Jean-Paul Sartre and neo-marxism

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Kevin Gray 0 ףר1 & /) ' J L/ t <p<JEAN-PAUL SARTRE AND NEO-MARXISM Mémoire présenté à la Faculté des études supérieures de !'Université Laval dans le cadre du programme de maîtrise en philosophie pour lobtention du grade de maître ès arts (MA.) FACULTÉ DE PHILOSOPHIE UNIVERSITÉ LAVAL QUÉBEC AVRIL 2005 © Kevin Gray, 2005

Transcript of Jean-Paul Sartre and neo-marxism

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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Introduction

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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״

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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.)

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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

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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).

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Chapter 1

Albert Camus

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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Chapter 2

Merleau-Ponty

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Chapter 3

The Revolution in Hungary and Sartre’s Reaction

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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*

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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Chapter 4

The Critique (Volume 1): The Theory of Practical Ensembles

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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(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.

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Chapter 5

The Critique (Volume II): The Intelligibility of History

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Conclusion

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

important works that the reader may wish to consult.

Works specifically cited:

Anderson, Thomas C. (1993). Sartre’s Two Ethics. Chicago: Open Court.

Aronson, Ronald (2004). Camus & Sartre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Aronson, Ronald (1987). Sartre ’s Second Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Bair, Deirdre (1991). Simone de Beauvoir: A Biography. New York: Touchstone.

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B ames, Hazel. E. (1967). An Existentialist Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Barrai, Mary Rose (1984). The Body in Interpersonal Relations. Lanham: University

Press of America.

Bell, Linda. E. (1981). ‘Review of Thomas C. Anderson, The Foundation and Structure

of Sartrean Ethics,” in Man and World. Vol. 14.

Bowman, Elizabeth and Robert Stone (1991). “‘Making the Human’ in Sartre’s

Unpublished Dialectical Ethics,” in Silverman (1991).

Bronner, Eric (1999). Camus: Portrait of a Moralist. Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press.

Camus, Albert (1987). Albert Camus: Editorialiste à l’Express. Paris: Gallimard.

Camus, Albert (1965). Essais. Paris: Gallimard.

Camus, Albert (1951). L’Homme Révolté [The Rebel], Paris: Gallimard.

Camus, Albert (1972). Journalisme et politique: l’entrée dans l’histoire. André Abbou

and Jacqueline Lévi-Valensi (editors). Paris: La Revue des Lettres Modernes.

Camus, Albert (1970). Le Combat d’Albert Camus. Text prepared by Norman Stokle.

Québec: Les Presses de !’Université Laval.

Camus, Albert (1959). The Myth of Sisyphus. New York: Vintage.

Camus, Albert (1942). Le mythe de Sisyphe: essai sur l’absurde. Paris: Gallimard.

Camus, Albert (2001). “Democracy is an Exercise in Modesty,” in Sartre Studies

International. Volume 7, Number 2.

Catalano, Joseph (1986). A Commentary on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical

Reason. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Catalano, Joseph (1996). Good Faith and Other Essays. Maryland: Rowman and

Littlefield.

Contât, Michel et Michel Rybalka (1970). Les écrits de Sartre: chronologie,

bibliographie commentée. Paris : Gallimard.

De Beauvoir (1981). La Cérémonie des adieux. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1963). La Force de choses. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir (1974). Pour une morale de l’ambiguïté followed by Pyrrhus et Cinéas [The

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Djilas, Milovan (1983). The New Class. London: Harcourt.

Djilas, Milovan (1969). An Unperfect Society. London: Harcourt.

Elgey, Georgette (1993). Histoire de la IVe République (deuxième partie): La République

des Contradictions. Paris: Fayard.

Ellison, David R. (1990). Understanding Albert Camus. Columbia: University of South

Carolina Press.

Gavi, Philippe, Jean-Paul Sartre et Pierre Victor (1974). On a raison de se révolter [We

Must Rebel]. Paris: Gallimard.

Grenier, Roger (1987). Albert Camus: Soleil et Ombre. Paris: Gallimard.

Hartmann, Klaus (1966). Sartre ’s Ontology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Howells, Christina, editor (1992). The Cambridge Companion to Sartre. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Jeanson, Francis (1971). Le problème moral et la pensée de Sartre. Paris: Editions du

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Johnson, Galen A and Michael B. Smith, editors (1990). Ontology and Alterity in

Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

Kemény, István (1985). Ouvriers hongrois. Paris: Editions L’Harmattan.

Kiraly, Bela K. et Paul Jonas (1978). The Hungarian Revolution of1956 in Retrospect.

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Koestler, Arthur (1964). Darkness at Noon. London: Penguin.

Koestler, Arthur and Albert Camus (1957). Réflexions sur la peine capitale [Reflections

on Capital Punishment], Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

Koestler, Arthur (1965). The Yogi and the Commissar. MacMillan: New York.

Kojève, Alexandre (1990). Introduction à la lecture de Hegel [An Introduction to Hegel],

Paris : Gallimard.

