanding society: one can argue that social groups are composed of individuals,
each acting intentionally (Sartre’s method), or that individuals are strongly conditioned
by society (the theory of Louis Althusser, amongst others).
Sartre chooses the first method, and argues that to accept the second would be to
reduce the liberty of the individual. This is why Sartre needs to rely on the neo-Marxist
idea of praxis. The analysis of praxis actually began in Search for a Method, but we only
get a full idea of Sartre’s project in the Critique. He begins with a discussion of solitary
praxis, which is ultimately composed of the actions of individuals oriented towards
matter.
Praxis and need are related. As we will see, all human activity is related towards
the alleviation of need. Treated phenomenologically, need is the source of negativity that
1581 would refer the reader to the detailed Table of Contents at the end of each volume of the authoritative French edition of The Critique. The Table of Contents, prepared by Pierre Verstraeten and Juliette Simont, is extremely useful for understanding the organization of the Critique.
91
Sartre argued earlier to be at the heart of all action. Need conditions our actions, all of
which are directed towards the alleviation of material demands in the future. Work as
praxis conditions the world, transforming its materiality.
Formally, praxis is a double negation. First, it is a negation that recognizes need.
Second, it is a movement towards alleviating this need. The second is the movement
towards an object. This movement is the totalisation of need while overcoming the
necessity that one finds at the heart of need. As Sartre said, “Need and praxis are
intimately related within the dialectic.”159
Praxis is an example of a totalizing force. With praxis, Sartre wants to show
something else: the force of intentionality. Returning to Being and Nothingness, Sartre is
arguing that human essence is realized through praxis, constituted as the radical liberty of
his earlier philosophy.
In the Critique, Sartre responds to four questions. How is praxis both an
experience of necessity (since it is need) and liberty? If it is true that dialectical
rationalism is the logic of totalisation, can the Critique show that History is a totalizing
movement? If the dialectic includes the past and the future, how does this affect our
understanding of the future? If the dialectic is materialist, what is its relationship with all
other materiality?160
To answer the last three, we need to examine the rest of the Critique. The answer
to the first question, however, is apparent. The unification of necessity and liberty occurs
because praxis allows one to pass between need as a historical given and the plurality of
options (understood in the dialectical sense I outlined earlier). Or, to quote Sartre: “all of
'*Sartre (1985a), p. 196.Sartre (1985a), p. 193.
92
(dialectical) history rests on individual praxis, which, it should be noted, is already
dialectical.”161
Sartre uses praxis for two reasons in the Critique. First, in some situations, praxis
can become liberating. Second, Sartre uses it to demonstrate how action can become
repressive. Praxis, he argues, can lead towards alienation, as the individual becomes
dominated by matter, never able to overcome need. Because human needs have become
governed by scarcity, need has given rise to conflict. Where praxis is alienated, need
becomes scarcity, and conflict is inevitable.162 History becomes Hobbesian.
This is all a summary analysis, and Sartre will show later how these situations
occur. Nevertheless it is important to emphasis one thing. Sartre’s analysis, inspired by
History, is the result, he claims, of investigation and some basic assumptions. From these,
he argues that a complex and useful sociological model can be developed.
Relationships Amongst Individuals:
Relationships between people vary between different times and places. In certain places,
human activity is principally solitary; at other times is it social. For example, peasants in
Italy used to spend large portions of the year in solitary activity, working in the fields.
Workers in factories are united socially, but this unity is, however, passive and primitive.
Materiality both unites the workers and neutralizes their sociality.
In Being and Nothingness, Sartre examined binary relationships. Whereas there,
as he was unwilling to examine social groups in greater detail, he was content to stop
with that simplified type of relationship. Here, where Sartre is interested in the structure
161 Sartre (1985a), p. 194.162 Sartre (1985a), p. 196 et passim.
93
of groups, he begins the discussion of inter-personal relationships with a discussion of
groups of three people.
At a fundamental level, all interpersonal relationships are negations that are
Fichtean in origin: I am not the other. But there is also another relationship that is also a
negation. I do not belong to that social class.163 My relationships with other people
necessarily presuppose an understanding of social circumstances. If I am to recognize the
other, I must understand his goals and his jor axis.164
The example that Sartre gives to begin the discussion borders on the facile and is
a potential source of misunderstanding. Imagine, Sartre begins, that I am staying in a
room with a balcony that overlooks the road. Beneath me I can see a wall. On one side of
the wall a worker is working on the road, on the other side, beneath the wall, works a
gardener. The two men are united only through me.165 There is no reason to suspect that
the worker knows that the gardener exists. As the third (a technical term Sartre
introduces), I condition the relationship between the two. The origin of the group is not
merely conditioned by binary relationships, but by the presence of other people.
Sartre’s example is potentially faulty, because it suggests to the reader what is
important is that the two workers do not know that each other exists. While that’s
important for this specific relationship, in general, the third is important whether or not
the two other people (or the two other groups, etc.) know each other. As Sartre begins to
examine more complex situations, the third will become most important in revolutionary
contexts, where the fear of others conditions the internal relations within groups.
*
"3 Sartre (1985a), p.213-214.Sartre (1985a), p.224-5.
^Sartre (1985a), p. 213.
94
Matter:
Sartre introduces three new ideas in this section. First, Sartre returns to an analysis of
matter, which provides us the objective conditions of existence, one of which is scarcity.
Scarcity is the underlying situation that connects all of western history. While it may not
be a necessary condition, it has been and continues to be present, even in situations where
it could be avoided.166 According to Sartre, a historian in 1957 can only see scarcity as a
historical but not a necessary condition. Because scarcity exists, there is a direct
relationship between it, and violence and ethics. Violence emerges as the need to secure
the necessities of life; as we try to organize our needs, ethics emerges.167 At this very
basic level, this ethics is radically Manichean. I saw in the other man a rival who must be
defeated.168
Second, Sartre introduces a more exact definition of praxis', praxis is the opposite
of materiality, an attempt to condition the inert world through our liberty.169 This will
become important in his definition of the third important concept introduced in this
section: the practico-inert.
At heart, the practico-inert is the name Sartre adopts for matter that has already
been modified through the influence of praxis. It differs from pure materiality in as much
as it has developed inertia; it has already been modified by praxis and may resist future
modification.170
What Sartre will do with the practico-inert through this and the next volume of the
Critique will be to show the influence that matter has on our actions. Sovereign praxis is
166 Sartre (1985a), p. 237 et passim. He says that scarcity is a fundamental aspect of our history.1671 will return to this in my discussion of Sartre’s unpublished ethical manuscripts in the conclusion.
Sartre (1985a), p.243.Sartre (1985a), p. 270.
