Sartre’s political theory PDF
Preview Sartre’s political theory
SARTRE'S POLITICAL THEORY Studies in Continental Thought John Sallis, general editor Consulting Editors Robert Bernasconi William L. McBride Rudolf Bernet J. N. Mohanty John D. Caputo Mary Rawlinson David Carr Tom Rockmore Edward S. Casey Calvin O. Schräg Hubert L. Dreyfus Reiner Schurmann Don Ihde Charles E. Scott David Farrell Krell Thomas Sheehan Lenore Langsdorf Robert Sokolowski Alphonso Lingis Bruce W. Wilshire David Wood SARTRE'S POLITICAL THEORY W illiam L. M c Bride INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Bloomington and Indianapolis © 1991 by William L. McBride All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses' Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. ©™ Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data McBride, William Leon. Sartre's political theory / William L. McBride. p. cm. — (Studies in continental thought) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-33621-X (alk. paper). — ISBN 0-233-20635-3 (pbk.) 1. Sartre, Jean Paul, 1905- —Political and social views. I. Title. II. Series. JC261 .S372M35 1991 320'.01—dc2o 90-25291 1 2 3 4 5 95 94 93 92 9i CONTENTS Introduction 1 ONE. Beginnings 16 TWO. First Ethics 45 THREE. The Masterful Though Unfinished Critique: Background and Introduction 85 FOUR. The Critique: Methodology, Ontology, and the Individual- World Relationship 115 FIVE. Politics and History 141 SIX. The Last Two Decades 173 Notes 211 Index 240 SARTRE'S POLITICAL THEORY Introduction Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 in his seventy-fifth year, having spent the better part of the last decade of his life in a painfully debilitated condition, unable to read and often afflicted by other maladies typical of the less fortunate aged.1 Since then, there has been a revival of interest in him, fueled in part by the posthumous publication of a number of Sartrean manuscripts, as well as by the appearance of the first comprehensive Sartre biography2 and of a number of other significant studies of aspects of his life, of his thought, or of both considered together; this book itself will, I hope, be a contribution to that revival. As one would anticipate under such circumstances, new images of Sartre have begun to emerge and proliferate. What constitutes, in a sense, the first "posthumous publication" actu ally appeared in print approximately one month before Sartre's death, a juxtaposition in time that should probably not be considered purely coinci dental. It consists of edited interviews of Sartre conducted by the last of a series of personal secretaries whom he employed, Benny Levy, whose relationship with the aging and dependent writer had clearly become much closer than the title of "secretary" normally implies. Sartre had frequently spoken with others about his venture with Levy, which he envisaged as an uniquely dialogic reexamination of fundamental questions about politics and ethics, to be entitled Pouvoir et Liberte.i The printed fragments, as they should properly be labeled, were first presented to the public in three March issues of Le Nouvel Observateur,* a newspaper that had frequently carried interviews with and stories about Sartre in the past, under the general title, "L'Espoir maintenant" (Hope, now). Among the features that many found astonishing about these brief pages of transcribed dialogue were the uncustomary tone of intimacy in which Sartre and his much younger secretary addressed one another; Sartre's apparent retreat from positions or at least emphases with which he had been identified in the past, such as the notion of conflict as fundamental to human relations in the world as we have known it up to now; his offhand dismissal of his earlier existentialist concentration on the phenomenon of dread or anguish as having been a useful because then-popular conceptual vehicle but not something that he himself had experienced in a serious way; and his great professed interest in aspects of the Jewish religion, which was then becom ing, as it has since become to an even greater extent, the principal focus of Levy's life. The range of actual and possible reactions to this unusual publication is wide. At one extreme, one can see in the interviews the basis for an entirely new Sartrean ethical, social, and political philosophy, supplanting many of the ideas that dominated both his literary and his philosophical works 1 2 Sartre's Political Theory throughout his previous life, and achieving this in a positive, constructive way. Even Benny Levy himself, however enthusiastic he may have been about his dialogues with Sartre, appears not to subscribe to such an extreme view, as his subsequent collation of Sartrean texts from various periods, Le Nom de I'homme, makes clear;5 but there certainly exist serious Sartre scholars who, given their own intellectual agendas, would like to believe that in his last years he had begun to pay more heed to one or more of the cardinal virtues and less attention to the negative aspects of exis tence. At the other extreme, one can simply dismiss these texts as painful illustrations of the manipulation of an old man by someone in whom he had been forced to trust.6 It is an open secret that Simone de Beauvoir, to whom, over many years, Sartre had offered his writings for prepublication criticism and correction, as she had hers to him, was strongly opposed to publication of the Sartre-Levy dialogue.7 Or one can