Lefort, Claude (1990). “Flesh and Otherness.” in Johnson (1990).

Lefort, Claude (1953). “Le marxisme de Sartre” [Sartre and Marxism], dans Les Temps

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Lévy-Val ensi, Jacqueline (1970). Les critiques de notre temps et Camus. Paris: Garnier.

Linsenbard, Gail Evelyn (2000). Investigation of Jean-Paul Sartre ’s Posthumously

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Lomax, Bill (1990). Hungarian Workers’ Council in 1956. New York: Columbia

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Marx, Karl (1978). Capital (in three volumes). London: Penguin.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1977). Les aventures de la dialectique [The Adventures of the

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1947). Humanisme et terreur [Humanism and Terror]. Paris :

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Gallimard.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Cornell Notes. Series of notes for a set of lectures (never given) at

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Yale University Library.

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ensembles pratiques [Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume I): The Theory of

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Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les Chemins de la liberté [Trilogy: Roads to Freedom], L’Age de

Raison (1945), Le Sursis (1945), La Mort dans l’âme (1949). Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1996b). Hope Now. The 1980 Interviews. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1969). Le Mur [The Wall]. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1983c). La Nausée [Nausea]. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean Paul (1968). Search for a Method. New York: Vintage

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1949). Situations III. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964a). Situations IV. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964b). Situations VI. Paris: Gallimard.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1965). Situations VIL Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1972). Situations IX. Paris: Gallimard.

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Silverman, Hugh (1991). Writing the Politics of Difference. Albany: SUNY Press.

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Vol. 56, Number 613.

Simont, Juliette (1992). “Sartrean Ethics,” in Howells (1992).

Simont, Juliette (1987). Sur les écrits posthumes de Sartre. Bruxelles: Editions de

l’Université de Bruxelles.

Spurling, Laurie (1977). Phenomenology and the social world. London: Routledge.

Stewart, Jon (1998a). The Debate between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Evanston: North-

western University Press.

Stewart, Jon (1998b). “Philosophy and Political Engagement: Letters from the Quarrel

between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty,” in Stewart (1998a).

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Alabama Press.

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Other Important Works:

Anderson, Thomas C. (1979). The Foundation and Structure of Sartre’s Ethics.

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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.

Aron, Raymond (1983). La Lutte des classes: Nouvelles leçons sur les sociétés

industrielles. Paris: Gallimard.

Aron, Raymond (1985). Mémoires. Paris: Presses Pockets.

Aron, Raymond (1986). L’opium des intellectuels. Paris: Calmann-Lévy.

Aronson, Ronald (1980). Jean-Paul Sartre : Philosophy in the World. New York: Verso.

Aronson, Ronald and Adrienne Adrian Van Den Hoven (1991). Sartre Alive. Detroit:

Wayne State University Press.

Brée, Germaine (1972). Camus and Sartre. New York: Dell.

Camus, Albert (1972). Lettres à un ami allemand. Paris: Gallimard.

Camus, Albert (1984). Le premier homme. Paris: Gallimard.

Cohen-Solal, Annie. (1999). Sartre: 1905-1980. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1986). Le Deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1960). La Force de l’âge. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1959). Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1990). Lettres à Sartre. Paris: Gallimard.

De Beauvoir, Simone (1972). Tout compte fait. Paris: Gallimard.

Detraer, David (1988). Freedom as Value : A Critique of the Ethical Theory of Jean-Paul

Sartre. Lasalle, Illinois : Open Court.

Edie, James M (1987). Merleau-Ponty’s Philosophy of Language: Structuralism and

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Gerassi, John (1992). Sartre, Conscience haïe de son siècle. Monaco: Éditions du

Rocher.

Jameson, Frederic (1985). Sartre after Sartre. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2000). Parcours deux. Paris: Verdier.

Nizan, Paul (1970). Les Chiens de garde. Paris: F. Maspero.

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(1984).

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Rybalka, Michel et Michel Contât (1993). Sartre: bibliographie 1970-1992. Paris:

CNRS.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1990). Ecrits de jeunesse. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions. Paris: Hermann. 1995.

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Paris: Gallimard. 1988.

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Gallimard: Paris.

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Sartre, Jean-Paul (1969). Les Mots. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1985). Saint Genet : Comédien et martyr. Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1947). Situations I, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1948). Situations II, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1964). Situations V, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1972)! Situations VIII, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1976). Situations X, Paris: Gallimard.

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Roger Garaudy et al. (1962). Marxisme et existentialisme: Controverse

sur la dialectique. Paris: Plon.

Schlipp, Paul Arthur, éditeur (1981). The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre. La Salle,

Illinois: Open Court.

Simont, Juliette (1988). Jean-Paul Sartre: un demi-siècle de liberté. Bruxelles: De

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Waldenfels, Bernhard et al. (1984). Phenomenology and Marxism. London: Routledge &

Kegan Paul.

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