170 Catalano (1986), p. 107.
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changed by the practico-inert. Originally (or at least theoretically originally), my praxis
dominates matter. I carry out my own desires, acting of my own free will. But eventually,
I may become dominated by the practico-inert. The machine itself and its needs, for
example, can dominate man.171 This is Marx’s observation in Capital. Sartre, not content
merely to assert this observation (which would probably be theoretically very difficult to
prove), offers a series of historical examples, the details of which are not important, to
show that this conditioning by matter has in fact occurred. But we can see from this
theoretical basis how groups of workers in industrial societies might emerge.172 In the
fight against the practico-inert, Sartre claims that we can understand man’s social
being.173
The Series:
At this point, Sartre begins to use the ideas he has introduced in order to discuss the
origin of groups in societies. He begins with a discussion of seriality, which he defines as
the passive relationship that exists amongst certain members of society.
Sartre gives us another example that is supposed to allow us to understand the
idea of the series. Imagine a group of people in line waiting for a bus.174 The group forms
a series, not necessarily physically, but in the sense that they are all united by the bus.
Each one of them becomes an individual waiting for the bus. (This is why it is important
that Sartre began to recognize series man in his writings during the Second World War.
Sartre (1985a), p. 295.Sarti? (1985a), p. 282.Sartre (1985a), p. 339 et passim.I find the discussion in Catalano very useful. See Catalano (1986), p. 144.
171
172
173
174
96
The reader should recall that in the introduction I discussed Sartre as soldier, Sartre as
prisoner, etc.)
These sorts of relationships are widespread, Sartre argues. People are often united
in this indirect, passive fashion. Another example which Sartre gives is that of people
united passively in listening to a radio program, each separated by a great distance but
united through technology. Each person is a member of the passive group of listeners.
In other examples, series are united by groups of people and not by things (in a
way that they are not as clearly united in the first two examples). The market (in the
economic sense) unites passive, perhaps impotent, actors, each one’s freedom neutralized
by economic forces. As a historical example, Sartre talks about the role of the church in
constructing groups of peasants. The peasant realizes that he is a peasant because of the
church. Social sentiment is created by the force of the church; it dominates the peasants,
making them incapable of resisting. Yet it also influences their understanding of society.
This is an example of what Sartre will call intériorisation. My self-perception is
influenced by social mores.
*
Collectives:
Sartre suggests that all social objects are related, in an adversarial way, to the practico-
inert. He writes, “I call a collective a two-directional relationship to an inert material
object which allows a multiplicity of ways of uniting itself.”175 Looking back at groups of
people united through waiting for a bus, we can see that that was an example of a
collective united into a series.176 A series is thus a special case of a collective.
^Sartre (1985a), p. 376.176 Sartre (1985a), p. 361 et passim.
97
In general, when Sartre calls a group of people a collective, he is suggesting that
they are united passively. When people unite into more active associations, such as
revolutionary organizations, he calls them groups.
Of interest to Marxists and to Sartre’s discussion of society, a class is, in general,
a collective. It is given existence through the practico-inert; it comes into being as a result
of the practico-inert.177 Ultimately, a class manifests negative unity, it is an example of
the impotence of its members. The practico-inert serves as an intermediary, rendering
more alienated the sociality of the worker while at the same time serving as the origin for
any project to improve the life of the worker. One becomes a worker through seeing the
other workers’s relationships to the machine, in the same way peasants became peasants,
according to Sartre, because of the church.
From this argument, Sartre can draw two conclusions. First, a worker’s liberty
becomes stolen by his own praxis, as soon as that praxis becomes intertwined with the
practico-inert. Second, all human conflict (in as much as it is the conflict of two praxes or
liberties) takes place through materiality, through practico-inert. Praxis is directed at
others through things.
Now we can see the importance of this last theoretical development. Sartre
believes that he has shown that classes are organizations that, provided scarcity continues
to be an important part of that society, must necessarily arrive at the heart of capitalist
societies (echoing to no small amount the traditional Marxist hatred of Taylorism and its
consequences). One can see therefore how fraternity arrives in a factory. Out of the
workers’s desire to overcome the practico-inert, workers become united, but only by
177 Sartre (1985a), p. 408.
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external situations that bring to the fore their complaints. In Hungary, Sartre saw the
importance of these groups in protesting not only against capitalism but also Stalinism.
Let us for moment return to the argument between Lefort and Sartre. Lefort had
accused Sartre of rejecting the inevitability of class formation and struggle. Sartre replies
now that it is not inevitable, but that only by external action (either by the Party or by
some other way) will classes becomes active. Certainly, the Party must be composed of
workers, for workers are in a unique situation because they experience the effects of the
practico-inert most profoundly of all. Their situation creates the desire to transform
society.
Yet at some level, Sartre has confused an argument about praxis, specifically
about the necessary conditions for the formation of the practico-inert, with an argument
about political actions. It is one thing to suggest that praxis becomes alienated; it is
another to suggest that this demands action. But of course, the connection here is made
through Sartre’s conception of liberty. Liberty is the root of ethics and hence action is
demanded when liberty is suppressed.
*
From Groups to History:
In the first section of the second half of the Critique, Sartre tries to explain the origin of
groups throughout history. That any particular collective will become active in society is
not historically necessary, even if the passive unity of the collective may be. Rather,
external historical conditions make historical action possible.
July 14th, 1789. A mob attacks the Bastille. Parisians had grown accustomed to
suffering in a series. Each suffered individually: from hunger, from cold, etc. Yet each
99
Parisian experienced something else. The Royal Army had surrounded the city; they were
led to fear for their safety. This pressure allowed groups to form. According to Sartre’s
terminology, this situation gave rise to groups-in-fusion.
Sartre believes that to a large extent, groups can be explained through external
exigency. Pressure encourages group cohesion. As a result of the actions of the French
royalist government, Parisians began to actively feel a sense of unity. A group of people,
originally united into a series, a series united through negativity. The group-in-fusion was
at that time à chaud. Each member of the group became a member of the series. The
series consisted, of course, of individuals, but these groups of individuals began to unite
and exercise their own praxis.
In each of these groups, we can see the importance of the third, the idea that
Sartre introduced earlier. In the crowd, each person is a third for every other. I see and
totalize their relationship in the same way as they totalize mine. When the group is à
chaud, the third functions to unite individuals in common praxis. The general structure of
the group relies on the third. In the situation in Revolutionary France, the fear of being
abandoned, the fear of betrayal by the third, radicalized the groups of citizens.
*
The Pledge/Oath:
At this point, Sartre introduces the idea of the pledge/oath, something he has already
discussed to some extent when examining the Hungarian Revolution and the cult of
Stalin. The pledge/oath is a promise of loyalty: when one swears loyalty to the group. At
its base, the pledge is a structure in the practico-inert that serves another function in
100
uniting social relations. The pledge reduces contradictions in the group (though after the
fact its importance diminishes and it fades back into the practico-inert).
