{"id":928,"date":"2020-03-02T14:20:11","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T19:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/?p=928"},"modified":"2020-03-02T14:28:50","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T19:28:50","slug":"bernard-e-harcourt-concluding-thoughts-on-sartres-critique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/critique1313\/bernard-e-harcourt-concluding-thoughts-on-sartres-critique\/","title":{"rendered":"Bernard E. Harcourt | Concluding Thoughts on Sartre\u2019s Critique of Dialectical Reason<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Bernard E. Harcourt<\/strong><\/p>\n

In his discussion of Sartre\u2019 s Critique of Dialectical Reason<\/em> in Marxism and the Existentialists<\/em> (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), Raymond Aron draws our attention to a passage, at the end of a note on page 349 of the French edition, where Sartre asks: \u201cWill the disappearance of capitalist forms of alienation be synonymous with the abolition of all forms of alienation?\u201d<\/a>[1]<\/p>\n

The question is important. Sartre himself does not answer it. He points instead to Jean Hyppolite\u2014or rather to the fact that Hyppolite asked precisely this question in his studies on Marx and Hegel.<\/a>[2] Aron, for his part, answers in the negative: \u201cThe answer,\u201d Aron writes, \u201cis not necessarily in the affirmative.\u201d<\/a>[3]<\/p>\n

But it remains a critical question today. To rephrase it somewhat for our contemporary moment, the question would be whether, if we were able to overcome Western liberal-democratic advanced-capitalist forms of governing, we would thereby eliminate all<\/em> forms of alienation?<\/p>\n

It would be hard to imagine an affirmative answer. In part, the problem is that the category of \u201calienation\u201d has become a signifier of all forms of oppression. So even if we resolve the problem of alienation narrowly defined\u2014i.e. the sense of distance from the objects we produce, from the fruits of our labor, in capitalist modes of production\u2014other forms of exploitation and inequality would likely arise. The question asks, in effect, whether a utopia is possible.<\/p>\n

That was not Sartre\u2019s project. On my reading, Sartre\u2019s Critique<\/em> does not imagine a utopia free of all forms of alienation or oppression, but rather it envisages a constant struggle of mobilization, of group-formation, of institution-creation and destitution, that backfires, that misfires at times, that requires new groups to fuse together. Aron characterizes this position pretty accurately, elsewhere, as follows:<\/p>\n

In fact the life of men in society oscillates inevitably between the series and the group, between alienation and freedom; according to circumstances, the humanization of the relationships between individuals\u2014the impulse toward reciprocity between the praxeis\u2014calls for violence or can be reconciled with reformism.<\/a>[4]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That seems like a fair reading of Sartre. And what it reflects is that the central element of Marxism that Sartre let go of, is precisely the historical determinism\u2014and in that, I certainly agree. The existential Marxist philosophy that emerges\u2014and which I tried to encapsulate in the introduction to Critique 10\/13<\/a>\u2014does away with the linear idea of progress. Mark Poster, in his book Existential Marxism in Postwar France<\/em>, develops this in terms of an open-ended system. Poster defines Sartre\u2019s ultimate position in the following terms:<\/p>\n

A non-Leninist Marxism that conceptualizes advanced industrial society in a way that points toward the possible elimination if its alienating structures; that looks to all the relations of daily life, not simply to relations of production, to make society intelligible; that picks up from existentialism the effort to capture human beings in the moment of their active creation of their world, in their subjectivity; and, finally, that rejects the attempt to have a closed theory complete within itself.<\/a>[5]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This captures well Sartre\u2019s struggle to reconcile existentialism and Marxism. And it is important to emphasize that it was not just an intellectual struggle, it was also a personal and physical struggle. As Poster notes, quoting Simone de Beauvoir, \u201cIn the Critique de la raison dialectique<\/em>, Sartre wrote \u2018against himself,\u2019 becoming ill and driving himself almost to a heart attack. It was a dramatic moment in his life. Over fifty years old, he compelled himself to alter his most cherished positions in order to account for his own experience.\u201d<\/a>[6]<\/p>\n

Success and Failure<\/h1>\n

As we know well, Aron did not believe that struggle paid off. Aron writes that, in the end, \u201cI do not think that Sartre has achieved his aim of renewing Marxism which, in the hands of the Stalinists, congealed into a sterile dogmatism.\u201d<\/a>[7]<\/p>\n

But the opinions on failure or success have varied over the ensuing decades\u2014and continue to vary to this day.<\/p>\n

For Thomas R. Flynn, author of Sartre and Marxist Existentialism<\/em> (1984), the verdict was far more favorable. From the title of his book, you have a hint of his conclusion: notice, he writes of \u201cMarxist Existentialism,\u201d and not, like everyone else, of \u201cExistential Marxism.\u201d And so, on page 206, Flynn underscores that \u201cthe slope of [Sartre\u2019s] thinking continues to incline toward the individual.\u201d<\/a>[8] But this does not doom the project, in Flynn\u2019s view. It means, instead, that Sartre achieved something different: a social theory that aims toward \u201can end-goal, not an end-terminus, of history.\u201d<\/a>[9]<\/p>\n

For James Lawler, author of The Existential Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre<\/em> (1976), the effort was not successful. Simply put, Lawler writes, \u201cexistentialism is essentially anti-Marxist,\u201d and the title of the book should have been \u201cAnti-Sartre\u201d:\u00a0 \u201cThis work might be entitled \u2018Anti-Sartre,\u2019 were it not that such a title would be a presumptuous imitation of Engels\u2019 great work against D\u00fchring. In many respects, however, the structure of this study parallels that of Engels.\u201d<\/a>[10]<\/p>\n

For Mark Poster, the author of Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser<\/em> (1975), the verdict is far more positive. Poster in fact utilizes Sartre\u2019s method to analyze the revolution of May \u201968, which, he claims, \u201cbecomes intelligible through the lenses of existential Marxism.\u201d<\/a>[11] Or as he explains later, \u201cIt seems to me that it was the existential Marxists who were best able to discover and to explain those features in the events of May that were new to protest movements and that make May, 1968, so historically significant.\u201d<\/a>[12] Some of the pieces of what Poster finds productive:<\/p>\n