Abstract
As the maladies of material scarcity fade into cultural memory throughout much of the post-industrial world, there is something of a tendency to orient ethical and political reflection away from any driving concern for limitation, whether material or intellectual. In this article, I revisit Sartre's underappreciated meditations on scarcity and dialectical reason in an effort to vivify a sense of reflective sobriety. I argue that dialectical language emerges in Sartre's later work, at least partly, as a rhetorical tool, a means of directing attention toward persistent conflicts over limited resources. On Sartre's account, we tend to ‘internalize’ conflicts in such a way that we come to exhibit an almost Hobbesian political sensibility or ethos. By underscoring the psychic significance of our situation in what he calls a ‘milieu of scarcity,’ Sartre's dialectical perspective encourages a sharper attentiveness to some of the material and intellectual constraints that may prevent the normative possibilities late-modern theorists imagine and defend.
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Notes
Search for a Method, first published in 1957, was included as a prologue to the original French publication of the Critique of Dialectical Reason in 1960. These two texts appear as separate volumes in English translation. I will refer to both texts under the rubric of ‘the Critique.’ For helpful discussions of Sartre's intellectual development, see McBride, 1991, and Flynn, 1986.
As we will see, Sartre remains suspicious of any strongly deterministic Marxist materialism, but this new embrace of historical materialism does contrast with Sartre's position in the 1940s. On Sartre's earlier denunciation of historical materialism, see for example Sartre, 1967.
In his ‘Self-Portrait at Seventy’, Sartre admits that an adequate account of dialectical Reason would require a massive historical study; to complete the Critique, he says, ‘I would have to go back to studying history’ (Sartre, 1977, p. 75). Aronson (1981) makes a convincing case that, by fall 1959, Sartre had come to recognize the naivety of his own political and theoretical optimism. Sartre's abandonment of the Critique coincides with his growing disillusion with Soviet-style communism and it opens the door for an engagement with a new set of political and theoretical concerns, namely the constellation of issues surrounding anti-colonial liberation struggles.
On Sartre's rejection of pluralism and his concern about history losing its meaning, see Sartre, 2004, p. 64, and Barnes, 1957, p. x. Even though Sartre abandons the Critique, he seems to maintain, throughout his life, this proclivity toward a singular, unified history (Sartre and Lévy, 1996, p. 66).
McBride has noted that ‘totalizations … are undertaken both by historical actors and, at a remove, by historians or by social theorists seeking to comprehend a segment of human history or society’ (1991, 104). Another way to formulate my qualification: we can bracket the larger project of the grand social theorist, the attempt to ‘totalize’ a multiplicity of human actions into a synthetic account of general historical trends, and still learn something from Sartre's discussion of historical actors who might be said to think and act dialectically.
For a helpful discussion of ‘reflection’ versus ‘contemplation,’ see Sartre, 1992, pp. 476–482, and Sartre, 1948, p. 90. Here Sartre suggests that this notion of critical reflection is connected to an ethic of authenticity, which consists ‘in having a true and lucid consciousness of [our] situation, in assuming the responsibilities and risks that it involves, in accepting it in pride or humiliation, sometimes in horror and hate.’
Consider, for example, a notable passage from Being and Nothingness, where Sartre describes the resistance of a rock one is attempting to climb. ‘What my freedom cannot determine is whether the rock ‘to be scaled’ will or will not lend itself to scaling,’ he says. ‘This is part of the brute being of the rock. Nevertheless the rock can show its resistance to the scaling only if the rock is integrated by freedom in a ‘situation’ of which the general theme is scaling. For the simple traveler who passes over this road and whose free project is a pure aesthetic ordering of the landscape, the crag is not revealed as either scalable or as not-scalable; it is manifested only as beautiful or ugly’ (Sartre, 1984, p. 627). The point here is that the rock becomes difficult to scale only if we project onto that rock the idea that we want to climb it.
We might note that Sartre concludes Being and Nothingness with a famous (or perhaps infamous) promise some day to work out the ethical implications of his ontological analysis (Sartre, 1984, p. 798). Clearly he did not intend for Being and Nothingness to speak directly to the kinds of concern raised by critical theorists, such as Marcuse.
As Sartre remarks in the unfinished second volume, ‘The original force here is need. Need is the primary drive. It feeds ambition’ (Sartre, 2006, p. 423).
See also 137—‘We are united by the fact that we live in a world that is determined by scarcity.’ See also Sartre, 2004, p. 28, where Sartre elaborates on this idea of scarcity as a milieu—‘scarcity is never an abstract principle, or one external to the social ensemble. At every instant, it is a synthetic relation of all men to non-human materiality and of all men among themselves through this materiality, inasmuch as the ensemble of techniques, relations of production and historical circumstances gives this relation its determination and its unity.’
Sartre goes on to offer one of the more memorable passages of the Critique – ‘Nothing – not even wild beasts or microbes – could be more terrifying for man than a species which is intelligent, carnivorous and cruel, and which can understand and outwit human intelligence, and whose aim is precisely the destruction of man. This, however, is obviously our own species as perceived in others [emphasis mine] by each of its members in the context of scarcity.’
Unfortunately, many readers in our time tend to caricature Sartre's political import by highlighting only his occasional defense of violence as a legitimate mode of political expression. Sartre's most important political document, it would seem, is his infamous preface to Frantz Fanon, 1963. For a more generous discussion of violence in Sartre, see Butler, 2006, and, for a more comprehensive discussion, Santoni, 2003.
We might also note the recent work of J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006), two feminist political economists who trace ‘the makings of a new political imaginary’ around an attentiveness to a kind of abundance or surplus of new ideas, new lines of communication, new modes of ‘economic being-in-common.’
We might also note Merleau-Ponty's claim, in his commentary on Sartre's earlier Communists and Peace , that ‘In Sartre there is a plurality of subjects but no intersubjectivity’ (1973, p. 205).
In a discussion of the very complex notion of violence in Sartre's thought, William McBride makes a comment that might shed further light on the point I want to make. ‘Such phenomena as love or friendship or social solidarity are real and really possible,’ McBride writes, ‘but … they can never be permanent and entirely without the potentiality of violent conflict … ‘Harmony theorists’ tend to wish to deny the pervasive reality of violence by claiming that there can be such privileged, sheltered relationships of both a dyadic and perhaps even a communal sort, and moreover that it is on such ideal relationships that we ought to concentrate our attention. Sartre would maintain … that such an approach to social theory is at best self-deceptive, and is sometimes even a deliberate effort to encourage others not to reflect on the conflict-filled reality of the world around them, in the interest of preserving existing social hierarchies that have no rational basis’ (1991, p. 20).
One could argue that Sartre is more ambiguous on this point. In his later interviews, for example, he seems to question sincerely this Hegelian notion that our subjective dependence upon others and the world is a necessarily negative phenomenon, something to be overcome. See Sartre and Lévy, 1996, p. 91.
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Acknowledgements
For their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts, I wish to thank Lawrie Balfour, Lewis Hinchman, Allan Megill, Raia Prokhovnik, Melvin Rogers, Justin Rose and Stephen K. White, as well as the editorial staff and two anonymous reviewers for Contemporary Political Theory.
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Douglas, A. In a milieu of scarcity: Sartre and the limits of political imagination. Contemp Polit Theory 10, 354–371 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.37
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2010.37