In the cases Sartre discusses (and I would speculate in all occasions), fear is the
origin of the pledge. Individuals, feeling pressure, adopt it; it helps to totalize their
fight.178 Sartre also observes that these structures seem to remain in groups well after the
danger has passed. While he will not argue for this theoretically (and there seems to be no
reason to think that this is necessary), it is an observation he feels to be historically
justified. After the group is à chaud, a group still often sees its raison d’être in the past;
rarely do groups adopt new, different goals. Gradually the pledge becomes more
important and ceases to serve a practical function. The pledge becomes a political tool,
used by a leader to preserve his power.179
Returning now to the original moment, each member must swear to demonstrate
his loyalty.180 At the beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution, the cult of Stalin emerged as
total for ensuring unity against outside pressure; tragically it would continue beyond its
utility.
A similar phenomenon emerged during the terror that followed the French
Revolution. During the terror, each swore their loyalty and denounced the faithlessness of
the others. Something similar occurred after the Hungarian Revolution. The threat of the
Soviets radicalized the revolution; workers united for fear of what the Russians might do.
Sartre will return to this in greater detail in the second volume of the Critique.
*
178 Sartre (1985a), p. 440-480.179 Sartre (1985a), p. 518 et passim.
Sartre (1985a), p. 522.
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The Organization and the Institution:
As should by now be evident, Sartre’s goal in his analysis is to explain the origins of
groups of people. He passes from theory to practice, to explain his theory and to develop
the necessary examples for developing the next level of theoretical and sociological
complexity.
The worker, as she tries to become an individual, often becomes alienated. She is
alienated because the capitalist system denies those who work in the factory self-
realization. Work created the practico-inert; the worker then loses her own labour in it.
Yet when workers unite, they discover not only the other but themselves. 181 In passing
from passivity to activity, workers can exercise their liberty. Through the group and then
the organization, individuals unite.
The revolutionary organization exerts a strange attraction on its members. It
allows its members to, often very quickly, develop a sense of fraternity. This poses a
danger, naturally. In the upcoming study of organizations, we will see that there exist at
least two reasons why individuals join organizations. Some do it because it offers them
the chance to improve their own and their fellow citizens’s situation (what Sartre calls
voluntarism). But of course, there are those who do so because it allows them to assume
power (opportunism). This second option is of course what explains the origin of
dictators like Stalin.
Organizations come from organized praxis. People united freely in order, at least
ostensibly, to accomplish a goal. As groups-in-fusion become more developed, their
internal structure becomes more complicated. Different individuals acquire different jobs.
181 Catalano (1986), p. 187-9.
102
Some are promoted. In each group à chaud, however, they suppress their personal
differences. The groups adopt a certain attitude, reaching a state of accord.182
Strictly speaking, organization ceases to exist when they become institutions (not
that they necessarily must). This institution is at first an effort to achieve the ultimate in
unity. Gradually, it is taken over by the inert structure of the old pledge.183
Sartre’s argument is that the only way to understand an organization is to
experience as its members do. Abstract historical study will not suffice; all revolutionary
organizations appear at first united. Yet seen internally, problems become visible.
In the fight against the practico-inert, institutions emerge as a means to achieve
unity and avert danger. Yet the plan often fails, institutions become part of the practico-
inert and the process begins again. The institution prevents the emergence of other
groups. The individual gives up his liberty to this new sovereign. Briefly free, she
becomes a slave to a new system.184
Often, the state itself is an example of an institution - one that offers the
possibility of control. The state is a curious entity, as it converts active members into
passive members of a series. The state pacifies the population so that new groups cannot
emerge. In Communist societies, the personality cult or the bureaucracy are examples of
such types of control. Sovereign strength exists only within the executive; individual
power (sovereign praxis) is weakened.
In this analysis, we see how organization can become institutionalized, becoming
part of the practico-inert. New states, initially full of promise, soon become repressive.
*
"G Catalano (1986), p. 202.183 Catalano (1986), p. 213."" Catalano (1986), p. 218.
103
At the Level of the Concrete:
In the second half of the last section of the book, Sartre begins to use the schemas he
developed (the collective, the series, etc.) in order to explain History. Whereas in the
second volume he will use these for a detailed chronological study of Russian history,
here he wants to offer the reader some isolated examples. Sartre’s argument during these
examples is that the past is always a part of the present (in fact, if it were not, Sartre’s
historical materialism would be impossible). He will argue that if we are to transcend the
past, we must understand the weight that History has on the sovereign acts of the
individual.
I want to mention two specific examples given by Sartre. In these examples, we
can see the effects that groups (in the active sense) have on collectives. First, these
groups create structures and situations that encourage fraternity amongst members of the
collectives.185 Second, in doing so, the sovereign praxis of groups becomes deviated from
its original goal.
The first example is colonialism. In a colonial society, practico-inert structures
grow.186 What happens is that original violence becomes institutionalized. Bourgeois
society is then affected by these structures and colonialism becomes more violent and
more oppressive.
In the second example, Sartre returns finally to an analysis of class violence,
particularly of the violence of 1848 that had a profound formative effect on Marx. Sartre
wants to examine the importance of reciprocity in class struggle. He wants to respond to
the question: how can praxis be exercised as class action when a class itself is not a group
185 Catalano (1986), p. 230186 Catalano (1986), p. 240.
104
(when a class is not active)? True class conflict, Sartre will argue, can not be understood
as the opposition of different praxes of different collectives united only by seriality.187
Whereas the proletariat is united by the practico-inert into forming a collective, it never
becomes an active group without the actions of other groups. The proletariat is rendered
active, as are all groups it would seem, by the actions of other classes. Groups-in-fusion
begin. Unions form. These actions are circular; groups feed off each other.
At this point, Sartre has opened up a response to Camus, augmenting Jeanson’s
original criticism. Our understanding of class conflict must take care not to stand outside
History. Our ability to criticize is very limited.188 We can examine present conditions but
have little understanding, without examination, of the possibilities available to the group.
While this may sound like apologism, it is not. It merely substitutes for Camus’s
liberalism a correct understanding of value. Moreover, a group can only be organised
with the goal of overcoming a contradiction in the practico-inert. A non-chaotic transition
is practically impossible. Only liberty can be an absolute morality.
'*7 Catalano (1986), p. 255.188 Catalano (1986), p. 235. Sartre (1985a), p. 789.
105
Chapter 5
The Critique (Volume II): The Intelligibility of History
106
The second volume of the Critique, as I mentioned above, was left incomplete by Sartre
on his death. The reality was however that for at least the last fifteen years of his life he
had not worked on the book at all. The edition we have now was published after his death
in a volume put together by Arlette Elkaïm-Sartre, his adoptive daughter.
The central question of the second volume is: does history have a direction?
Sartre’s answer must be that it does. History must have both a direction and be
comprehensible if Marxism is to remain a privileged political position in spite of Sartre’s
voluntarism (to use Merleau-Ponty’s accusation). The purpose of the first volume of the
Critique was to construct the theoretical, particularly sociological, apparati necessary for
this examination. The method that Sartre will use will be the progresso-regressive method
that he outlined in Search for a Method, which by its very nature, is at heart a historicist
approach. Now, the validity of the progresso-regressive method itself depends on Sartre’s
definition of praxis. If praxis as Sartre understands it is wrong, then the progresso-
regressive method must fail.
