Critique of Dialectical Reason

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Critique of Dialectical Reason is the book Jean-Paul Sartre called the principal of his two philosophical works for which he wished to be remembered. That is a remarkable thing to say for the man who also wrote Being and Nothingness. Yet here Sartre made his most ambitious wager: that existentialism and Marxism could not only coexist but needed each other. Published in 1960, the book arrives at a moment when Communist ideology was losing its grip on French intellectual life, and when Sartre himself had just broken with the Soviet Union over its suppression of the Hungarian uprising. What drives a thinker to that moment? What does it mean to declare Marxism the philosophy of one's time while rejecting the government most associated with it? And is this book a betrayal of everything Sartre had built, or the completion of it? Those are the questions the Critique forces onto the table.

• 2. A Friendship Fractures

  ›

  Maurice Merleau-Ponty was Sartre's friend, associate, and, by some accounts, his political mentor. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Merleau-Ponty was ahead of Sartre in trying to synthesize existentialism with Marxism. His writing in those years, including Sense and Non-Sense, was charting a path that Sartre would later follow. But then the two men moved in opposite directions. Merleau-Ponty grew increasingly skeptical of Marxism, a position he made explicit in Adventures of the Dialectic in 1955. Sartre moved the other way, growing more committed to Marxist thought just as his friend was abandoning it. The conflict ended their long friendship. Ronald Aronson, writing about this period, argues that the Critique was in part Sartre's direct answer to Merleau-Ponty's attack on Marxism. Albert Camus was another casualty of this same political fracture among French leftists. The rejection of Communism by intellectuals sympathetic to Marxism cost Sartre those two friendships, and Sartre responded by trying to learn, in his own words, "the lessons of history" from what had happened.

• 3. Scarcity and Freedom

  ›

  Sartre's central argument in the Critique breaks from how freedom had worked in his earlier philosophy. In Being and Nothingness, human consciousness stood apart, radically free. Here, Sartre insists that people are neither absolutely free to determine the meaning of their own acts nor simply slaves to the circumstances around them. The key concept bridging this is scarcity. Sartre treats scarcity not as an economic condition alone but as something that reaches into social life and diminishes humanity itself. Every time a need is satisfied, antagonism can follow; every scarcity makes it harder for people to recognize one another as fully human. Social life, on Sartre's account, is not just individual acts rooted in freedom. It is also a sedimentation of history by which people are constrained, and a struggle with nature that imposes further obstacles. Conscious acts, he argues, are movements toward what he calls "totalization," and their meaning is co-determined by existing social conditions, not freely authored from scratch. Where Sartre lands is that Communism, by abolishing shortages, would restore the individual's freedom and restore the ability to recognize that freedom in others.

• 4. Scholastic Debates

  ›

  When the Critique appeared in 1960, scholars immediately split over what it meant for Sartre's legacy. George Kline read it as a repudiation of Sartre's existentialist stance. Marjorie Grene took the opposite view, arguing the book could be readily translated into the categories of Being and Nothingness. Hazel Barnes and Peter Caws saw a shift in emphasis between the two works but not a difference in kind. Barnes offered a notable observation about the title itself: she noted it "suggests both Kant and Hegel." She drew a parallel with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, in that both works are concerned with the nature, possibilities, and limitations of human reason. But she saw Sartre as more indebted to Hegel than to Kant, since Sartre's interests are not primarily epistemological or metaphysical. Josef Catalano offered a bridging interpretation, arguing the Critique gives a historical and social dimension to the being-for-itself that Being and Nothingness had described. Fredric Jameson went furthest, writing that reading the Critique permanently changes how one reads Being and Nothingness, and that the label "existentialist" as applied to Sartre can no longer carry its previous meaning after the Critique is absorbed.

• 5. May 1968 and the Groups

  ›

  Sartre's concept of "groups-in-fusion" proved unexpectedly timely. He used the phrase to describe people brought together by a common cause, as distinct from passive, anonymous forms of individual alienation he called the "practico-inert." When French students rose up in the May-June 1968 uprising, commentators reached for the Critique to explain what they were seeing. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu connected the two directly. He described how Sartre had first mapped the passive and anonymous forms of alienation, then shown how a group introduces negation into history and shapes itself rather than being shaped. Anzieu quoted what he called a dialectical philosophy of history as the intellectual backdrop for the students, and described the May uprising as "the historical upsurge of a 'wild-flowering' force of negation" and "the inroad of 'Sartrean' freedom, not that of the isolated individual but the creative freedom of groups." The concept also gave Sartre a temporary advantage over his structuralist rival Louis Althusser, whose interpretation of Marxism competed for influence among French leftists during this period. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari later endorsed Sartre's position that there is no "class spontaneity" but only "group spontaneity."

• 6. Critics and Dissents

  ›

  Not everyone received the Critique as a serious philosophical contribution. Roger Scruton, the conservative philosopher, was blunt in his verdict, writing that the book "shows a total rejection of the rules of intellectual enquiry, a determined flight from the rule of truth." Sidney Hook, describing his reading of the work, saw it as a philosophical justification for widespread human rights abuses by the Communist leadership of the Soviet Union. Leszek Kolakow­ski offered the most extended critical engagement. He acknowledged the book as an interesting attempt to find room for creativity and spontaneity within Marxism, noting that Sartre rejects both the dialectic of nature and historical determinism while preserving the social significance of human behavior. But Kolakow­ski pressed hard on several failures. He argued that Sartre gives such a generalized account of revolutionary organization that he ignores the real difficulties of groups acting in common without infringing individual members' freedom. He charged Sartre with introducing many superfluous neologisms without providing a genuinely new interpretation of Marxism. He traced Sartre's rejection of the dialectic of nature and his view of the historical character of perception back to the work of Gyorgy Lukacs. And he concluded that Sartre never explains how Communism could actually restore freedom in practice. The psychiatrists R. D. Laing and David Cooper read the book differently still, treating it as an attempt to provide a dialectical basis for structural anthropology, and to establish through a dialectical approach the limits of dialectical reason itself.

• 7. A Manuscript in Two Volumes

  ›

  The Critique was Sartre's second large-scale philosophical treatise, the first having been Being and Nothingness in 1943. Both volumes of the Critique had long gestation periods before reaching English readers. The first volume, titled "Theory of Practical Ensembles," appeared in English in 1976, translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. A corrected English translation followed in 1991, based on the revised French edition of 1985. The second volume, "The Intelligibility of History," was published posthumously in French in 1985 and reached English readers in 1991 in a translation by Quintin Hoare. Sartre had originally written the Critique and the earlier Search for a Method as a common manuscript, intending the Critique to logically precede that 1957 essay. The unfinished state of the second volume, published only after Sartre's death, left open questions about where the work's larger argument would have landed, and those open questions have shaped decades of scholarly debate about what Sartre's mature philosophy ultimately amounted to.