try simply to bypass much of the controversy generated by this publication by taking the posi tion, as I shall throughout most of this book, that remarks attributed to Sartre in interviews should on the whole not be accorded as much impor tance, in understanding his thought, as written texts (even posthumously published ones, assuming no serious editorial distortions), on the ground that he at least had greater opportunity, even if he did not always avail himself of it, to correct the latter. But this position of mine is more of a procedural guideline than a proposition, the validity of which could be demonstrated—if indeed it would even make sense to speak in this way. Therefore, the controversy over the meaning and importance of Sartre's "last words," as contained in this interview, cannot be laid to rest, even though their potential signifi cance for a study of his political thought in particular is considerable. I make this admission with a view to establishing a pattern for my subse quent interpretations: I cannot claim to be furnishing a "definitive" inter pretation of Sartre's political thought, not because of a lack of competence on my part, but because of obstacles intrinsic to Sartre interpretation. On the one hand, interpreters may reasonably disagree, as they do in the rather crucial case of the dialogue with Levy, over the relative importance to be attributed to interviews (or perhaps to certain interviews) as opposed to letters, to letters as opposed to published occasional essays, to the latter as opposed to more systematic philosophical and/or literary treatises, and among such treatises to those that were published during Sartre's lifetime as opposed to those that have been or still will be published posthumously. On the other hand, Sartre himself would no doubt have been amused at the very idea of trying to produce a definitive version of any aspect of his thought, for his often highly assertive style of expressing his views went hand in hand with the clear realization on his part that no philosophical formulation, however systematic and comprehensive it may appear to be, ever merits being taken as final. Texts written and actions taken at the most varied periods of Sartre's life Introduction 3 tend to confirm this observation. Writing to Simone de Beauvoir from his military post at the end of 1939, he alludes to the notebooks that he has been composing and that he intends to take to her when he goes to Paris on leave: "You will have four of them at once when I arrive in Paris and a completely new theory concerning nothingness. Another concerning vio lence. Another concerning bad faith."8 Note that he is proud of his theories, all of which will of course become key notions in Being and Nothingness, but he does not pretend that they are something more than that, namely, worthwhile theories. In the posthumously-published Cahiers pour une mo rale, written during 1947-48, he at one point says the following about the two nineteenth-century philosophies that occupy his attention throughout large parts of that unfinished work: "It is desirable that History have its crisis, like physics, and detach itself from the Hegelian and Marxist abso lute."? It is this notion of an absolute end of history and the philosophical outlook that points to such an absolute end, attributed by Sartre in different ways to Hegel and to Marx (whether accurately or inaccurately is not my present concern), that he here rejects in favor of a philosophical openness and tentativeness. He continued to reject such absolutist claims even dur ing the period when he felt the greatest affinity with Marxism, the 1950s and 1960s.10 And it was during those same years (in 1963, to be exact) that his very carefully crafted autobiographical fragment, Les Mots (The Words), was published, in which he concludes his presentation by insisting forcefully on the extent of changes that he has undergone in his intellectual outlook over time.11 Finally, in his 1974 conversations with de Beauvoir, he reflects calmly, along with her, on the relative merits of his various philo sophical pieces and says that he feels little solidarity with his past and hence a readiness to admit "misdeeds or mistakes, since they were com mitted by someone else."12 This strikes me as a rather authentic expression of Sartre's attitude toward all his work, at once serious, ironic, and detached. It serves as a vivid contrast to the intense polemics that have often been waged about it by commentators. And it helps to set the tone of the present study. The label that I have chosen to focus the object of this study is Sartre's political theory, or political philosophy, or political thought; for present purposes I am not distinguishing among these terms. In fact I could with equal accuracy have denominated this a study in Sartre's "social theory" or "social and political theory," terms for which I myself have a preference. But "political theory" is the older and still more familiar expression, and one of my purposes in examining these aspects of Sartre's thought here is to demonstrate some of the many ways in which, in dealing as he does with questions concerning the nature of society and history in an often un familiar, sometimes even eccentric, vocabulary, Sartre is nevertheless re considering some of the issues that have dominated Western philosophical thought about political life from the pre-Socratics and Plato onward.
The list of books you might like