In order to understand the second volume, one has to realize that Sartre is going to
great extremes to preserve the idea that History can be understood without there being
any overarching idealistic principle guiding it - he refers to this as ‘a totalisation without
a totaliser.’ In the first volume of the Critique, we saw that the individual adapts to
external conditions: for example, external exigency can induce a sense of group cohesion,
as happened during the French Revolution. And, as a result of this new-found cohesion,
the overarching project, the fight against the King, became possible. Sartre’s argument is
that any and every action represents a totalisation (partial by its very nature) of the
environment in which the individual finds himself. It reflects both social conditions and
107
the individual’s preferred outcome. In order for class conflict to be understandable, Sartre
argues that in the origins of classes (since classes are ultimately the organs of history) one
can find groups of people that have united together, either passively or actively, as the
result of the practico-inert or the actions of other classes and groups of people. In any
event, Sartre’s understanding of intentionality requires that every one of these acts is
undertaken freely, even if the results are unexpected (as they often are when praxis
becomes diverted from its original goals).
Second, Sartre begins the second volume with an attack on the analytical project,
specifically as it relates to the study of History; in particular, he attacks traditional
positivism and sociology. This is not an easy passage to read and is often misunderstood
by commentators. Sartre uses as an example the different methods for studying military
history. A student studying an important battle can withdraw from the actual situation and
abstractly analyze theoretical possibilities, outcomes, etc. This, while playing an
important role in some fields, is ultimately not the approach that must be taken in
philosophical studies of history. What Sartre is proposing is a dialectic examination of
historical events wherein the historian examines history from the point of view of the
actors (essentially, what Sartre wants to do is to apply the progresso-regressive method to
an actual historical study). Thus, for Sartre’s purposes, we need to understand the
exigencies that forced a General to take this or that action, to send his troops on this or
that mission. What Sartre wants to do here is not to examine all of the possibilities,
(which would very possibly have the effect of making the individual seem incompetent
while rendering an understanding of history more impersonal), but examine the
possibilities that the individual saw available for himself. This is naturally not what a
108
historian would say is his job. Rather, Sartre wants to try to help the philosopher
understand why certain actions seemed necessary, even if, with the benefit of hindsight,
they may have seemed cruel or immoral. Sartre is essentially taking up Merleau-Ponty’s
argument from Humanism and Terror, where he argued that only by understanding the
actor’s perception of the situation can we understand the morality of the act. The reader
can and should ask at this point if this is not an unfair leap. Even if we do understand why
an actor took a particular action, can we not still say that the particular action, while
perhaps seemingly necessary, was nonetheless immoral? Of course, Merleau-Ponty’s
objection goes unanswered if, as he claimed, Marxism itself is not a privileged
philosophical position.
Thirdly, Sartre brings up the idea of contradiction that he first introduced in the
first volume of the Critique. Contradiction manifests itself as an objective condition in
the practico-inert. The question in the second volume is how contradiction divides society
and cleaves groups. (The reader should remember that the Marxist tendency to treat
groups as organic entities was one of the things that forced Merleau-Ponty to abandon
Marxism.189) To continue this line of reasoning, Sartre introduces anti-labour (,anti-
travail) as the deliberate action taken by groups to undo the praxis of other groups.190
This second praxis, while ultimately destructive, nonetheless plays an active role in
history. The importance of this will become apparent in the fourth chapter of the second
volume (in the Soviet Union, it becomes either the cult of Stalin or the cult of the future).
Sartre tried to demonstrate in the first volume that the class structure was
conditioned by the actions taken by individuals so that they can achieve, through
189 Aronson (1987), p. 45.190 Sartre (1985b), p. 105-6.
109
fraternity and common labour, solidarity with others. Because each person is able to
internalize the general external conditions of the struggle, groups take on the
characteristics of the individual (something Merleau-Ponty criticizes in The Visible and
the Invisible, where he begins to develop a criticism of the praxis of groups191).
In order to assimilate a conflict to a contradiction, and enemies in terms of
contradictions, one must consider these transitory determinations of the
group in a manner that is wider and deeper so that the conflict is seen as
the actualisation of one of the objective contradictions. Also, the group
must retotalise and then transcend their original fight towards a new
synthetic reunification of the field around them while reorganizing the
group’s internal structures.192
In other words, the conflict changes the group while the group changes its environment:
this is Sartre’s understanding of the dialectic.
What is important is that although anti-labour is in fact an active application of
praxis, in the sense that individuals work together, it is nonetheless a feature of the
practico-inert. The original idea that gave rise to the original act of anti-labour was
important, reflecting a very real concern. Over time, the idea became ossified, becoming
a part of inert social structures and the act of anti-labour became an act of repression.
*
The Boxing Match:
Sartre begins the philosophical text of the second volume with a discussion of a boxing
match.193 In discussing the struggle between the two fighters, Sartre argues that each and
191 See Merleau-Ponty (1964). The notes published at the end of The Visible and the Invisible (p. 217 et passim) contain often cutting remarks of Sartre’s philosophy. Tragically, Merleau-Ponty died before giving them final form.192 Sartre (1985b), p. 19.193 Sartre (1985b), p. 26 et passim.
110
every boxing match is not only a fight, but it is also the incarnation of general tensions
within society. One can see in the actions of the fighters, in each motion, the rules of the
fight, the expectations of the spectators. One can also see their intentions: they prey on
the weakness of their opponents. Yet their actions and the actions of the spectators
include several other tensions: the fight is the singularisation of these various tensions.
Yet in the very idea of a boxing match, we can see particular social tensions: the thrill of
violence. We also see the misdirection of the desires of the boxers, who, instead of using
their energy to fight against the practico-inert that oppresses them, turn their energy, like
caged animals, against each other. The praxis of the boxers is mystified: it is directed
against the wrong problem. This is a very interesting observation and one that Sartre will
apply generally to struggles throughout history. Sartre will seem to say later, in
discussing the Bolshevik Revolution, that all rebellion leads to alienation and hence
mystification.
*
Anti-Labour and Contradiction:
The previous discussion of anti-labour in the second volume seems stilted and short and
Sartre again takes up the issue. After the brief interlude of the boxing match, Sartre
returns to anti-labour, this time discussing its relationship to contradiction. At the heart of
the group, after a period of danger, we find a manifold of contradictions that exist in the
practico-inert: some contradictions are holdovers from the previous system, others were
created by the revolution. Sartre’s argument seems to be that open conflict is only
possible when external contradictions are interiorized.194 After the revolution, the group
194 Aronson (1987), p. 78. Sartre (1985b), p. 63.
Ill
becomes divided over questions of direction, goal, leader, etc. Whereas once the group
was united by fear or desire for change, it is now riven by competing desires.
Yet against the contentions of structuralists, Sartre argues that the origin of
conflict is almost certainly subjective. Even if the practico-inert provides an impetus,
individuals respond to it in forming groups, in allying themselves to factions, etc.
Because of this, Sartre’s method spills over into his writing style; the text is almost
written as a series of anecdotes. Typically, the origin of conflict occurs over the direction
of groups or over relations of power at the heart of the group.
The group-in-fusion, after the initial rush of the revolution, becomes an
organization; it begins to differentiate internally. Every member of the group begins to
perform specialized functions. Often at the same time, the group splits into factions. Each
member of the faction takes on a specific role, often competing in that role with a
member of a different faction. As soon as the factionalisation occurs, the group itself
begins to divide over contradictions in the practico-inert. Each sub-group threatens to
sideline the other and threatens it with disintegration.195
This new fight, taking place in the period following the revolution, this new
conflict can begin as an attempt to reunite the leadership of the revolution. “The
usurpation of function is necessarily a manoeuvre that breaks the unity of the group.”
Each group fears isolation; each wages the war against the other in name of ‘unity.’196
Only a study of history can understand what will happen following this new
conflict. Yet often the Conflict ends with the destruction of one or other sub-group, or
with the broadening of the conflict, or even with its diversion. Anti-labour thus emerges.
195 Aronson (1987), p. 88.Sartre (1985b), p. 75.
112
Instead of fighting against the original structures the revolution was designed to
overthrow, this anti-labour tries to attack the structures of the revolution. Each group
fights against the praxis of the other.
In the first volume of the Critique, Sartre developed a series of structures
designed for sociological examination, by starting with simple structures and proceeding
to more complex ones. At this point, Sartre has completed this process. Now, he
abandons that approach, having shown the importance of these structures in several brief
studies (of the French Revolution and of the boxing match). Sartre begins a discussion of
the Russian Revolution; he examines the events in chronological order.
*
Socialism in One Country:
The discussion of ‘Socialism in one country’ is perhaps the most important in all of the
Critique. With this slogan, we can see the power of ideas in revolutions. The fight
between Trotsky and Stalin incarnated the entire Russian Revolution, or, strictly
speaking, their respective actions, understood as intentions, incarnate the entire Russian
Revolution. All challenges and demands that made this conflict possible exist there.
Sartre calls the slogan ‘Socialism in one country’ a truly monstrous object,
created only as the result of each group’s anti-labour. In order to understand its origin,
Sartre discusses the beginnings of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin and Trotsky adopted
different policies after the death of Lenin. Stalin wanted to remain pragmatic: he
represented the practical aspect of the revolution. Trotsky, the theoretician, rejected the
idea that pragmatism should rule the revolution - or rather, that pragmatism should
113
govern something as fundamental as the Bolshevik’s relationships with other Communist
parties and with capitalist countries.
The idea that the Revolution should (and even could) survive if it remained inside
one country split two groups that should have remained united: the Bolsheviks and the
proletariats in other western countries. Originally and according to the original
revolutionary Marxist project, it would be incomprehensible for the workers in one
country to ignore the workers in another; practically, it meant changing the relationships
between the Bolsheviks and other Communist parties in Eastern Europe.
To understand why this possibility was even mooted, one needs to study the
historical situation. Originally, Marxists had thought that Revolution would propagate
from one country to another. One revolt would engender others. Yet after some initial
(and ultimately transitory) successes following the armistice that ended the First World
War, this did not happen. Furthermore, because Marx had always taught that the first
Communist countries would be the industrialized countries (Germany, England, Belgium,
etc.), it seemed that if Russia was ready for Revolution, these other countries would soon
follow.
As well, Russia following the Revolution was surrounded by capitalist countries;
countries that would intervene in her Civil War. The importance of the Civil War should
not be understated. The Bolsheviks had an almost impossible task following the
Revolution: the peasant population of Russia was hostile to their project. The very
Socialist project seemed virtually impossible in a feudal country.
So a conflict between two factions and two people began to converge around this
question. Those who supported Trotsky rallied around his internationalist teachings and
114
the doctrine of permanent revolution. But with the defeat of the revolution in Germany
and then with Trotsky’s defeat himself after the death of Lenin, Stalinist pragmatism was
victorious.
Sartre points out, however, that this precise interpretation was not necessary, in
the sense that it was the only possible outcome of objective conditions in Russia. One
interest group used it in order to defeat Trotsky.197 The external conditions made several
choices possible (as Sartre argued previously in discussing the study of battles); the
actors themselves chose one over other possible candidates.
In the case of the Russian Revolution, external conditions gave rise to the
conditions that defeated the internationalists. Trotsky had worked with international
organizations, organizing workers in several countries. With the acceptance of the idea
that Socialism could exist in only one country, Trotsky’s defeat was inevitable.
“Socialism in one country constituted the rejection of Western Marxism; with it Trotsky
was defeated.”198
Moreover, in adopting this particular formation, the new leaders of the re-united
Bolshevik Party had said more than was necessary. The pledge that they chose to solve a
problem in the present would, in the future, take on the status of cult. The pledge,
‘Socialism in one country,’ would, like the cult of Stalin in The Phantom of Stalin, affect
policy far into the future. In the next sections of the Critique, Sartre explores the
continued importance of the outcome of this power struggle, using the idea of the
pledge/oath.
197 Aronson (1987), p. 106-7.198 Aronson (1987), p, 107-8, Sartre (1985b), p. 114.
115
After the Revolution became institutionalized, the violence and bloodletting that
accompanied it never ceased. Rather, it also became institutionalized. What Sartre wants
to ask is: how does violence arrive at the heart of a society that lacks unity?
Sartre has in the past explained the origin of conflict in society as the result of
contradictions which give rise to groups-in-fusion. External pressure causes its members
to internalize certain objective conditions.
The Bolsheviks had inherited a very difficult situation. The peasants did not
support them; the economy had been destroyed by the First World War and the Russian
Civil War. Moreover, Russia was not an industrial country. Even following Witte’s
reforms, little industrial infrastructure existed. The population lacked the necessary
education; there were few universities and technical schools.
Quite naturally, the Bolsheviks began to deviate from theory. In order for the
workers to control the factory or the economy, a profound revamping of the economy
would have been necessary: equipment needed to be modernized, infrastructure built,
whole relations of production modified. Due to a lack of technicians, politicians
(particularly in the upper-echelons of the party) began to control day-to-day economic
activity. This was fundamentally a deviation from Marxism and in particular from its
demand that the activities of the factory be directed locally. In fact, we can see in this
solution to the Bolsheviks’s early political difficulties the institutionalization of a
problem that would dominate the Hungarian Revolution.
Sartre wants to show that, even if analytically other options can be found, the
Bolsheviks had good reason to adopt the policies they did. Revolutionary praxis had to be
carried out in this way. Moreover, “The urgency and the dangers [that existed] demanded
116
an unprecedented acceleration” of the process of modernisation.199 Thus, not only did
they adopt, with good reason, their other economic policies, they began to institute the
policy that became known as forced collectivization.
And thus, we can see that second importance of theoretical structures Sartre
developed in the first volume of the Critique. Not only do they have obvious explanatory
power for struggles against capitalism, they can also explain what happened in Russia.
The new leaders created a series of workers, inactive and dominated by the practico-inert.
The party and the bureaucracy created these conditions. The continuation of the
bureaucracy would make effective control of the country more difficult.
Sartre will draw important conclusions from this discussion.200 He has already
argued that revolutionary praxis often becomes alienated. Revolutionary parties, when
they assume power, become ossified. Yet we can see something else, we can see the
effect that Hungary had on Sartre’s desire to support workers’s councils. Not only did
Sartre see in Hungary the same problems with economic management that occurred
during the Soviet Revolution (showing perhaps that economics issues are not necessarily
resolved in the transition to Socialism), but also that workers’s councils are a way of
preventing the growth of factionalisation and the bureaucracy. This would prevent the
growth of oppressive structures in the practico-inert.
This discussion reaches its climax with the discussion of Stalin and his power.
Returning to the discussion in Search for a Method, Sartre insists yet again on the
importance of the individual. Stalin emerged victorious from the fight with Trotsky;
nonetheless the party was in a weak position. The country was in turmoil. The peasants
199 Sartre (1985b), p. 150.200 Which is substantially more elaborate in the Critique than I can explain in this short summary.
117
were opposed to forced collectivization. There was not enough food to feed the cities.
The party was searching for a strong leader and found one in Stalin. The cult of Stalin
was bom.
That fact that brutality might be necessary was the defence employed by Merleau-
Ponty in Humanism and Terror. The idea was that only the revolutionaries could
understand the logic of the revolution (an idea that the two philosophers employ); there
was no privileged position from which to evaluate objective standards.
The cult of Stalin would survive its utility and even his death. As a result, it
ceased to be an oath/pledge and became part of the practico-inert. It would continue to
cause problems in Europe, after the Second World War. “Between 1948 and 1953,
Stalin’s praxis became a monstrous caricature of itself. It had no idea how to resolve the
problems posed by the existence of new Socialist states.”201 Not that this was surprising:
Stalin’s victory was predicated on the existence of only one Socialist country. Stalin
created the situation but was also conditioned by it. This is as close as Sartre is willing to
come to acknowledging any form of social determinism.
It seems now that Sartre has decided that all revolutionary praxis will necessarily
become alienated.202 The Russian Revolution was the perversion of reason as the result of
external pressure. Stalinism remained intact at the heart of Russian society for a
generation. In every situation Sartre has examined - Russia, Hungary and France after the
Revolution - praxis has become practico-inert.
*
Sartre (1985b), p. 246.202 Sartre (1985b), p. 282. See also his discussion of anti-Semitism.
118
With that discussion of the Russian Revolution, the manuscript breaks off. Sartre
returns to a series of fundamental questions. Importantly, he takes up a task he should
have completed much earlier: he tries to reconcile the Critique with his earlier
ontological work; it is not unreasonable to ask if this is even possible.203 Any discussion
of these questions would be beyond the scope of this work.
We have seen how Sartre proposes to examine the Russian Revolution and the
subsequent history of the USSR. The goal of the second volume of the Critique was to
explain history through an existential examination of sociology. Individuals, through their
praxis, totalize their environment, reacting to their need and to the scarcity of resources,
sometimes coordinating with other individuals. Moreover, Sartre has given us historical
examples to illustrate the process; Sartre believes additionally that he has shown how a
just revolution can become murderous. There are numerous ethical conclusions to draw
from this, and only in examining Sartre’s subsequent (and incomplete) ethical work can
we fully understand his responses to his critics. Yet for all of this, Sartre has never
demonstrated that his work is not a perversion of Marxism. What it means to choose
freely in a world where we ourselves are conditioned has never been made clear.
203 Certainly, many researchers think it is impossible. At the very least, it requires the assimilation of liberty to praxis.
119
Conclusion
120
The basis for this thesis has been the evolution of Sartre’s political thought during the
tumultuous 1940s and 1950s. As I said in the introduction, the Critique de la raison
dialectique can be understood as Sartre’s response to the dialogue amongst intellectuals
in France, a dialogue that discussed the features of political ethics in general and of
Marxist revolutionary ethics in particular. There are three questions that stand out in the
discussion. First, how should one respond to Camus’s anti-Communist, humanist critique
of Communism? Second, can one show that Marxism has promise, and in particular that
existential Marxism has promise, contrary to Merleau-Ponty’s criticism of Sartre’s
project? Third, how should one adapt Sartre’s nascent Existentialist morality to the real
world? All three of these, I have argued, need to be understood against the backdrop of
events in Europe as Sartre composed his gargantuan last philosophical project, the two-
volume Critique of Dialectical Reason. I want in this conclusion to summarise Sartre’s
answers to these three questions; in doing so, I want to show the origins of Sartre’s last
ethic, contained in his unpublished manuscripts and last interviews.
As to the first question, Sartre believes that he has demonstrated that there can
exist no privileged understanding of revolution. Truth and philosophy, or at least our
understanding of them, are rooted in subjective social conditions. In the case of the
Bolshevik Revolution, it is only possible to understand it by examining the decisions of
the revolutionary leadership after the Revolution has run its course.
Since Sartrean ethics is in general founded in his radical individualist conception
of liberty (a position which he never retracted), he finds it impossible to accept conditions
imposed on liberty before it is exercised. Nonetheless, Sartrean liberty, developed in his
early works, has changed slightly. Originally strongly solipsistic, Sartre chose in his later
121
works to interpret liberty fundamentally as praxis, and focused particularly on the praxis
of the oppressed - no doubt reflecting his political preoccupations. With the Hungarian
Revolution, Sartre saw the importance of local action, something that we had not seen
prior in his work; small groups could work together to bring power to the oppressed and
allow them to struggle against the practico-inert. This work reflects Sartre’s new concern
with the importance of fraternity - a preoccupation that would last until the end of his
life. Fraternity became for Sartre not only a means for living the ethical life but a tool of
liberation, capable of freeing the individual from the excesses of the practico-inert.
Fraternity is realised through action and as such Sartre’s Marxist ethics is based
on a hermeneutics of praxis. His understanding of the historicist project begins with the
praxis of the individual. We can see this in Sartre’s last publications, including the series
of interviews he began at the end of his life in which he tried to define his new political
position.204 Praxis represents the negation of need. In praxis one sees the beginning of
hope; the sovereign actions of the individual represent a hope for the future. As Sartre
said in the Caliban articles, being hungry means that you already want to be free. Hope
for Sartre is not merely an unspecified future state; hope lies in fraternity, in common
action. The actor can find her essence only in free relationships with others. Sartrean
ethics is, as he would say, the desire for society.205 In the Critique, Sartre begins to
emphasise the fraternity as the beginning of ethics, an argument that comes from, at least
in part, I have argued, the Hungarian Revolution.
204 These interviews, with Benny Lévy, are referred to as Hope Now. The original ones were published in Le Nouvel Observateur in March of 1980 but have become, as one might expect, difficult to find. Happily, they have been reprinted in easy to find English and French editions. All my citations are to Sartre (1991), the French edition.205 Sartre (1996b), p. 35.
122
Camus’s criticism is mooted, Sartre would say. Echoing Jeanson, he would claim
that Camus has failed to understand History. Not that Sartre would accept all of
Marxism’s excesses; much to the contrary, from The Phantom of Stalin onward he has set
strict requirements on revolution.
Starting from this idea, Sartre attempts to respond to Merleau-Ponty’s last
writings, answering my second question. In the Critique, Sartre adopted his sociology in
order to examine the phenomenology of social life, employing his hermeneutics of
praxis. Merleau-Ponty had attacked Sartre for avoiding speaking of the entremonde.
Merleau-Ponty’s later philosophy was constructed to give weight to the region between
subjects and objects, which he calls the entremonde: the inter-world. Sartre responds with
the practico-inert. The practico-inert is the heavy, weighty presence of the past in our
every day life. Unlike Merleau-Ponty’s inter-world, Sartre’s is inert, oppressive and
restrictive. Merleau-Ponty is willing to accept the weight of culture and tradition in
forming our political theories and our ideas.
Sartre argues that when the group is à chaud, it is only as a result of the action of
individuals. Every individual revolution, even one precipitated by social conditions (i.e.
the practico-inert), can nonetheless be understood through the solipsistic
phenomenological analysis of Being and Nothingness.
Yet has Sartre responded to Merleau-Ponty’s claim? Merleau-Ponty thinks that
Marxism is not a privileged position and moreover that Sartre’s subjectivism is so radical
as to eliminate any truth the dialectic might have. It seems to me that the answer to this
question depends on what one thinks of Sartre’s idea of liberty. It is very hard to believe
that one creates things ex nihilo. The practico-inert is supposed to respond to this
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objection. But of course, it is inert, and Sartre seems to think that Marxism, properly
constructed, can exist outside its influence. The problem of course is Sartre’s stated
position, in the Notebooks for an Ethics, in the Cornell Notes and elsewhere, that
morality is merely the ideology of the ascending class. If Marxism itself is an ethics (and
thus presumably ideology), then why can we not confine Sartre’s Marxism to the dustbin
of History? Why should we not view it, as Merleau-Ponty does, as merely another, non-
privileged way of understanding History?
Finally, let me examine the third question, the question of Sartre’s efforts to
construct an Existentialist ethics. Sartre’s project is fundamentally ethical and thus my
response to this question will out of necessity be the longest. In his vitriolic attack,
Jeanson called Camus ahistoric. In his later work, Sartre adopts this position vis-à-vis all
those who would critique Marxism. Camus had argued, as did several of his fellow
liberals, that the Communists were too quick to embrace violence and in fact deviated
from their own values by being excessively pragmatic.
Now, in order to give a complete answer to the third question, we need to ask:
what did Sartre do after the Critique? The answer is that not only did he continue with his
biography of Flaubert, but he also started to write an ethics that would take into account
his early work, modified to fit his later Marxist conversion.
Sartre gave a long series of lectures at the Gramsci Institute in Rome in 1965,
where he presented the fruits of this research. The text was then adapted, and Gallimard
even went so far as to prepare a typed version with the intention of publishing Sartre’s
text after a subsequent round of revisions. Although the book has yet to be published,
there are copies of this manuscript. One is in Paris and another at the Yale Library, which
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also has possession of a second manuscript, called the Cornell Notes. The Cornell Notes
were prepared for a series of lectures that Sartre was to have given at Cornell but that he
cancelled in protest because of the escalation of the Vietnam War.206 It is fairly certain
that these manuscripts will not be published any time soon; Sartre’s adoptive daughter
has decided, for political reasons, to suppress the manuscripts.
In them Sartre asks himself, no doubt as a response to Merleau-Ponty (but also to
Camus): can violence be used as a means to overcome alienation? This question had
haunted Sartre and the group around him since the 1940s. Merleau-Ponty had examined it
in Humanism and Terror. Benny Lévy would force Sartre to justify this position almost
forty years later in Hope Now. In his conference in Rome (henceforth the Rome
Manuscripts), Sartre responds.
Human essence has yet to be completed and perhaps never will be. The root of
morality is need - need provides the lack, the negativity which (as we have seen) gives
rise to ethics. (Sartre makes this point clearer in the Rome Manuscripts than in the
Cornell Notes, which are often scattered and technical.) Our goal, as ethicists and as
human beings, should be to encourage the free exercise of our sovereign praxis.
Throughout our history, we have allowed the practico-inert to dominate our
praxis. In order to overturn the existing order, violence is sometimes necessary. In so far
as this is possible, violence is permitted, perhaps even demanded.
In his unpublished writings, Sartre also concerns himself with the debate between
ends and means; a debate which I discussed when examining Camus’s philosophy. Sartre
206 My discussion of Sartre’s last ethics comes from four sources. Principally, it comes from Santoni, but also from Simont (1992) and Bowman. I also have studied cursively the Cornell Notes (when I was at Yale). Where I cite the manuscript itself, I refer to Box and Folder numbers according to Yale’s system of classification.
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does not want to simply weigh the means and ends. He is content to have the means
correspond to the perceived end. This may seem like a mere technical distinction, but it
is not. A weighing of means versus ends demands a constant set of values. Seeing future
values as a continuation of the means adopted in the present allows (presumably) for
changing morality.
With this idea in mind, violence that situates itself within the current historical
conditions, aimed specifically at the overthrow of the inert social structures that suppress
free praxis, is permissible. Sartre has adopted Merleau-Ponty’s early political position
which argued that the only way the revolutionary can judge morality is to examine the
past with an eye to the future.207 All methods are acceptable except those that denature
the ends, such as the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops.208 As such, Sartre gives us a
list of potential conditions for deciding if violence is necessary: that it is the only method
possible, that it does not encourage alienation, and, most importantly for our study, that it
finds its roots in the masses.209 Hungary was an example where the means employed
were contrary to the ends; the Soviets tried to reinforce the bureaucracy and the practico-
inert. We have already seen how groups of workers become united around contradictions
in the practico-inert and the relationships it imposes on men. Groups, formed by actual
situations (this is Sartre’s technical response to Merleau-Ponty), unite through the
pledge/oath, responding to external demands. In Hungary, this meant a response to
economic conditions and government mismanagement of the country. In the Critique,
Sartre uses this as an example of anti-labour - the attack by Russia and the orthodox
207 This is Santoni's own interpretation. See Santoni, p. 147.208 It’s not clear if this is Santoni’s opinion or Sartre’s. See Santoni, p. 147. In any case, Sartre would have agreed with this209 Santoni, p. 149-150.
126
Marxists — in order to formulate the idea of the ossification of structures. This is another
reason why the Hungarian Revolution was so important. There are many examples of
anti-labour, but few take place in countries that already profess to be Socialist.
First, Sartre believes that through his analysis of the social, he has shown that
sometimes only through violence can one break the chains of the practico-inert. As
Ronald Santoni has shown, Sartre’s position with regards to violence is ambiguous. He is
willing to favour it, but only under certain conditions. As such, Sartre has adopted a
substantially more nuanced position than that credited to him by others. While many in
France and the United States were willing to denounce virtually all revolutionary
violence, Sartre is willing to countenance it. He avoids the trap of weighing means and
ends. Means can only be justified by reference to the future; Camus’s criticism,
emphasizing rights over liberty, inverts Sartre’s fundamental moral project.210
Sartre shares however the apprehension many in France felt for the CPF and its
pragmatism. Sartre would argue later (after the riots of 1968) that the French Communist
Party had become afraid of revolution. The CPF had become beholden to the USSR and
was willing to sacrifice the interests of the workers. Nonetheless, Sartre feels that he can
remain a Communist while rejecting some of the actions of the French Communists.211
Moreover, Sartre rejects the idea that the CPF cannot be pragmatic. The question
is not whether the CPF can be pragmatic, but how it does so. Certainly, the CPF has the
responsibility, as argued implicitly in The Communists and the Peace, to be pragmatic; it
210 Certainly, Sartre’s prolonged discussion of the evolution of morality in the Cornell Notes was designed to attack Camus’s criticism in The Rebel, wherein Camus implicitly argues for the existence of static values. In the Cornell Notes, Sartre tries to show that the development of morality is historically conditioned. (The discussion takes places in Folders 59 and 60 in Box 5 and Folder 61 in Box 6.)211 After 1968, it was not just the French who criticized Western Communist parties in this way. In Italy, the group surrounding II Manifesto offered a similar critique (see note 211).
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can choose the best moment to mobilize the workers, provided its actions always conform
to the best interests of the French workers. As we saw in the first volume of the Critique,
the workers exist as a series that must be united into a political (and not solely a social)
force. The free actions of the Communists can accomplish this.
In a fitting way, any answer to the moral technical third question must return to
the first. Sartre’s and Camus’s differing ideas of the concept of liberty lie at the heart of
this disagreement. For Camus, liberty preserves something more basic: individual rights.
For Sartre, liberty is the essence of humanity. Not only is it the most basic element of
human existence, it is the only essential characteristic of human existence. Camus
attacked revolutionaries for rejecting individual rights in The Rebel. Sartre responded
then, and continues to respond now, that in order to preserve praxis, sometimes violence
is necessary. As praxis creates rights (rather than being beholden to them), there is no
reason to be concerned about deontological rights (as Camus seems to be). Sartre’s
response to Camus and the liberal critique of Communism is to put violence within an
historical context. Even if, due to Camus’s sudden death, the debate never had time to
mature, Sartre has shown that his philosophy is substantially more subtle than Camus had
presumed.
Sartre’s responses to these three questions do not avoid raising questions of their
own. Can Sartre preserve his ontology while attacking values? That is to say, is not his
idea of liberty susceptible to the sort of deconstruction of morality he undertakes first in
the Notebooks for an Ethics and then later in the Cornell Notes? If a philosophy is merely
an expression of the ascending class, why should we not dismiss Marxist Existentialism
128
in the same way? Is the Critique itself immune from historicist analysis? These are the
questions, broached by Merleau-Ponty, that Sartre never fully answers.
Finally, we can place the Critique in the future evolution of Sartre’s thought. I
mentioned the events of 1968 in my introduction. Now we can ask: why did Sartre align
himself with the Maoists?
Sartre has, as Merleau-Ponty argued, situated the individual’s only path to
freedom within the group. He replaced his concept of liberty with a situational liberty
constrained by the practico-inert. With the Maoists, Sartre could see a preoccupation with
the actual situation of the workers in France and an emphasis on local action: in factories,
in the universities or in the streets. Action was always undertaken as a response to various
situations. The Maoist political program called for an attack against the vestiges of the
practico-inert in France. The movement started, and probably failed, because of its
rejection of hierarchy and seniority. The failure of the Maoist movement, along with the
failures in Hungary and elsewhere, does raise serious questions about the viability of the
ideas expressed in the Critique. If hierarchy is needed for a revolution to be successful,
what hope is there for a just revolution?212 If hierarchy creates injustices, then any
successful revolution must out of necessity be unjust (Sartre’s apparent yet implicit
conclusion in the Critique). The Maoists were successful in creating chaos but never
succeeded in creating order. Could such a revolutionary project ever succeed? Sartre’s
ethical project here fails for a second time; the only ethical revolution, it would seem, is
the one that is impossible.
212 The events in Paris and elsewhere in 1968 caused soul-searching in several Communist parties in Europe. In Italy, the CPI splintered, with the emergence of a new group associated with Rossana Rossanda and the journal II Manifesto. See Rossanda, p. 281 et passim. Sartre also gave an interview to II Manifesto, printed in Rossanda as well as in Sartre
129
In general, one can see the importance of Sartre’s critique of Communism in the
passage from Sartre’s young to mature writings. The Russian Revolution allowed Sartre
to see the beginnings of violence. The Hungarian Revolution showed Sartre that social
structures, revolutionary in nature, can become ossified.
Sartre took these events, analyzed them and replied to his critics. He replaced his
early solipsistic liberty with a liberty firmly attached to the idea of fraternity. Sartre’s
analysis, though theoretical, is the response of a committed philosopher to contemporary
economics. Man, enchained through his isolation, can find his humanity only through his
brothers. Hope and fraternity are the necessary conditions for liberty to survive, a liberty
that must form the core of any future ethics.
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Bibliography:
Writing a thesis in English about a French philosopher for an audience of francophones
poses particular problems, some particularly evident in arranging a comprehensive
bibliography. What I have done, in an effort to make this thesis as accessible as possible,
is to refrain from citing translations wherever possible. Thus, for books that were written
in English I cite page numbers in the original English. For books that were written in
French, I cite page numbers to the French editions. The translations that appear here are
my own. I have included in the bibliography the title of the authoritative English edition,
where possible. With regard to Sartre’s writings, I have always tried to cite the
authoritative Gallimard editions. For all works, I have tried to cite the editions that would
be most readily available to a general audience. Obviously, where the original work
appeared in a language other than English or French, I have cited the work most readily
available. This occurs with greatest frequency in my discussion of the Hungarian
Revolution.
I have divided the bibliography in two sections. The first is composed of works I
cite or make reference to specifically in the text. The second is composed of other
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134
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1947). Humanisme et terreur [Humanism and Terror]. Paris :
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135
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136
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137
Aron, Raymond (1985). Démocratie et Totalitarisme. Paris: Gallimard.
Aron, Raymond (1987). Les Désillusions du progrès: essais sur la dialectique de la
modernité. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
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industrielles. Paris: Gallimard.
Aron, Raymond (1985). Mémoires. Paris: Presses Pockets.
Aron, Raymond (1986). L’opium des intellectuels. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.
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138
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139
Paris: Gallimard. 1988.
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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1947). Situations I, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948). Situations II, Paris: Gallimard.
Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964). Situations V, Paris: Gallimard.
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